I thought it was worth $10.75
I'm different than many though. I go to be entertained and don't care how believable it is. If the acting is good, the special effects are good, and the story line is good, that's all I need. I'm looking forward to seeing the Hobbit movie when it comes out in a few weeks, and I don't remember the last time I ever saw a hobbit.
My opinion follows. Not a terribly important opinion in the grand scheme of things. A popcorn flick is a popcorn flick and this isn't a matter that Oil Lady is willing to let herself get all ornery about.
Too much other important stuff to worry about, like the coming zombie apocalypse.
But this is my opinion on the whole fluffy world of writing stories and screenplays .......
SPOILERS FOLLOW
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You can ask the audience/reader to suspend disbelief on just about anything. You can ask them to suspend disbelief on the existence of little beings called Hobbits. You can ask them to suspend disbelief on the existence of something called The Force. You can ask them to suspend disbelief on the existence of tiny little people who live under the floorboards of a house. You can ask them to suspend disbelief about a tornado which lifts a farm house up off the ground completely intact and then safely sets that same house down unharmed in a faraway land full of scarecrows that talk and monkeys that fly. These are the makings of great stories.
But if you ask me to suspend disbelief on an EMP attack which wipes out the electrical grid, and if I at first go along with your request for my suspension of disbelief because I am hoping for a really great story, then you need to be consistent for the rest of your story about the sudden lack of electrical anything elsewhere in the story. And if you go one step further and try to tell me that there is a very special portable telephone which is special for no other reason than the fact that it is somehow shielded from electrical disruption, then you need to continue to demonstrate that said electrical disruption is indeed going on so as to justify not only the need for the very existence of that special telephone, but also justify the need for our heroes to risk their lives trying to capture that special telephone.
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END SPOILERSThis movie is way too much like the never-produced-and-totally-rejected comedy fantasy angel screenplay (not my rom-com fantasy angel screenplay, someone else's rom-com fantasy angel screenplay) where the writer tried to say on Page 12 that angels cannot walk through walls, but then on Page 40, the angel goes and walks through a wall. I don't really care which way a writer wants to take his angel story. One writer can have his angels walk through walls, but another writer can prohibit his angels from walking through walls. (The angels in my own rom-com fantasy angel screenplay can walk through walls.) Either premise will work. The real point here is that you can't change or in any way ignore/negate crucial, hinge-pin details of your story halfway through. Changing the story halfway through doesn't work for Hollywood anymore than it works for the cop who is questioning you. It pisses off all parties from all corners of life when the story changes midway through. Changing the facts of how your world works is a betrayal on the part of the writer against his reader. The reader trusted that writer back on Page 12 when he said angels can't walk through walls. But then on Page 40 that trust got betrayed and then that whole magnificent angel world that got crafted over the previous 39 pages suddenly collapsed in a puff of non-credibility when the dam holding back the floodwaters of disbelief suddenly burst and a tidal wave of disbelief came rushing through and ruined everything. (Thus that particular rom-com fantasy angel screenplay was rejected. And the screenwriter was stubborn enough to insist that the walking-through-walls bit was just a minor detail and no one in the audience would care. But everyone in the room at that production company cared when they made the decision to reject his angel screenplay.)
Now I personally am a very slow reader. (I can read a 120-page screenplay in 120 minutes. Most other people could read it in 60 minutes.) So if I begin to read your angel screenplay, and I spend 39 minutes reading the first 39 pages (most other people only need 20 minutes), only to stop there on Page 39 and roll my eyes and cast your angel screenplay aside, that's 39 minutes I'll never get back again, as well as the disappointment of the initial promise of a great story which turned out to be grossly flawed.
When you craft a world like Middle Earth, you need to flesh out that world and all its details in order for us to believe it's real -- but in truth we don't REALLY "believe" it's real, we are instead merely suspending disbelief that it isn't real (a subtle but important distinction that separates normal people who have a grasp on reality and are merely well adept and ingesting a good story from psychotic people who cannot tell fact from fantasy and who either need medicine or institutionalization or both). In one sense, a writer is being given permission to temporarily mess around with your mind -- you're specifically inviting him to mess with your previous concepts of reality. (The 2010 movie
Inception is a brilliant example of that.) The writer-reader relationship is a great little relationship, but one based upon trust, like when you sit back in a chair that looks kind of like a barber's chair and let a guy with a doctorate in dental science insert a high-powered drill into your mouth. That's a LOT of trust right there! But woe unto the dentist who screws up that trust by making a rookie mistake while he's messing with the insides of your head! A sane rational person would NEVER let someone put a drill into their mouth. But the relationship between dentist and patient is a special one whereby the patient will suspend an otherwise natural and healthy inclination to avoid letting people stick a power drill into an orifice of his skull. The betrayal of a bad writer doesn't hurt as much as the betrayal of a bad dentist. But it's still a betrayal, and you likely won't trust that writer ever again.
I'm trusting the writer and the director of a film to give me an alternate take on reality of the sort that makes sense within its own reconnoitered version of reality. But if it turns out that its own reality makes no sense even to itself, then the story is flawed and will collapse, much like a house with a faulty framework will collapse. (Story structure is often likened to architecture. Bad story design and bad plot structure will make a story collapse.)
This story,
Red Dawn II, collapsed in upon itself several times at several key parts. It was flawed, and glaringly so.
I like the idea of a film which --like this film did-- shows people with their backs to the wall, mustering their inner soldier, finding out what they believe in, finding out what they are made of, and making the really hard choices in life from which there will be no turning back. And this film tried to embark upon exploring those issues. And it did an "okay" job during isolated moments of the story in exploring such issues. I also appreciated the profoundly astute sheriff/father character who
SPOILERS made that very important speech right before he was summarily executed by Captain Cho.
END SPOILERS He was an excellent character who is a positive and levelheaded representation of the very best philosophical stances espoused by the entire Prepper movement. I also appreciated the very important character arc of the main character, the kid brother named Matt who
SPOILERS as always just about his own game plan and was a crappy team player -- his character arc centered upon his NEED to learn to stop doing it all his own way and to think of the larger group instead.
END SPOILERS These were PIECES of this film that were ..... great, quite actually. But there were other issues in the overall execution of this film's mainframe plot which were supremely flawed. These weren't minor flaws to the structure, such as a set of back steps to your new house which don't quite line up with the kitchen door -- these were HUGE structural flaws such as the key loadbearing wall of the house not strong enough to support the roof. It's okay to like a wraparound porch on a house if that porch was well-built and nicely painted, and it's also okay to like the dual-sided fireplace of that same house. But if the mainframe of the house is itself so badly designed that the whole thing is going to collapse in six months or less, then I have to say the house is a failure. It might have some pretty details, but the part that counts just won't hold up.
There was a lot of glossing over of these structural issues. And while some people won't mind that kind of gloss, I do. (Especially for $10.75.
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