Why Transcendence Fails to Transcend

Big budget Hollywood films that fail to find an audience often offer lessons in storytelling. Transcendence is an example.

In most successful films, a main character embodies a story's promise (what the story is about) and that character experiences narrative tension around the course and outcome of the story. Transcendence violates this by starting with the aftermath of what's happened in the film with a major, but secondary character. This sets up a plot question, what happened to create the world we see in the opening scene? We then meet Johnny Depp in the present. He's a scientist working to create a singularity, an artificial, highly intelligent computer system that has the potential to evolve rapidly. But Depp is soon shot and dies, and his consciousness is uploaded into a computer. This takes 25 minutes. The action is slow and the settings mostly dark.

Main character #3 is kidnapped to force him to help shut down the new version of Depp, and he experiences narrative tension about this, but he's not the main character. These scenes run about twenty five minutes.

Eventually he's reunited with Depp's wife, who builds a massive underground compound at Depp's direction and guidance, using new technologies he's creating. A scientist friend gets into the facility and suggests to her the possibility that the A.I. is using Depp's personality to mislead her, and its real plan is to wipe out humanity and take over the world under the guise of using nano-technology to heal the crippled and end pollution. Now she experiences narrative tension. But she's not quite the main character in the film, either.

This builds to a major confrontation and some significant action (the trailer suggests this is an action film; that's not true at all). With the action, there's more tension generated about the plot about how the battle to shut down this facility/Depp will play out. To save his human wife, a newly minted Depp in a physical body allows himself to be infected with a virus she carries.

Depp and the wife he loves die together; her love has pulled on what was left of Depp to do the right thing. He dies, and since everything about his nano technology has already infected the world, everything in the world (anything connected to the internet or run from the internet) shuts down.

The film ends with main character #3 in a garden created by the human Depp that shields some of the nano technology that could rebuild the world. Will he allow the technology to rebuild the world?

The film develops a number of ideas about technology, but none are ever developed. It's also a muddle about who the main character is in the film. Depp and his A.I. version? The wife? The other scientist? It's not clear. They all have prominent roles in the story.

A film can be developed with multiple main characters. L.A. Confidential is a great example, but it's also a great example of story mechanics. Several main characters, but one story (about illusion, reality, and identity) and one plot (who's going to replace Mickey C, and what happened at the Night Owl Cafe?)

You don't find that kind of clarity in Transcendence. Big budget Hollywood films that fail to find and satisfy an audience often have flawed story mechanics, and not having a clearly defined central character is deadly. A film can be told with an ensemble that acts out the promise, it's just hard to do well and easy to do badly.

Helping an audience to transcend mundane reality is a basic goal of a good film. Having a main character the audience relates to or invests in and begins to share that character's narrative tension is a major part of how a good film helps its audience become absorbed in and share the story's journey to the fulflllment of its promise.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook.

Dale E Basye on Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go (+playlist)

RoboCop Vs RoboCop: An Issue of Tone

RoboCop Vs RoboCop: An Issue of Tone

In screenwriting, a difficult issue for new writers to deal with is tone. A problem in many first scripts is a shift in tone that undercuts the impact of a story. A script with a comedic tone turns to slap stick humor at the climax. A dramatic story (realistic) becomes melodramatic (unrealistic).

The current reboot of RoboCop shows how two movies can have the same basic story and plot (man who becomes mostly robot struggles to retain his humanity) and, because of different tones, turn out to be very different movies.

The original RoboCop, directed by Paul Verhoeven, was both an action film and a satire about the media and corporate greed. We were asked to care about the main character and his struggle to hold on to his humanity but also to enjoy the visceral thrill as his actions to solve his own murder led him to take on both hard core criminals and his corporate masters.

The current RoboCop starts on a satiric note about American, robotic peace-keeping in Tehran, but then shifts to a realistic account (for a movie) of how a near-dead detective is rebuilt in a mostly robotic body, and the complications involved from both a standpoint of science, morality, and corporation machinations. It felt like this took about half the running time of the movie, and the drama was low-key.

The main character, deep into the movie, does sets about to solve his own murder, which makes the plot finally feel like it's getting into gear.

Unfortunately for the movie, since it's taken on a realistic tone, and it takes so long for the plot to hit a higher gear, the movie invites a realistic assessment on what's happening. The problem is, it's tough to sell the idea that Americans would be against robots enforcing laws, when so much has already been set up via computers (cameras scanning crowds and using facial recognition software, scanners automatically recording the license plate of every car that enters a community). Also, a central issue in the movie about congress refusing to allow robots in law enforcement comes across as artificial, because it feels like the issue has already been resolved.

Another problem for realism, when it comes out that a .50 caliber machine gun will take RoboCop apart, no one shoots him with that (or if they do, he survives); and none of the several thousand bullets expended in his direction hit him in the mouth.

The original RoboCop was fresh and bracing and true to itself as a story, the current RoboCop comes across as struggling to be realistic and failing to be true to itself.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook.

Narration and The Book Thief

by Bill Johnson

The movie The Book Thief opens with narration by death, who adds some comments through the movie. In the film, a young girl is given up by her mother (who is possibly a communist or Jewish) to a German couple just before WWII. The girl is illiterate, but learns to read and then 'borrows' books from a local, well-off woman who lost a son in WWI.

I haven't read the book, but the movie has a golden-hued look that seems out of place with what is happening. The deeper problem is that, until the end of the film, it's not clear why it's narrated by death and what, ultimately, all the golden-hued action is meant to convey.

