War of the Worlds saddened me when I saw it this past weekend. I found it emotionally manipulative and boring, and I can't for the life of me think of why Spielberg remade a movie that was fine just the way it was.
When I watched DARYL again recently, I kept thinking that THIS is the kind of movie Spielberg made in the 80's. Whether it was the Goonies (he wrote the original story) or E.T. or even one of the Indiana Jones movies, there is a sense of awe, a thrilling amount of peril/action, and a cheeky amount of comedic fun thru the whole film. Characters were a touch cartoony, over the top, and exagerated, but they were easily identifiable and we cared about them, because we knew them. Two dimensional they may have been, but the characters had a rich range of emotions and back story/personal history which made them more interesting than they would have been otherwise. Which leads to the biggest flaw in current movies...
To grind my favorite axe, the biggest problem with today's films is that I don't care about the characters. I seldom know more about them than their name and their immediate goal, and that's not good enough. Bad or non-existant dialogue for the sake of character development and a complete lack of fleshing out main characters, weakens the dramatic tension to a crippling degree.
They need to be fleshed out, they need to be more than one dimensional, just two dimensional would be nice at this point. Characters need to have humorous/interesting backgrounds, maybe some kind of complex motivation for doing whatever, and have a sense of fun. Even evil characters are more enjoyable when there is a spirit of fun (somewhere in their madness and cruelty). Characters need to have anecdotes, quirky habits, completely ridiculous or irrelevant backstory that will make us laugh, something. Most characters in films these days, I can't empathize with them because I can't find anything to relate to in them. They are just names on a page.
If I don't care about the character, what difference does it make whether he succeeds? If a villain is a cardboard cut-out from any of a hundred other movies, how can I suspend my disbelief that he won't inevitably lose (or even, how can I root for him to some degree?). If the dialogue is either spare or almost non-existant, how will I know what is internally happening with the heroes, what emotions they are going thru, what fears they have, etc.?
In DARYL, I cared about all the principle characters and understood them. I knew what they were doing and felt apprehension when they were confronted by the "bad guys" (the only real flaw being that the military villains were kind of cheesy/one dimensional). When the climax of the film arrived, I was rooting hard for DARYL and was able to buy into the sadness and potential for failure, even knowing that there had to be a happy ending. And when that ending came, I smiled and felt good about the whole experience.
War of the Worlds...not so much. The end of that film, I was annoyed, bored, irritated, and a host of other negative emotions. Never has Stephen made such a pointless movie, more so than even Jurassic Park 2, I kid you not. The original was perfect just the way it was, we didn't need an updated version whose only improvement, and that only slight, was in special F/X (that ultimately hurts the film by foolishly showing goofy looking aliens instead of just hinting at them as a better movie would, destroying what little fearful quality/power the aliens had in the enigma of appearance we had in the original movie).
Dakota Fanning is a great actress but her only funcion in the movie is to emotionally manipulate the audience thru her shouting, crying, and her constantly being put in danger to heighten dramatic tension in what is a really boring movie, and that's not good enough. (Also, when you only have two main characters, for the most part, you know neither one of them is gonna die. Kind of a bad move dramatically.) Everytime she tearfully and fearfully looked into the camera for "her moment" (of which there were far too many), I was hoping a Tripod was gonna squash her and put her screaming, annoyingly weak character out of my misery.
If you only have two or three characters for the bulk of the film, there is simply no excuse to not have interesting moments of dialogue and to take all the waiting around because nothing is happening moments (of which there are many) to have meaningful, or funny, or cathartic moments of interaction. The dialogue in this movie was clunky in it's humor, hamhanded in emotion, and uninspired in it's spareness of expression. Not only did I not care what happened to the characters, I was waiting for something bad to happen just so I would be surprised and find one small shred of enjoyment in this turgid, slow ride that was unsatisfying at best and a feat of endurance at worst.
I want to be entertained and have fun. I want to be taken away from reality and laugh, be amazed, afraid, follow right along with the characters and share in the defeats and victories so that I CARE about what happens and feel that the battle was worth it in the end. Don't saddle me with a film where at the end, I am annoyed and feeling cheated by the lack of anything worthwhile, by character's whose names I barely remember and know nothing about, or by a trite, depressing ending. Not saying I need a happy ending, but one that feels right, is meaningful, and that has some kind of payoff at the end isn't asking for too much.
Make my movies fun, not pointlessly won.
reply
share