Published on MacGMagazine, June 29th 2019
The point of art is to make the viewer feel something. Granted, that intention may fail and the viewer might feel something other than the desired feeling. Nonetheless, an emotion or reaction was experienced. The art may be in poor taste, poorly received or mass produced by a company with dollar signs in their eyes, but that experience exists.
Movies and television are relatively young art forms, especially compared to literature’s whopping millennia to film’s century. It’s also one of both auditory and visual expression. Editing, cinematography, direction, writing and countless other things are done to support that art, to build this moving, breathing thing we behold. But what about when a key part of of the project itself apart? What then?
A great example of this comes from “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” In the last season, the main characters go to a play that depicts an abridged retelling of the show’s events. The play is over-the-top, gets numerous things wrong (casting a hulking woman to play a small ten-year-old girl being one of them) and even deigns to foretell future events for our heroes. One by one, the characters air their complaints about the play, ending it with the line, “But the special effects were decent!” Hilariously, the movie based on the show would suffer similar reviews.
While done as a joke, it speaks to my question. There’re countless movies that have weak writing and acting but might be visually stunning. “Transformer: Dark of the Moon,” which has more problems than I could possibly list, does have many visually stunning scenes. The Star Wars franchise helped create new tools in filmmaking in its long history and yet has many flaws.
What if the show or movie started off promising but falls apart as it continues? The first two season of the BBC‘s “Sherlock” were amazing, but the show lost its steam during later seasons. That being said, its interesting visualization of challenging concepts (such as Sherlock’s deduction process and his mental breakdown after an overdose) were exceptional.
What about its intentions? Recently, “Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” an addition to the long-loved franchise, hit theaters. The plotting and script are definitely weak, but it also acts as a love letter to the titans featured in it. I recently watched it, and you can feel the care and love the crew had for the project. So should that be discounted as a mindless spectacle or something more?
At what point should we appreciate art, as flawed as it may be, as art? At what point is the whole greater than the sum of its parts ? I don’t have the answers, but as we get further into the year, maybe it’s something we should think about.
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