A Good Movie

A good movie is sort of hard to come by these days. All you ever really get is a bunch of remakes or sequels that completely obliterate anything good about the original movie, or book adaptations which, believe me, you’re better off reading the book for.

Before we start, SPOILER ALERT! There may be some spoilers to movies you want to watch but haven’t gotten around to watch it yet. I can offer no other warnings. There will be a lot of movie mentions, and I’m not going to go listing them all here.

But sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get some absolute gems, like The Martian (probably the best book adaptation ever), Interstellar, Gravity, Christopher Nolan‘s Batman trilogy, and Dangal. Other times, you get garbage like the Fast & Furious series, the Transformers series, or Suicide Squad.

So, what makes a good movie?

Well, there are a lot of things, and most movies get some of them right. Obviously, no movie gets everything right. There will always be something wrong. Here, I will list everything a good movie needs to get right, which ones did it perfectly, and which ones got it all wrong.

First, there’s the story. The film’s story must have no plot holes. It must be a complete story from start to end. I understand the hardships with that, being a writer of stories myself, but an honourable mention here is The Martian. The story is awesome. A guy gets stranded on Mars, finds a way to grow crops on a different planet, and eventually survives. The story is thrilling and keeps you on the edge of your seat most of the time. For all you fellow bookworms, I am angry that they didn’t put some parts from the book into the movie like that Rover accident in the Schiaparelli crater. I hated that they didn’t add it, but the movie was actually good. On the other hand is the Fast & Furious franchise. The movie has absolutely no story, and introduces new, crucial characters without giving any hints whenever they damn well please.

Next, there’s the acting. Most movies do amazingly well in this category, but some, like The Last Airbender don’t. The way the lines are read in that movie, you’d think they were reading from a text-book. A movie that did this perfectly is … well … any of the “gems” I mentioned above.

Then we have the stakes. A movie should seem like the characters are in some sort of danger, or in some sort of trouble, otherwise it’s just boring. I really can’t think of any movie that did this part properly, but some movies bend the rules of this criteria a little. One movie that completely mauls over any rules of this criteria is Furious 7 or any Fast and Furious movie, really, but the 7th one has a scene where the car’s skeleton can be seen after a topple from a cliff, but the occupants of the car have ABSOLUTELY NO SIGNS OF INJURY! None! They just got out from the car and continued on their merry way like some kid who recovered from a minor fall in the park.

Some movies absolutely captivate me, and some movies make me want to stab the screen with a pencil. But, somehow, I enjoy 75% of the movies I go to watch. The key, I feel, is to think of every movie as if it’s going to be horrible, therefore, it’ll be double as magical if the movie is good, and the bad ones will make you go, “Oh. Well, that was better than I expected.”

Sometimes, I break this rule when I get too excited for a Star Wars movie or a Harry Potter/Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them movie, but usually, I come out of the theatre saying, “Well, that was pretty good, actually.”