Writing

Folks, I am a lazy, lazy man. Unless it involves booze, I don’t like to put much effort into things. Take grooming, for instance: Haircuts, shaving, dry cleaning your clothes, all generally too much effort for Your Humble Author here. If I could find a way to combine booze with those activities – booze for me, mind you; I don’t need some drunk bastard cutting my hair – I’d be a happy man. And probably rich once I sell the franchise rights.

About the only thing I’m usually not too lazy about is writing, but this is because writing has always been fun and easy for me, pretty much in the same category as drinking – hey, if only I could combine those two NO NO NO that way lies madness. Sometimes when writing, though, you have to be lazy, kind of on purpose, you know? LEt’s face it, real life is a pretty huge dataset. The number of details that go into just one person’s every day experience while wandering this globe searching for free drinks and tasty sandwiches is staggering, and if you actually tried to capture all of those details in a story, even a story that takes exactly one minute of time to unfold, your story would like be about twenty-seven volumes long.

Thus, laziness. A great example is the popular-with-the-kids-these-days Zombie Apocalypse story, which almost always focusses on the whole thing about killing zombies and rebuilding civilization while calmly ignoring the fact that you’d probably starve to death long, long before the zombies broke down your door. Zombie stories are lazy about the food issue because it’s the only reaction that makes sense – no one wants  story about the urgent need to find a can opener, say, or the moral quandry of murdering your dog in order to eat him. So, Zombie Apocalypse stories usually have abandoned supermarkets filled with foodstuffs for our survivors to gorge on, when in reality every time it rains more than two inches here in Hoboken the local supermarket is an empty, ransacked shell. I mean, seriously, if the news started reporting a zombie fucking apocalypse the supermarket would be completely devoid of edibles within about twenty seconds. Or, the story will have the survivors hunting and farming like in the good old days, which makes a lot more sense, except for the lazy convenience of having your survivors – almost always in a major metropolitan area – know how in fuck to hunt, skin, and butcher animals or farm anything. Not a terrible stretch, but I for one would be found dead with two cans of tuna in my hands and bloody fingernails before I figured out how to grow something in my backyard.

Or, take Lost for example (no spoilers here, don’t worry). The most recent episode, which gave us the extended backstory of Jacob and Smokey, was set in some undefined past, and the characters were all dressed in a sort of rustic ancient style by way of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars Episode IV. The costumes are cheesy and vague, and evoke exactly no culture or historical period ever in the history of ever. They are the laziest costumes I’ve ever seen in my entire life (the whole episode annoyed and disappointed me, but that rant is for later, after the series ends and I have a better perspective). But, I can see why, maybe, that decision was made: Because a) the story is maybe meant to be a parable and not taken literally, or b) because they don’t want to distract us with questions about whether, say, ancient Romans or Egyptians would do something. Keeping it vague gives them latitude to do whatever they want. Thus, the lazy costumes are necessary.

Or, maybe just lazy. Figuring out what’s a necessary laziness and what’s just lazy is not easy, even when you’re writing. I’ve had plenty of moments where an editor hands back a manuscript and tells me I need to spend more time and energy on a sequence, and when I lok back on it I can see pretty clearly that I was impatient to get past that spot and glossed over everything too quickly. It’s easy to be lazy when you can see everything clearly in your own head, and forget that people can’t read you mind and see all the details as clearly as you do.

Now, all this talk of booze has made me hungry. The food not so much. To paraphrase Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles, food just makes me sick.

Apparently, there will be an ongoing series of posts where I discuss a movie I saw recently. This will usually happen when I’m pissed off about some really lazy writing, but I suppose it might also happen when I’m blown away by the writing, too. It’s just that simmering resentment after you’ve spent 94 minutes of your life on a story that could have been good inspires more words than pleasant enjoyment does.

So: Pandorum. Came out last year to little fanfare, got some mildly non-negative reviews I dimly remember, and is now on Cable TV, so I watched it. The basic no-spoiler premise is: In the future, the world is spiraling out of control with overpopulation and global warfare. So they put 60,000 people into “hypersleep” and send them on a huge motherfucking spaceship on a 123-year journey to the only Earth-like planet ever discovered, called Tanis. Two members of the flight crew suddenly wake up from their hypersleep, suffering temporary short-term memory loss from their lengthy induced comas, and find the ship seemingly abandoned, in a sad state of disrepair, and themselves unable to raise anyone on the radio. Plus there are frequent power surges indicating that the nuclear reactor is going to fail.

