More Like 30 Hours of Night
Watching 30 Days of Night, I carried two main (conflicting?) thoughts in my brain for pretty much the whole time:
1. This is a great premise for a movie.
2. This is a terrible premise for a movie.
It's a great premise because it's about an extreme-Northern town that shuts down for a month in which it'll have absolutely zero daylight. Ideal slaughtering grounds for vampires. You'd think it would write itself.
It's a terrible premise because 30 days is, in fact, quite a long time. At least, it is in movie-land. When was the last time you saw a horror covering such a very long timeline? I'd argue they don't really exist, and for good reason: it's impossible to maintain a sense of urgency.
And that was my problem with the movie. I just couldn't get over the fact that days seemed to be passing while our main survivors were hiding away in an attic. Days. Many in a row, just glossed over. And no one seemed to be getting especially dirty, or claustrophobic, or mad. The story felt like it took place over 3 days; maybe a week, max.
I've said it before, time is a problem. How much time is passing affects how we understand the story as well as the characters and their motivations. It's why I feel the Harry Potter books can never make great movies: in the books, you always feel an entire year passing. You feel the frustrations, the missed clues, the build. Covering a year in two hours always feels somehow rushed.
When you have the option (i.e. it's not an adaptation?), your best bet is to tell the story over as little time as possible.
1. This is a great premise for a movie.
2. This is a terrible premise for a movie.
It's a great premise because it's about an extreme-Northern town that shuts down for a month in which it'll have absolutely zero daylight. Ideal slaughtering grounds for vampires. You'd think it would write itself.
It's a terrible premise because 30 days is, in fact, quite a long time. At least, it is in movie-land. When was the last time you saw a horror covering such a very long timeline? I'd argue they don't really exist, and for good reason: it's impossible to maintain a sense of urgency.
And that was my problem with the movie. I just couldn't get over the fact that days seemed to be passing while our main survivors were hiding away in an attic. Days. Many in a row, just glossed over. And no one seemed to be getting especially dirty, or claustrophobic, or mad. The story felt like it took place over 3 days; maybe a week, max.
I've said it before, time is a problem. How much time is passing affects how we understand the story as well as the characters and their motivations. It's why I feel the Harry Potter books can never make great movies: in the books, you always feel an entire year passing. You feel the frustrations, the missed clues, the build. Covering a year in two hours always feels somehow rushed.
When you have the option (i.e. it's not an adaptation?), your best bet is to tell the story over as little time as possible.
Labels: time
posted by Jennica at 12:28 p.m.
5 Comments:
I haven't seen the movie yet, but I agree with your overall thesis. For stories that are heavily centered around character and over a long stretch of time, like Harry Potter, the relentless pace a movie has to sustain totally robs the story of it's power and depth.
The big problem I have with most films nowadays, especially the big budget blockbusters, is precisely the preposterousness of how quickly these stories have to unfold.
You have characters (usually) who have never met before this movie began meeting, forming a close relationship (where they would be willing to sacrifice their life for the other people), meeting the bad guy, and becoming his arch-enemy, all within the span of a day or two. And added to that, you often have the male and female lead go from strangers to passionately in love in half that time. And most of their sharing of information comes during conversions held while driving/escaping at high speeds, running through tunnels, or being tied back to back in a prison cell.
I just can't buy it anymore, no matter how well the movie sells it.
And it just seems that every single movie of this sort has to go through all the same beats.
That's why I loved "3:10 to Yuma" so much, is that it didn't cram these unbelievable relationships down our throats. (That said, the ending of the film DID fall into this trap and for me was the weakest part of the film).
Is there any way around it? CAN an action or genre film take place over a span of time and not feel like the story is stalling?
Hey, Vic!
You know, you offer great, specific support of my argument... you've nailed the formula. But also made me realize that 30 Days of Night is actually not guilty of a couple of these particular sins.
The film has its tiny-townness going for it. Because it's such a small, remote place, there isn't that whole "strangers coming together" and "people who've never met before falling in love" thing. In fact, 30 Days handles its relationships relatively well: everybody knows everybody already, so the stakes for the characters feel quite high from the get go (as in, people's parents and siblings are in danger...) and the love relationship explored is a divorced couple (so the passion/love is broached from a different angle; there's already lots of history).
So, credit where it's due...
Still, we're on the same page about everything you mentioned!
And a great reminder that I must see 3:10 to Yuma...
Well, I'm really curious now to see "30 Days of Night" precisely to see how successfully (or not) it handles these timing problems.
In your opinion, what are some other examples of films that either commit the sins we're talking about, or somehow avoid them?
I nominate "Aliens" as a success for how it dealt with the Ripley-Newt relationship, and the Ripley-Hicks relationship. And for being just a flat-out great film.
The final two Pirates movies were dismal failures in my mind.
Vic, I totally agree (on Aliens being fantastic, and on Pirates 2 & 3 not working).
I mentioned the Harry Potter films because of their year-long timeline. I've thought about this a bit... how do you have that school-year feeling without a year actually passing? I can think of some examples of high school and college films that worked (time-wise, anyway) because they simply didn't aim for a whole year. My beloved Rushmore covers just a few months of the fall... and you do get a sense of the time passing and the relationships evolving, as Max changes schools, Herman's marriage falls apart, etc.
I think the Lord of the Rings trilogy does a great job of feeling long (I think the story in the books spans a number of years, does it not?). My guess for why this works (besides having 10 hours to tell the story...) is that, as we're following Frodo and Sam, we truly believe that they have been walking for months. Their bodies are taxed, their minds are weakened... I think these simple aspects go a long way to indicating time. (If we didn't have Sam and Frodo, would, say, Aragorn's story have felt like it was taking a year? I don't think so.)
I agree totally. One thing I meant to say in my previous comments was that movies no longer are able to effectively show the passage of a long period of time within the course of a two hour (or even three hour) film.
I think because of TV shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica, and all the other serialized dramas, we're more cognizant of how long certain dramatic events should take, such as falling in love, or an entire year spent in a school. When movies that SHOULD be TV series or mini-series zip through events that should be dwelled on, it jumps out at us now.
Lord of the Rings was the last one to effectively show the passage of time, for all the reasons you mention.
I think the final Harry Potter book will be the best represented of them all, precisely because it will now be split into two films shown a few months apart.
One of my favorite fantasy series, George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" is set to be adapted by HBO into a series of ten-episode arcs. Each book will be one season. Ten episodes, while still probably not enough to show all the nuances of the book, will still be far more effective in presenting the scope of the books, spreading out the emotional beats that logically should be spread out and not happening back to back to back.
Overall, I think straight up dramas or comedies or romantic comedies ('Knocked Up' is a good example) can get away with the time passage thing easy enough if done right.
It's when action films have all the other stuff going on, and in the midst of that, we have these intimate moments that are supposed to encapsulate months of 'getting to know each other' that it really feels false to me.
Anyway, this discussion continues to pique my interest because one of the screenplays I'm working on is sort of a very small-scale version of "National Treasure" with less focus on the adventure and more focus on the characters. And it spans maybe a couple of weeks time. While my main male and female characters meet-cute, bond and have an obvious attraction to each other, I don't have them taking their relationship anywhere major over the course of the film. But even still, I'm second-guessing myself. I'm worried I'm committing many of the same errors I get so frustrated with in other films.
I'm babbling! I'll stop now...
Post a Comment
<< Home