Quote:
Originally Posted by Strange Brew
Anyway, I kind of enjoyed the OP. But picking Whiplash as the movie that breaks your back on plausibility is quite the choice.
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Haven't seen Whiplash, but I can recognize the feeling.
IMO we should be talking about setting up expectations and then failing them (or not). Clearly Whiplash set up wrong expectations for at least the OP.
Nobody expects anything in Avengers 2 to be plausible other than the basic character motivations. In fact the audience expects that implausible things will happen and will be disappointed if it doesn't.
Setting up the right expectations is for example a reason to start a movie with a fight scene. It sets up the expectation that "The fights are the thing that I'm supposed to be paying attention to. Turn off brain, chew popcorn, be entertained. Got it." Audience is told what's the right mode for this film.
For me probably the worst case of failing to properly set up expectations is Sunshine.
The movie starts as a story about people facing incredible pressure. Literally all of mankind could be doomed if someone makes a simple error. The basic functions of the ship is presented in a way that makes it clear that someone has actually given thought to what the ship would be like. The crew actually resemble people you would send on a journey to save all mankind. There's extra flavoring over everything, but for the first part of the movie even the plot revolves around what is the
sensible thing to do. The extremity of the situation also only really hits you when you
think about it. For the first part of the film, thinking about the film is how you're entertained the most. (In this mode the first part was actually very edge-of-the-seat stuff for me at least.)
Then in the second part of the film you're expected to completely switch off the logical part of your brain as the movie turns into action horror. I can't change into that mode halfway through the film.
So the second part of the movie, the one with with "action and stuff" ends up being terrible, because the audience has their thinking caps on and are constantly going "oh come on this is so
stupid". Which of course it is, because action horror is almost by definition a pretty stupid genre.