The Expanding Trend

When I first saw the movie of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, I was really mad. They rushed the shit out of that movie, and the plot really suffered. It was much darker than the movies before it, and the way they made a lot of scenes go by so quickly gave me the feeling that it was more of a series of impressions than a movie adaptation of one of my favorite young adult novels.

David Yates returned to direct Half-Blood Prince, and this downward spiral seemed like it would ruin the better books of the series completely. But then they made a decision I will always be thankful for: the seventh movie was split into two parts. I was still skeptical, since I hate what Yates did to the series, but once I saw Deathly Hallows: Part One, I was amazed by how good it was. Granted, there were some weird additions and subtractions like always, but this was the closest Yates had ever been to getting it right. That film is probably the best of the Harry Potter movies (it's either Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire, or Deathly Hallows: Part One). Of course, the Part Two really pissed me off, since they took far too many liberties, but in the end I thought that this technique of dividing it into two movies made perfect sense.

But this seems to have started a trend in YA book-to-movie adaptations, Twilight being the next example of this. I read the Twilight series in my senior year of high school, not because I thought it would be a good read, but just so I wouldn't be bashing something that I'd never really given the time of day. It sucked in the end, but I don't regret doing it. After all, it made me realize that this trend of splitting movies isn't always a good thing.

Breaking Dawn is the book/movie in question. Now, this book hardly has any real action taking place in it, and was more of a place for Meyer to tie up all the loose ends that didn't necessarily need to be tied up. While Bella does finally become a vampire, the rest of the book is horribly dull and anticlimactic. Even though it was the biggest of the books, the least amount of things happened in it. And yet, when it came to making the movie, they decided it should be split into two. I was confused when I heard this, since I thought that there was no way you could really make two films out of that book, unless you took extra time for the characters to talk about their feelings, or made up some battles that never took place (I haven't seen the movies, but I'm betting the latter of these two happened).

But I don't really care about that franchise that much. If anything, I was mostly annoyed that the whole thing wasn't ending soon enough. I first started to be truly mad about this trend in film-making when I found out that Mockingjay would be in two parts. I read The Hunger Games trilogy, and Mockingjay was, without doubt, the worst. The first two were actually good, but the fast pace didn't work well with the plot of the third book, and everything ended up being crazy, confused, and too short. I saw The Hunger Games when it came out, and I thought it was a great adaptation, staying mostly true to the book. I have somewhat high hopes for Catching Fire, but I don't know how to feel about Mockingjay. On one hand, it is a bit of a compact book, so spreading it out might help. But on the other hand, we might just end up with two really bad movies.

Gotta love Memebase

And to top it all off, the end of 2012 faced us with the knowledge that Tolkien's prequel, The Hobbit, was to be split into three movies. This one's got to be the most ridiculous of them all. The rest of the Lord of the Rings series (or, at least, the main trilogy) was really long reading, and made for some extremely long movies. Return of the King was, like, 3 hours. Now, none of these movies were split, even though with hindsight we can see that there was more than enough content for that to happen. It's especially crazy when you take into account the fact that The Hobbit is shorter than any of the other novels.

I saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and to be honest I can slightly grasp why splitting it would make some sense--most fantasy stories could be split, after all. But I didn't really like the movie itself. It was too slow, and Bilbo, in my opinion, did not bring it all together, unlike what I've heard so many people say. If anything, it just reinforces the logic of those critics who say that Gandalf could just solve all these problems himself: bring the dwarves together, fly the eagles to Smaug, and fight. Though I'm sure there's some cockamamie reason he can't do that.

Why do they split movies? Who makes this decision? As the above meme points out, the reason behind it is most likely the money they can get out of it. Money's the whole reason anybody produces anything these days, sadly enough. But the other reason for this trend seems to be that filmmakers are trying to solve the problem of long movies. A problem which really has more to do with the average American's attention span than anything else. As a society, we tend to see long movies as bad movies. Or at least we put that down as a con when we evaluate a movie. People make a big deal about any movie that goes over 120 minutes, and especially if it goes near 180. We simply don't want to invest that much time.

But really, is that a good objective measure for a piece of art? Of course not. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I saw The Dark Knight Rises, and some people complained that it was so long (165 minutes). I complained that it needed to be longer, to flesh things out more and set scenes correctly. See, it's not about how long the movie is--it's about what they do with that time. I would've liked if The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey had been shorter, and perhaps if they split the book into only two movies. There was a lot of stuff in the movie that didn't need to be there, or could've been done better. Perhaps it didn't really need to be shorter--all it needed was for the content to be changed.

When we focus so much on the running time of a movie, we forget about the actual storytelling aspect of it. Focus on that, and let it be as long as it may.