The implausibility effect also has  to do with tone.  If you’re watching an action flick, the tone sets the level of realism that the audience expects.  If a action sequence from a Jackie Chan movie broke out in the middle of The Departed, something would be wrong.  Rambo is not Reservoir Dogs.

Then you have Shoot Em Up.   Of which Roger Ebert said, “I may disapprove of a movie for going too far, and yet have a sneaky regard for a movie that goes much, much farther than merely too far.”

Not one scene in the film is remotely plausible even by the standard of your average 1980’s Schwarzenegger movie.  But it is brutally honest with its audience, making sure that before the credits roll, everyone has a clear picture of the movie’s warped universe.  The first person (of literally dozens) to be killed by Clive Owen’s character is dispatched by the use of a carrot.  A carrot.  As in our protagonist brings an orange root vegetable to a gunfight, and wins.  By shoving the carrot through the guys head.  Through the guy’s head. A carrot.

The scene does many things, like making every subsequent gun battle more plausible by comparison, but it primarily tells us  all that the rules in this story are not the rules of the real world, and if anyone is worrying about that sort of thing after the head-piercing carrot, it isn’t the story’s fault.

The idea of corporate governance seems at odds with our current reality, where the state is advancing its role across the board.  But, strangely enough, in the face of the most aggressive growth of state power in history, the idea is popping up in diverse places.

What if we’re watching the initial death-rattle of the nation-state?

And it would be interesting to see a take on the idea that isn’t dystopic.

It might be as wildly implausible as the prior film, but it isn’t nonsensical.  In fact, it does a nice feat of legerdemain by giving us the typical age-old conspiracy by the Illuminati, spending most of the movie investing in having us buy the absurd premise, and then having a shocking reveal at the end which is 100% Hollywood and yet actually makes the entire previous movie more believable.   “More believable” being a relative term— We’re in pre-reboot Bond film territory here.

Then from Weird Universe, we have a notable flick of similar vintage, Psych Out, a neglected part of Jack Nicholson’s oeuvre.

Also from Weird Universe, we have the indescribable indefensible incoherent NSFW trailer for the Tattoo Connection.

Utopia, UR doin it rong: A dystopia often is someone else’s utopia looked at from another angle. In some sense Brave New World is like this. And my planet Bakunin in the Hostile Takeover and Apotheosis Trilogies is definitely a reaction to one too many happy sunny Libertarian Utopias.

I Made U an ekosystem, but I eated it: Another large subset of dystopian fiction is post-apocalyptic.  The world just falls apart, and society falls apart with it.  It can range from the various children of Mad Max, to Children of Men to even George Romero’s Dead films.  The trigger used to be nuclear war, now it’s more likely environmental.

YR Politikz, DO NOT WANT!: Don’t like a political idea, just place it in control of the world and let it run everything to its logical conclusion.  This gets you everything from Little Brother to The Handmaid’s Tale.  There’s been SF about the world run (badly) by conservatives, liberals, fascists, doctors and ad-men.

U Can’t Has Freedoms, Not Yours:Akin to the above but a bit more intense.  The idea is less about a political idea or trend per se, but the loss of free will.  There is an existental dread of being trapped in an amoral, mechanical system that denies your humanity.  Think of 1984, Brazil or THX1138.

Oops, iz sorry: Lastly, we can slide into the end of the world as we know it through sheer obliviousness.  We just do what we’re doing, do more of it, and one day we’re in Fahrenheit 451, or Neuromancer.

Babalyon AD is another one of these movies. The following rant will be spoileriffic, so stop reading now if you care about things like that.

It starts out promising, showing a war-torn central Asia that plausible enough to be scary. For a while it seems that we’re going to see an action-movie take on the kind of gritty realist dystopia we saw in Children of Men. Unfortunately, the comparisons with that better movie don’t end there, as much as it turns out we wish it did.

The set-up is standard SF dystopia plot #235. Jaded loner is reluctantly hired to move special person through nastiness. Nothing wrong with a stock plot, it’s worked in a lot of films from Serenity to Gauntlet. However, for Babalyon AD, the problems come when we find out why this person is special, and who hired our hero, and who’s been trying to screw with the delivery.

