GOOD AND BAD STORYTELLING

In the series we will discuss the future of the film industry, which will involve fewer action movies and franchises, more work on smaller screens, more original stories, and better writing. Also we will discuss how women have always been the driving force in Hollywood and can be again, if we protect and empower them.

Places to learn storytelling from

During the virus shutdowns I dove into Korean television and I was shocked at how much better their stuff was than the work from other Asian countries.

Korea has mastered an art form that America is beginning to adopt as well, the notion that in between the feature film model and the open-ended television series model, there is a happy medium wherein a story is told in sixteen hour-long episodes, and then they do the ending and move on. A long mini-series.

Story lines Koreans like: their Joseon past, the notion of a South Korean monarchy, North-South relations, corruption, time travel, children who have scary adventures and meet again as adults, and Cinderellas marrying rich cranky men. The heavily Korea-centric stories obviously work less well for non-Korean audiences.

Korean humor doesn’t always translate smoothly for American audiences either and it can come across as fluffy. However, don’t be put off if a show looks silly at first, because a number of these shows start as fluffy comedies and then dive into much deeper depths. It’s a Korea thing. 

The culture is hierarchical and sexist. A lot more abusive bosses, parents, husbands and boyfriends than Americans would tolerate, which makes several series harder to watch. Skittish about sex, even more skittish about LGBT.

The acting is generally excellent, particularly the young actors, although there’s a lot of crying in the melodramas.

Lots of cellphones. Lots of food porn. Lots of Korean power ballads.

Here are some shows to check out.

Korea has a lot of strong romantic dramas, where they mix the romcom stuff with some much deeper dramatic themes. The best in this category include When The Camellia Blooms, Thirty But Seventeen, Rain Or Shine aka Just Between Lovers, One Spring Night, Rookie Historian, Another Miss Oh, Chocolate, and the bittersweet Crash Landing On You. And one conventional romcom, Because This Is My First Life, which is more formulaic but excellent all the same. I left out Something In the Rain, despite the glorious performance by Son Yejin, because they totally failed to stick the landing in the finale.

They also have clever, innovative procedural and workplace dramas: Live, Descendants of the Sun, Stranger, Voice. The girl in While You Were Sleeping is also in Start-Up, a surprisingly absorbing dive into the world of IT.

Also worth a look: Legend of the Blue Sea (on Hulu), Jun Ji-Hyun displays Chaplin-level comedic skills as a mermaid horking down spaghetti like a Doberman and crying like a whale, and managed the athletic underwater scenes not long after giving birth.

K2, bodyguard falls in love with girl targeted by vindictive relative. Good acting overcomes hokey plotting.

Live Up To Your Name, medieval acupuncturist is transported to modern Korea. Male lead shows astounding range as the story leaps from slapstick to romcom into deep drama.

For contrast, look at China. The projects coming out of China don’t measure up to the Koreans yet. The Chinese market is getting bored with all our blockbusters and they want fresh stuff, but the government is concerned about internal unrest during tough times so they’re tightening controls, limiting foreign content, steering foreign stuff away from prime time. Films going to China can’t have ghosts, undead, superstition, unscientific elements, talking animals or time travel; anything anti-Chinese, or criticizing the government; foreign culture, religion or suicide; explicit sexuality, homosexuality, prostitution or incest; nuclear Weapons, excessive violence, American military dominance, or dystopian themes. And if your budget is bigger than 40 million on a Chinese production, it must have “Chinese values” in it somewhere.

Taiwan has some good material. One interesting entry was Perfect Match, a restaurant soap opera that starts rocky and gets better as it goes. Strong acting from almost all the cast. This is not to be confused with Love Cuisine, which American audiences will find indigestible because of the incessant sexual harassment portrayed as comedy.

A Thousand Goodnights is excellent and creative, but moves slowly.

Another excellent place to learn movie storytelling is the silents.

Go back a century. No CGI, no computers, no superhero wisecrackery to fluff up terrible plotting and dialogue, just great art. So, what kind of movies to watch?

One director everyone needs to see is F. W. Murnau, particularly for his masterpiece Sunrise. The hundred things he used to fill us with eerie dread, even in the simple trip to the barber’s: moon and clouds and fog, lighting, odd camera angles, tracking shots, double exposures, the pre-Fellini montage and the pre-Hitchcock carnival, the pre-Spielberg faces in the window, the baby consoling his mother, the insane dog and the drinking pig, the storm on the lake and the burning boat. And the heartrending way they depicted two people trying to save their marriage, a story they told with almost no words on the title cards. Lillian Gish did a film with the same flavor a year later, the Wind, about a woman going mad in the wilderness.

