Wasted Potential at 19 Minutes

 Don't waste your time always searching for those wasted ideas

The four legged flame that burnt out too soon

So the last two months have been pretty eventful. I somehow managed to come with down COVID the same week my girlfriend had to go in for nasal surgery in November, and I spent all of December in a strange fugue state which culminated in me sitting on the kitchen floor holding my cat as the new year rolled in. I'm fine now (as is the girlfriend and the cat for the concerned amongst you), but those two months had me thinking a lot about wasted potential. And that brought me to my go to example of a movie wasting the greatest opportunity it had in a less than 10 second scene. And now I'm going to get angry about it.

I know I'm late to the “Lets all bash the everliving shit out of Bright” party by a good few years, but dammit I'm here now and I brought the margarita mix. If you haven't seen Bright, good job keep it up. But as a refresher, Will Smith gets into gun fights with Orcs that are absolutely coded to be horrendous stereotypes of African-Americans. I mean for crying out loud there's Orcs in durags in every other scene. They don't even have hair! But anyway, at the 19:20 mark (or thereabouts) you see the one thing that the film makers did that makes actual use of a contemporary setting with fantasy elements. A centaur in full riot gear appears for maybe ten seconds and is then never seen again. Everything about his design is clever and well thought out. His armour flows perfectly from human body armour on his man-torso to actual horse riot gear on his... horse-torso I guess?

I have said, often manically and unprompted, that Centaur-Cop is the greatest character we know nothing about. In a world were every single background character in every single Star Wars movie has a full name and backstory, the fact I can only refer to this glorious character as Centaur-Cop is violation of my Human-Rights. And he's a perfect encapsulation of movies with cool concepts and settings absolutely wasting them.

I spoke briefly about Tenet not so long ago when I railed against smart arse directors being too clever for their own good, but Tenet is also a great example of wasted potential. A secret society of spies fighting to prevent the end of the world in the future by changing their present is a really cool idea, and the whole inversion thing could have been really cool too if they'd change the rules a little bit. But instead Nolan, probably smashed on Aperol Spritz's (because he definitely seems like the type) decided he wanted to make John David Washington be called The Protagonist and have him beat up scary people running backwards.

You want to know how Tenet could have been fixed? I'll tell you. Have the inversion only work on inanimate objects. Make it so the inversion machine acts like a portal, and have things that come through it from the future “work” backwards (like those rope harnesses they use in the Mumbai scene) and have Sator gather the algorithm so he can finish it for someone in the future to use to do all the world ending shit at a later date. No backwards gun fights sure, but those were dumb to begin with. Then just give Pattinson and Washington more time to wear cool suits and remove the “we are an expression of faith in the mechanics of the universe” line and bing-bang-boom, better movie.

The hardest part of writing a story is never the actual making of the world, as a matter of fact that's the part that's the most fun. The hardest part is how to make the best use of that world through the use of characters. Whilst I don't enjoy them at all, having Frodo be the audience surrogate is probably the only good move in The Lord of the Rings. You have a tiny man who never left his home town suddenly in a world that is literally and figuratively bigger than him. He sees everything for the first time just as the audience does and gets stuff explained to him when he needs it, but not constantly. It's not like Peter Jackson is sat next you with a heavily annotated copy of The Silmarillion and spouting off trivia about Gandalf technically being an angelic demi-god (which frankly sounds like my new personal hell), but you grasp how big the world is and get to see some of the best bits of it. They don't dangle stuff in front of you and then dash it across the cutting room floor like they did with Centaur-Cop, yes I'm still on that bit.

The take home point is, simply, if you have something bouncing around your fictional universe that has such a strong visual or conceptual basis, but you instead focus on solely on the stuff that's similar to the real world, you are wasting all that effort it took to come up with those strong points. And if you spend all your time with a blank slate character running through a visually dense world of thoughts and ideas, the audience isn't going to remember or care about any of it. And striking that balance is probably the hardest part of story telling, and better writers than me have struggled to find it. But I do know this for sure. If you build a world and choose to forego it just to give your big name actor more screen time in the hopes of that tricking more people to watching it, then congratulations! You've just made Bright! Or maybe even Ad Astra, that movie had bandits hiding out on the moon with freakin' laser pistols and barely even acknowledged them. “Bandits of the Moon” sounds like some golden age Sci-Fi and instead it's the trailer scene for the space movie that basically no one remembers three years later except the guy who's still bitter over Centaur-Cop not being the main character in a five year old Netflix flop. #bringbackcentaurcop