Stupid is as stupid does

 If filmmakers are going to do contemporary sci-fi, or fantasy, or whatever you might like to call it, let them sit down and think the thing through before they pass it to the cast and the director. Please…

Netflix has been dredging up some not so hot pieces in this line recently, and the only thing I can say about them is they caught my attention for long enough to want to know how it would all end. I’m not giving anything away by saying it all ends, in both cases, pathetically.

Turns out I’d seen Nicholas Cage in Next before, but I’d forgotten the storyline, mostly, and something
about some early scenes seemed to indicate it hadn’t been too bad on first viewing. Plainly my memory was mistaken.

And then there was Sandra Bullock in Premonition, as badly thought through a story as can ever have been conceived – apart from Next, of course. I’d never seen it before, and am slightly amazed that I managed to sit through it at all. (My wife kept saying, ‘It’s horrible,’ though I’m not sure if she was referring to the ugliness of some of the events or the script.) But it had a kind of hook, as Next does, and you think ‘this will all be explained in due course.’ Nope. The writers hadn’t a clue how to explain their mess in either case, and gave up long before the end.

I guess film actors have to keep paying the bills, and it’s a bit of a doddle to make a movie that doesn’t require any thinking about, though surely at some point each of these highly-paid actors must have said to themselves, ‘Remind me again why I’m doing this nonsense?’

Mr Cage must also, surely, have asked himself why he was playing a part that should have been given to a (hem) younger man – he was 43 at the time – and why on earth his hair was made to look as though it was a badly made wig. And why he was allowed to walk through the part as though he was continually thinking he should be elsewhere.

Curiously enough, Premonition was made the same year – 2007 – and Ms Bullock was the same age as Cage at the time. I don’t know what that means, but there must be more of a story in that coincidence than there is either of these movies. At least Ms Bullock acquits herself as though she’s giving something to the part (except in one odd long-held shot where she hears of her husband’s sudden death, and stands looking into space, and stands, unblinking, and stands with no apparent thoughts going on in her head, and stands…

Okay, let’s let the actors off the hook. If you’re given trash scripts and for some reason you decide to go ahead, then you do the best you can with them. Next tells us that Cage’s character can see events happening two minutes before they happen, but only events happening to him – except when he meets his one true love about whom he can see everything in the future.

The writers conveniently forget how complicated this would be, and how unlikely it would be that he’d save himself from all manner of unpleasant events, just in time. Worse, at the end we find he (and we) have seen a third of the movie in advance, so in almost the last shot, he tells us that he made a mistake. Yup, that might be the point where he finally realised he was acting in one of the dumbest movies ever made, but I don’t think that’s what he means. The scriptwriters, at that point, having blown up Los Angeles with a nuclear bomb, conveniently forget everything that’s gone before and shut the movie off at that point. With no further explanation.

Right.

But long before the last third of Ms Bullock’s movie, her character has got herself into such an infinite tangle through living through actual premonitions that neither she, nor we, nor her husband, nor her mother, nor her long-suffering young daughters, have any idea what’s going on at all. Worse, the writers in this movies also do the big cop-out. Turns out that her premonitions were correct all along, and that her husband actually dies. The only quirk to that is that she brings this about by her attempt to save him, and even that is done in such a skewwhiff fashion when it comes to the telling of it in the movie that the audience groans at the stupidity of it all.

I spent a lot of time with a friend of mine, when I was writing my children’s fantasies, making sure that things had their own kind of inner logic. She continually talked about ‘plot holes’ and the need to avoid them. So we did our best.

No one told the people involved in these two movies that ‘plot holes’ exist. Or worse, they assumed their audiences would be so dumb that they’d never notice. But audiences, even the most distracted of them, have an inbuilt aversion to stupidity when it comes to the plot of a film. Something that scriptwriters/directors/actors don’t appear to have taken into account yet.