Perhaps Movies Should Make Sense

plot coherence does matter

This post spoils the plots of The Dark Knight Rises, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, and Ocean’s Twelve.

Awhile back, there was a little mini-moment of various film commentators, especially on YouTube, declaring that plot sense doesn’t matter. Of course there was a lot of nuance and provisos and qualifications, but there really was a groundswell of this type of argument, which you can explore at your own leisure. Probably the best version of this argument was made by the video essayist Patrick Willems. The way this is summarized in the thumbnail really speaks to me: Vibes > Plot. (See also.)

As longtime readers know, I am a big fan of movies that conjure up beautiful images at all costs, and I care much more about evocative set pieces than I do about many conventional elements of filmmaking. Terrence Malick is my favorite director, and his entire gambit is making movies that exist as excuses to showcase beautiful imagery and moving compositions. I also think a pretty good generic review of modern movies goes “first half was great, second half was bad” - the setup is so often better than the payoff because the payoff has to be accomplished through plot machinations, whereas in the early going many movies can just depict and explore and vibe. (Logan is a good example of a movie where the first half is vastly better than the second; I Am Legend is another, with Will Smith ambling around a beautiful destroyed New York giving way to lots of stupid plot beats and awful CGI zombies.) I’m definitely receptive to a certain expression of this general argument.

And yet… I think that people have taken this thinking too far. My guess is that this whole wave was inspired by the rise of annoying plot hole nitpicking online, as exemplified by the widely-and-justly-hated YouTube channel CinemaSins. And certainly that stuff can be aggravating, trolling around in a movie’s plot, looking for every loose thread to pull. Ultimately I think it depends on the execution; I really enjoy Pitch Meeting, which explores all of the absurdities of movie storytelling in a way that’s fun and good natured. On a deeper level, though, I’m stuck on a basic fact: you can’t say that good plots are worthy of praise but suggest that bad ones aren’t worthy of criticism. If you look at Chinatown and marvel at its intricate and impeccable script, it seems to me that you’re making a judgment about what’s of value, in a movie, and assigning a lot of it to plot coherence. If you’re impressed by the satisfying way various plot elements slide into place in The Usual Suspects, that implies a basic belief in plot sense as something important. Yes, it’s definitely the case that the plots of even the best movies often can’t survive a great deal of artificial scrutiny, and choosing to be a pedant about narrative sense is tiresome and unhelpful. But movies have to work to establish a basic level of story credibility to earn our appreciation. Otherwise you might as well watch stock footage, right?

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For me, perhaps the ultimate “this makes so little sense that I simply cannot suspend disbelief sufficiently to enjoy it” movie is The Dark Knight Rises. Widely considered a disappointment when it was released, I find that TDKR has become somewhat more esteemed over time. Which is strange, because it’s very very bad!

Longstanding rumor has it that Christopher Nolan’s heart wasn’t in the movie; supposedly his original plan for the trilogy-ending film heavily involved Heath Ledger’s Joker, a plan which had to be scrapped following Ledger’s death. The movie has all of the portentous “darkness” of the preceding two but lacks the verve and excitement of those movies. Rises clearly attempts to introduce themes of wealth inequality and elite cluelessness but has nothing whatsoever to say about them. (Some people say it’s an anti-Occupy Wall Street tale where the good guy is a billionaire, but there just isn’t any actual thematic meat on that bone to analyze.) Tom Hardy is as game as ever, but his Bane is caught between being a brutal barbarian and weirdly foppish for no clear reason or effect. Hardy’s also a genuinely small man - the internet says he’s 5’9 but I’ve seen him in person and there’s no way he’s that tall - and the movie’s various tricks to make him seem like a large one are unconvincing and hard to understand, given that you could just cast a bigger actor. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s confused, confusing character seems to exist for no reason other than drop a one-word “easter egg” for the nerds. The rushed and pointless romance with Catwoman is rushed and pointless. Alfred’s advancing mortality and dreams of Bruce Wayne’s future are heavy-handed and out of character with the trilogy; we don’t know Talia Al Ghul well enough for the twist to pay off; the nature and purpose of the League of Shadows seems more garbled and arbitrary than it already was. The Clean Slate storyline feels like it’s meant to be something more but ultimately is only a motivating device for Catwoman. Christian Bale’s Batman voice, always a bad joke, is even worse here.

