A character does something, or something happens, so crazy that it makes you take notice, surely this will have consequences!
…nope not really.
Natural City-
The main character has a “cyborg” (I think it is an android actually, the movie doesn’t seem to know what cyborg means) robot girl he is in love with and her body is breaking down. A mad scientist tells him he has discovered he can download cyborg personalities into human beings, so he goes and grabs a young girl from the ghetto to host his cyborg babe’s mind.:eek: He seems to have no reservations about wiping a human beings mind for his own use, to make it worse the character of the ghetto girl is a romantic interest.
If you’re a really dedicated masochist, you hit the internet and ferret out things like CHUD. But if you’re a lazy masochist like moi and happen to get all of the premium channels from your video drug pusher of choice, just surf the listings for something like Showtime Beyond. I have to rest up for a few weeks between brain numbing marathons of their fare.
Stories change so much between idea stage, script stage, re-writing, shooting, editing, re-editing, and release that you can’t say for sure that any missing plot point or story thread that seemingly goes nowhere wasn’t addressed, just that it got lost along the way or was excised for time.
It was actually entertaining, and I found the lack of hollywood conventions refreshing. The hero…well more like our protagonist is really a complex character, morally grey all the way. It is a pretty interesting movie, if it does obviously copy from the greats and have some spotty acting.
Peter Parker is bitten by a genetically-combined spider, and the venom grants him the powers of Spiderman. The lab still has a whole rack full o’ spiders. He’s not going to mention this to them? “Say, have you guys considered doing any testing of the venom of these spiders on, say, live subjects?”
Then again, a rat or a monkey with the powers of Spiderman would probably be a bad thing…
Not exactly an obvious plot point but you have to wonder about Billy’s father in Scream
.
First his wife leaves him and his son because he has an affair with Maureen Prescott. Which, no, he’s not blameless in this scenario but it snowballs from there. His mistress is killed, and he likely feels some grief for her. Then his son, demoralized from the fallout of the affair, kills several innocent people, then is killed by a combination of self-defense and suicide by cop. Then his estranged wife kills many more innocent people in “revenge” for her son’s death. She ends up killed the same ignominous way as her son. And his lover’s daughter Sydney is continually targeted in a bloodbath essentially started by his son and his wife.
Granted, he has likely stayed out of the picture because he is sane enough not to hold Sydney responsible for his son’s and his wife’s actions, and he has decided he wouldn’t be in Sydney’s good graces, anyway – the best he can do for her is stay away from her. But his position in the whole picture is an interesting one. He must feel some guilt; if he had not had that affair, most of the victims would not have had to die needless deaths. However, even though he acted despicably in cheating on his wife, he could not foreseen that the damage of his indiscretion would have carried this far.
/No spoilers because the first movie is almost twenty years old.
Assuming your talking about the latest movie, I think they do cover this. My memory of that film is kinda vague, but I’m pretty sure they establish that Parker is “special” somehow so that the venom gives him powers. Other subjects they’d run tests on had died or gone otherwise haywire like LizardScientistGuy. Presumably his father fine-tuned the experiment to Parker DNA somehow.
The Spider-man one is also more apparent in the reboot movie. There’s a mess o’them spiders. IIRC they get out in the new one? In the second Tobey movie, Harry Osborn is making a big deal about how Doc Ock will invent some fusion device or another that will change the world. Really, Harry? The fact that your scientist not only built a new aid for the severely crippled, but also seemingly invented AI at the same time? That’s not important at all?
Scream: isn’t that kind of guilt kind of like the type that the admissions guy at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna could’ve had? Sure, maybe giving Hitler a art scholarship might’ve redirected him creatively. But still: Most people don’t need art to keep them from killing millions of people. Stopping him still would make you WTF in hindsight.
Since you didn’t mention Scream 4: SPOILERS - the plot is terrible.
Bur the finished film is the actual work. A plot thread that appeared in an early script is no more relevant to its artistic assessment than an idea an author toyed with but ultimately didn’t write into his book.
in the process of assembling the movie from the bits and pieces, and of cutting for speed and tempo, it’s not surprising that things get left out, although it’s surprising that they don’t get caught when the film is watched later on.
The James Bond movie Diamonds are Forever does this. They never explain why it is that Lana Wood’s (Plenty O’Toole’s) body is in Jill St. John’s (Tiffany case’s) swimming pool. There was apparently supposed to be a scene where O’Toole breaks into Case’s house (How? Why? Aside from both meeting Bond the two have no connection), gets mistaken for her (despite the difference in hair color and body) and gets cement-shoed into the pool.
Maybe the director was too tired from taking care of the car-is-flipped-on-the-wrong-side fiasco from the Vegas car chase earlier in the film.
A big one, to my mind, is howcum Neo can blast squiddies in the Real World in the second and third Matrix movies. This astounds everyone the first time he does it, but is neve explained, as far as I know (although I don’t doubt there is much fanwankery). The most obvious suggestion is that the Real World is just another level of VR, as in Xistenz or 13th Floor, both released at the same time as the original Matrix. But the Wachowskis seemed reluctant to go there.
In Gamer tries to resuce his wife from a twisted version of Sims; during the process he violently kills a character identified as “Ricky Rape” (played by Milo Ventimiglia) who was trying to rape his wife. The thing is in this “game” the users take control over an actualy human being (a poor person doing this for money, it’s implied to carry a stigma similiar to prostitution) so he didn’t really kill the person attemping to rape his wife. He killed some poor fuck who was in the same desperate situtation as his wife, and he new it.
I guess they don’t have Netflix in Israel. Netflix Instant is full of terrible movies just like that one. (I don’t know if that one is actually on Netflix.)
It seems like a lot of action movies leave an expository scene or two on the cutting room floor. Sometimes I wonder if the all of the movies on MST3K were really that bad or if they cut out some important part for commercials or their skits.
Some movies have a tough enough time telling as much of a story as they do tell. Trying to clear up all these other things probably wouldn’t do anything to make them better movies. Besides, internet critics need something to pan them with.
I don’t think anything essential was ever missing. Mostly they were more boring because they didn’t have a joke every 30 seconds. I think they liked exposition since it’s relatively easy to make fun of.
I actually liked some of those movies on their own, but seeing them mocked, by robots and spacemen, was always fun.
