7. A Movie Must Have a Point
A movie should have to be about something. Nowadays, movie after movie comes out and doesnt leave the slightest impression beyond That one actor was really good or The effects were pretty good or other micro-concerns like that. Blockbusters seem to be laminated from the exact same press, and even our indie dramas fall into several obvious pre-determined shapes. If youve seen one movie about a depressed guy in his mid-30s falling in love with a quirky girl who teaches him to enjoy life The problem is, so many movies exist just to, well, exist for the sake of existing. Its like movies are grown in labs or, more likely, planned out in boardrooms before a single actual artistic person looks at it and has their say. Executives decide the look, tone and subject matter of the films before theyre released and people like writers and directors are employed to execute that plan on time and on schedule and on budget. Because of this, movies just follow the trends of whatever is popular, without any attempt to understand WHY those trends have merged in the first place. Take the ongoing Nolan-ization of superhero and fantasy films. Nolans brilliant idea was to take Batman out of the heavily-stylized soundstage cityscape that Burton had so carefully built in the 80s and plop him into the real world (or close to it) and examine what would actually make the Dark Knight tick. It worked because Batman is the perfect character to try this approach with (dark enough that the real world stuff made sense, silly enough that you could still have him drive a rocket-powered tank and no one would blink) and because the themes that Nolan and his team brought to the fore with this approach (power of symbols, power of fear, terrorism, spread of chaos) were pulled directly from our own post-9/11 daily lives. But making movies is hard and it takes a while and Jersey Shore was having a marathon that day I guess, and so subsequent creative teams have tried to nakedly ape Nolans dark approach but without any of the larger thematic elements that actually made his vision make sense. They were just doing it to do it. Thats why, in a perfect world, every movie would have a thematic reason to exist. Every film would have to be ABOUT something. That doesnt mean that every film would have to have deep socio-economic underpinnings, because thats not necessarily what a theme is. A theme can be as simple as Family and the writer can find dozens of permutations upon that to build a story around. If every movie had a clear thematic core to guide the decisions made concerning things like look, tone, pacing and characterization, it would cut down on the feeling that the paying audience is seeing endless copies over and over again. At least it would cut down on all the damn GRITTY fairy tales that come out every couple of months.