Also, The Last Laugh. Murnau taught every director how to move a camera in this tale of an old man facing a demotion; he stressed the visual by releasing it without title cards, and added a pack of Expressionist surrealism in the second act.

More great storytelling that Murnau would have liked: The Kid, Charlie Chaplin’s beautiful father-son story. And Safety Last, Harold Lloyd tries to win money for his girl by going to the top of a skyscraper – on the outside.

The old masters told good stories but they carefully crafted what the eye would see also. A lot of wild design: Metropolis, totalitarianism and robots, cutting edge design and effects, but long and slow. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, messed up and surreal, the villain of Casablanca as a zombie terrorizing a town devoid of right angles. Ben Hur, shorter than the Heston version, clearer story, better effects, naked flower girls, what’s not to like? Phantom of the Opera, a Lon Chaney piece which is better than his Hunchback, or Nosferatu. 

Also, stunts and special effects: the aerial battles in Wings are stunning even by 21st century standards; A Trip To the Moon is pretty plucky, shooting absurdist science fiction in 1902; Douglas Fairbanks’ special effects and stunt work in Thief of Baghdad are exhausting just to watch. But the big winner is Buster Keaton, with his chase scene in Seven Chances, his underwater scene in Navigator, his hurricane in Steamboat Bill, firing live cannon on a moving train in the General, the suicidal bicycle ride in Sherlock Junior.

A few actresses totally owned the camera: Rene Falconetti overcoming mental illness to play Joan of Arc, Clara Bow stealing every scene she was in (the film It), Janet Gaynor who could build romantic chemistry with anyone (Seventh Heaven), Eleanor Boardmen in The Crowd.

And a few good epics popped up: some good but long pieces, Napoleon and Greed, and some political rah-rah epics, the Battleship Potemkin and the Big Parade.          

Something that can totally save a movie that might sink otherwise, is the ability to spot the mistakes in your source material and fix them.

So, Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien is justly credited (or blamed) for creating the genre of fantasy fiction and the concept of world building, but as an actual writer he was kinda terrible. Happily, Jackson and the gang had the right tools, and fixed most of the right things.

Endless page after page describing the scenery? Gone.

Flimsy characters? Give them more depth and emotion.

Total lack of conflict among any of the characters? Fixed, in large part by Gimli, Legolas and Theoden.

Ridiculous faux-medieval dialogue? Junk it.

The deadly, chloroform-like passage with Tom Bombadil? Gone.

Stupid plot contrivances, to include Aragorn having no sane reason to ignore Frodo’s quest to destroy the ring, so he could instead rescue Merry and Pippin, the two most useless characters in all Middle Earth? Fixed. Now Aragorn has a motive for turning west.

Half the characters are three feet tall? Just put them on their knees, or don’t do two-shots and group shots.

Of course there was some stupid stuff, like Legolas surfing down the stairs at Helms Deep, Gandalf breakdancing at Isengard, the green-slime army at Minas Tirith, the appalling special effects when momentarily making Bilbo, Galadriel and Gandalf scary. And part of me would like to have tidied up that long messy ending and added in more of the scouring of the Shire. But they’re not going to get everything right.

Star Wars

The problem with the Star Wars universe isn’t just that they recycle ideas over and over. It’s that a lot of their ideas were terrible to begin with.

ABSURD WRITING. The fascinating plot about the taxation of trade routes, the no-chemistry “romance” with Natalie Portman, the action scenes in which no one ever shoots straight, and the Christmas special starring Bea Arthur and Chewy’s relatives Itchy and Lumpy.

Johnson, at least, got rid of a lot of the absurd Lucas artifacts; no love triangle, get rid of the scary Kylo Ren mask. When Chewbacca saw a cute Ewok-like animal, he roasted the thing. Johnson got rid of Lucas’ idea that the force was only for people with noble blood, and turned it into something anyone could reach out for. Johnson created a gutsy alpha male rogue warrior, but then sent a woman with purple hair to put him in his place.

