How to screw up a Hollywood film and an indie film all in one weekend.
Genre: Fantasy/Adventure
Premise: (from IMDB) The ancient war between humans and a race of giants is reignited when Jack, a young farmhand fighting for a kingdom and the love of a princess, opens a gateway between the two worlds.
About Giant Slayer: This film was directed by Bryan Singer, trying to get out of director jail after Superman Returns and Valkyrie. It was written by an interesting trio. Christopher MacQuarrie, who of course has been a big part of Singer’s career since The Usual Suspects. Dan Studney, a TV writer (he wrote the TV series version of Weird Science) who’s big feature credit is “Reefer Madness,” the musical. And finally Darren Lemke, who wrote Shrek: Forever After, which I believe is the fourth film in the series, though I called Dreamworks for confirmation on this and even they weren’t sure. While I can’t give you a timeline of every writer’s participation, my guess is that Lemke wrote the initial draft, Studney wrote another draft, and then when Singer was brought on as director, he used his go-to writer, McQuarrie, to get the script where he wanted it. The film came out this weekend and grossed an underwhelming 26 million dollars, a disastrous take for a product that cost 200 million to make.
About Stoker: Stoker was a hot script from 2011 that got everyone in town riled up. Imagine their surprise when it was revealed to be written by Wentworth Miller, the doofy lead actor in the 3 seasons too long Fox thriller, “Prison Break.” He’d written the script under a pseudonym so as not to be discriminated against (Oh, another actor who thinks he can write, eh!). It paid off as the script sold for mid six-figures. And if that wasn’t enough, legendary Korean director Chan-wook Park decided to make Stoker his first American film! Park is responsible for such classics as, “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” and “Oldboy.” The film stars Matthew Goode (Watchmen), Mia Wasikowska (Alice In Wonderland) and Nicole Kidman (Celebrities Addicted To Plastic Surgery).
Writers (Giant): Darren Lemke, Dan Studney and Christopher McQuarrie.
Details (Giant): 114 minutes long
What do you get when you couple Jack The Giant Slayer with Stoker?
A lot of disappointment.
However, that disappointment may not be distributed in the way you’d think it would be. We have some high quality craftsman working on both projects here (Singer and McQuarrie on one, Park on the other), yet you’d assume that the bedroom swallowing sinkhole would reside with the picture celebrating CGI giants. Not so fast. Stoker was easily the worst film I’ve seen all year. And “Giant Slayer” was kinda okay (even if Miss Scriptshadow called it “a flat piece of trash” – hey, what do girls know about giants, right?).
“Giant Slayer” follows our plucky peasant hero, Jack, sticking up for a young bullied woman (who turns out to be – SURPRISE! – the princess). He then gets swindled into trading some beans for his horse at the market, and comes home to get yelled at by some angry old dude with really bad teeth (his great uncle maybe?).
Later that night, the princess comes by to thank him, and one of those beans falls through the floor, landing in dirt. A storm follows and the roid bean sprouts. Like REALLY sprouts. The resulting gigantor plant shoots up into the air, taking the house, AND THE PRINCESS, with it! The king shows up the next day, wanting Jack to tell him where his daughter is, seemingly blind to the fact that there’s a thousand-feet in diameter bean-stalk behind them. Jack tells him the princess is up there with it, so the king sends his best climbers, and Jack, to go get her.
They make it to the top, where they discover a secret land in the sky that is home to giants. Not only do the giants capture our pint-sized crew, but learn that the bean stalk they came on heads down to Human-Land. Since everyone knows giants love the taste of humans, they decide to head down there to satiate a serious case of the human-munchies. The only problem is that Jack is one crafty little individual. And once he falls in love with the princess, he’ll do anything to save her, even if that means taking down giants, mother*&%er.
It’s funny. Last Thursday I was going to do an article about “writing the blockbuster.” Blockbusters are unique beasts. You approach them slightly differently from “traditional” scripts. Set-pieces become a huge part of your approach, so that was going to be a big part of the article.
But sadly, this blockbuster made the same mistake at script level as pretty much every other blockbuster I read. The setup is the best part. And then it falls off a cliff (no pun intended) becoming a mediocre, occasionally amusing piece of fluff. I’m not going to lie, I was excited to get to the giants. From what I’d seen in the previews, they looked amazing. That anticipation made the first act suspenseful, even if it amounted to your basic setup scenario of peasant-can’t-be-with-princess-cause-he’s-a-peasant.
