Alright, I'll try to be obscure so I don't ruin it for those who can't resist reading despite their wishes to not see spoilers.
Classic movie plotlines often have the "winning idea" used in the climax illustrated earlier in the movie. The part where the hero remembers something his dad told him as a child (which just so happened to be included in a flashback 30 minutes prior) allows him to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
Call me selfish, but I prefer to either be surprised or to have my little mental lightbulb blink on right at the moment the hero's is in the movie. Sadly I'm handicapped by being relatively intelligent so I see a lot of the twists coming anyway. The Sixth Sense was the most recent movie I can remember that actually threw me off until the very end. It's still one of my favorites for that reason.
Now with Master and Commander I felt that they couldn't have made the key more obvious if they'd had flashing red neon inside the ship when the doctor was teaching the kid.
Was that just me? Did anyone else sit there and think, "Ah-ha! So that's how they're gonna beat the bad guys!" and then have to wait, like me, the entire rest of the movie impatiently for them to get to the point?
It would've been so simple - just find a few lines of dialogue that were supposed to be exchanged between the captain and the doctor and move them from their current scene to that scene. Cut the doc and the kid's dialog down the the bare minimum, and then use the cinematic tricks to downplay them and upstage the captain. Kid's sitting in the dark, cap's carrying or standing next to a lantern - simple basic tricks to focus audience attention.
Or maybe I'm just being a snot. Opinions?
Posted by Ayelar (Member # 183) on :
Better slap a spoilers tag on that.
Posted by Kayla (Member # 2403) on :