There may be spoilers from this point on, kids, so if ye fear spoilers and foresee a scenario where you watch this bad movie, be warned.

So: The first 30 minutes or so are actually promising. There’s a decent sense of dread as the two crew members struggle to make sense of what’s happening, and the introduction, early on, of humanoid hunter creatures who infest the huge ship hunting down humans as they wake up from their hypersleep is a bit derivative, but effectively handled. It’s one of those movies that comes down to the revelation of the mysteries, and there was potential for some really cool mysteries, man. The problem is, they tried to cram about 500 mysteries into one story, and fucked them all up.

Mystery One is what are the creatures hunting everyone on the ship, and how they got there. That it’s obvious that they are in fact a portion of the 60,000 passengers, mutated somehow, is minimized by the fact that the story makes this pretty apparent early on. The main problem with this mystery is the simple fact that it exists, because the whole damn story would have been much better without it. Seriously. Some moron decided they couldn’t sell a sci-fi horror movie without human-eating alien creatures, so they dumped a box filled with human-eating aliens into the story. Now, the idea that these creatures have been waking people up from hypersleep and devouring them alive just as they’re waking up is indeed kind of creepy and horrifying, but the story would have been stronger, tighter, and more interesting without this third-rate Alien ripoff of a plotline.

Mystery Two is what really pisses me off: What happened to the ship? It’s the size of a city, has facilities and space for 60,000 people, and looks like its been through a war. I’ll grant another smart move in that the characters  figure out early on that they may very well have been asleep much, much longer than the 123 years the trip was supposed to have taken, and this is a really intriguing question. There are apocalyptic hints that the Earth was destroyed in a cataclysm some time after the ship launched, which indicates that there was some sort of mass psychosis or something – Hypersleep Sickness is known as Pandorum, apparently, in case you’re wondering about the title. Remove the stupid monsters and stick with survivors creeping through a dead ship gathering clues as to what’s happened, and you’ve got a tense, creepy story. Instead, because of the many fight and chase scenes involving the fucking retarded monsters, they cram this mystery’s denouement into one gloriously infodumpy scene where a character introduced moments before inexplicably knows everything that happened, and just tells us. The fact that the explanation is, in fact, an idea that has potential is just an extra kick in the balls. If they’d actually written a better story and found a way to give us these revelations organically it might have been really affecting and fascinating.

Mystery Three involves that fucking title again: Pandorum. Space Madness, basically, established early on in the film as a real disease with symptoms and everything. Symptoms the two initial characters both exhibit at different times. It’s such a repeated thread in the story you start to think it’s going to mean something, and in a way I suppose it does, as it serves as the explanation, ultimately, of what happens. But on the other hand, it also fucks everything up, because there’s a clear implication, towards the end, that maybe a lot of what’s been happening is just inside once of the character’s pandorum-addled mind. And holy shit, that one little throwaway bit of business borks everything, because there is literally no support built into the story for that subtle twist. Usually when stories build up to a “it’s all in his head” climax, there’s a Sixth-Sensing in the background, all the little details that now fall into a different order and convince you that, yes, this makes sense now. There’s none of that here.

Maybe I’m overthinking the last bit; After all, it’s a flash and a line at the end. Maybe it’s the remnant of an older script or edit, where that was the intended twist. The real problem here is the obsession with the twist ending. Everyone loves twists, sure. And most people like a good mindfuck movie where the rug is pulled out from under you at the end and you free fall into a new understanding of all that went before – but this movie seemed like the twist was the whole point, and everything else is just padding so they can hold out on the twist until minute 90. And, frankly, the story would again have been stronger without the twist. If they had just stated what was going on, it’s a creepy premise. While this appears to be standard Hollywood Hackery, as a writer it’s good to remind yourself that sometimes the clever bit isn’t really worth keeping.

I’ve definitely been guilty at time of keeping a “clever bit” in a story even after the story grows beyond it, simply because I was so impressed to have come up with the clever bit in the first place. Being able to recognize when it is the very clever bit that inspired you that is now killing your story is good kung fu to have; sadly, Hollywood, as a whole,  doesn’t have it. probably because movies are greenlighted because of the clever bit, and removing it also probably removes the funding.

Sigh. Oh well. Nothing is a complete waste: There’s good stuff to steal in Pandorum. You could walk away with 5 decent story ideas just from the unexplored threads this movie leaves behind, and five more from the wrong turns the “twists” throw in there. Have it.