Stutter Island might have been better

The Atomic Writer liked this movie, but grew tired waiting for the last reel payoff that never really came. Don’t get me wrong, the movie is well worth seeing and is very entertaining, however with all the extravagant buildup I was let down in the end. I started to think is this the work of M. Night Shyamalan? Could he have been hired as a ghost writer for this project to avoid the expectations and justified letdown of his recent cinematic attempts? Sure the movie had all the beats of a classic noir psychological thriller, but the clutter of over the top visual imagery, a soundtrack dictating the movies conceit, and almost melodramatic performances leads me have to not recommend this movie to my readers. See it on DVD for sure, but save your money at the box office.

In the latest Martin Scorsese movie, Shutter Island, we find an overt attempt to create a masterpiece only leading to a forced payoff in the denouement. The story of two federal marshals sent in 1954 to an island off the coast of New England to investigate a dangerous missing patient. The dialogue on the ferry seems forced and full of exposition in an attempt to quickly reveal backstory. Add to this the cellos of Robbie Robertson’s score blasting away followed by freaking out violins, as the ferry arrives on the island, reminds me of a Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick movie.

The island creates a boxed, trapped in feeling with the electrified fences, iron gates, medieval maximum security building and jagged rocky cliffs along the shoreline. DiCaprio’s character, Teddy, begins to feel like he’s becoming a prisoner when the walls start closing in around him. Ben Kingsley plays the director of the facility who wants to use modern treatments on his patients, but what is he hiding? Max Von Sydow plays a character that reinforces Teddy’s nightmare of freeing German concentration camps during WW2. But who are these doctors? I would have liked to know more about them. Are they conducting Nazi like experiments on the patients? Remember this is the cold war era and this was very much on everyone’s mind. DiCaprio, is haunted by dreams of the war and of his late wife that are not needed in the story. Like flashbacks, only in a dream, these attempt to provide backstory that could be relayed through character actions. Characters are defined by how they act, not with what they say. Showing us the gruesome atrocity of Nazi concentration camps sends a familiar message, that killing and war are wrong, but seems out of place in this movie.

Mark Ruffalo’s sidekick character makes us wonder who’s side he’s on, and the movie uses misdirection very well in this sense. We become enthralled in the psychological torment DiCaprio is undergoing but where is it leading? All the tight close up’s, the eerie backgrounds, the soundtrack, and mystery eventually leads to a payoff that is too fast and cheap. DiCaprio makes it to the lighthouse only to find empty rooms and Ben Kingsley sitting at the top at a desk with a whiteboard (weren’t there only blackboards in the 1950’s) ready to explain all the misdirection and the little role playing game they were playing.

Wouldn’t have been better to let the game go fully awry? Perhaps DiCaprio escapes the island and continues his delusion on the mainland where he uncovers some truly meaningful reveals. Maybe he discovers a newspaper article on a missing federal marshal? Becomes an innocent on the run. You see where I’m going with this…

Shutter Island tries too hard to be great and like most things in life, trying to hard is not a good thing. The screenplay is an adaptation of a novel, and like most things coming out of Hollywood, original is not in the equation. Perhaps if Shutter Island was written as an original screenplay, it could have saved the film.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

The Book of Eli

In The Book of Eli we see the hero, Denzel Washington on the road in a post-apocalyptic world littered with bomb craters and full of Mad Max characters that appear to be re-using the same costumes from the original movie. We never actually learn of what type of bombs these were only a “flash” that tore open the sky. We can assume atomic but then the survivors seemed to not have radiation poisoning. Don’t get the Atomic Writer wrong, I liked the movie and its powerful message almost as much as I like to write, but not quite.

Early in the story we have the scene where Eli beds down for the night, bar-b-cues a cat he hunted earlier, then gives a piece to a little mouse who somehow survives alright on his own. This is a screenwriting technique known as “save the cat”. The late Blake Synder coined the phrase which literally means to show your hero doing something nice so we the audience will like him. A character can save a cat from a tree, help a little child or throw a bone at man’s best friend. Showing the hero do this also prepares us for the other side of a complex character: The dark side.

Within minutes of “saving the mouse” we watch a brutal fight scene where, and yes this is another technique us screenwriters like to do; we show the hero doing something he’s very good at. In this case it’s killing other people, a skill undoubtedly valuable in this post-apocalyptic world. He whips his combat machete around and a half dozen men fall limp to the ground. We see him later wheeling a pistol around and shooting armed gunmen off the tops of roofs and over a hundred yards down the road, and when the twist comes at the end, and I’ll leave this out so this is not a total spoiler, it could only come from divine or supernatural intervention. He is protected because of the importance of his mission.

We begin to respect him when he turns down Mila Kunis for sex. Okay, on a personal note: I thought he was being stupid turning her down, and I know this sounds cheesy, but hey she’s HOT, and I’m a red blooded atomic writer!

