Netflix sure likes to lose a lot of content at once. November 1st will see the expiration of over a dozen items I've been hoarding on my instant queue, so I've been vegging out and even trying to multi-task my exercise and writing duties while watching as much as I can. My biggest fear is that I'll turn into my step-brother from ages ago, a kid whose main loves were eating, watching tv, and shitting. It was an entirely common occurrence to witness him come up from the basement (seriously) to grab a tray that could last you or I days, then vanish back down for more viewing time.
Note to self: Make sure you go the hell outside today. It's the big place with no ceiling and all the panhandlers.
It's a lot of pop culture that'll be gone on the 1st. The Bond films, the first three Star Trek films and also some of the Trek films nobody cares about, some classics, and Demolition Man. I hadn't seen that last one since its theatrical release, and my memory of it was accurate enough; that it's a really fun, big budget C-movie. The future tech, culture, and lingo is so absurd that you can't really stop to contemplate how impossible it is without going insane (though its depiction of a lawless 1996 Los Angeles where cops don't uphold the law was pretty spot on), so that leaves the pretty explosions, car chases, and fistfights. It's worth a watch.
But what really got me was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, a movie I hadn't actually ever seen. I might have to confess to this one a lot, for a prospective screenwriter there's a lot I've neglected to watch.
I'm not the hugest sci-fi fan, but one thing I always loved about these early movies is that they never forgot that big starships in space were damn cool, so there's a lot of really loving close-up shots with wonderful, booming orchestral music. Yeah, the models and effects are ancient, but if you take that and film it with such obvious passion, I'll take that over fancy CGI where the camera assumes we've all seen it a hundred times before and it doesn't need any special treatment.
The real treat, however, is the depth of plot here. In the same way that Demolition Man is a spoof that dares to thrill us, Khan attempts (and succeeds) in getting us to take things seriously. It's not perfect, and near the end they seem to skip over a number of logical solutions (you'd think somebody would ask if the huge bomb-like thing that can wipe out an entire planet has a cancel button, or if they could beam it elsewhere) but instead go forward with a line of action guaranteed to get people killed.
What makes the movie such a kick in the ass is the sense of history, fueled as it is by the events of the television series some fifteen years previous. And I think you could have just made a movie with that sense of history, actual evidence absent, and it would work just as well. But it doesn't hurt that the writers had solid background material to build it on.
There's a school of thought in writing that says you should know your main characters as well as your childhood friends. There's another school of thought that says this is bullshit, and I think the best place to land is in the middle; your characters need to have history, the more detailed the better, but when you know their favorite colors you're probably being a bit asinine.
In a good script, most of the events that occur by the end are dictated by the things that came before. Characters can't develop skills at the speed of plot just because it's necessary, they have to earn it in some way. Likewise, random events can't just happen because they need to, something needs to have gone into it before. A good, if incredibly zany example is in Billy Madison, where Adam Sandler calls a guy he used to bully in school to offer a belated apology. Not only does the recipient of the call (Steve Buscemi) take the main character off his To Kill list, he shows up at the end to save him from mortal danger.
That wouldn't work in a serious movie, but it was an inspired bit of comedy and it's indicative of the basics of writing a good payoff. And if you know the basic history of your characters and the world they inhabit, these moments should dictate themselves.
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