Dear People-Who-Make-Movies-Or-Stuff-For-TV.
Here I am, offering myself up to you, and not in the way you might think. I propose to create a brand-new job for myself, and you’ll hire me. Oh yes, you will.
Basically, I will be your Common-Sense Editor. You could send me drafts, scripts, even final working prints, and I will attack it with a big red pen and tell you exactly how fucking stupid you are.
You know that cliche bit in a horror movie where the young nubile lead heads UP the stairs in the creepy house, practically wearing a shirt with a diagram of her internal organs on it, so the killer knows exactly where to shove his knife? Well, it’s that sort of thing I’d like to sort out. The bits of the film that have your audience screaming ‘Oh, you fucking idiot! Why would anyone do that? this is ridiculous’.
It isn’t even always based on what a ‘normal’ person would do. Sometimes, it’s just based on what that particular character would do. If, all of a sudden, a peace-loving hippy suddenly picks up a shotgun and spouts a wittily aggressive line, the audience will do little more than groan.
Almost every mainstream movie suffers atleast a small lack of common sense. Directors and script writers use them to move the story along, to set up a big action piece or to put a certain characterin a certain position. But it’s just lazy. With a bit of extra care and thought put into things, it could actually make sense, which would help to immerse the viewer in the film, regardless of how rubbish it is.
It’s like when, to explain away a plot twist or something similar, a film will use liberal amounts of ‘science’. Or say ‘the internet did it’. When was the last time you saw a computer accurately portrayed in a film? Or even the word ‘hack’ used in any way that makes sense? Never. It doesn’t happen. Take, as an example, ‘Iron Man’ – in particular the scene where Gwyneth Paltrow ‘downloads’ the ‘files’ onto a memory stick of some sort. That whole scene is plagued by techno-nonsense. Tony Starck has the most advanced EVERYTHING in the world – even his home security system is sentient – yet his office PC is nads and looks rubbish. A little bit of common sense injected here would make the scene more tense, which is what it’s supposed to be.
Which is where I would come in. This could all be fixed with a little Common Sense Editing. Never again would a previously intelligent character do something so willfully stupid that you hate them from that point on. Never again would a nerdy-looking character tap-tap on a keyboard for 3-4 seconds and announce that, suddenly, he has access to the exact file he’s after. Never again will the plot points be explained away with a large flashing neon saying saying ‘SCIENCE!’.
Bliss. Pure movie-sense bliss.
All I ask for in return is a pat on the back, a ‘thank you’, and several thousand pounds deposited into my bank account on a weekly basis. Are you going to give me this? No, of course you aren’t, so why would you let the characters in your film do something equally dumb?
PS – No, just because the film is ‘sci-fi’, doesn’t mean you can waive any of the above. Don’t be lazy.
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