4. Drama Taking Backseat To The Melodrama
Who here walked out of Beautiful Creatures thinking the movie would have been much more interesting if it was about the conflict between Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson? If not, I'd be surprised if you saw the same movie - a main failing of this genre is its failure to recognize the most interesting parts of its own source material and go from there. As I mentioned earlier, the emphasis falls onto the shoulders of the "Who will choose?" spectrum, and it never quite seems to work. Far be it for me to speculate, but bland people falling in love at first sight and then proceeding to spend an entire movie (or movie series) not admitting it to themselves is not something that requires the operatic backdrop given by these films. If you have a magical world to frame a romance, use it to more effect than a marginally higher visual effects budget! One thing to take note of when making a melodrama of any kind - the setting must be interesting and unique, in order to counterbalance the effect of having the painfully cliche character dynamics. The end result of putting melodrama over drama? It's roughly the same dramatic unbalance one gets when emphasizing a subplot over a main one - the films ultimately feel lacking on both counts.