In the last line of the film, death admits to being haunted by the girl's death. To be a dramatic question for the story, the question of what about the death of her brother haunted the girl, and whether she could survive this haunting, would have given the film and death's narration a dramatic purpose. It's a question that would relate to other families in the film dealing with the deaths of loved ones in the war. But since this line comes at the end of the film, it's only then that the narration serves some dramatic purpose.

The reason people who write screenplays are told to NEVER use narration is that as a device, it lends itself to simply commenting on or explaining the action of a film, but not being dramatic unto itself. Narration as explanation, by its nature, tends to be dramatically flat; it's often the authors using characters to convey information the authors feel the audience needs.

An example of a dramatic use of narration is the film Days of Heaven, narrated by a young girl who doesn't understand what she's seeing, so her narration is dramatically interesting. What the audience sees happening is different that what she relates.

Another example of failed narration was in a horror film that was a remake of a Japanese horror film. In the movie, a new frequency is opened for cell phones, and via that frequency, the dead start returning to this world. The actors in the film all react to this event, but what the story is about is only revealed with the last line of narration, 'The dead had a stronger live to live than the living.' If that had been framed as a question at the beginning of the film, all the action would have had a purpose.

In films like this, actors are left to pose, because they aren't given characters to play. All the actors in The Book thief do a good job of posing, but they aren't given fully-realized characters to play.

Something else that's interesting about narration, even though screen writers are taught to avoid the technique, it's often used in popular films, Memento being a great example.

If you're going to use narration in a script, make sure it serves a dramatic purpose unto itself.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon Kindle, and Smashwords.

Perceiving a Director's World View

by Bill Johnson

The Great Beauty, written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino, is about an aging author who wrote one book when young that gave him entre into the night life of Rome. His barbed wit and interviews eventually made him an arbitrator of what made a party cool (his presence) or not cool (his absence).

Reviews call the film Felliniest because of the set up (creatively stuck main character, similar to the director in 8 1/2), and visual references to Federico Fellini films, a young girl around jaded adults and a reference to a sea monster (La Dolce Vita).

In Beauty, the opening third of the film has a surface resemblance to Fellini, but a comparison of the two directors and their work reveal a difference in the mind-set of the directors. Fellini loved people, and his films reflect that; the art of his films reflect that. Paolo is more artist as observer. He creates beautiful, lovely images, but they lack that underlying warmth.

An example of a Hollywood film described as Felliniest is Big Fish, directed by Tim Burton. Again we have the same kind of images (an adult son learns that his father's apparent boastful, fanciful lies had some basis in reality), but one character is set up to be assaulted in a kind of standard, he's standing in the way of the main character so he deserves to be beaten up, that conveys a lack of warmth for the characters in the film.

Because Fellini was a great artist and film maker, his techniques down to the composition of his scenes is often copied by others.

When I read manuscripts, particularly troubled manuscripts, I often find that the writer is creating a work to act out their inner drama, but failing to realize they are the sole audience for their work. They aren't reaching out to connect to an audience. The result is stories that have vague main characters (who, as actors, have their back turned to the audience while they perform for their creators).

Shopping With My Girlfriend

It was a boutique, mostly women's high end clothes. Most of the men were wandering around aimlessly or following three feet behind girlfriends and wives. The women were so focused they seemed to be guided around the shop point by point by lasers, while the men had a look in their eyes that said, "Tarqet Acquisition Failure; Abort Mission, Abort!"

I found a comfortable chair to sit in and ignored the Abort Mission messages.

I don't shop. I go into a store to buy something and get out as fast as I can. Unless I'm buying JoJos. That's something that can't be rushed. Or Diet Soda. In restaurants I ask to sniff the cork to make sure I'm getting a good vintage.

Bill

Authors Road Interviews George R.R. Martin

As we’ve traveled the country talking with writers and experts on authors, we’ve come to understand that this remarkable group is first and foremost storytellers. Since earliest times, these are the people in our cave-clans, tribes, castes and social circles who have that special gift to enrapture, instruct and inspire us with tales of myth, truth, daring and insight.

George R.R. Martin is one of the world’s modern storytellers who has for years spun his legends and kept us watching, listening, and reading. He has been telling fantastical tales since he was a child, and his genres are most often fantasy, horror, and science fiction. His mediums have included comic books, short stories, bestselling novels, and episodic as well as epic television programs and series starting with Twilight Zone and continuing to the current HBO blockbuster series, Game of Thrones. And his art has been acknowledged with bestselling worldwide sales, and numerous awards, including his selection in the 2011 Time 100, those people the magazine named as the most influential people in the world.

This last summer we had the great fortune to visit Martin at his writing studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We filmed our interview with him in an elegant room with two walls filled with dioramas of miniatures engaged in medieval war, science fiction disasters, and flights of fancy – a fitting backdrop for our talk.

We are so very pleased and proud to share with you our interview with our 38th writer, George R.R. Martin.

And more:

Recently the tables were turned on us as we were the subject of two media interviews. If you’re interested in hearing us, or reading more about us, please check out the following:

On Oregon Public Radio’s, Think Out Loud: https://soundcloud.com/thinkoutloudopb/the-authors-road-chronicling

And in a Portland Tribune newspaper, Boom: http://portlandtribune.com/bnw/21-news/202348-george-and-sallis-excellent-adventure

And last, to one and all: Thanks for your continued support and encouragement, and our fondest wishes to all for a Most Happy New Year.

George, Salli & Ella

Next Up: Bestselling author and writing professor,

Pam Houston

Thanks for . . .

. . . joining us . . .

. . . on the road!

Authors Road