More than anything, the decision to do a half-assed Knightfall storyline - honestly, more like a quarter- or eighth-assed Knightfall storyline - just never made any sense. Why have Bane break Batman’s back at all, if that plot point is going to come and go in fifteen minutes? Why reference a very long and convoluted classic comic arc if you’re only going to do so in the most perfunctory manner?

the cop on the right appears to be fighting the Invisible Man

Also, the fight choreography is so bad! If you Google around a bit you can find various examples of guys throwing punches that clearly miss that still cause their opponents to snap back, sometimes right out in the center of the frame. Picking any random extra in one of one of the big crowd fights is good for a laugh. The climactic battle in the sewers between Batman and Bane is goofy and anticlimactic, and honestly I suspect it’s so underlit in order to hide the bad choreography. In the final fight between Batman and Bane, both actors seem to be swinging very gingerly; it looks like stage fighting, which should be a solved problem in Hollywood in the 21st century. The shooting scenes are also unconvincing, with a lot of random squibbing and characters reacting as if the actors were told to jerk around when they heard shots. It’s so strange, in a big-budget blockbuster that's part of one of Hollywood’s most lucrative franchises and a movie being helmed by a director who’s famous for his technical mastery.

But mostly, the problem is that the movie makes no sense. At all.

• How does hanging from a rope fix a broken spine? Shouldn’t we be appropriating this ancient technology for our own patients?

• The plane hijacking is ludicrous from start to finish. To remind you of the setup - Bane’s guys already have the nuclear scientist they need; no convoluted plane hijacking is necessary. Still, some guys who secretly work for Bane deliver the scientist to the CIA and try to also give them some terrorists. The CIA guy asks why he would want the terrorists, and he’s told that they’re Bane’s men. He accepts them WITHOUT LOOKING UNDER THEIR HOODS. They go up in the plane, Bane is revealed to be one of the hooded terrorists, an extremely elaborate sequence unfolds where another plane shows up, the original plane is dismantled in the air, and Bane absconds with the scientist. Who, I will remind you, they already had. So… why? Why go through with any of that costly, complicated, dangerous plan? The best we get is Bane saying that he needed to find out what the scientist has told the CIA. But he doesn’t find out anything! The scientist just denies that he told the CIA anything, which isn’t hard to believe considering that they only just dropped him off. And it’s completely unclear how the whole plane bit would help extract any information, exactly, compared to asking the scientist beforehand or just kidnapping the CIA guys, who are eminently kidnappable. And even then, why does Bane go through with the whole ruse of pretending to be a prisoner at all? What strategic advantage does that give him, to put a cloth bag over his face and pretend to be cuffed? Isn’t he exposing himself to a lot of pointless risk for no reason other than to deliver an empty lecture to a CIA guy that’s just gonna die anyway? He doesn’t even help the other guys hijack the plane. It’s done purely for “drama.” So stupid.

• The really egregious plane bit is this, though. The movie uses the plane sequence to show what an exacting planner Bane is and to show the fanatical loyalty of his troops; the whole set piece exists to make the audience feel like Bane is an estimable villain. But to achieve that, the character’s actions have to make sense. They deliberately crash the plane with the CIA guys and a fake version of the scientist. Before fleeing, Bane orders one of his League of Shadows goons to stay in the plane and die so that there will be the right number of bodies in the wreckage. So the authorities are going to make sure to count the number of bodies in the plane debris… but they’re not going to notice that you blew the wings off a hundred miles earlier with precision explosives? Bane’s team’s going to take a blood transfusion from the scientist in order to trick the CIA into thinking one of the corpses is him, but they feel confident that no one’s going to realize that the fuselage has been surgically split apart? Why sell us so hard on Bane being careful and shrewd when the whole plan is so absurdly sloppy? Well, obviously, because it looks cool in the trailer. But you have to establish a certain level of believability and credibility with your audience to earn this level of plot absurdity.

• How does Batman escape the thermonuclear blast after jumping from the Batwing? How fast can this guy swim? You can’t just sprinkle “He’s mysterious!” dust on everything all the time.

• Commissioner Gordon appears to have ordered just about every last Gotham police officer into the sewers, spontaneously and with no plan, and predictably it does not go well. Plot-convenient stupidity strikes again.

• I guess this isn’t a plot hole, really, but the fact that Alfred sees Bruce Wayne literally in the same restaurant in Florence that Alfred fantasized about is… something. Something stupid, I mean.

• This movie has a similar problem as The Dark Knight, which is nevertheless a consistently entertaining movie: too much simply gets chalked up to evil’s desire for chaos. Bane gives a long speech about exactly why he’s going to blow up Gotham with a nuke, I’ve seen that speech three or four times, and yet I couldn’t begin to tell you what he’s doing or what’s motivating him. He’s just, like, there to cleanse the world in some perfectly vague way.

