Lack of empathy for lead character

The movie starts out with Will Ferrell’s character, Rick Marshall, being laughed out of the Today Show studio by Matt Lauer. His crazy scientific theories then get him laughed out of the scientific community until he’s teaching science at an elementary school. He’s a laughing stock which makes it difficult to empathises with him. Even his scientific theories look crazy to us.

One of the tenants of screenwriting is to create empathy with the protagonist. The screenwriting guru, Michael Hauge, has a short list of ways to create that empathy. One of those is to make them intelligent. Rick Marshall certainly isn’t that, he’s the butt of every one’s jokes. The physical fight he gets in with Matt Lauer only lends to him being out of touch.

Lack of context

Without empathy for the protagonist we’re kind of lost, and not in a good way. Instead of trying to counter that the movie drops us into the actually Land of the Lost that has no context at all. There are dinosaurs, strange monkey creatures, ice cream trucks, hotel pools, etc. There is no law and order, no rules. Not even the dinosaurs have any context as apparently here they can understand the English language.

A skit gone too long

There are some funny parts but it all happens in this land of no context and around a protagonist we don’t empathises with. It makes the jokes a little less funny and makes the whole thing little more than a skit. And like a lot of skits on Saturday Night Live, it goes too long – more than an hour and a half too long.

If you listen to the commentary you’ll quickly learn that the writer director team obviously didn’t care much for their own work. It seems more like a haphazard homework assignment. Not surprisingly this is the same team responsible for the Crank movie series.

To see how much of an art this is, just compare Avatar to the other film I saw over the break, Sherlock Holmes. I can’t fault them for trying to make Sherlock Holmes an action star, but I can fault them for their utter lack of character development. The movie starts out more like a sequel, as if we’ve already been introduced to these characters. Even if you’ve read the books, the movie should still get me to empathises with these characters. Guy Ritchie seems more happy to play with the unnecessary fighting scenes than trying to build empathy. He did have his work cut out for him though, the great part of a Holmes novel was the explanation at the end, but in a movie that is too late. But Guy Ritchie didn’t even make an attempt at making up for that when he crafted one of the weakest and laughable villains I’ve seen in recent memory.

What I did find interesting was how many story related positions they covered in the movie’s credits. Which shouldn’t be that surprising, Pixar puts a lot of focus on story. It also farms out story duties, not relying on a sole screenwriter or screenwriters to come up with everything.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

In the end the movie actually conjures two questions.

1. Why did they make this movie?
2. Why did they make it so long?

I was warned that G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was horrible and it was much worse than I could have thought. Was it just targeted at 8 year olds? With the violence I would have to think not, but it’s so cheesy I don’t see who else it would appeal to. It reminds me of the long forgotten Masters of the Universe from 1987 but on a much bigger budget. At least that film had the cover of fantasy and being of a different world, this one has no excuse for the moronic weapons, characters, and plot.

Wonder how much they lost on this turd.

I was shocked to see how popular it was in Japan, well at least according to Wikipedia.

In both France and Japan, The Dark Crystal was the highest-grossing box office release for the year (1983) and outgrossed E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial as the most successful foreign film in Japan until Titanic took over the spot 14 years later.