So I've just read through this thread twice, over a couple weeks. Many of the things I might point out have been said, so I'll generally give a hearty +1 to just about everything that's been brought up. Probably my biggest peeve is with bad/lazy writing. Bad directors, bad actors, bad editors, and so forth can ruin a great story, but very rarely can superb craftsmanship save bad writing.
First big offense: Verisimilitude. Someone said early on in this thread something about getting too mired in reality when movies are supposed to be escapist. I've always maintained that a good writer (or director, etc.) can work
within a scaffold of rules for the setting, be that real-world or fantasy world. An example of this is Michael Bay's Transformers. He laid out a dictum early in pre-production that there was to be no "mass-shifting" or other stuff not grounded in the physically possible. Which utterly ignores the supremely advanced technology of Cybertron from the original -- subspace and faster-than-light tech was just part of it. You get rid of those and you've hamstrung a lot of what you can do. The movie we got was awful. Breaking something down into small enough pieces, anything can be made into anything else. The Transformers looked like shambling mounds of polygons, most of whom were shades of gray, so I had a hard time knowing who I was even
looking at. The essence of what they're supposed to be was just not there.
Second: Continuity. I always am very quick to recall Brannon Braga's famous comment in an interview that "continuity is for wussies". By which, he apparently means that a "truly creative" type won't feel constrained by things like reality or what has gone before. Bull-pats. And other comments. Quite the opposite. A good writer is one who
can find themselves painted into a corner and pull something out of their hat. Using Brannon as an example, he wanted to make Zefram Cochrane a woman in
Star Trek: First Contact, to be Picard's love interest in the film. When it was pointed out to him that we frikkin'
met Zefram Cochrane in the Original Series, he was most definitely male, his response was (only slightly paraphrased), "So what? That was one episode, thirty years ago. Who's going to remember something like that?" Apparently utterly forgetting who his audience was.
Third big writing crime: Bad science. The worst offender in recent memory, for me, is 2009's
Star Trek. A supernova that threatens to destroy the entire galaxy? And that has a powerful enough blast wave -- apparently propegating faster than lightspeed -- to wipe out a star system light-years away? Red matter? If a tiny pea of the stuff is enough to snuff a supernova, why is Spock carting around an entire beach ball of the stuff? If it creates a singularity, why is Nero drilling to the planet's core? What's the point of the drill platform, when it drops the mining laser only a couple miles closer to the planet out of the couple hundred of synchronous orbit? Why was this
Enterprise built entirely on the ground, when it's approximately as massive as TNG's
Enterprise-D? That puts an utterly unnecessary strain on the support frame. Every prior iteration has had the ships built -- in whole, or at least the engines and engine core -- in space.
Fourth: The villain has no motivation. How many stories would be over in ten minutes if the villain weren't an idiot who didn't realize he didn't need to be doing what he was doing?
Man of Steel,
Star Trek (2009),
Star Trek: Generations... That last one, for example -- it was said in the film that he was trying to change the course of the Nexus rather than flying into it because no ship that had encountered the Nexus had survived... Except that it won't matter to
him if the ship survives --
he'd be in the frikkin' Nexus!
Honorary mention: Time travel. Stop it. No one ever writes it corretly. Paradox is not a fun little logic puzzle to think your way out of -- the universe simply is not so arranged as to allow it to happen. Whether single-continuum or multiverse or even all the way out to a quad-matrix multiplexed nigh-infinite causality strings, the way it is almost always portrayed is the one way that just doesn't work. And those times they try to get the sceince right, they focus on the wrong part of the story for dramatic tension, so it falls flat.
Special George Lucas Prize for bad dialogue: Well, George wins this many times over, especially for the Prequels, where he didn't have anyone riding herd on his writing. We got so many hours of people standing around in semicircles talking politics. Thrilling... Donald Jackson does get the prize, with clusters, for the Roller Blade Seven films, which could almost be "so bad it's good" except that they go further in a gravity well of meta and become truly awful again, such that the only times they're watched is to experience the
schadenfreude of exposing people to it for the first time so you know you aren't suffering alone.
One of my screenwriting professors gave me what is probably the best advice in the craft I'll ever get. "Learning this means you're going to watch a lot of movies and TV shows. There's a lot of crap out there. Whenever you're watching something and you notice you've gotten kicked out of the experience, don't just sit there bitching about it -- get a copy of the script and see if you can do better." So far I've re-written Star Treks I, II, and III (my tweaks to the first one are very minor); Man of Steel (three movies instead of one, for starters); all of Star Wars
except The Empire Strikes Back (this is an essay in its own right)... And I won't call my Transformers treatment a re-write, as I started it before Bay got his hands on it. But everyone who's read my version likes it orders of magnitude more.
And spinning off of that, regarding the re-packaging of '80s-nostalgia properties... It
can be done well. One thing I'd actually like to see is what I call my Grand Unified Theory of the Marvel-Hasbro Universe. The two collaborated with Transformers and G.I. Joe, the two of them crossing over more than once. Spider-Man appeared in both, as does Roxxon Oil and several other background entities. That pulls them firmly into the same universe as S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers and such. Hasbro bought Kenner, which -- in addition to Star Wars -- also made the M.A.S.K. toys. Granted, DC had the comic for that, but let's ignore that for a moment. After the events of the Avengers, and with the Initiative abandoned by the World Security Council, the Ark revives and we take a little bit to get used to our inorganic alien visitors and thwart Megatron. The good guys are happy to share their tech with us, which Stark helps the U.S. military use to create a covert Special Mission Force, independent of World Security Council meddling. They are aided in the "covert" part by vehicles that can transform into combat modes. This, ironically, was the original incarnation of the Diaclone line that was most of what the G1 Transformers were drawn from -- piloted mecha. And, in this take on things, Cobra and V.E.N.O.M. are tributary organizations under Hydra, in keeping things snake-y. There's more, of course, but that's the bare bones.
I've also done things like step out of the conventional wisdom that's grown up around some of these properties and looked at them as for the first time, to try to dispell some of the misinterpretations that have popped up over the years. Like he way we refer to the guys on Leia's ship as "Rebel Fleet Troopers". Um... If this is supposed to be a consular ship attached to the Senator from Alderaan, if they want to appear innocuous, why the
hell would they have folks in Rebel uniforms unning around aboard her? My take is that they're that era's garrison-uniform version of the Senate Guards, and that many of them went with their senators to the Rebellion when the Senate was dissolved, which is why there are so many on Yavin IV. Now repeat that sort of thinking a dozen more times for other things in there. That's part of my re-writing, and what I alluded to at the beginning of this mini-essay -- figure out the framework of the universe you're creating stories in, and then play by those rules. Consistency and logic and either real-world accuracy or a semblance of it in a fantasy setting to provide a familiar touchstone. You can play an awful lot within such strictures, and the stories that come out will be the better for those rules being there...
--Jonah
