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May 22, 2006
Why movies suck
So: since graduation, I’ve been doing a lot of job searching. But between times, I’ve been doing a lot of reading, and working, and playing of the video games. I haven’t seen a single movie the theatre this whole time...
This is something that I’ve been thinking of quite a bit since Brokeback Mountain came around. I realized that I had no desire—none at all—to see a love story in cinematic form. And yet I am a sucker for romance...
The thing is, no movie can show a romance that works as well as the Monica/Chandler relationship on Friends. There is no way that I could ever feel about the movie cowboys the way I felt about Willow and Tara on Buffy. The thing is, relationships take time to evolve and mature. A single sitcom season has something like 4 times the amount of airtime as a 2hr movie...
And the situation is worse when it comes to Video Games—at least the good ones. To use a much over-used example, when Aeris died in Final Fantasy VII, it made stone weep. The only movie character whose death would make me feel even close to that emotion would be Serenity’s Wash—who I care about from his TV role...
To take a more congruent example: When Lucas wanted to show us the devastation wrought by an army of Clones in his 2nd episode of Star Wars, he had to balance that with the need to tell us the real story he was telling about the fall of Anakin Skywalker. We barely know about how the soldiers in that war behaved, thought, felt, lived and died. By contrast, when Star Trek told a story about killer clones, they gave us the Jem’Haddar, and were able to take several hours and devote them to nothing else. We know the Jem’Haddar are people in a way we just can’t about the Clone Troopers. This is not the fault of Lucas; he had to serve the cruel mistress Brevity...
When faced with other, newer forms of media, movies just fall short. Perhaps back in the bad old days of episodic television, a movie’s longer length would allow for fuller, deeper characters and plot. Today that is no longer the case. There is simply no way that a 2hr self-contained short can be as rich as a 22hr season of television—or a 80-90hr game. So pass me the popcorn—and the controller...
Posted by Andrew at May 22, 2006 06:51 PM
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