A big budget film's script is lacking? This question came to mind recently after seeing the newest chapter in the "Star Trek" opus. The movie was certainly a spectacle, with great visuals and exciting action sequences. However, I found the story and the script lacking. A friend of mine in Los Angeles who works in the biz was more partial to it, and we exchanged a few emails about the merits and shortcomings of the movie.
I won't go into what I found lacking in Star Trek. Perhaps I was expecting something more in line with the old films and the TV series. Whatever it was that did not strike me right got me to pondering the question: can we say the writer executed poorly when a big budget film does not work story wise? It's one thing on a spec script or in an indy setting if the script is not up to snuff, but when hundreds of millions are going into a movie and the writer is being directed by producers, studio executives, a director, and so on to make many changes and go in different directions, can it be said that the writer is to blame if the script does not turn out to be gangbusters?
I guess part of it might stem from how one views the film in question, but I don't think (and maybe this is being generous) I'm an old curmudgeon who does not like blockbuster or big action films. On the contrary, I do. I was quite fond of the first X-Men movie, and I thought WALL-E was one of the best films of 2008. These movies were high budget and worked in my opinion. So when other big budget films don't turn out as well as those, can we fault the writer?
We might not be able to fault anyone in reality. There are so many competing forces in big budget films, and so much is at stake. From the producers to the distributors to the advertisers, perfect storms can become perfect disasters, and it can be hard to tell which link in the chain was the weakest.
Joe and I were working on an action script last year. It was not our strongest genre, but we liked the idea and the producer with whom we were working so we gave it a go. We were pretty much following orders and trying to please the producer most of the time, but we were not mindlessly regurgitating everything the producer asked for. We tried to bring our own voice and style to the script, but in the end it was the producer's idea, and he was the one taking it to the marketplace so why not try to get it the way he wanted it? Looking back on it, I don't think it was that great of a script, so was it our fault?
Sometimes I find a useful way to judge a film by asking: would I use the film in one of my screenwriting classes to instruct beginners in the art of story telling? So maybe 'fault' is the wrong word to use when any film's script doesn't work, and I'm hesistant to say that Star Trek doesn't work (it's box office receipts alone might contradict this assessment). Nevertheless, it's an intriguing topic to explore, and we invite others' opinions and comments.
-Randy
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2 comments:
See now, I thought "Star Trek" was just fabulous. I think there were a couple of quibbles I had regarding a few bits here or there (mostly regarding Eric Bana's villain, "Nero") but for the most part, I think they nailed it.
Most importantly to that success, I think, was that it brought back the sense of PURE FUN that had been lacking in "Star Trek" for quite some time. The last movie, "Nemesis" had some (lame) light moments, but was pretty dour. I thought this film struck the perfect balance of serious and silly that the original series had back in the 60s. Certain niggling details don't jive (stardates, cloaking devices, yada yada) but those are things best left, I believe, for obnoxious Internet fan forum debates amongst ear-wearing convention-goers (who speak three dialects of fluent Klingon).
But getting back to Nero and blaming the writer... At just over two hours, this film already feels pretty dense, moving briskly from sequence to sequence - and apparently several minutes explaining more of Nero's backstory (and especially where he disappeared to for 30 years while Kirk and Spock were growing up) was cut from the finished film. We can hardly blame the writers for decisions made by the editors and director.
Moving beyond "Star Trek", we've all heard horror stories about scripts that have gone through endless revisions by countless writers, ending up nothing like the original drafts, with murky attribution. Exactly who wrote the latest "Terminator", which, at last glance of Rotten Tomatoes, was sitting pretty at 35%? The story told to the public by director McG and star Christian Bale was that Bale refused to do it until the script "could be performed on stage by two people and still be compelling". Frankly, I can't imagine a Terminator script that could possibly do such a thing, no matter who wrote it, but whatever. Still, word comes down that half a dozen people took a crack at that script, and the movie is still getting crapped on by fans and critics across the board.
I may have lost my point somewhere in my ramblings... That might be a problem with my own scripts. I tend to lack focus. Whoops.
Maybe I'm trying to say that it all has to be taken on a case-by-case basis, and it's too easy to just say "the script sucked" when, maybe, the best parts were cut out or on-set ad-libbing was really to blame.
Ben,
I think all of your points are great. I can't say the movie was a failure. There were some fun sequences, and perhaps I'm stacking this up against the films and the TV shows (I'm not a Trekie, but I did like TNG and DS9) when the comparison is not apt. But I thought this ST was too silly. The old shows were campy it's true, but they always explored an issue, a theme, something. The series finale of TNG was very intelligent, and this ST didn't really explore anything. I think it's sole purpose was to reignite the ST universe. As some poster on another board said, it felt like a two hour TV pilot.
There were some geeky things about it that I didn't like, such as Kirk becoming the captain of a ship he was smuggled onto. From raw cadet to captain in no time at all, made me question the logic of the world. But it wasn't just one thing; it was many of these moments which I could not get passed and thus threw me out of the story.
I certainly wouldn't say the script sucked, and I'm sure the writers are fine craftsmen, but, as you say, I think so much went into this beyond story that what came out was kind of muddled.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
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