Story Problems
Nov 29th, 2009 by Ninja Dodo
I’ve been meaning to write a post about this for a while.
Stories are fragile things. One false note can easily pull apart that carefully constructed illusion and your audience, once you’ve lost them, are lost forever.
Sometimes you can’t help but wonder what possessed someone to make such baffling story-choices. I’m going to use movies as examples here, but mostly these are issues cinema shares with narrative games, though they have problems of their own (see a previous post, or two).
It goes without saying this will be a trip to SPOILER-town… You have been warned.
INTERNAL CONSISTENCY
No matter how fantastical, every universe has rules. When you tell a story you make a deal with your audience to accept that these are the things that can happen in this place. If you break those rules, they tune out.
For example, if someone is dead, they should probably stay dead.
At the end of Pirates of the Caribbean, Captain Barbossa dies holding that apple he so would have liked to taste. This was a good death for an interesting character.
At the end of Pirates 2 he is suddenly resurrected with zero explanation, rendering his previous demise utterly meaningless. In the third film there is some vague attempt at explaining why he could be (and needed to be) brought back, while Jack (who at this point is also sort of dead) cannot be brought back the same way for entirely arbitrary reasons (but can be brought back another, more complicated way)…
You lost me.
Given that the first film featured undead skeletons, there is a certain amount of leeway granted here, but when characters that are not understood to be immortal are brought back to life with little to no justification, it rather destroys all credibility and any sense that our heroes are ever in danger…
Cause hey… they can just be resurrected, right?