LAME COMEDY. Jar Jar, a Rastafarian lizard on helium, helps to make obviously evil Senator the emperor, and talks like this: “Exsqueeze me. How wude! Ohh, maxi big da Force. Well dat smells stinkowiff. Da Bosses will do terrible tings to me TERRRRRIBLE is me going back der! Mesa cause one, two-y little bitty axadentes, huh? Yud say boom de gasser, den crashin der bosses heyblibber, den banished. Ooh mooey mooey I love you! Yoosa should follow me now, okeeday?”

Later, the writers tried to make Poe funny and it fell flat. Boyega, however, created comedy simply with his acting.

SILLY SCIENCE. Your pilot brags about a spacecraft making the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs, when a parsec is a unit of DISTANCE. It’s like saying you made the Kessel run in two quarts and a pint. And of course the mitichlorians, born of Lucas’ inability to pronounce mitochondria.

GOOD AND EVIL. The battle of good and evil can be complex, but it can’t be muddled and incomprehensible. A screenwriter tackling a large-scale action fantasy needs to clearly define the heroes and villains. In this as in all things, George Lucas was not up to the job.

The heroes were represented by the republic, run by monarchs and princes, plagued by crooked special interests, slave traders, assassins, bounty hunters, smugglers, crime lords, private armies, a count with his own droid army, a chancellor who loved weapons, separatist movements, civil wars. At the moment of greatest crisis the incompetent senate gave dictatorial powers to the worst member of their body, with predictable results.

Their greatest heroes, the Jedi, invited Darth Vader into their midst, whereupon he wiped most of them out and drove the rest into hiding; this must have been pretty easy since the Jedi avoided blasters which could kill at long range and clung to light sabers which were useless beyond ten feet. Both Jedi leaders, Kenobi and Luke, ran away.

The villains were led by the James Earl Jones, Mufasa guy, a man who overcame the death of his wife, the loss of his children, and crippling injuries; he finally restored the republic by killing the emperor and then dying in his son’s arms. Their military was the most harmless and ineffective military force since the Italian army. Yes, they blew up one planet, but they provided peace and stability to the other 699,999 planets, no civil wars or separatists or rogue armies, no predatory criminals.

When the “heroes” took power again, they made exactly the same mistakes as they had the first time, and the new “villains” were led by Ron Weasley’s brother.

So why it was so important to root for the Republic over Vader? You think maybe Darth Vader wouldn't have gone bad, if not for the fact that the shiny happy people of the republic allowed him to be enslaved and put to work as a child, and then the Jedi separated him from his mother?

PAPER-THIN CHARACTERS. All those years in the desert, what did Rey dream of? A grown woman, she didn’t just want to find Mommy and be a child again, and she has shown no interest in romance: she certainly wouldn’t want a laughable chemistry-free “romance” like Amidala and “Ani”. I think the true love of her junk-meister heart is the Falcon: she’ll be crushed when it finally falls apart.

What drives Kylo Ren? You’re going to trash the galaxy because your father made you study your algebra? 

OVER-RELIANCE ON VIOLENCE. All forms of conflict are resolved by violence. Every story is about who can kill the most people. Blasters, light sabers, warships, fighter craft, death stars.

Rey was forced to ape male strength: hurting people with a big stick, then a blaster, then a light saber.

And the Force shouldn’t just be a cool trick for telekinesis and strangling incompetent generals. 

Marvel

As a writer it is offensive to me that the Marvel people have made billions by telling the same story over and over. And it’s a stupid story. Tight costumes, snappy banter, contrived conflict, search for magic doohickey, major landmarks blow up, people jump from building to building, and then the magic moment at the end when the shiny-eyed heroes realize they've saved the world and THEY'LL NEVER HAVE TO DO IT AGAIN. What a relief! The billions of dollars wasted on this.

The first Captain America, in which evil villain Scarab wants to make magic super weapons, one of them the Dynamic Vibrator.

Howard the Duck destroys evil villain Dark Overlord with a magic Neutron Disintegrator.

The Punisher kills evil villain Lady Tanaka.

Captain America, kills evil villain Red Skull using the magic Supersoldier formula.

The Fantastic Four kill evil villain Doctor Doom using magical Cosmic Rays and somehow a magic diamond is also involved.

Blade kills the evil villain Frost; magic vampire stuff is involved.

X-Men defeat evil villain with magical magnetism powers.

Blade II, defeats evil vampires armed with magic virus.

Spiderman kills the evil villain Green Goblin using magical spider venom.