Now a genetically engineered virgin birth sponsored by a synthetic church is a cool idea, especially when there’re signs it might be a real miracle. But can someone tell me why, if the people ordering the miracle baby believe it is actually a hoax, why would they go to all the trouble? I could see pulling out the stops if they believed they were building a messiah. I could see, likewise, if she was a beta version, that the church might want to pull her back in to avoid some questions. I do not see expending the resources to manufacture a fake messiah— we have those all the time, without wasting the mad science skilz.

Speaking of waste, our neo-virgin Mary sparks the ultimate gunfight in NYC by coming out and saying, “If you hand me over to the church, they’ll kill me.” Say what?!? Did the writers read the script? These are the same people who hired our morally ambiguous hero to smuggle this woman into the US. Worse, these are the same people who fired a missile into the convent she came from. If they wanted her dead, why remove her from the convent before they blew it up? Or why didn’t they hire our smuggler to pop a cap in her? And why are they spending all this ad time announcing her arrival? Sense. . . Not. . . Making. . . Head. . . Hurt. . .

Here’s another nonsensical plot point. Our hero has to smuggle our Miracle Mama through blatantly life-threatening passages to get to North America, alone. However, as hermetically sealed as the border is, some of the same characters show up on both sides of this airtight border, and certainly both factions have ample personnel on both continents. This implies they have better ways to transport goods and services than to hire our loose-cannon hero— especially since he was the only one of the trio running this gauntlet that needed a forged passport.

What the hell is with the whole “if you’re carrying a virus I have to kill you?” Where were they going with that? If it’s a red herring, it stinks like one. Oh, and thanks for solidifying the whole plastic surgery is eeeeevil trope. And how is it the Ebil Church Lady can only track down Miracle Mama’s father once the plot requires it? Subtlety wasn’t his strong suit. (Let’s make the grab in a public bar, unarmed, in the midst of a few hundred drunken Russians. What could go wrong?) And, you’re going to hide your daughter from the Ebil Church Lady, so you sequester her in a convent run by her church. Huh. What?

I get the feeling the movie would have been loads better if they just didn’t try to “explain” anything.

The problem is, I think, a failure of nerve on the part of the screenwriters. The first half of the film is great on just about every level. We have a story that is centered on the concept of a superhero, we have a deeply flawed character that has the physical omnipotence of Superman, and has a problem that cannot be solved by his Godlike powers. It is a perfect set-up for a good drama, and the titular character’s attempt to redeem himself, both in his own eyes, and in the eyes of the public, is a powerful engine driving the movie forward. The tension in every scene is held, not by any external threat, but by the potential that Hancock could snap and do something to destroy any chance of him succeeding in becoming a worthwhile hero.

And, for some reason, the screenwriters didn’t think this was enough to carry a whole film. So we have two films. The first is the character drama I describe above. The second feels like a sequel to that much better film. Where the first move goes places that most superhero movies don’t get near, and actually avoids most, if not all of the clichés, the second film is pretty much the textbook boilerplate of the cheezy superhero movie. Have your hero deal with a problem originating (so to speak) with a character related to their origin, make sure they have an explicit weakness, make sure the villains show up to exploit that weakness, and somehow have the hero overcome despite being terribly weakened in power. . .

The problem with Hancock is none of the second half is foreshadowed in the first. Much of the important plot points (like his origin) are blown over way too quickly giving a serious WTF vibe to the transition. In addition, because the way the second half is compressed, there are major plot holes. (How’d the villains just happen to show up when he was vulnerable? If this certain someone knew the consequences of being in the vicinity of Hancock, why would this person remain in LA after Hancock started appearing on the news? What did Hancock do between Miami and LA?)

All those elements, and all those problems, would never have come up if they’d just stuck with the first movie. In that movie you don’t really need an origin, and ignoring it would be better than the half-assed explanation we get in the second half of the movie. You don’t need a designated villain or the arbitrary weakness in the first film because Hancock is his own worst enemy, and the story is about him winning over himself.

