Maybe it’s just me, but I’m often baffled by what Hitchcock (and for all I know other film-makers) used to call “spatial reference,” meaning telling the viewer where characters in a film are physically in relation to other characters in the film.
Filmmakers seem to give up on the hopelessness of achieving this end very easily, and go with “Oh, hell, they don’t need to know all that” but I do.
One example would be in the film A BRIDGE TOO FAR, which relies (absolutely, to my mind) on having some sense where various troops are in relation to other troops. You could say that’s what the entire film is about. The premise of the film is that the British, American, and other nations’ armies must coordinate precisely where their various units are on a very strict timetable to pull off successfully a very difficult mission.
I’ve seen this film many times, mind you, and I’ve never understood (other than very generally) why the mission failed, besides “certain soldiers got bogged down along the way for various reasons.” Maybe this is all I was meant to understand, and maybe explaining the particulars very clearly was simply impossible, but in that case I wonder why make the movie at all? On a smaller scale, this would be like, oh, filming a killer-in-the-closet movie without telling viewers where the closet was located. Viewers would have no idea if the potential victim was safe or not walking almost anywhere inside the house: the whole point is to let the viewer know where the scary parts are and where the safer parts are.
I don’t know; in that case, the uncertainty might work to the film’s advantage. If you don’t know what closet it is, then you cringe every time you see anyone walk past any closet.
Related (I think) to the OP; I hate it when, in a thriller, they give you a shot which appears to be from a character’s point of view - furtively, like peeping through a window, or from a different room in the house. When it turns out to be a cheap cinematic tease, it really takes me out of the film, making me too aware of camera operators.
Spatial reference is half the enjoyment for me. Having a map of Westeros or Middle Earth gives more meaning to time, travel, character interaction, etc.
When the makers of films just hand wave it as “oh, it doesn’t really matter where things are in relation to each other” the story loses a lot of its weight.
I’m about to watch Dunkirk for the first time tonight (now on Netflix) but not before I read a wiki on the event first and look at a bunch of maps of the locations.