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Why are blockbuster movie scripts so... bad?
I've been going to the movies more in the last year than I have in the previous decade, because I have a coworker turned friend that likes to watch films in theaters and it is a cheap way to hang out with him (protip: bring your own snacks and drinks in a backpack instead of buying from the concession stand and watch the morning matinee instead of purchasing the more expensive evening tickets). And what I keep noticing is that, while they are very pretty, the writing in them is absolutely, uniformly awful.
I'm not even talking about politics here. I'm talking about how nobody in Mufasa ever stops to think about "wait a minute, how do I know that Milele even exists?!" the way a level 1 intelligent character would. I'm talking about how half the runtime of Jurassic World Rebirth is pointless action sequences that contribute nothing to the plot. I'm talking about how Brave decided to waste its amazing prologue by focusing the movie around the mom turning into a bear.
If you are already spending $200 million dollars producing a movie and a similar amount marketing it, why can't you just throw in an extra million to hire Neil Gaiman or George R. R. Martin (or, hell, Eliezer Yudkowsky) to write your script for you?
But... it doesn't seem to be a question of money? It is certainly possible to find much better writing in direct to video films than in theatrical films, despite their much lower budgets. Everybody agrees that the DCEU was a pile of crap, while there were have been some very solid entries in the DC Universe Animated Original Movies series. I recently watched Justice League: Gods & Monsters, and I was hooked from the first scene of General Zod cucking Superman's dad to the end credits; I wasn't looking at my watch wondering how much longer the movie is going to last, the way I do when watching a blockbuster.
Previous discussion.
I haven't seen the last Jurassic Park, for reasons (cw: crude joke song), but the last one I did watch made ARK look like the height of skilled literature. Not because the CGI physics were any less realistic than WildCardPhysics, because hell no, or even because of good writing, because also hell no. Yet people were doing things! With actual motivations! And reasons to believe that their actions derived from those motivations, in ways that someone in the real world might even do. We're grading on a pretty steep scale, here -- ARK includes an NPC that injects Molten Science into his Veins to Become As A God (and is a not-very-subtle-critic of the british scientist) and another that basically does the same thing by accident, and players whose motivations often are little more than 'make a nice base' or 'beat the ark guardian' or 'wrongly believes something will work' or 'troll as many other players as possible without being too annoying' -- but compared to Brave or Mufasa it might as well be Shakespeare.
I've seen furry porn artists who've written scifi comics where the main characters spend almost the entire comic with their junks out, and still have more compelling characterization and plot!
And that's just bizarre. I don't expect blockbusters to be good or smart. I don't even expect them to avoid the various headscratchers or plotholes; cinemasins are actively obnoxious to me. It's somewhat understandable for something like The Lego Movie to have random asspulls or a main character that's an idiot. Why is the same true for the newer Alien movies? Why does the teenager -- or the adults! -- in the Beetlejuice sequel seem dumber and more cartoonish than Emet from Lego Movie, or sometimes even the same character in the original?
There's some economics arguments for why the writing and character points end up so bad so often, even when better choices are available even in the same movie, and there's some process-style arguments that having to start work on the major CGI-heavy shots early and separate from the writing team gives stories a glued-together feeling, but I dunno. It's not universal. There are CGI-heavy, or modern-economics-driven, or works that aren't aiming for the international market, or works focused on action, or even politically woke stories that still work as stories. Fanlore says Zahn supposedly offered to write the Sequel Trilogy for Star Wars. It's interesting to think about how much difference that would involve, even if executives insisted using the same characters and same major plot beats, but it's just as plausible we'd have a great script and an awful set of movies anyway.
Wasn't the last Alien movie decent? The one where it was a bunch of teenagers trying to make it off a colony by looting a space station? I don't recall any obvious idiot-balls being kicked around, though, to be fair, I have very low expectations after the first Prometheus.
Alien: Romulus is excellent.
After the previous two turds I did bother watching that one. I'll give it a look.
Totally different director, totally different vibe. Prometheus and Covenant were "in the universe" but weren't really Alien movies, Romulus is very, very much an Alien movie.
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