However, once we get to Giant-Land, it becomes Boring Central. Remember, since the second act no longer has the advantage of anticipation (you’ve basically shown your cards, a.k.a. the Giants), the reader/audience must love the characters in order to stay interested. None of the characters here were lame. But none of them stood out either. If I was giving grades, almost every one of them would’ve received a “C.” They were all average.
This is a deadly combination when writing a screenplay. It’s the equivalent of a pilot losing access to his hydraulics as he comes in for a landing. A second act has WAY MORE slow moments than a first act does. So for those moments to be entertaining, you need interesting characters engaging in strong conflict. We had the conflict part (there was a bad guy wreaking havoc within the human team. Jack couldn’t have the princess because of the class difference) but BECAUSE THE CHARACTERS WERE SO AVERAGE we just didn’t care.
What nearly saved this movie was the ending. It was high caliber action set-pieces at their best. When the giants come down to our world and start hurling trees and windmills at our puny little counterparts, I was in awe. The giants looked great and the battle was inspired. The problem was, as I already mentioned, there was no one worth rooting for. Nobody stood out. Even the always good Stanley Tucci plays a boring villain. This simply isn’t worth your time unless you have a 12 year old son. Oh well.
BUT!
But. If someone’s put a gun to your head and told you you HAD to either watch Stoker or Giant Slayer, for the love of all that is holy, go see Giant Slayer. Stoker is abysmal. It’s terrible. It’s got an interesting backstory, a great director, but it’s just terrible. It’s the very definition of style over substance, which is what you’d assume I’d say about Giant Slayer. But here we obviously have a director who’s more interested in visual tricks and award-winning cinematography than, well, AN ACTUAL STORY!
That’s assuming there was a story. I haven’t read the script. I know Roger reviewed it a long time ago, but I skipped the synopsis due to spoilers. I mean, nobody in this movie utters a line that someone would say in real life. Everyone acts like they know they’re in a movie and therefore must say something poignant or eerie. That is when they DO talk. Because 95% of this movie is dedicated to Matthew Goode staring at people! I swear to you. That’s almost the entire movie. Someone says something, then cut to Matthew Goode staring at them in a really eeire way for 5 minutes.
What’s it about? The short answer is nothing. The long answer is… Disturbingly reclusive India has just lost her father, who’s mysteriously died in a car accident. So his brother, an uncle India never knew she had, shows up to offer the family support. He takes a particular interest in India, whom he tells, “I just want to be your friend.” Except there’s nothing friendly about his rape-stares, which would make even a Catholic priest uncomfortable.
People close to the family, like the grandma and an aunt, start dying mysteriously, and eventually India learns that her dear uncle is a crazy serial killer. Except India isn’t put off by this. She’s turned on by it! Like SERIOUSLY turned on. And she wants in. Complicating matters is her alcoholic mother, who makes daily shameless advances at her dead husband’s brother. When India sees this, she gets jealous, and we get a mother-daughter cat fight. Rreow!
KILL ME IF I EVER HAVE TO SEE THIS MOVIE AGAIN.
It was so bad. There was no plot, nothing driving the story forward besides the mystery uncle, which got boring after 10 minutes. That didn’t stop Miller and Park from stretching that mystery out for another 40 minutes though. But the real problem here was that nothing felt connected. Each scene felt like Park experimenting (a 5 minute trip down to the basement for ice cream becomes a celebration of dancing lights), and once he was done, he’d go on to the next experiment, regardless of whether those two scenes fit together. There’s a moment around the midpoint, for example, where India is at school. Since when did India attend school??? Nothing from the first 50 minutes indicated that India was in school at the time. That was a microcosm of the entire movie. No progression of story. No point to the story. Random shit popping up out of nowhere. Weird scenes completely dependent on mood and lighting.
Stoker is a mess of the highest order. At best it’s a master filmmaker making his dream student film. At worst it’s a distracted director trying to make sense of a pointless script. I would strongly recommend avoiding this film. It’s awful.
JACK THE GIANT SLAYER
[ ] what the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
STOKER
[x] what the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: (from “Giant Slayer”) Remember this. DO SOMETHING UNIQUE WITH YOUR CHARACTERS. Make them stand out in some way. Give them something we haven’t seen before in from movie characters. Or else they will be generic. And no matter how awesome your plot is, we won’t care because your characters are boring. Anticipation and story build-up might help us ignore this during the first act, but once the second act comes around – the act that depends on your characters – your story will die a quick death.
What I learned 2: (from “Stoker”). Make sure there’s a well-thought-out and compelling plot to your story. Your characters might be interesting as hell. But if we don’t know what the hell’s going on half the time or understand what their goals or motivations are, we’ll quickly get bored and check out on you.
