Words are losing their power. Not even Jason Bourne can save them now
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
That said, it's completely believable to me that the cost of making universally clever dialogue is much harder than just doing it in one language, and will be the easiest line-item to justify cutting with international audiences being increasingly prized. I've always been OK with reading subtitles but it wasn't until Inglourious Basterds did I realize how jarring and unusual it is to have foreign languages hold equal screentime to your own native language (which makes me respect IB even more for its artistic achievement).
It'll definitely be a shame if plots themselves become increasingly dumbed down for international reasons. One thing the OP didn't mention in terms of the Chinese-market effect on Americans is the seemingly higher frequency of Chinese locales making cameos...though this is something I welcome, as the Chinese-based set pieces in movies such as Skyfall as Pacific Rim have usually been spectacular.
Flesh-Kincaid vs year of release in those subtitles would also be interesting...
/just planting seeds of ideas or there in hacker space because I'm too lazy to do it right now.
I'm curious to hear how you think it can get more dumbed down than Pacific Rim. I actually liked the film -- it did look spectacular, and sometimes you just have nothing better to do than watch Giant Robots vs. Giant Aliens -- but I don't see how a movie can get any more boilerplate.
While there are some stupid stuff in there ("my robot is immune to an EMP because it's all analog") most of the "cool dumb stuff" has an in-universe explanation on why it has to be that way ("we need big punching robots because we must intercept the monsters before they reach the shore and spilling the least of it's poisonous blood possible").
The movie is exceedingly dumb, but not dumbed-down, IMHO. For example, obviously missile and drone technology would be vastly more effective than robots in taking down these kinds of threats. But after glossing over that reality, the writers/producers go all in with the concept of robots, and invest their creativity in building this improbable world with interesting characters. Or to put it another way, this is dumb action movie that punches up and exceeds its premise, when it could've just been all dumb action all the way through.
Her touching on the loss of quality in dialogue, not just quantity, seems like the more important problem. To me, meaningful and good dialogue is important - whereas dialogue for the sake of dialogue tends to suck. I'm not saying that everything that comes out of a character's lips needs to be important plot points, but writers and producers should think more about what they're trying to accomplish in their work when a character needs to say something. I think a piece of bad dialogue hurts more than if that character were to say nothing.
Movies, on the other hand, have a definite limit to how much they can cram in, and so they're more inclined to use time efficiently. As in games, dialogue is extremely convenient as a way to do exposition, but the medium holds many other possibilities. Since there isn't conflict over agency, it's easier to make more elements in a film "inevitable" by design. For a game to present many of the set-pieces shown in movies, it has to carefully coax the player to move in the right direction and look in the right place at the right time.
There's a new Harry Potter book out today. Kids were lining up at Barnes and Noble for it last evening. Words are doing just fine.
Looks to be mostly online and set in the original timeline. Bryan Fuller is involved, he wrote for Voyager and has a history of dialog heavy shows after that (pushing daisies is so underrated by the way).
> pushing daisies
Yeah, I've seen some of it; it's quite ok :).
Besides, Alicia Vikander can't seem to keep her mouth shut whenever she's on the screen. I think her character more than compensates for everyone else's lack of dialogue.
Alicia Vikander's character on the other hand was in a position that allowed for plenty of dialogue and she did have it, she was involved in most of the plot exposition. Hell, I suspect her time-on-screen comes close to Bourne's.
I just feel that criticizing a film just because the titular character doesn't speak much is a bad practice because there are situations where that's appropriate. Showing over telling is something that should be cherished. I'd rather criticize JB for doing very little towards advancing the Bourne story overall.
I can't say I've ever seen an episode of animated television like it in recent times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush_(Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer...
> Dexter makes an angst-ridden trip to the hardware store to buy a new light bulb for his lab. Note: This episode is almost dialogue-free; the only dialogue in the entire episode is Dexter's punch line at the end.
More budget = more action scenes = less dialogue
In the far future, special effects alone might not suffice to sell films, but for now it's enough.
