Bad Twist 2: Twist Badder
When I last ranted about awful twist endings, I focused mainly on the “twist for the sake of twisting” problem that plagues so many screenplays — twists that not just come out of nowhere but actively undermine the story and characters. Lately, I’ve come across something infinitely worse: scripts that actively telegraph some of the world’s most misguided Shyamalan twists (more misguided than murderous trees, even).
The most egregious example has a setting I immediately fell in love with: New York City, at an unspecified time in the future, after some sort of hinted-at Apocalypse that left the city at the center of a vast desert. Water is scarce, and it’s suggested early on that, much like Chinatown, he who controls the water supply controls the entire city. Unfortunately, the writers squander the setting by using it as little more than a backdrop for a dull, cliché-ridden detective procedural about urban corruption. Because, no, the water-supply motif is not the only allusion to Chinatown. This always bugs me: why create a unique setting to tell a story we’ve seen a thousand times before? The setting alone doesn’t make it worthwhile.
But wait, it gets worse: throughout the script, Our Hero (a.k.a., the world’s dullest antihero) has these strange flashes. He sees himself, bathed in white, fighting battles. He also has long scars running vertically down the sides of his back. He also has only the foggiest memory of his past. As he works his way up the chain of corrupt command, Our Hero discovers — wait for it — that the chief villain is the Great Satan (as portrayed by a super-hot stripper — eat your heart out, Freud!), and that Our Hero is…an angel.
No, really. An angel. Those visions? His vague memories of fighting the battle for Heaven. The scars? Where his wings once were. Now he’s fallen to Earth and fallen in love with a mortal, and he must trade the chance to return to Heaven in order to allow his one true love — also a stripper — to enter the Pearly Gates.
The thing that bugs me is, if I said, “An angel? Are you high?” I’d get the following response from Murdstone & Grinby: “Sixty percent of Americans believe in angels.” Because that statistic alone makes the script great, right?
Look, having the big twist of your sci-fi wannabe-noir turn out to be “he was an angel the whole time,” that’s fine, but make it count. This entire script felt like 100 pages of wheel-spinning, followed by 10 pages of “big twist.” In other words, the script exists solely for this twist, and that’s not good enough. Let’s quickly apply this structural model to your average road movie. The fun of road movies, theoretically, are the hitches thrown in the perfect travel plans and/or the wacky stops along the way. If this script were a road movie, the main characters would have driven 2000 problem-free miles before running into a slight hitch on mile 2001, then reaching their destination at mile 2001.125.
This is a Screenwriting 101 thing: the first question you ask — just before “How do I sell this?” and “How do I get an agent?” — is “Why does this story need to be told?” If your answer is, “Because he turns into an angel, and that’s awesome,” congratulations! You fail! I would have accepted something along the lines of, “His ‘past life’ as an angel guides every action he makes on Earth, and it’s only when he learns the value of self-sacrifice that he can truly ‘become’ human, although he has to pay a steep price.” It’s not mind-blowing, but at least it gives him some relatable, human struggle and doesn’t mention the repetitive, poorly written gunfight sequences.
Here’s a phrase I love: inevitable but not predictable. This should describe the last 10-15 pages of every script you ever write.
Make no mistake, though: “not predictable” is not synonymous with “big twist,” because in this case, the twist was predictable. When you have a main character named Samhain and random flashbacks to your main character in gladiator-esque costuming, fighting an epic battle amid a backdrop of blinding white… What else could it be? Unlike the earlier rant about twists that undermine what’s already established in their efforts to blow our minds, this new brand of twist is even worse: they tell stories that exist solely for the twist. They can’t undermine a halfway decent story because there’s no story to undermine. I can’t figure out which is the bigger cheat: the one that takes a halfway decent story and throws it down the toilet, or the one whose story is a total waste of time aside from a slight moment of surprise at the end.
I guess the former is disappointing, because it squanders some small amount of potential, but the latter is fucking irritating. It doesn’t even have potential to squander. Hollywood spends all their time wondering why movies keep making less and less money — or, more accurately, they spend all their time accusing pirates of ruining their industry. The fact of the matter is: THIS SHIT IS WHY MOVIES MAKE LESS MONEY. It’s the “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” principle. You can only be burned with so many waste-of-time twist-ending piles of garbage before you start to realize seeing them is a waste of time and money.
Adding insult to injury, two extremely high-profile, justifiably well-regarded actors signed on to play roles in this anal fissure of a movie, elevating it to an undeserved level of importance that will probably cause moviegoers to waste some hard-earned cash, only to walk out two hours later saying, “Angels?! Were they high?!”
But you know what? Maybe next time, they won’t fall for it. After all, Robert De Niro hasn’t been in a financially successful non-comedy sequel in a decade. Deservedly, despite his stellar past work. I just feel bad audiences have to get screwed this time, but you know how it is. Kids have to touch the stove flame in order to know not to do it again.
Posted by Stan on June 20, 2009 4:15 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | How Not to Write a Screenplay | Digg It
Post a Comment
Powered by Ajax Comments