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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'm particularly annoyed by the decline within the John Wick franchise.
The first movie? Goes hard. Taut cinematography, pacing, and music. The bathhouse shootout still gives me bumps. A+. It even manages to stay somewhat grounded, allowing for the Secret Assassins stuff.
And then it goes downhill from there. Half the population of New York shot dead with no repercussions. The lore getting ever more convoluted while simultaneously becoming nonsensical. The fight scenes got way worse.
The last mainline JW movie I saw, which must have been number 4, I gave up on halfway through. When the story wants me to believe that a blind man somehow manages to be a dangerous assassin on part with John Wick, I fucking give up. The man uses a katana most of the time. Has nobody tried shooting him from more than 20 meters away? How is he not hard countered by a JBL speaker blasting Fetty Wap?
It's no surprise I barely watch movies these days.
I am happy to see this same take I have expressed in the wild, though you feel stronger than I do. I think the first one was definitely the strongest, with everything afterwards having some Marvel-like quality about them, but still with pretty decent action scenes, usually with some stupid gimmick.
It's too bad you hated them enough to stop watching them. I wanted to ask what you thought about the flamethrower fight in Ballerina. I thought it was dumb as hell, but everyone around me and everyone online said that it was awesome. It had a bunch of other problems, too, if you ask me.
It seems to me that every JW flick increasingly flanderized the core conceit to the point of self-parody. It would be sorta acceptable if the choreography kept up, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised if they started running on water and throwing qi balls at people.
I gave up on Chapter 4 before the bit with the Dragon's Breath rounds, presuming that's the right movie (even 2 and 3 are so forgettable that I genuinely can't be sure), but a fucking flamethrower?? That's so absurd that it loop around to being worth watching, in a so bad it's good fashion.
I didn't have any plans of watching the Ballerina, I have cynical views on the fates of franchises that seek to replace an existing character with a Strong Independent Female Lead, but perhaps I'll save it for when I get badly stoned and manage to switch my brains off.
4 is indeed the one with the Dragon's Breath rounds. It was featured in a really popular no-cut scene that drew a lot of inspiration from Hotline Miami with its top-down camera view. The visual of John Wick shooting a shotgun at enemies who would blow up in flames was pretty cool, but definitely highly overrated, with the top-down view basically negating the benefit of a no-cut scene which is usually supposed to give a visceral, exciting sense of actually being there in the middle of the action.
I'd say you didn't miss much by missing that, but you did miss the best scene of the film, the long take of John Wick being kicked and rolling down several flights of stairs (the actual gun combat scene surrounding that was pretty meh).
Yes, actually 4 is the one I remember the most because of the stairs part. Sorry, that's just awesome. I did also like the top-down thing because I quite like Hotline Miami. I have now defaulted to assuming most of the things shown in John Wick are not true to life, so the Dragon's Breath stuff doesn't bother me much.
Frankly, I will probably see about every John Wick related film for the foreseeable future, because my family likes to see it, and I still think the action is decent enough. Far above pretty much anything else, anyway. My real preference is for high stakes, high lethality stuff, like the hotel shootout in No Country or the crazy car chase scene in The French Connection.
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