• The biggest one is just so insulting. A core scene in the movie depicts a daring stock market heist by Bane and his men. They assault the building in broad daylight, not even attempting stealth, openly monkey with the computers, and are soon surrounded by cops and media. They get into a chase with Batman. (A chase in which day suddenly becomes night, after driving under an overpass.) Afterwards Bruce Wayne’s various financial accounts have been mysteriously emptied. On telling Bruce this, top advisor Lucius Fox says “We might be able to prove fraud.” … you might be able to prove fraud? You MIGHT be able to prove fraud??? Terrorists attack the stock market in broad daylight and are directly seen manipulating the computers by dozens of people inside, Gotham’s richest man is suddenly penniless, and you might be able to prove fraud???

Also everyone figures out Batman’s secret identity, like everyone. And Joseph Gordon-Levitt knows because Batman has the eyes of an orphan, which is so lame. The whole thing where it was actually Talia al-Ghul who escaped the prison hole and Bane was just her helper is dumb and pointless and makes no sense. Nothing about the whole prison hole thing makes sense! Why was Ras al-Ghul’s daughter in the hole? What kind of relationship did she have with him where she’s fanatically loyal to his memory but also he left her in a hole as a toddler?

The core point is this: a movie has to earn the suspension of disbelief. It has to petition the audience for the right to indulge in plot details that don’t make sense.

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Since this post is obviously a flimsy pretext to complain about movies that bother me….

The other night my wife and I watched the latest Planet of the Apes movie Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, released earlier this year. Aside from the title not making much sense, the whole thing feels rushed, and it suffers from a really killer problem that too many modern movies have: the film depends on us being emotionally invested in character relationships that we have no reason to be invested in, as the filmmakers have not taken the time to establish them and make them meaningful. In particular, the movie seems to believe that it’s at heart an adventure tale about our main chimp (who we don’t know well enough to care about), a wise orangutan, and a human woman. I would argue that the film was marketed as such. Unfortunately, we have maybe ten minutes of actual shared screentime between those three characters before the plot splits them up. The various story beats of sacrifice and betrayal between them simply don’t land because we have no reason to care about their connection, given how thin it is. Meanwhile there’s another trio, with the same chimp and his two chimp friends, that we’re also supposed to be invested in but which we similarly don’t have any reason to care about. A review I read referred to the girl chimp as the love interest of our protagonist chimp, but that dynamic was news to me; there’s just no time spent on relationships, so who knows? And it’s a two and a half hour movie, so it’s not a problem of running time. Plenty of movies have established relationships that we care about in very limited amounts of screentime.

Relevant to today’s discussion, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is also a cornucopia of total plot senselessness.

• The film features two major speaking human characters, one played by William H. Macy (who’s really cashing checks here) and another a woman named Mae. At the end of the film we’re also given a brief glimpse of many more talking humans. This is all happening “many generations” after the first three reboot movies, which dramatize how human beings were almost wiped out by a devastating virus that rendered the remaining survivors stupid and incapable of speech. We see a herd of these mute wild humans in the film, and later ape characters are shocked that Mae can talk. None of this is ever addressed; there’s nothing resembling an explanation of who these human are, why they’re different, how their language ability and intelligence survived so many generations after the virus…. None of that is necessarily a plot hole, though it is deeply annoying that we learn nothing about this very essential question. What is a plot hole, however, is the fact that the William H. Macy character can talk, and has never before met Mae, and yet is totally unsurprised by her ability to talk. This despite the fact that the apes he lives with are totally shocked by the existence of other talking humans. So humans who can talk are sufficiently common that William H. Macy doesn’t bat an eye at meeting one he’s never met before, nor does she evince any surprise at all herself, but also the basic lore of the franchise is that humans can’t talk after the virus and the apes think the idea of a talking human is crazy. Doesn’t make sense.

• The human woman character, Mae - who I find intensely annoying - is revealed to be undertaking a secret mission for her group of smart humans, who kind of remind me of the weird scientists trying to keep civilization going in Night of the Comet. She has to procure some sort of data card from a battleship, which (for whatever reason) allows the humans to activate a communications relay in a decaying old base. She moves about the ship effortlessly and finds this one small obscure piece of equipment quickly, in a vast and darkened space. How did she know the interior of the ship so well? Human civilization fell “many generations” ago so it’s not like she ever worked on such a ship. She instantly knows what the card she’s looking for looks like; has she seen one before? Where? If they had one to show her why didn’t they use that one? Did they have a picture? What are the odds that a picture of an obscure communications card from a centuries-old human warship happened to survive in a post-apocalyptic landscape? Why is she so confident maneuvering around an ancient battleship, when the base of her human tribe is an old cosmology research station? And how does she know what a gun is, let along how to fire one?