Daredevil defeats the evil villain Kingpin using magic sonar.

X2, X-Men defeat the evil villain Stryker using magic shape-shifting and brainwashing powers.

Hulk defeats the evil villain using magic radioactive powers.

Punisher remake, kills lots of villains, carelessly forgets to add a magical power.

Spiderman 2, kills the evil villain Doctor Octopus who has magic tentacles.

Blade Trinity, kills more villains; magic Sun Dog ammunition AND magic Daystar weapon.

Elektra kills evil villain Kirigi, has magic power to raise the dead.

Fantastic Four reboot, more Doctor Doom, more magic cosmic stuff, no magic diamond this time.

X-Men the Last Stand, kills the Phoenix; magic mutant cure.

Ghost Rider, burns evil villain Blackheart with his magic Penance Stare; devil magic involved as bonus.

Spiderman 3 kills evil villain Venom; magic alien involved.

Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, kills the Surfer, evil magic humanoid with magic surfboard; characters trade magical powers by mistake.

Iron Man kills evil villain Stane, magic heart, magic suit.

Incredible Hulk defeats the evil villain Abomination, the magic radiation now has a magic antidote.

Punisher War Zone, kills evil villain Jigsaw, still no magic!

X-Men Origins Wolverine again takes on Stryker who now has magic bullets.

Iron Man 2, takes on evil villain Vanko with magic whips, and a magical chemical element is thrown in.

Thor, Loki, magic hammer.

X-Men First Class, so much magic chaos everywhere that I can’t possibly summarize it.

Captain America the First Avenger, kills evil villain Red Skull again, magic shield, magic wormhole, magic relic.

Ghost Rider Spirit of Vengeance, sends Mephistopheles to hell, more devil magic.

The Avengers, back to the magic relic and the magic wormhole and the magic suit and Loki is alive! Oh wait, magic aliens too.

Amazing Spiderman fights evil villain Lizard with his lizard magic, and of course the spider magic.

Iron Man 3, evil scientist, magic suit, magical regenerative medicine.

Wolverine, evil villain Silver Samurai, magic immortality powers.

Captain America versus Winter Soldier, preserving human consciousness through magic, magic memory erasure, quick look at magical scepter.

Amazing Spiderman 2, Green Goblin again, magic spiders and magic eels.

X-Men Days of Future Past, another smorgasbord of magical power, plus magical time travel in which they tragically save Richard Nixon’s life.

Guardians of the Galaxy kill the evil villain Ronan the Accuser, aliens, cyber-raccoon, magic stone.

Avengers Age of Ultron, maybe kinda sort kills evil villain Ultron, more magical powers including yet another magic stone, apparently there are six in all.

Ant Man kills evil villain Yellowjacket, magic shrinking technology.

Fantastic Four yet again, Doctor Doom yet again, magic gate, magic planet, magic powers.

Deadpool versus evil villain Ajax, magic serum, magic “megasonic” explosions.

Captain America Civil War, heroes fight each other because there’s no one left to kill until the evil Zemo shows up; magic super-soldier serum.

X-Men Apocalypse, ancient magic mutants can teleport and want to destroy the world, plus the usual telepathy, ESP, shape-shifting, hypersonic speed, etc.

Doctor Strange, magic book, magic arts, magic astral plane, magic dimensions, magic buildings, and the Eye of Agamotto which bends time; the hero also plays the villain because this one wasn’t silly enough already.

Logan, magic child kills people.

Guardians of the Galaxy 2, magic “Celestials”, magic seeds, and the usual talking tree etc.

Spiderman Homecoming, magic aliens again, magic grenade, spider magic, and something called a…Vulture Suit?

Thor Ragnarok, Loki, hammer, dying gods, aliens, wormholes, magic sword controls a magic bridge.

Black Panther, civil war in African kingdom, magic meteorite, magic herb, magic weapons, another magic suit.

Avengers Infinity War, evil Thanos, lots of magic stones, kills half the Avengers, we think.

Deadpool 2, he blows himself up but someone we’ve never heard of magically sticks all the pieces together; someone brings in a long-overdue idea, magic anti-magic collars to bring these people under control. Sadly it doesn’t work. Also, time travel again.

Ant Man and the Wasp, wormhole to a quantum realm.

Venom, alien superpowers, souls hopping bodies, and some guy with a spectacular tongue who tragically does not take his talents to the porn market.

