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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 producing a movie and another $100 million 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 think writing in general, including novels has declined and in part I think it’s down to how we create writers. These are not people who had traveled widely and read, they go to college to learn to write (or make films) they are taught structures and methods, but because everyone is going to the same programs and learning the same methods and having the same experiences, there’s not much to draw on. So you get a lot of people writing without very much understanding of how people react in a given situation, and the dialogue sounds a bit off because the person that’s on the screen is someone’s blind guess at what a person like that is like.
That’s obviously wrong.
You’ve got the George Lucases of the world: studied film at USC. No interesting life experiences. No ability to write human dialogue. Clearly capable of making a movie anyway. His whole cohort of Coppola and Spielberg and so on have similar stories.
Then there’s the Wes Andersons, whose ivory-tower philosophy degrees don’t appear to have prevented them from writing competent films. Or branch out to weirdos like Hideo Kojima. It’s not like he had an exotic childhood. He just thought movies were cool, so he started writing something resembling screenplays.
I agree that George Lucas had not a wide variety of interesting life experiences, but I think illicit race car driving hobby that ended in nearly-fatal accident is plenty interesting, far more than run-of-the-mill sheltered millennial can boast of. But I agree his personal life experiences provided enough material for only one film (American Graffiti) which isn't bad but not the work Lucas is famous for.
I propose a synthesis: Great films require great directors, scriptwriters, actors, camera work, costumes, special effects, score. Some of those, I imagine, are skills someone can learn if he/she has the requisite talent and aptitude and opportunity to learn (such as in a film school). However, when it comes to the story elements and character portrayal, the film school can be beneficial but it is not the only nor the best source. School education has tendency to teach formulaic standards that please the professors. So it helps when the directors and scriptwriters can draw from real experiences- while it is not necessary if they can draw from imagination and someone else's real experiences. Likewise, it is not necessary but it helps when actors can do the same thing (during the filming of Lord of the Rings, Sir Christopher Lee corrected Peter Jackson on what kind of sound a man makes when he is stabbed in back. I doubt many actors today can claim similar knowledge.)
It is necessary that the scriptwriters are very good at writing, which requires superb talent or relentless practice and usually both.
In Star Wars the original trilogy we have a bit of both: Lucas draws not from personal biographical history but from previous films he saw as a kid that were more connected to reality and they had other writing talent and producers and directors. Star Wars (1977) is a collage of samurai epic, westerns, WW2 airplane action films, and Flash Gordon. When Lucas draws from Dam Busters (1955), he takes inspiration from a film based on a genuine military operation. Kurosawa's samurai films have a more tenuous connection to history, but it is a connection nevertheless, and as inspiration it was new to the US mass audience. Flash Gordon is work of imagination, but contributes the pulp setting and plot elements. Concerning the script-writing skill part, for The Empire Strikes Back, they brought in Leigh Brackett for the first draft, who had written countless amount of pulp space opera and screenplays for noir and John Wayne films, and later Lawrence Kasdan to polish the dialogue. For Indiana Jones, they had Lucas, Spielberg, and old adventure movie serials.
As an aside, Francis Ford Coppola is a great director who did nothing too exciting growing up, but one of his particular skills as director has been in choosing great occasionally high-brow script material. I don't think people today realize how many of his films are either directly based on or inspired best-seller novels. Everyone seems to know that Apocalypse Now is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness set in Vietnam (and Joseph Conrad had plenty of varied life experience), but it is not as common knowledge that the Godfather was based on novel by Mario Puzo ("The novel remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 67 weeks and sold over nine million copies in two year") who also wrote the script. The Outsiders and Rumble Fish are novels by S. E. Hinton. Original inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula is, you know, in the title. I think the only film of his I've seen that is based on original script is The Conversation. In comparison, Spielberg appears to be a directorial wonderkid, winning competitions at age 13 and sneaking into Universal Studios as teenager.
The generation of film-makers today have two major endogenous weaknesses: Firstly, they draw from pop culture products that are now twice or thrice-removed from the 'real' source (instead of WW2 aircraft dogfight films, the Star Wars sequels were inspired mostly by previous Star Wars) and the creators have PMC childhoods followed by college and adulthood which are more boring and scripted than 60's kids had. Secondly, both low-brow pulp fiction and high-brow literature are dead. Of pulp era media products, only the withering remains of comics are left. Pulp provided scripts and training ground and filter for aspiring writers whereas high-brow literature provided an aspirational ideal, and occasional script, too. DC and Marvel have been mostly successful at reanimation of decades-old characters and tropes.
Now I believe the weaknesses mentioned above would not be fundamental obstacles alone- the directors and scriptwriters could draw inspiration and verisimilitude from elsewhere if they had to, but then myriad of separate obstacles grind down that possibility: propensity to be blinded by activism; attention deficit among the audiences; economics influenced by streaming services; economics of producing CGI heavy blockbusters to sell toys and-or theme park rides; all sound plausible contributors to decline of the cinema.
Right, I think this is a big part of it, but…
No! Not with any consistency, at least. Maybe I’m just skeptical of the evergreen argument that the current generation is coddled and sheltered, but it just doesn’t add up. George had exactly the kind of wealthy educated youth that Maiq was complaining about. It even fits the theory about not understanding dialogue! But because he was successful, his life must have been interesting, must have been in some way better than those miserable PMCs.
I think that’s pretty silly. I think you could sample veteran directors at random and find plenty that had boring, upper-middle-class upbringings. Or pick a young one and find something at least as irresponsible as George’s hobby. Not do I think it would correlate very well with critical or audience success, because I think your other factors are carrying all the weight.
This is really important. We have unprecedented access to the preserved corpses of existing projects. For the unimaginative, that’s a license to play it safe. Reboot the continuity and deploy a new line of toys. For the visionaries, though, having a rich world in which to play has its own advantages. We get commentary, metafiction, callbacks and fanservice. It’s opportunity. But it absolutely warps the market for intellectual property.
Entertainment is a commodity. You can’t sell Star Wars today because that spot is taken. You have to do something legally and perhaps even creatively distinct. Shot for shot remakes are a bizarre attempt to clear that bar. So are reboots. So are pivots to streaming, or AI, or whatever economic models promise market share without mining for good ideas.
The millennials barely even come into it.
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Hence all his military choreography looks like it's being acted out by aircraft, not spacecraft.
His trench run didn't have inherent verisimilitude because spacecraft really need to keep thrusting forward to maintain a constant velocity, it had relative verisimilitude because essentially none of the audience has an intuitive feeling for Newtonian mechanics in a vacuum, so "why don't Luke's wingmen just spin around and shoot back?" isn't a thought that we find unavoidable.
I wonder if some modern lack of relative verisimilitude is simply because we're a more culturally fractured society now. You still don't have an astronaut in the writers' room because there just aren't enough astronauts, but there's also lots of other occupations and activities and demographics that the writers room wants to write about (because they're interesting to watch), has no expertise with (because these days people with relevant experience are less likely to be acquainted with scriptwriters), but now gets burned by mistakes about (because lots of their intended audience is acquainted with those experiences).
It gets to the point where a little bit of realism can become a fun trope subversion in itself. When Sterling Archer has tinnitus or we see a montage explaining why Hawkeye is going deaf, seeing the reminder that guns and explosions are actually cripplingly loud is amusing, even to people who go to gun ranges and always wear ear protection, because seeing Hollywood get it right in fiction is a pleasant surprise.
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