Anyway, if you go see it, see it for the first half. And if you need a bathroom break, wait until they toss the refrigerator. If you go after that, you won’t be missing much.

Now, I’m not going to claim that Sex and the City is some high water mark of American filmmaking. It is unabashedly what it is, a piece of escapist fantasy— the relationship equivalent of an action movie with sex replacing the cars blowing up and shopping montages instead of chase scenes. It hit exactly the mark it was aiming for, and I can’t imagine that anyone who really enjoyed the series wouldn’t enjoy the movie. I can certainly think of other TV shows that transitioned less gracefully to the big screen.

But I am seeing a lot of hate for the film, and a good portion of it seems to be because it isn’t more than what it is:

From Rick Groen:

This is a pricey handbag of a movie, uncontaminated by anything so crass as substance, filled only with the perfumed air of a culture at rest – concept blissfully free of content.

And you were expecting what, exactly?

First of all, while we get the inevitable superhero origin, Iron Man handles it as an integral part of the story. The origin and development of the suit is an integral part of the movie’s plot, the inciting incident of Iron Man’s creation is also the inciting incident of the story that is resolved with the climax. (Superman was slightly different in this respect, as it was structured like a biopic rather than an action movie.) The superhero genre has many examples of origins clumsily shoehorned into some other story, Daredevil being the most egregious example I can think of.

Second, while Tony Stark could have been played as a self-righteous emo supertwit, we get Robert Downey Jr. playing a nuanced and very credible performance. He is a reckless, self-involved playboy who has a near literal change of heart after a period of (PG-13) torture and imprisonment, but his change in attitude is believable. We clearly see that this guy is the same reckless, self-involved genius he was before. Just he’s now going to fix the problem.

Third, the politics. Dicey thing, especially in an action/superhero move, to tackle things like weapons proliferation (Case in point, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace). When the main character starts blowing things up, he can lose some credibility on those points. Iron Man actually is smart enough to take a pragmatic view. Tony Stark is not against weapons, just weapons in the wrong people’s hands. He is quite content to deploy flame throwers, missiles and any other ordinance at the bad guys. Agree or disagree, it is perfectly consistent with his character. Especially when he takes the idea of non-proliferation to the logical extreme, he’s the only one who gets the suit.

Combine that with the fact the writers could pull off wry humor without losing respect for the characters, they treated the material seriously but not so much to give off any weird übergeek vibes, and while they stepped in the occasional cliché, they didn’t track it all over the carpet.

All in all, this movie is made of win.

A lot of the other contributors to the film at least have the excuse of having been lied to by the producers, producers who then banned some (but not all) of those same people from a pre-screening of the film. (Come on, you filmed the guy and didn’t expect him to try and see the movie? WTF you smoking?)

Worse for ID proponents, the film commits a classic blunder and wastes little time in invoking Godwin’s Law. . .

From Fox News:

The whole idea of Stein, a Jew, jumping on the intelligent design bandwagon of the theory of evolution begetting the Nazis is so distasteful you wonder what in — sorry — God’s name — he was thinking when he got into this.

From Richard Dawkins’ review:

The alleged association between Darwinism and Nazism is harped on for what seems like hours, and it is quite simply an outrage [...] Stein has no talent for comedy [but] his attempt to do tragedy is even worse. He visits Dachau and, when informed by the guide that lots of Jews had been killed there, he buries his face in his hands as though this is the first time he has heard of it. Obviously it was not his intention, but I thought his rotten acting was an insult to the memory of the victims.

It is truly hard to believe that people making such pathetic arguments actually believe in their subject matter. In fact, given the rampant lying and deliberate re-editing of interviewees, I can’t help but think Mark Mathis is in the midst of some elaborate scheme to siphon money from gullible creationists or engineer an elaborate tax dodge. Or, perhaps this case of epic fail is itself a pro-Darwinist conspiracy designed to make Intelligent Design proponents look like raving loons.

ADDENDUM: A link to show there are people who actually get the point.