He does this in the name of the book, which later we learn is the King James version of the Bible if we hadn’t already figured it out. This makes the divine intervention angle more plausible. He’s on a quest to deliver the book to a place where it will be respected and protected. Why not just take the back roads and stay away from other people? I mean if this really is the reason he has been given supernatural powers then why did it take him nearly 31 years to get to Alcatraz? Well why did it? Even if he started in the Northern most tip of Maine, it would not take someone, especially with supernatural powers, 31 years to get to the San Francisco Bay. One possible reason is that it makes a better story. Can’t make a movie about a guy tiptoeing through the woods to deliver a Bible. Nah, it just doesn’t work. We need at least three acts, 15 major beats, according to Mr. Snyder, in order to make up a well structured movie.

Good screenwriting is telling a story in pictures more than in dialogue. It is always better to move the story forward with images and actions that the character does instead of telling the story with talking heads. This is an axiom in the business, and The Book of Eli does this very well. If you want to tell a story in pictures you need these basic elements:

1. A single main character shown in 95% of the scenes.
2. A world that limits interaction between people, like the post-apocalyptic genre.
3. Make your hero do a lot of reading.
4. When he’s not reading show him pulling a Jackie Chan maneuver on the minor characters with a very sharp object.
5. Use supernatural or divine intervention to explain why bullets seem to just miss him.
a. if he does get shot at close range, make sure he can still walk down the road.
6. Create a twist to reveal at the end of the movie so that the audience leaves trying to wrap their heads around the validity of it, and not the central question of why it took him 31 years to get to San Francisco.

Please anyone out there correct me if I’m wrong…

Overall, The Atomic Writer recommends The Book of Eli and just wants his readers to know the full story and behind the scenes motivations that the writer, Gary Whitta had to deal with. Great job Gary.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

I know you must be thinking the Atomic Writer has lost it this time, but read the entire post and I think you’ll find new insights into this great movie and agree with my comparison.

I really think the title speaks for itself. I just returned from seeing this amazing movie in the Dome in Hollywood, and can honestly say “I see you” to James Cameron. Avatar reaches out to the audience on many levels, the top most being the incredible world Cameron has created on Pandora.

I felt immersed in Pandora’s enchanted forests and fluorescent jungles and in the beauty of the indigenous people who live there. These people, called the Na’vi, are connected to all other living things in their environment and share a unity of spirit and a circle of life. They biologically connect to the trees and animals in their world through their ponytails; okay you have to see it.

Wait a minute, haven’t we seen this before? I mean not on a distant planet named Pandora, full of six legged rhino mutations, flying lizards, giant fluorescent mushrooms, and beautiful scantly clad yellow eyed females. Where you can literally say, “Yeah, I got some great tail last night,” and actually mean it. But isn’t the underlying message a familiar one. Save native cultures and their environments from the evil clutches of the big bad west. I’m 100% for saving all indigenous peoples and their environments; I haven’t had a chance to travel to most of these places on Earth, let alone Pandora, and would like to experience these “alien” worlds first hand before they are gone. With that said, The Atomic Writer knows that if we destroy these places he will never get to see them, but he also knows we cannot go back to the way it was. We cannot reverse the hands of time and take a technological step backwards to a more simpler time. Human nature and the needs to strive to be the best would quickly bring us back to the same point. We must learn to live within our means and understand all living beings are here for a reason.

Exploring space and finding new worlds to spread out into makes the most sense to me. Change is the only constant in life, and those that oppose it are destined to fail.

When I first saw Dances With Wolves, I thought man I wish we could go back and live off the land like that, to belong to a unified community where you don’t have to fight the rat race of the big stinky city in order to survive. Where everyone has a place and a purpose. But this wasn’t the real world back then, it never was, it’s only a man made afterthought created to entertain and romanticize the period. But lets get back to Avatar.

We meet Jake Sully a paraplegic ex-Marine who replaces his recently departed brother on a mission to distant Pandora. Now what better character to create than a person who cannot walk and then offer him the chance to run, jump and generally be more agile than the Chinese men’s gymnastic team. And the only thing Jake wants, at the start, is the money to have the spinal cord operation to make him walk again. Now his brother was supposed to be the Avatar driver, but since the hybrid alien/human avatars are so expensive, and are grown to work with the DNA of its host, Jake comes in as a reluctant fish out of water. Why not just have him be the Avatar driver off the bat after being a great soldier who is injured in battle? Why create this backstory of an untrained hero? Well the story and plot would fall flat if Jake already spoke the native language and already knew about the Na’vi.

We need to see the interaction between Neytiri, played by Zoe Saldana, and Jake. We connect with Jake and feel sorry or him and then see a fish out of water as he plays with his new legs. This reminds me of Dances With Wolves, where we see Kevin Costner’s character as a fish out of water in the world of the native American’s as his mentor, Mary McDonnell teaches him her culture. Now wait a minute isn’t there a similar theme threading through both movies. They are both soldiers in the military, they are both seduced into an indigenous culture that seemingly lives in harmony with the environment. And don’t both turn against their people to join in a battle against a foreign invader? Well don’t they?

