Flaws you can't unsee in great stories and how to fix them.

[filthytrancendence]

Or we are as lazy as our audience allows …

I dunno. I think as writers it's easy to overlook how much more of a zero-sum game screenwriting is. It's probably a bit of a stretch to assume Cameron and Wisher didn't see the flaw in question. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. Maybe the shooting script even fixed this flaw, and the fix hit the cutting room floor. In any case, the 'fix' would have added runtime to the final cut, and that's not usually a real option with a film that big. So the fix would necessarily have to have seen something else cut. Is the fix worth cutting something else?

Maybe it was just lazy and nobody even thought about it. Maybe they did all the calculations I just explained in their heads and decided it wasn't worth trying. Because the other thing to remember is that 'trying' in this case costs an obscene amount of money that may very well just end up on the cutting room floor.

Filmmaking is a lot more complicated than what we do, is my point. And you can say what you like about James Cameron, but it would be silly to argue the man doesn't know his craft better than most. He was never trying to be Kurosawa.

 

[iwatchus]

It may well be that stupid antagonists play well with the audience as a whole. (See Avatar)

Or it’s close enough as to not matter to him. Or it just makes the screen writing task easier.

I don’t pretend to understand his mind

 

[FrancesScott]

He was never trying to be Kurosawa.

Yeah, what I wrote came out as more dismissive of his talent than I intended. I like many of his movies. He’s good at what he does. I meant what you said, he wasn’t trying to create something akin to a Kurosawa movie, and we shouldn’t expect one.