Narrative

If you haven’t seen Sunshine or Alien and care about plot details, you do not want to read this post. Partly because you won’t know who the characters I’m talking about are, but also because of major story spoilers. You have been warned!

– PREDICTABILITY IN FILM –

I missed the Animation and Narrative lectures due to being ill, but I already had an idea for what to write about anyway so here we go – predictability in film. There is a seemingly endless list of tropes related to this, but two that cover it quite simply – Chekhov’s Gun and the Red Herring. I had a long list of films that I wanted to talk about relating to these, but I’ve had to cut it down to two because I could literally go on about them forever.

Chekhov’s Gun as a trope is derived from this quote:

“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

This principle is firmly ingrained in my mind – don’t draw attention to something (such as with a close-up of a specific object) unless it is going to have some importance later. I’m usually pretty okay at working out a twist/key plot point/punch line before it happens, because generally the clues (visual or otherwise) are there.

Meanwhile, The Red Herring trope applies to when something leads you to the wrong conclusion – a lot of murder mysteries set up the ‘obvious’ murderer who doesn’t have an alibi within the first act, who then turns out to be innocent. We’re so used to this formula now that if that person did turn out to be a murderer it’d be a surprise. Anyway, here are a couple of examples of predictability (or lack thereof) in films that have stuck in my mind:

– SUNSHINE –

Before I start complaining and give off the wrong impression, I really like Sunshine. It’s interesting psychologically, particularly with how the situation affects each of the crew. For example, Cassie is obviously exhausted and is the first to accept that they’re not going to survive, Corazon is intensely protective of the oxygen garden and is the most affected when it’s destroyed, Searle and Kaneda seem to become obsessed with the observation room, which fits in with Pinbacker’s descent into madness on the Icarus I. I liked how they dealt with not having enough oxygen to keep the remaining crew alive and still make the payload – the majority’s willingness to sacrifice someone else for the ‘greater good’ being contrasted by Cassie’s refusal to be involved in such a decision. The film spends a lot of time on characters rather than on action/special effects sequences, which can only be a good thing.

It’s a gorgeous film to look at (most films set in space are going to satisfy me visually), and its score is by one of my favourite soundtrack people (John Murphy), and I like the overall atmosphere up until Capa finds Pinbacker in the observation room, where it then goes down into chase-madness-stabby-stab territory and doesn’t really recover until a very brief moment at the end, which wasn’t enough to redeem what had just happened (for me, anyway).

The irritating thing is I was waiting for it, because I’m naturally superstitious. The film starts with Capa talking about the failed first mission to create a new star within the Sun, which would save the currently-freezing Earth. Literally a minute and a half into the film I had decided they were most likely all going to die, and this was purely because of the name of the ship – the Icarus II. The Icarus II follows the failed Icarus I mission, which itself was named after the mythical character of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and got himself killed. Why would you name something after that?! It would be like naming a ship the Titanic II (which to be fair, someone with more money than sense is doing). Gradually more and more things start to go wrong, so when the inevitable doom does happen, it’s not a shock.

Could it be called foreshadowing, or was it just flat out silliness? Personally I think the best kind of foreshadowing is something that goes unnoticed until a repeat viewing, where seemingly insignificant things take on new meaning. At some point Mace says to Trey, “Don’t kill yourself” because Trey is beating himself up about the fact that he messed up something vital with the navigation, and the moment is treated as just a quick reassurance, and you realise later that it’s cool foreshadowing because Trey does kill himself.

I’m pretty forgiving when something I like falls short on some level, and I don’t for a second think Sunshine is a bad film, I just feel like they didn’t have to do what they did in the way that they did it.

– ALIEN –

Alien was probably the first film I saw which followed the formula of the Everybody Dies trope (or the everybody-dies-except-one-or-two variation), and going into it with no background knowledge of what it was, when I was possibly too young to watch it, I thought it was brilliant. The great thing about it was that Ripley wasn’t even obviously the main character at first – if anything the first act of the film is more about Kane and Dallas (I instantly liked Kane, so of course Kane was the first to die). It played with your expectations and kept you in suspense right up until the end. It’s been nearly 35 years since Alien, and I feel as though we’re at a point where that kind of story doesn’t really work unless it’s given some kind of killer twist. More often than not it seems to just be retreading old ground – I’m looking at you, Prometheus. As a sort-of-prequel to the Alien franchise, it had a lot of potential to be interesting, but in the end it just felt like a missed opportunity. CinemaSins explains it more entertainingly than I could:

In general, I love films which give you a false sense of security then slap you in the face with something unexpected. If you think someone or somewhere is safe and then something terrible happens it hits you a lot harder (Serenity is a very good example of this, as is Mass Effect 3). On the other hand, if I’m really invested in a set of characters, I’m going to be swept away in whatever’s going on regardless of whether or not I know the outcome. Toy Story 3 made me audibly whimper in the cinema when I saw it a third time because I was so caught up in it, and the beginning of Up doesn’t get any easier to watch despite having seen it countless times.

In the end, no matter how much you try to perfect a story, to deviate from formulaic nonsense and innovate etc. – everything comes down to personal opinion, and you’re not going to please everyone. Filmmaking is hard.