Do you think the beginning of movies is often better than the rest of the film? Is this a common opinion or do others share this view?
08.06.2025 01:02
The rest is just following the screenwriters formula. A rule of three; the idea of a three act story, where the first is the setup, the second is where it all goes to shit and the third where everything is resolved.
That there are rules for the resolution of everything. Take ‘the big final fight’ between the hero and the bad guy. Regardless of genre, in 100% of the cases it will, once again, follow a strict set of rules: good guy makes a good initial show, then the tables get turned and the bad guy shoots/hits/stabs/whatever the hero within an inch of his life. Then some inspiration strikes him and he defeats the enemy, usually quite quickly. Worse for wear, but still alive, he gets the girl.
I think that the great problem here is that the people that still try to sell the gospel of ‘good storytelling’ are forgetting that the days you could fool an audience with that are long behind us. The big problem is that Hollywood insists on assuming its audience is stupid and you need to spoonfeed them a simple intrigue according to strict rules you always adhere to.
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I agree and I have the unpopular opinion that this is partially because of how set in stone the rules of especially American film making are. All these rules on ‘how to write a good screenplay’; ‘ten things you should always include in your story’; ‘three ways your plot has to advance in order to work’ …
It’s a good idea in principle, but if that is all you ever do - and it is all Hollywood ever does - the audience will catch on and lose interest.
But what they also do, is squeeze every story through the same mold of storytelling. Just think of all these amazing books that have been used over the years as inspiration for blockbusters. The fans of those books always say the same thing: they don’t recognise the story beyond some very superficial elements, the names and the visualisation of the settings. And if you see those ‘making of’ documentaries of the movie and see how the writing process took place it is hardly surprising.
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Breaking those rules and make a good movie is very difficult, more difficult than just safely following those rules. Game of Thrones pulled it off when it killed main characters left and right. The Acolyte failed because they forgot to first let you care about the faceless witches and jedi they killed off dramatically. Acolyte is probably the best example I can think of why those rules that make stories so predictable are ignored at your peril.
And that makes that for many movies, the beginning is in fact the best bit of the movie. It’s where the world is established; where sometimes there is some room to breathe, to get to know the world. Have some character defnition moments. For about twenty minutes - if you’re lucky - the movie is still setting up all the rules. Not everything has been filled in yet: ‘hey that’s a strange looking guy - wonder if he has something to do with what happens next’.
I think it’s the old story of the modern art painter that learned to master classical painting before he knew why he was rejecting those techniques for something else: you need to understand the value of the rules before you can safely break them. But if you make that work, the movie is so much more interesting because of it.
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The first draft is the condensed version of the book. Then lots of people from the industry do rewrites. More often than not, at the very end, they bring in some famous hero that is known for successfully ‘punching up’ the scripts: taking out more and more ‘fluff’, focussing on the ‘core’ of the story. What that means is kill much of the flavour of what made the story unique, condense it as much as possible into Joseph Campbell’s fucking ‘hero journey’-mold and the result is another ‘evil empire vs a plucky band of rebels plot’.
There was a brief moment, after the end of the studio system in the late 60s and the advent of the blockbuster with Star Wars in 1977, that movies briefly broke the mold. That you didn’t quite now where stories were going. That, not seldomly, the point of the movie was not that the good guy won. Star Wars was in fact at the time seen as a breath of fresh air after a decade that gave us so many bleakly told, gritty and realistic stories. Star Wars was so successful that we almost stopped making those weird movies again, and that is a shame.
Movies that do this well exist of course, but they are quite rare. The only blockbuster movie in the last few decades I can think of that pulled it off were the two Dune movies.
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Because although it can be a downer to root for a hero that gets shot in the head in the final shot of the movie, it will increase the exitement for the next movie where the hero ends up in a predicament: maybe that guy also won’t…ah, no he shot the bad guy. But at least there would be some suspense left.
But forty five minutes in, everything is set up according to the golden rules of Hollywood writing and after that it’s basically a paint-by-numbers affair. Everything gets wound down according to the rules.
The problem with (especially, but not uniquely, American movies, because they understand the craft so well) movies is that they fall apart into setup and execution. In the setup you can show the cool new things in your world, but in the execution you tend to end up with ‘that is the good guy, that is the bad guy. good guy has to almost lose and then win from bad guy’ - and that is the second two-thirds of your movie. Fun, but predictable, even when the movie is good.
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This is true for good and bad movies. Good movies like Star Wars or Alien follow these rules slavishly, but they are so entertaining that we don’t notice it all that much. But take Star Wars: until they leave Tatooine, the movie feels like it can go in all kinds of directions. Once they’re in space, the course is literally set. Alien, same thing: it’s vaguely mysterious for the first 45 minutes, but it’s straight up horror (of the best possible kind) after that until the end.
They are probably sensible rules, based on how many movies in the past have been terrible for not adhering to those rules. They make sense from a perspective of ‘when in doubt, follow these rules’.
So that’s why you can literally watch a horror or monster movie today and know that 30 minutes into the film, you will see its first real appearance. That there will be a crisis halfway through that - if you had never before seen a movie - looks like the protagonists are never going to recover from it, but in the final twenty minutes everything will flip.