The other trend to consider is films lengthening; there are multi-part series and also the Netflix streaming model. A 6-hour film can maintain the same (high) action-to-dialogue ratio but still have room for a plot.
I'd like to see some historical comparisons, too. We tend to imagine movies as containing more than they do. 43 lines doesn't strike me as particularly small. It's one more line than I count for Darth Vader in Star Wa^H^H^H^H^H^H^HA New Hope, for example.
What does short, fluffy blog posts with titles unsupported by their brief content demonstrate?
Even if movies did represent trends in common language usage, which I doubt, using fewer words could represent the opposite of the title's conclusion -- it could be that words are becoming more efficient, and thus more powerful, over time.
Anyway, some people actually studying common vocabulary usage patterns seem to come to the opposite conclusion, when they use data and not their favorite movies. https://bostonreview.net/blog/claude-s-fischer-how-gss-got-i...
The generation that grew up with the internet is not gonna be bad at writing. Videos are great, but text still rules.
Certainly I can remember lines from Whedon's Avengers film, such as:
"Puny God"
and
"That's my secret, Cap. I'm always angry."
and of course:
"It's good to meet you, Dr. Banner. Your work on anti-electron collisions is unparalleled. And I'm a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster."
More here: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Avengers_(2012_film)
> Tom Hardy also spoke on this issue by saying, "We have to take it differently as George is taking it. It's a relaunch and revisit to the world. An entire restructuring. That's not to say that it's not picking up or leaving off from the Mad Max you know already, but it's a nice re-take on the entire world using the same character, depositing him in the same world but bringing him up to date by 30 years." On the other hand, Charlize Theron also said that Hardy wasn't playing Mel Gibson's character. They just happen to be both named Max Rockatanski. In fact, Miller stated with the 30 year gap since the last film and a new actor playing the lead, it was just easier to do a new version of the film without maintaining any continuity. The easiest way Miller puts it is to think of each film as a "legend of the Road Warrior" meaning that each film is a story about Mad Max that happened, but perhaps told by different people and so some things are altered from each story.
That is what i think of it.
I think it is also important to notice that Max is barely aprotagonist of the movie. He is more like a walking plot device. He help the drama start and move along while not being the real focus of it. Max is more of an entity than a character.
We go for the bigger than TV spectacle. We don't need the theater to get adult, dialog driven movies since we have great adult, dialog driven television which have the long length to give the dialog some effect. Movies are not the place to think anymore. If they can slide in great dialog than cool, but it doesn't seem to be a requirement.
Heck, I'm more mad that Honest Trailers[1], CinemaSins[2] (Everything wrong with X in Y minutes), and HISHE[3] have so much damn material because of spectacle over plot. Plots that make us wince[4] is the greater tragedy.
or... its hard for a screaming kid to screw up an action scene, but the little whippersnapper can certainly screw up a drama
1) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL86F4D497FD3CACCE
2) https://www.youtube.com/user/CinemaSins
Some quantitative analysis to back that up would be interesting; you are right that this article does seem anecdotal in evidence.
For a different take on lack of dialogue, a highly recommend Robert Redford in "All is Lost." A a beautiful and completely compelling movie with no dialogue, and a single actor and a single setting. Of course Hollywood didn't finance this film and it takes an extraordinary actor to pull this off.
I have recently realized that this is one of the things I pay attention to the most when it comes to deciding.
Two great such examples of shows with meaningful, but often terse, yet still subtle and even duplicitous would be Peaky Blinders and Marco Polo.
Here is a great example scene from Peaky Blinders:
I severely doubt the phenomenon is new and I think it's more the author trying to make a point by cherry-picking from already rather "silent" genres than analysing a general trend.
I can vividly imagine Hollywood directors ordering their script writers to aggressively trim any dialogue spoken by a Schwarzenegger or a Stallone to one-liners and grunts after actually viewing the first couple of test shots.