by Rodimus_Prime13 » Thu Jul 05, 2007 12:52 pm
Ok, completely from someone studying scriptwriting and filmaking's perspective, throwing out that I loved Transformers.
One of my favorite writers in TV/Movies today is the guy who did the recent Battlestar Galactica. They recently had a kind of convention for people studying to be screenwriters and movie makers. They had a panel of successful directors, writers etc. The writer of BSG was one of them.
For being someone that I wanted to hear a lot from. He actually had very little to say at all. (brace yourself, some might consider this mildly offensive.)
"Don't be a whore."
That is all he said. He then passed the microphone on to someone else.
It took me a while to think about what he meant. But in situations like this, the "whores" of the movie industry as far as Director's and script writers are guilty of a major sin that should not be tolerated from any quality movie.
1. The first thing to hit the cutting room floor, is character development. They excuse this basically by saying that they want to sell it to your average shallow person.
2. They spend more time and effort on speacial effects then quality of acting. This was very true with the recent Star Wars Prequels. Episode 1 was fairly solid. The actors began to get lazy as the series progressed. In comparision to the intensity of the previous three movies, the characters where only important because they where "Anakin Skywalker" not because they had any real depth. And any depth that they did have, we had to bring to the theatre with us.
3. The plot as it develops is not clearly defined. It does not move smoothly from one part to another. This sort of thing generally passes by unoticed to that "Shallow Person" who is often targeted for their money. But to an intelligient person, it is pretty clear.
Now, all of these things do lead to initially successful movies. And that is why the "whore" mentality is so prominent. They want the pay off that comes from the first three years after release. They want instant gratification, and money NOW.
The Star Wars Trilogy did not get to be the phenomenon that it is by doing this. Nor did the original Batman movie. (It is also what the Batman sequels completely lacked, that Batman Begins recaptured) The Batman sequels basically based their hope for success entirely on the Batman name, and the fact that the first one was such a Hollywood sensation. (I feel this is also true about Episode 2 and 3 in the Star wars Series.)
The new Transformers movie has hope. And they can make up for it in the sequels. They are teetering on the edge. If Bay makes the right decisions in the sequels, this line can be saved. If he goes the other route and takes the easy and initially profitable path, Transformers will fade back to the cult following that it was before this movie.
