Mythological Action-Adven… Zzzzz
Nothing bores the shit out of me faster than the genre I will lazily identify as “mythological action-adventures.” This genre also encompasses the general, non-mythological “historical” action movies because, frankly, they might as well be mythological for all the historical accuracy they preserve. Now, I don’t really care much about accuracy if they tell a good story, but nine times out of ten, they tell a story that bores the shit out of me. Gladiator? Troy? Alexander? 300? Christ, how could 300 bore me? It’s specifically designed for the ADD generation. I am convinced there’s not a scene in that movie longer than 30 seconds or an individual shot longer than 0.25 seconds. And don’t get me started on anything older than Gladiator — the older you go, the slower the pacing, which means they get progressively more tedious. Spartacus? Ben-Hur? Never made it through them, and this is from a guy who thinks 1941-1952 and 1968-1981 are the golden and silver ages of cinema. I have a very high tolerance for movies not directed by Michael Bay, but this particular genre is just the height of tedium for me.
The weird thing is, I like history and I like mythology. What are these movies doing wrong? Maybe, because of my familiarity with history and mythology have led me to a point where these movies don’t show me anything I don’t already know. Actually, once in awhile they do, but it’s usually wrong. Not to say I’m some sort of genius historian/theologian/anthropologist or anything — it’s more like, “These movies are so goddamn braindead, even an idiot like me has culled more knowledge from History Channel documentaries than the jackasses who wrote the script.”
This idea of getting bored by the lack of new, interesting information makes some sense to me. Many of these movies exist as bland, generic action movies with bland, generic stories and bland, generic characters, and theoretically the only bright spot is the “unique” historical setting, or the “unique” presence of strange, mythological creatures and/or gods. I liked the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for instance. The movies are long, but (ironically) I could never get through the books, so everything after the first ten minutes of Fellowship of the Ring was news to me. These movies visualize a made-up mythology that I’ve never seen before and populating the world with compelling characters and interesting stories, so even when we aren’t watching badass action sequences, we’re engaged.
However, thanks to the unfortunate success of 300, I’ve read a glut of shitty mythological action-adventures script. 300’s influence is evident in every shitty story much more than the superior Lord of the Rings movies. They’re all boring action stories, using either significant historical or mythological events to drive boring action sequences. I love action movies, but I don’t love them when they don’t add any kind of new, ridiculous spin to the genre. If the best you can do is craft a plodding Seven Samurai retread around the signing of the Magna Carta, congratulations! You’ve just bored the shit out of me!
It’s funny, too, because as a budding screenwriter trying to find my way in the world, one of the early lessons I received was, “Make sure to make your script between 100 and 110 pages.” Everyone had a thousand different reasons why this had to be the sweet spot — 111-119 are too close to 120, and anything over 120 is way too long. Similarly, anything under 99 is double-digits, so even if it’s 98 or 99 pages, the psychology of the reader will tell them, “It’s too short.” I always thought this was sort of ridiculous, but now I understand… Except I sort of think differently. I don’t give a shit how long the script is. I read one that was only 73, and I was damn happy the jackasses didn’t waste my time for 103. I’m not gasping at the lack of professionalism, because that’s not my job. I get paid to read the shit, no matter how long it is, so shorter is always better.
When I see a script that goes over 120, I pray to God the first ten pages don’t have any explosions or long Greek names. I’d rather read the worst 135-page comedy ever written than the best 135-page mythological action-adventure. That’s all there is to it. The comedy might be horrible and unfunny, but 90% of comedies have brisk, snappy paces that I can breeze right through. Mythological action-adventures don’t have that; in fact, many of them go overboard on period detail, making already-leaden scripts into a new form of torture.
In the past month, I’ve read five mythological action-adventure scripts. These include:
- The aforementioned Seven Samurai retread surrounding the signing of the Magna Carta, whose chief problem is its portrayal of King John as an incredibly one-dimensional villain. Plus, it has a failed attempt at a romantic subplot. Sounds like every shitty action movie ever made, doesn’t it? Well, you’re wrong! This one has ancient English politics! Different!
- A Greek mythology Star Wars knockoff with the world’s most passive protagonist. (Seriously, nothing motivates him to do anything. Zeus keeps having to whisper things into his ear to move the plot forward. I am not making that up.) It plunges to depths of silliness rarely seen in deadly-serious action movies when the gods descend from Mt. Olympus to fight. Maybe this will come across differently when visualized, but I can’t imagine anything funnier than oiled, white-bearded musclemen doing battle in a pit that makes me think of a wrestling arena more than anything godly.
- A retread on every creature feature ever made, from the 1931 Dracula through something like S.S. Doomtrooper or Dinocroc 2: Supergator. I came closest to liking this one, because it tried to explore the unstable relationship between Druids in what is now Scotland and the Christian Romans who conquered England. Despite what could have made for an interesting conflict, the entire first act is devoted to introducing us to what feels like a cast of thousands, many of whom die. Who cares? They don’t impact the story in any way, their deaths mean nothing to any of the characters, so why not just concentrate on the core group of people and develop them into interesting people. They waste too much time, so the whole story suffers.
- A Nicholl Fellowship pick almost as inexplicable as Butter. In fact, until I read Butter, I was willing to assume the badness of this script came from it being a later draft. All bets are off now — this draft could very well be the Nicholl draft. Anyway, it’s basically The Treasure of Sierra Madre, with a few changes. Replace 1920s Mexico with post-Plague France, replace a group of American bums with Crusaders returning from the Holy Land, replace gold with a witch, and replace insight into greed and its decaying effect on the psyche with action-movie clichés and a bland “religious crisis” that’s solved by the protagonist realizing this girl is of the Devil, and if there’s a Devil, there must be a God. Next!