• How come the battleship and the communications relay can power up immediately after centuries of lying in ruins? Everything’s rusted, the satellite dishes are all smash up and missing pieces, but everything works. And who and what is powering these massive contraptions? Who’s powering the monkey society that’s very deliberately portrayed as using electricity extensively? The apes have a natural gas power plant going somewhere, somehow? (That the bad guy apes have access to electricity is lingered over very deliberately, and yet it’s never explained, which makes me suspect that a scene depicting their power generating capacity was cut out; the movie has that feeling of something that’s been chopped up a thousand ways in the edit, in general.)

• I concede that this is very petty, but a key early plot point is that protagonist Noa has to get his own eagle egg from a nest, so that he can raise the eagle chick up and train it to be his hunting companion. The implication is that the eggs are mature and soon to hatch. Unfortunately, in a brief tussle his egg gets smashed and reveals… an egg white and yellow yolk, just exactly as you’d expect from getting sunny-side up with your Denny’s Grand Slam platter in the morning. But that’s what an unfertilized egg looks like, an unfertilized chicken egg, and unfertilized eggs (by definition) can’t develop and hatch. Fertilized eggs have fetal birds inside of them. If the eagle egg is sufficiently developed that it will soon hatch, when Noa steals it, then there should be a gross little eagle chick in there.

I’m fairly lukewarm on all things Planet of the Apes, but my wife really loves the reboot ones. I don’t particularly feel that the Caesar character had much further to go, and I don’t think that the lack of Andy Serkis hurts this movie, really. But it’s certainly the case that they had a big hurdle to clear when it came to establishing a new protagonist, and unfortunately our hero Noa is badly underwritten as a character, with no defining features other than his loyalty to his clan. And it’s in that context that all of these plot problems become so aggravating: I would judge them much less harshly in a better movie.

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I could go on, but I’ll spare you.¹ The point here is pretty simple: it is absolutely true that there are many other important virtues in a movie than plot, and many of my favorite films are heavy on imagery, style, dialogue, and characterization while being plot-light in conventional terms. But, for one thing, emphasizing those other values isn’t something that I’m obligated to do as a member of the audience; I feel that way when those plot-indifferent virtues are so obvious and moving that they make me let go of plot as a principle concern. For another, you can’t make plot the core of your movie’s identity and also pile on the plot holes carelessly. The three movies I’ve discussed here are all plot-dependent movies; they’re just not doing what Tree of Life is doing, or what Mindwalk is doing, or what The Limits of Control is doing, or what Cool as Ice is doing. All of them are conventional narrative entertainments that fundamentally function by way of story, and I’m afraid their stories don’t make sense.

Ultimately, I think there’s something to be said for the idea that plot is overrated, especially given that I’ve made that argument before. But I think that perspective is far too often misapplied, used to defend failures rather than choices, treated as a kind of hand-waving eraser of senselessness rather than an appreciation of genuine artistic intention. Frankly I think the reasons this argument flourished had a lot more to do with the particular attention-getting dynamics of the YouTube Video Essayist Industrial Complex than anything else. You can certainly make a movie that’s built on something other than a tight and coherent plot. But when you build a movie on story and your story doesn’t make sense, people are going to call you out on it, and they should.

1. OK, one more: Ocean’s Twelve. The story is that our lovable crew of thieves have to steal a McGuffin before this French thief does. There’s hijinks, they can’t get the thing, he’s gonna beat them to it, all hope is lost, until! it’s revealed that they had actually stolen it way earlier in the movie but the audience didn’t know. Aside from the fact that this manner of keeping the audience in the dark almost always seems cheap, it renders the last part of the movie totally nonsensical. They’re going through all these machinations, taking on all of these risks, and plotting together constantly all while they already have what they’re ostensibly trying to get. People try to explain this by saying that they were just acting in order to make the villains think they didn’t have the McGuffin. But then why are they talking as if they don’t? Why are they having intense and emotional conversations based on the premise that they don’t have the thingy when they all know they do have the thingy? That’s acting too, conversations within the group that no one else can hear? Just senselessness in the pursuit of a twist.