The other day, apropos of nothing, I put on the remake of Get Carter so I could have some background chatter while working on something. I'd seen the movie before, and seeing it again reminded me of a little thing I like to call the Law of Incurious Storytelling.
First off: the movie's bad. Oh, sure, it's got John C. McGinley in a great supporting role (he steals every scene he's in, and even a few he's not in), and I have no particular allergy to Sylvester Stallone — but the movie freely disregards the implications of things it even takes the time to stop and comment on.
Random example. At one point Stallone's character is told that if he kills a certain someone, he's going to spend the rest of his life running. Fine. Guess what happens? He kills the guy — and the movie ends with not so much as a soupçon, a suggestion that he is indeed going to spend the rest of his life running. He goes back home presumably to continue business as usual. You could, I guess, cough up some excuse that this is a hard-boiled nihilist noir (the way the excellent Michael Caine original was) and that we can hand-wave some of that in the name of mood and atmosphere — but there's a difference between that and just plain sloppy storytelling.
Maybe better to say incurious storytelling.
One thing I constantly push myself to do when I'm working on one of my books is to ask hard questions about the implications of any one thing that happens. If you kill a man, or let him die, 99% of the time that's not something you can just let float past you under the bridge. Use it as fuel for something: an insight, a realization, a disagreement — something that shows your characters for what they are.
Fiction may be about the exceptions in life and not the rules, but that's a lousy excuse to invoke if you pass up the opportunity to make your story that much deeper. The rule goes double for SF and fantasy, of course: the whole premise of most of that stuff is to, as Theodore Sturgeon put it, ask the next question. If you're not doing that, then all you're doing is creating a style, not a world.
Follow me on 
Friend me on 
Friend me on 
Also on 
Interesting points made here....
I guess a lot of the problems/flaws in the remake of GET CARTER can be placed at the _time_ the remake was made. The original was made in '71, and at that time movies were a hell of a lot more nihilistic and brutal and just downright grim. It's easy to see why: turbulent times in the real world would soon show up in films. Caine's Carter wasn't even a likeable guy--but everyone else was so much more worse that Carter turned out to be better than them.
There was a good article in Creative Screenwriting magazine a few years ago comparing/contrasting the original GET CARTER and the remake. If you can track it down, do so.
[Reply to this comment]
Thanks for the tip about the magazine piece; I'll see if I can find it. I can definitely understand why the original was that much more bleak (and if you think that's a bleak movie, check out "Blast of Silence", now back out in a Criterion edition) - but it was also that much more internally consistent, and the remake just isn't.
I also resented how they tried to make the new Carter into a quasi-sympathetic character by giving him a relationship with the Rachel Leigh Cook character, because that too isn't used in a way that would have furthered the movie's true aims -- it's just a sop to the audience that wants something to smile at.
[Reply to this comment]
Leave a comment