We've all pretty much seen James Cameron's Avatar. It was the highest grossing film of all time, beating out James Cameron's last movie "Titanic". It was a Sci-Fi juggernaut. It reached beyond the normal crowd and attracted millions of people who wouldn't have dared pick up something like "Merlin and the War of the Dragons".
But with all this I still hated it. The complete exodus of the supporting cast, the complete failure of Jake to even think about his role as ambassador, and those floating rocks! How much do I HATE those floating rocks! Of course though, others are entitled to their opinions, and many disagreed with my conclusion. The sacrifice of the supporting cast was to build tension in the third act! Jake fall is love with Neytiri and was distracted from the ambassador role! Oh haven't you ever heard of suspension of disbelief? Those rocks were part of an alien planet!
With the first two arguments, I could see it, although I still thought that it was bad writing. But the rocks, well, this was the usual conversion.
"But wait a minute! Those rooks couldn't have been covered by suspension of disbelief!" "Why not?"
"Well it is.... is..."
I didn't really know. But if you know me, you know I think. I think a lot! So this brings us to today's real topic. What is suspension of disbelief? Whats covered? What isn't? How do we tell the difference?
The basic concept is simple enough. You allow yourself to believe something, even if it isn't possible, for the sake of the story. You had to let yourself believe that Superman was an alien with superpowers, or you wouldn't enjoy the story. You had to think that there was another galaxy with humans in it or Star Wars just seem ludicrous!
So that's one requirement to be believable.
1: It needs to be an essential part of the story and it must be a necessary lie to make the
world believable
This is a concept across all Sci-Fi. Aliens, laser rifles, diseases; these are all concepts that are integral to the story. But sometimes that's not enough. There are some movies that are set in the modern day. Take Transformers (cartoon or movie, your choice), for instance. When first rule is applied, you say "to believe this story, you need to believe that there are a race of sentient transforming robots that disguise themselves as cars, and they have landed on earth". But what about the two factions? While there is the existence of the Dinobots and other sub-sections, you can pretty much label near every transformer into two categories. Hes either an Autobot or a Decepticon. But that seems a little convenient don't you? That there was two factions out of the gate. Why? Well, there was a war on their home planet and on earth the re-coalesced into those two waring factions.
This gives us our second rule
2: Parts of the story that aren't covered by rule one need to be explained, in either science or origin, whatever applies.
Now that that's established, lets go back to transformers (for now just the Micheal Bay Movie). In this movie, we are introduced to an item of great power. A relic of Transformer society;
THE ALLSPARK!
Now in our movie here, we are introduced to the allspark as a relic, but its powers aren't explained throughly. Now thats fine, its essential to the story as a reason for conflict. But in one scene we see it do something completely different from what we thought. Our hero Sam Witwicky raises the sacred cube to the evil Megatron's chest. This causes Megatron to die and the allspark to destroy itself? Well that was random! We never established that. Plus, in the next movie it now can bring Transformers back to life? What?
Well that brings us to our final rule.
3: You must be consistent with the properties of a universe OR follow rule 2 and explain why THIS is different.
So now we have three neat clean rules!
1: It needs to be an essential part of the story and it must be a necessary lie to make the
world believable
2: Parts of the story that aren't covered by rule one need to be explained, in either science or origin, whatever applies.
3: You must be consistent with the properties of a universe OR follow rule 2 and explain why THIS is different.
Now lets go back to our lovely rocks! If we look at our rocks and apply the rules we find this. The rocks are essential to the story but aren't essential to the believability of the universe. Strike one. It is also never explained how these mountains float or where they came from. Strike two! Rule three is shown as false as the rocks aren't effected by gravity like all other thing on Pandora. Strike three! Your OUTTA HERE!
So now that I've gotten that out of my system, I hope you enjoyed this little article and I hope you come back for next weeks article.
