Care of Zack Snyder

[kilroy]

Dear Hollywood:

I think you and I need to have a talk. I've noticed something missing from your work lately, and it worries me a lot: basic humanity. I'm not talking about the fact that a lot of your headliners are now digitally animated Smurfs-- I've been watching cartoons since I was tiny, I have no problems with that. I'm talking about trying to connect to the audience via empathy. You appear to have lost the knack.

I'm even noticing this in action and horror movies now. You don't exactly need a lot of character depth in a shoot 'em up or a slasher pic, but there has to be something. A single truly emotive expression. A snarky line delivered out of frustration. One moment where the characters step out of their genre and the audience recognizes them as more than walking cliches. Just a few seconds, that's all it takes for us to care.

But we haven't even been getting that. Those few seconds require a confluence of modest competency between the writer, the director, and the actors-- and that's the problem. You're failing on the most basic possible level of storytelling. We can't suspend our disbelief if we don't have someone in the film to latch onto. And if we can't pretend to ourselves that your world is in some way real then the whole exercise is pointless. You just spent however many millions of dollars on a movie when you could have just made the trailer and the posters and we all would have been happier.

Remember who you are. You are not landscape photography. You are not documentary war footage. You are not a Magic Eye painting. You're a dream of a writer performed by actors, filmed by a director, and seen by an audience. You're people all the way through. All you have to do is acknowledge it.

Comments

[brigid]

(Also: sometimes when a visually compelling big budget movie is on, I sit there and pretend I'm watching a different movie. I do this with previews, too.)