The original post: /r/movies by /u/Agreeable-Divide-150 on 2024-12-29 09:01:01.

I doubt any of these thoughts are original. So a common complaint/statement about these types of movies (By which I mean stuff like Pacific Rim or San Andreas or more recently something like Venom, anything that revolves around a few big VFX scenes) is that nobody really cares about the ‘main’ storyline that takes up most of the runtime of the movie, and they just wanna see the big fight/climax. And to an extent this is true, nobody was watching 2012 for the marital drama or Deadpool to see if he stays with his girlfriend, but to me the studio heads have taken the wrong message

While I’m sure it’s not new, a lot of new movies seem to take an approach of “Nobody’s watching for this part, so lets just not bother trying” for non-action plot. All the pieces are thrown at our feet, the expository lines run through so that the movie feels like a checklist, and then we get to the action. Here’s a couple examples of what I mean, spoilers for the stated movies ofc

Godzilla vs Kong: The title is what people paid for, so I get why they wouldn’t elaborate on everything else, but I honestly don’t even get what was going on. The classic ‘Exploit nature’ capitalist villains want to capture Kong and the Kaiju to do evil, so they take him from the island with some girl who taught him sign language which is never explained. They go to the center of the earth and decide to shoot at kong just so he can kill said villains so they’re gone, mechagodzilla is defeated by pouring alcohol on its controls and I end up so confused I don’t even understand who’s doing what or why. This one might just be my shoddy memory, but my point is you end up too confused by the carelessly thrown together plot to enjoy the show

Kraven (Spoilers): Just saw this one so my thoughts are fresh, here we have another symptom of a carelessly produced plot, boredom. Superhero movies have so many cliches that they can be hard to avoid, but that’s also why you need to try. Kraven gets his partner on the other side of the law to trust and agree to help in a two minute conversation, we get the title drop, they mention the time they met as kids, why they do what they do. It’s all very bare bones and feels like the producer checking off a list for the scene “These people need to team up, every letter is a dollar out of your paycheck” feels like the motivation. There’s no fun moments of their characters bouncing off eachother or naturally existing in the world, they meet, sync up, and that’s it. Every scene feels like it’s being unwelcomly stapled on before the execs can get back to what the people want.

2012: Another thing these plots that fill out the screentime can do, and why people most want rid of them IMO, is the fact that they have so little to do with the actual plot. In this movie most of the melodrama isn’t about the rich being the only ones surviving armageddon, or about how a subatomic particle mutates, it’s about a divorced couple with kids and all that mundane bullshit. It’s about how John Cusack’s book sucks, about how his kid still wets the bed, about how his ex-wife’s new husband seems to be taking over his role for his kids, nobody gives a shit, we wanna see Woody Harrelson explode.

So to sum up my unhinged and probably incorrect in a few aspects rant, people hate the plots of action packed movies more often than not because they add nothing, take a lot from what the film could be using that time for, and often aren’t thought out. The issue is that execs suck at understanding feedback, and assume the winning bet is to not try, which is how we end up with expository dialog and hollow characters. For a big budget movie that does the plot decently well, lets look at The Day After Tomorrow:

For one, the drama is simple, relatable, and easy to understand. The main character is the son of the B plot’s main character, he’s stuck in a frozen flooded New York, and the B-team needs to save him. This means the plot adds to the movie (The dad gets into danger on the way, there are reasonable stakes that cause tension etc) and stays on fixed on the issue people paid to watch. A lot of the other drama and character moments come naturally from the situation (The lady cuts herself during the flood, so they need to go out and fight wolves made of bad CGI to get medicine for her) The scenes where we breathe and know the characters get the same benefit, it’s mostly them talking about the disaster, not about all the weird bullshit they talk about in The Happening for instince. The end result is that it feels like a movie about characters experiencing a disaster, not a disaster happening around some actors after they spent an hour talking about their mortgage.

The funniest part is that by not bothering to try to give their movies a plot, the execs shoot themselves in the foot. It’s not like the people who never want to see the quiet parts of an action movie are gonna show up now that those parts suck, they’re just gonna do what they always do and wait for the action clips to show up on youtube six months after release. Movie execs seemingly took the advice of people who’d prefer a few entire genre’s of film be turned into 15 minute clipshows, and the result is they’ve made some shitty movies.