What's the difference between the overridden cliches most films use at their expense and the deadly sins films willingly commit against the audience? Maybe not as much as you think. After being used so many times, certain cliches might also be considered sins. However, a film sin must be defined as a willful act that goes against the good laws the film fathers set before us as the standard for making a film. The film fathers before us, including Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola, created masterpieces and saw that "it was good" until man decided to use his liberties for evil, and then came the rise of terrible directors including Brett Ratner, Uwe Boll, Michael Bay, and Paul W.S. Anderson. Here are 10 deadly sins we need to either learn to forgive or, better yet, remember to condem.
10. Immortality
A rule of thumb for any movie is keeping the good guy alive unless his death is the natural conclusion to his character arc and story, but even then the audience can't handle any likeable character passing on. Since Adam and Eve lost eternal life when they fell from grace, it's only appropriate to start off the list with this as the first deadly sin: immortality. In films such as Dog Day Afternoon, American Beauty, Scarface, Reservoir Dogs, and The Departed, the main character(s) that die add to the story and the level of emotional depth, so we can't imagine it ending any other way. Can you imagine Tony Montana living happily ever after with his sister? Gross, no. Mr. White and Mr. Orange move in together and learn to accept one another as cop and robber? Never. However, there are films out there where you kind of wish the main character died in the end, and if you've never had that thought then you haven't seen any Kate Hudson movie. Zing. Anyway, there are certain films that call for the death of the main character or would even benefit from it on the whole, but keeps him or her alive to appease the audience. For example, The Butterfly Effect starring Ashton Kutcher wasn't a great film by any means: the only thing it did was showcase Kutcher's decent acting chops when it came to dramatic material. The film is about Kutcher's character and how his life has effected those around him, so he goes back in his past to change the future, but things don't go as planned. The entire movie pretty much leads up to the conclusion that it'd be better for everyone involved if Kutcher's character never existed, but at the end he changes the past for the betterment of the future and decides to stay out of some girl's life and they live happily ever after separately. Tragic. In the director's cut, Kutcher's character ends up going back in time and killing himself before he's out the womb. All the other characters live happily ever after and this ending fits better to the movie because it's the only way it should've ended, with Kutcher's character sacrificing himself for his loved ones. If the director's cut was the original movie, audiences would've been sad and perhaps complained about the morbid ending, but the film would've been way better. Maybe not way better, but sort of better. Why is keeping the main character alive a sin? Well, it's not unless you're keeping a character alive when he or she should be dead. It's not a sin of commission, but more a sin of omission by the writer or director. If a character needs to go and all signs from the story point to the grave, then they gotta go. If not for the sake of story, then at least for the sake of the audience, like Michael Myers, who should've died in Halloween 2 or 3 or even 4 instead of torturing us with endless sequels.