Too much story? Not enough?

dougspice said:
SCRIPT and STORY are two totally separate things. Mixing them up is only going to confuse this argument.

Yes, you can take a non-traditional or weak story and make a brilliant film out of it. But it's an uphill battle; it's tough. There IS, in fact, more or less a science to story. But we're fickle creatures, we get bored easily. So we have to place a layer of abstraction between the bare bones of STORY and the much more diverse world of STORYTELLING. The Silent City (and I swear I'm going to stop picking on this film now) had excellent storytelling. It had a lousy story. The majority of directors can succeed based on those skills. Get them a good script, they'll make a good movie, probably. The problem is that most people seem to think they are also good story creators, which is less often the case.
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JAWS. Dude... a giant shark eats people. thts not a good story.... but its a film with AMAZING story telling.
 
Are you trying to contradict my point? Because I don't think you have. I'm not saying a film with a weak story can't succeed. In any case the story of Jaws is not "a giant shark eats people". You're not giving it enough credit. It's the story of a man who must overcome bureaucracy and corruption to do his job, and find redemption. The shark could easily be anything: the themes are universal. Particularly at the time, when they spoke clearly to an audience fed up with Vietnam, Watergate, and general lack of faith in their leaders.
 
THE CELL = Looked INSANELY GOOD, lots of imagery at work supposedly to tell a story, with a box office star, and no story.
And it did not do well.

Can't tell you what it was about really. I understood it at the time of course but it didn't stick with me. Not like SEVEN for example, which we all know the story off including the "twist" at the end very well.

SPOILER

In fact before that script was produced it was referred to in it's shopping around phase and development phase as the "head in the box" script. The studio tried to cut that ending from the script before shooting, but Fincher and Brad Pitt had to convince them to keep it. Only because Fincher had a star like Brad Pitt on his side did he get them to keep it. Yes I watched the special features like probably everybody else. Sorry for those that this is old news too.
 
Great discussion and probalby a question, that can never be fully solved ?

Still my take on it would be, that there for sure can be too much going on at once. I mean we are humans, we can only process so much information over a certain period of time, to much characters, plot twist and turns, etc... so i think yes, there can be too much story.
 
MojoTrancer said:
Ok peeps, this is a carryover from the Silent City thread. This film sparked the question, but this debate's been coming up a few of times.

How much story is too little? When does it stop being a story and just a series of pretty pictures? How much of the blanks have to be filled in to satisfy? And also do we expect even more of this from a sci-fi flick? Are we so used to the common practice of inking out every detail of a sci-fi world that we can't accept something more ambiguous or undefined?

Discuss.
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So I had not seen the film that sparked your question when I responded to this thread initially.

I think the answer to your query is very simple.

If the film engages you the whole time and feels satisfying when it is over then that's that.

Silent City looked phenomenal. But when it was over my predominant feeling was "huh?" "wtf did I just see". Some guys in a futuristic city, separated from their support and getting chased around by the unseen force from Evil Dead does not a story make. And it doesn't have a thing to do with not knowing enough information about the world they were in. There have been examples on this website that were totally dialogue-less movies, that never "told" us anything about the story and yet at the end all of the jigsaw pieces came together and the film felt complete.

A BRIEFCASE would be one. There is dialogue but none of it tells you what's going on. All expository information is shown.
There's another from Sci Fi - can't remember the name.
CACHE would be another, although there is dialogue.
 
i just give him props for getting cillain to bad cillian didnt get to act more other than kaboom and bloody.
 
Yeah, I'm a big Cillian Murphy fan. But I agree with Jack's comments above. This looked awesome. At the end I wanted to see more, that's for sure. But fulfilling, no. But maybe it was created just to get studio attention. I could see this working on a demo reel.

It's a scene, not a complete story. What was the filmmaker's intent on this? Was this made to get funding for a bigger piece? Because it doesn't stand on its own as a quote "short film".
 
Hey Kholi,

so what do you think of the VO at the start of Forrest Gump and Road to Perdition? lol
 
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