Avatar also borrows from one of the most successful science fiction stories of all time, The Matrix Trilogy. Instead of jacking in and entering a virtual world made up of other jacked in humans and artificial agent programs; in Avatar you connect your mind to a genetically engineered indigenous Avatar who can breathe, run and jump and presumably get the inside scoop on the locals. When I saw the exo-skeleton battle suits, reminiscent of Matrix 3, I knew what Cameron was pitching to the studios: The story is The Matrix meets Dancing With Wolves.

Our hero enters “another world” where he comes as a savior reluctant at first, but after some Jujitsu training by a convented mentor, accepts the challenge before him and crosses the threshold into the new world. There he learns who his allies and enemies are and approaches the inner most cave. He faces a supreme ordeal and seizes the sword before his road back where in the crisis undergoes a resurrection and rebirth. If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about, the above is a basic outline for a mythic story. Myth stories are found in every culture and are universally understood on a subconscious level by all peoples.

The Matrix had a very distinct mythic structure, however Avatar is much more subtle in each myth plot point.

Overall, The Atomic Writer enjoyed Avatar very much, it’s my cup of tea, and would fully recommend it to movie goers. Will it win a best picture award? I doubt it. It’s not a bad movie but it falls short in structure that could have made it a much stronger story. I question the motivation of Jake Sully and what he really wants in the movie. Perhaps if we knew more about him; saw him doing things to reveal his character. A character is defined by what they do, not what they say. Oh sure his body undergoes physical change but his character only becomes rebellious against his own culture in a way we’ve seen before.

You need to see Avatar in 3D in a theater. The suspension of disbelief will not work watching it on DVD in the home.

Avatar is a technological achievement, a visually groundbreaking movie to be remembered for the ages, but it’s not a great story.

Remember, never stop looking up in the night sky and asking….what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

This is certainly the case in Law Abiding Citizen. In fact, on the second page the family is attacked by a home invasion and the story takes off from there. We meet Gerald Butler’s character, the father, soldering some electronic device with a magnifying glass, while his daughter makes bracelets in the living room. They both seem very happy and we begin to like the father because he pays attention to his child and the child reciprocates her love to him. We feel empathy for him. Almost immediately the home invasion occurs and instantly we feel sympathy for him for the tragedy occurring to his family. These are all tools a screenwriter uses to help the audience, or reader, connect and invest in the protagonist. We care what happens to him.

Later, we meet the Jamie Fox lawyer character who works for the DA. Here we are shown a driven man eager to move up the ladder no matter what it takes. He believes that the ends justify the means, and is more concerned about having a high conviction rate than doing what is right. We see him bouncing down a spiral staircase, a metaphor for descending down into a corrupt world, with his boss the DA. The message slipped in here is this: The justice system is corrupt and it doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what you can prove in court. Jamie lives by this philosophy. During the staircase scene, we learn he has made a deal with the killers of the mother and daughter, and must tell the father the news.

This story has two protagonists who each are presented in a different light. Both will have transformational arcs taking them to different emotional places by the end of the movie, although they are in the physical place. The writer, Kurt Whimmer, skillfully weaves this story together by creating a statement against the judicial system by creating complex characters who represent this system. By personifying pillars of the system in characters like the DA, the police, the major, the warden, we the audience become emotionally invested and subconsciously open up to the message.

By routing for and feeling empathy for the Gerald Butler character, who we believe has been done wrong, and then feeling sympathy for the Jamie fox character, the target of the masterful ploys of his prisoner, we are in a constant emotional tug-o-war. Does justice prevail, or do the means justify the ends? This creates a fertile breeding ground for the writer to reveal cracks in the system without standing on a soapbox. The goal of a successful screenplay is to slip your message to the viewer/reader without him knowing about it. Law Abiding Citizen does this wonderfully on multiple levels.

To recap we have one protagonist who has been deeply wounded by the brutal death of his wife and daughter. We learn he is a master of weapon technologies and could skin a lion in his sleep. This skill allows him the opportunity to get revenge not only on the killers but on the system itself. In the process he destroys himself. He is the classic anti-hero.

To recap the second protagonist, we have a driven lawyer who believes the ends justify the means and will do anything to get a conviction. He has no time for his daughter and takes his family for granted. This diametrically opposes the other protagonist. Their character arcs collide and create an effect on each other. In the process this character learns to not make anymore deals with criminals, and to get closer to his family.

This is the classic dual protagonist scenario where one is the hero and the other the anti-hero. BRAVO to Kurt Whimmer for giving us an excellent story.

Remember, never stop looking up into the night sky and asking, what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

p.s. My screenplay, Privileged Voice is currently a semi-finalist in the 2009 Writers On The Storm screenplay competition. Wish me luck!