Firefly

The show Firefly achieved a superfecta of unbelievable characters and bad plotting.

All they had to do was create SOME characters who were at least believable, if not always likable, and send them off on interesting adventures. Because they thought they were there to create an old-fashioned western in space – they even rode horses at one point – they felt compelled to build the series around toxic alpha males and the women who enable them.

The characters. You’ve got Mal, the guy who lost a pointless war and therefore is allowed to act like an out-of-control alpha-male bully who can’t go two minutes without insulting or threatening somebody. He is such a jerk, threatening at various times to kill at least half the members of his beloved “family”, that the network forced the writers to rewrite him.

Next, the Doctor, dedicates his life to protecting his sister and then sends her along on an insane robbery; lets Mal punch him and of course he agrees to work for Mal.

River, whose mental illness gives her Ninja fighting skills and other superpowers, because that’s a thing that happens. Because she is psychotic and delusional, Mal of course promotes her to co-pilot.

Inara, who is totally okay with Mal calling her a whore because that’s true love.

Zoe and Wash who are okay with Mal acting like a jerk about their relationship.

Jayne, another macho jerk, because Mal wasn’t bad enough; makes fun of everyone’s romances right in front of them.

Kaylee, the impossibly cute Mary Sue who can magically fix anything with no training, and magically loves all these unlikable people no matter how awful they are.

Derrial Book is the only character who is actually credible, so of course they kill him off.

They achieved the superfecta: they created exactly zero credible characters, and the interpersonal dynamics among the characters are toxic. It’s like the writers have never actually seen humans behave, but only read about us in books.

And then the stories. Wide open sci-fi concept, they could have created any kind of villain. What they created is a dull European Union-like thing called the Alliance, which is mainly known for unifying the galaxy, making peace and providing medical assistance to those who need it. Those bastards.   

In the first half of the season, Mal smuggles the wrong people, steals the wrong cargo, boards the wrong ship, attacks Inara’s date and almost gets killed, decides which of his crew members to kill, marries the wrong girl, and has an absurd plan to lay low that goes totally sideways.

In the second half, Mal concocts two absurd robbery schemes, dopes off and lets the ship be seized three different times, threatens to kill a member of his “family” in a rage, and botches a job for a crime lord. For the grand finale he jumps into a local brouhaha involving a pregnant prostitute and takes the obvious step of sleeping with the prostitute.

A whole universe full of stories they could have told, and they chose to show Mal stepping on his crank week after week, and abusing and threatening everyone in his path, like a demented Wile E. Coyote with roid rage.

More bad storytelling 

It’s amazing how much bad writing Hollywood gets away with.

Pulp Fiction, a sort of lowest-common-denominator slag pile, an ever-growing mound of references to the kind of juvenile junk culture that might appeal to stoner clerks in a video store: McDonald’s, Burger King, bacon, Sprite, gourmet coffee, trashy TV pilots and reruns, personalized wallets, Dutch hash bars, Kung Fu, the Fonz, milkshakes, Pepsi, blueberry pancakes, vanilla Coke, Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, French fries, theme restaurants, breakfast cereals, board games. Mix in some faux-cool hitmen with bad haircuts, several murders, a rape, a botched robbery, a drug overdose, some naughty words, some instant-cool retro musical references, and there’s your script. It’s a stroll through a cultural junkyard, a colorful cartoon, a bare hint at the kind of movies Tarantino could be making, if only he was as interested in the art form as he is in looking cool in front of the kids in film school.

Tarantino then exploits the Holocaust for money, exploits slavery for money. Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Tarantino exploits another tragedy for money, while ruminating about how hard it is for addictive, violent white men to get work in Hollywood. How zeitgeist-y.

Quentin says he wants to retire. Let him. Please. He’s a professional bad example.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Love Actually. But the writers throw ten stories at you all at once, hoping you won’t notice that each story is weaker than the last one.

Bill Nighy, musician, gets drunk with his manager.

Andrew Lincoln stalks Keira Knightley at her own wedding and she thinks it’s sweet.

Colin Firth proposes to a girl he’s never even had a conversation with.

Alan Rickman cheats on Emma Thompson for no sane reason.

Hugh Grant makes creepy comments about a staffer’s body, fires her, uses the government to track her down.

Liam Neeson stumbles into a gorgeous available supermodel, because that’s a thing that happens.

His son chases the girl of his dreams by running through Heathrow security without getting shot.

