L U N A T A L K with Eva Moon

Moon Falling Down, TV Disaster

June 22, 2009 on 7:21 pm | | In General Musing, Movies

I would not have subjected myself to the ABC mini-series disaster that is “Impact” had it not been for the incredible synchronicity factor: The release of a movie about the moon falling down the same week as the release of my CD Moon Falling Down.

Before I comment, let me torture you with the trailer.

I hardly know where to begin. I’ve watched some really horrible disaster flicks. But this one made me wish the moon actually would annihilate the Earth if that’s what it would take to wipe it from my brain. I could start listing the occurrances of blitheringly bone-headed Bad Movie Science, but I have a life and others will surely do it for me.

Instead, let me talk about the art of telling a story. To illustrate I will compare Impact with another movie currently in theaters: Up.

One challenge that faces scriptwriters is the lack of exposition. How do you explain important concepts and fill in back story?

Elmore Leonard wrote his great essay 10 Rules of Writing to help him remain invisible when he’s writing a book, to help him show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

The opening few minutes of Up show an entire life story with hardly a word. I was so drawn into the arc of these two lives that I couldn’t stop my tears at the conclusion. They didn’t need to explain everything. An entire tale can reside in a few small details.

Impact is filled with endless lectures thinly disguised as dialogue. You can tell when they’re doing it: Any time you’re watching a movie and a conversation suddenly makes you want to cram popcorn in your ears so you don’t have to hear it, chances are it’s not really a conversation but a writer shoving his big fat writing into the story. I keep hoping the characters will rebel.

Here’s an example: At one point two scientists and a bright astrophysics grad student have just learned that the meteorite that plowed into the moon was no ordinary rock, but a fragment of a brown dwarf. The bright astrophysics grad student says, “What’s a brown dwarf?” whereupon one of the scientists launches into a textbook explanation of a neutron star. (To say the moon was struck by a piece of a brown dwarf is like saying the moon was struck by a piece of Jupiter’s atmosphere.)

The only reason the grad student (who apparently slept through Astronomy 101) existed was to cue the exposition.

Do these people not read their own scripts? If it doesn’t sound like something a person would say, rewrite it until it does.

My only cynical hope is that it was calculatedly bad so that people would stay tuned out of sheer stunned amusement at the absurdity. (”Sporadic reverse gravity! Martha, they can’t possibly top that one! Wait…”)

Nah.

See more like that one:

• And the winner is...
• Pigs on a Plane
• Quantum of Evil
• Oscar Night: There Will Be Food
• Anything Else But This