- And finally, the Conan remake, which I reluctantly admit I sort of liked. Maybe I liked it because it makes up its own mythology and is very different from the original movies. Or maybe I liked it because it’s a pretty great vehicle for mindless action, if you ignore the awful romantic subplot and the weird “twisty for the sake of twistiness” problems in the third act. I blame Shyamalan for this idea that every non-comedy has to have 15 different mind-blowing twists in the third act. I’d rather know pretty much what’s going on with maybe one well-thought-out twist. Instead, you get a bunch of really goofy, nonsensical twists to create the illusion it’s one-upping the last hit action movie.
What’s the point? I know, I know. “Making money.” But bear with me for a second. You’re a writer. You have a story rooted in ancient mythology or history, but rather than making it something interesting about the time of the people involved in the myths, you make it into a cheesy action movie. No interesting characters, a story you’ve seen done better 1000 times before, and as far as accuracy… Like I said, I’m not a stickler, but why would you change the history of, say, the events surrounding the signing of the Magna Carta when what actually happened is infinitely more interesting than an action movie?
This script, in particular, would have you believe that it’s all about freedom! It makes some of the least subtle comparisons to the Bush administration that I’ve seen in quite some time, but that just makes everything way too simplified. The guys who banded together to force King John to sign the Magna Carta had more complex reasons for their actions. It was more about not wanting to pay taxes than it was about civil liberties or having some sort of say in government. Remember, this was over 500 years before “no taxation without representation.” This was just “no taxation ‘cause I don’t want to pay.” Isn’t that a more interesting motive than freeeeeeeedommmmmm? Wouldn’t the Magna Carta, which forced an early Parliament-type group of representatives on the hitherto unquestioned divine right of the king, cause some trauma for him? I mean, what a legacy: the first question who got his balls stuck in a vise by a group of bitter farmers. You don’t think that would upset him? Nah, you’re right. It probably is just about cartoonishly evil tyranny to prevent his royal subjects from having any individual freedoms.
The other scripts have more of a fantasy/horror tinge to them, but they’re equally rife with interesting, human material that gets sacrificed for been-there-done-that action-movie plots. Why do these stories always miss so many opportunities?
Maybe I’m just bitter about this genre in particular because, in addition to finding it boring as shit, I can’t help thinking of my friend Ryan. Some years back, he wrote the best script I’ve ever read in this genre — one of the best scripts I’ve read, period. And I’m not saying that because I’m his friend. I barely knew him when I wrote it and, in fact, decided I’d force him to be friends with me. I like hanging around with people like that in the hopes that their talent rubs off on me. (It doesn’t.) At any rate, he pitched it to the Big-Shot Producer, who almost literally laughed in his face. Actually, he merely laughed at him in a press release after dollar-optioning a different script Ryan wrote.
Why wouldn’t that piss me off? The Big-Shot Producer, for those too lazy to read it, said of that script, “He [originally] pitched me some giant-epic-action-biblical-save the universe from a flood type thing (or something like that).” You can practically hear the smug chuckle accompanying that statement. Little did he know, a year later 300 makes a shit-ton of money and suddenly “giant-epic-action-biblical-save the universe from a flood type thing[s]” are the flavor of the month, and he could have been sitting on the king of them all. Instead, he opts to laugh and indenture Ryan to do free punch-ups on scripts for movies that will never get financing. And when I tried to convince him he was sitting on a goldmine, he just reminded me he has a job, three kids, and a mortgage in Chicago and can’t do much to sell a script in L.A.
Looking back at Ryan’s script, it occurred to me how to solve the two major problems in these scripts:
- Getting bogged down in ancient mythology
Old mythology is insane and complex. Writers need to realize that few people care about the details and mechanics of mythology. The writers need to know all of this valuable information for their own background information, but in all these scripts (including Conan, the one I liked), huge chunks of exposition and even entire subplots could go away without affecting anything. They exist to flesh out mythological backdrops that have very little to do with the characters or story. Who cares? Writers need to remember to approach fantasy stories the same way they’d write any other — draw people into the world, establish rules, but don’t go overboard on exposition and backstory. The recent failure of Delgo shows just how severely convoluted mythology can affect an otherwise affable flick.
- Trading real people for archetypes (or stereotypes)
Many of these scripts — especially the ones that feature actual gods and goddesses as characters — tend to treat the people in the story as symbols rather than people. It’s not just the mythological action-adventure that has this problem — it’s actually one of the reasons I’ll never stop railing against Butter. They do things for inexplicable, plot-driven reasons and have few (if any) believable or relatable qualities. Myths have endured, even after the religions associated with them have died out, because they portray the gods as having human flaws. I guess people ignore that because, in the Christian Bible, only the human characters have flaws. Portraying them as people, with the same problems as any human, makes them relatable. If they audience can relate, they might actually care. Isn’t that the goal?
Conan works, at the start, because it models itself as a revenge movie. Conan’s entire civilization is wiped out, and he sets out on a mindless quest to kill the people responsible. The first several pages establish Conan’s relationship to his family and his people, so we actually care a little bit when they all die. For all its flaws, his quest is a lot easier to relate to than Zeus whispering in his ear the whole time.
I guess, when I think about it, Conan’s success has less to do with its original, semi-unique attempts at mythology and more to do with it operating as a story on a human level. None of these other scripts, including the non-fantasy Magna Carta script, accomplish that. So which of the screenwriting gurus is running around saying, “The rules of drama don’t apply when you’re writing a mythological action-adventure”? Because I’d love to punch that guy in the scrotum.
Posted by Stan on December 31, 2008 11:27 AM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | How Not to Write a Screenplay | Digg It
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