1) Any time you set out to illustrate a theme, it should be both simple and readily illustrated by the majority, if not all the scenes in the work. No Country does this in spades. The theme is pretty much, “The world is random, violent place, and men cannot control it.” Every scene in the film feeds back to this idea, from Tommy Lee Jones’ monologues, to the penultimate scene where the ruthless assassin who’s driven most (but nowhere near all) of the violence is the victim of a completely random, and very nasty, accident.

2) Follow the action. Find a way to show the interesting things that happen in the story even if the nominal “protagonist” is not present for them. In No Country, by most academic definitions, Tommy Lee Jones is probably the main character, since he is the one who has a character arc. However, like The Great Gatsby, our protagonist has an internal low key struggle while most of the “action” happens without him.

3) Clichés can be great tools for misdirection. While it is generally good practice to, as they say, avoid clichés like the plague, they can be a tool like any other narrative element. If you introduce half a clichéd situation, there’s a built-in expectation that, as they say, the other shoe will drop. If you instead drop a brick, you surprise the audience. The whole plotline of No Country can be thought of as being built on this premise. The whole film is constructed of cliché genre set-ups that resolve in ways other than expected. From the large, having the climatic gunfight happen off-screen with the “wrong” guy losing, to the small, the whole business with the coin flip. I bet the second flip didn’t end how dozens of action films led you to expect.

When people talk of fiction, there’s often much made of the distinction between plot and character, or “plot vs. character,” as if the two were somehow in opposition. The fact is, a story needs both to survive. If either is missing it becomes hard for a reader to care. Without character there’s no reason to care about what’s happening. Without plot there’s nothing happening to care about.

Now the connection between the two is not always very strong. There are literary character studies where the protagonist is caught up in events beyond their control and the object is to watch how this person’s character changes, and there are genre stories where interesting sympathetic characters are caught up in some grand adventure that doesn’t do much other than threaten their safety and give them something to do.

But, in the best stories, the plot is a direct result of character and vice-versa. It is a feedback loop that, in a tale like 28 Weeks, sets up a resonant vibration that shakes the whole universe of the story apart. (Before you go on, warning: Here Be Spoilers.)

In 28 Weeks we start with the typical post apocalyptic holdouts, a bunch of people including a man and wife whose children are safely on a school trip out of the country. The movie begins much as Night of the Living Dead ends, with the zombies storming the house, and one lone man (the husband) escaping. This is the point where we enter new territory. Not only do we jump to the post-apocalypse reconstruction effort, we get to see Dad— wracked with survivor’s guilt that’s painful to watch— reunited with his kids. When he breaks down explaining what happened to Mom, we care about this guy and his kids more than any ten characters in a dozen other action/horror films.

This is also key to the series of events that pushes the rest of the movie into motion. The kids slip out of the safe zone, not because they’re kids and kids do stupid shit, but because the son’s grief-stricken and his big sister wants to go back to their house and get some pictures for him. When Mom’s at the house, apparently uninfected, the first thought isn’t “What? How’d she survive?” it’s more “Mom’s alive!”

Of course when the army brings Mom and the kids back and put them in isolation, Dad’s reaction is even more intense. Up to now he believed he had left her to die. Of course he’s going to go see her. . .

The most powerful moment of the whole film is when he’s facing his wife, apologizing for leaving her in the farmhouse to die, and she forgives him! You’ve agonized with this guy since the opening of the movie, and you can see the weight lift off his shoulders. He walks to her side, and even though you’re screaming at him not to, he kisses her.

And unlike so many “too stupid to live” characters in dozens of other movies, you’re not screaming at him because it’s an idiotic thing to do. You’re screaming at him because you know, given what he knows (the plague has burned itself out, the military said so), and what he’s been through (this his his wife) there was precious little else you’d expect him to do. Even though we see it coming, because we see it coming, we’re as horrified as his wife when we see the infection grip him, and when he kills her it’s as close to classic tragedy as I’ve seen a genre film get.

28 Weeks is made of this stuff. Human beings bring about the end of the world, not through malice or stupidity, but because they’re human.