There’s an Australian stop action film called “Mary and Max,” which is about a lonely 8-year old Australian girl named Mary who’s raised by an alcoholic mother and a distant father who spends all his time stuffing birds instead of caring for his daughter. Since Mary is lonely and gets teased a lot at school, […]
Every scene needs to change the story. If a scene doesn’t change this tory in any way, it’s redundant and needs to be cut. If you read James Cameron’s scripts for “Terminator 2” and “Aliens,” you’ll find that he includes a lot of unnecessary scenes that got cut from the movie. In “Terminator 2,” the […]
In bad movies, the ending is nothing but pure action. Watch a lousy movie like “The Net” where the hero hits the villain in the face with a fire extinguisher. Since “The Net” is about computer hacking, you would think the hero would defeat the villain using computer hacking skills somehow, but smacking him in […]
In a bad action movie, the villain ties the hero to a chair in a locked room and pumps the room full of poison gas. When the villain goes to check if the hero is dead, the hero miraculously has not only escaped from the chair and the locked room, but also managed to escape […]
The stereotypical villain twirls his mustache while wearing all black clothes and cackling with laughter as he pursues his evil goal. Such all-evil villains are actually boring because they don’t seem like real people. To make villains more realistic and even likable, give your villain problems. In “Star Wars,” Darth Vader may be all powerful, […]
One-dimensional characters are boring precisely because they’re either completely good or completely bad. Watch a bad James Bond movie (such as “A View to a Kill”) and you can see one-dimensional heroes (James Bond) and villains. That helps create a boring story. Now watch a good movie and you’ll notice something interesting. The “good” characters […]
Pixar has created some of the best movies in the past few decades. Although they’ve had a few misfires (“Cars 2” and “The Good Dinosaur”), even their weakest films are better than most of what Hollywood has produced. The secret to Pixar’s success is constant revision. In the book, “Creativity, Inc.“, one of the founders of […]
Either the hero’s goal or the villain’s goal needs to be mysterious. That’s because every story is really a puzzle for the audience to figure out. Something is happening and clues trickle out gradually until the audience (and the hero) discover what’s really happening. Then the final 30 minutes (Act III) is all about whether […]
Action movies focus on explosions, car crashes, and gunfire. However, all that action is meaningless if there’s nothing behind the hero. Nobody really watches action for the action alone. Audiences watch action for how it affects the hero. People still enjoy watching “Die Hard” because the story was more than just action. It was really […]
Far too many movies focus on action and forget about the human element behind that action. Specifically, we want to know how all this action changes the hero? Watch any bad movie that involves giant robots punching each other in the face (“Pacific Rim: Uprising” or “Transformers”) and you’ll get nothing but mindless action and […]