Laura Linney’s romance gets stalled by her brother, because all schizophrenics are violent, but at least we got the girl naked. 

Kris Marshall goes to America and every girl in the country wants to have sex with him.

Two porn stars have the only normal romance in the movie.

David Fincher’s Mank, which took a snapshot of the Citizen Kane creative process, just didn’t work the way Kane had. In Kane we saw Welles cleverly catalog many innovations from other sources the 1920s and 1930s; Fincher has catalogued the inability of modern directors to understand what makes movie storytelling work.

The blah dialogue in Mank cried out for a rewrite. Fincher failed to string the political bits into a coherent narrative that could have properly explained Mank’s growing disgust with Hearst and his need to take him down. Fincher’s longer scenes, the duet between Mank and Marion Davies, the meltdown at San Simeon, the clash with Orson Welles, are loaded with missed opportunities. The talented cast was mostly wasted, and shooting as many as 200 takes for a scene didn’t improve the acting. Fincher incorrectly attributes most of the script to Mank, not Welles. Welles’ Rashomon-like storytelling structure, in the hands of Fincher, becomes a jarring ping-pong between the Mank-Hearst relationship and Mank’s struggle to write the script: like Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, Mank’s jumbled timeline makes for a jumbled story.

The directing frankly was no better. Many of Fincher’s attempts at homage fall flat. He flies in the face of Kane’s use of deep focus and blurs background characters; he seems to think that all the visual magic of Kane came from the aggressive use of backlighting. He tries to get the sound perfect, but then he puts 1950s music into 1930s scenes, and shows us outdoor scenes with obvious, clumsy indoor overdubs.

Fast And The Furious 7 had these plot points. All of them. Amnesia, blanket amnesty for criminals, multiple secret bombs, rogue assassin, car chase, rogue special ops team, the “God’s Eye” computer program, mercenary, dropping cars from planes, billionaire hunting a flash drive, the abandoned factory cliché, helicopter, stealth helicopter, drone missile destroyed by ambulance, hacker, collapsing parking garage, attacking helicopter with car, sack of grenades, super-secret prison.

And the next film: criminals and street racers forced to hunt each other, secret government agent, rogue assassin, former criminal, miracle hacker, covert ops team, criminal mastermind, cyber-terrorist, Brazilian cop who is in the US for no sensible reason, crazy plot for world domination. And a submarine.

We also need to take them to task for incessantly and flagrantly exploiting an actor’s death to sell tickets to these stupid movies.

They sold the Matrix as this deep philosophical contemplation of men and machines, being trapped in the cyber world, with deep dives into Gnosticism, Buddhism, Hinduism. “This thing’s all about Plato and Kant and Decartes, dude!”....and then they just said "screw it, we'll just let Keanu Reeves shoot lots of guns".

An absurd arsenal that involves seven kinds of pistols, four kinds of submachine guns, assault rifles, shotguns, machineguns, gas grenades. And then purpose-built guns because they didn’t have enough firepower already. All based on the notion that the battle for cyberspace will be won with a lot of guns.

Characters repeatedly wearing sunglasses for gunfights in dark rooms.

Keanu, with his tight clothes and long overcoat that no sane man would take into a gun fight, fires endlessly and never misses. His guns have no recoil, even as he shoots full-auto while doing cartwheels. Seriously. Cartwheels. 

His opponents never hit him despite firing thousands of rounds. Ancient gunfight clichés, Mexican standoffs, is-he-empty-or-not?

Unbelievable, fake-looking fist fights that look like cheerleaders slap-fighting; combat choreographers who insist on throwing every one of their tricks into a common fist fight. Total suspension of the laws of physics. Slow-mo comes and goes for no reason.

Obligatory hot babe. Tank top, black plastic pants, lots of guns, sunglasses. Who can do impossible things with a helicopter. Survives an explosion with her makeup intact.

British actor plays villain with a mid-Atlantic accent, for no reason.

Zombie-like acting.

Really, really bad writing. Fortune-cookie philosophy, magic pills, cyber-octopi, prophecies, the search for The One, silly monologues on the fate of the human race, life is all just a video game.

Sets that are grungy for no reason other than the whim of the director.

Stop the madness. 

PS Anyone who is interested in top-notch low-budget screenplays, I have 24 in all genres, although one is in production. Check out loglines and scripts at https://threewibbes.wordpress.com/ .