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I mentioned in a previous post that professional movie reviewers tend to review based on their expectations on what a movie should have rather than its artistic intent. With animated movies, I still contend that due to their different form, there should be more leeway about reviewing them, especially for the potential lack of plot (the movie Fantasia comes to mind).

I recently came across a re-edit for Star Wars made by “the Movie Preview Critic” called “Star Wars The Moviepocalypse Edit”. While it’s considerably shorter than the original, you may want to watch the introduction and the conclusion (at the 1 hour 32 minutes mark). Essentially, it’s Star Wars in the “current” style of movies, meaning with character development and motivation completely missing. One of the point of “the critic” is that good storytelling tends to follow Aristotle’s Poetics, in order of importance: plot, character, thought, diction, melody and spectacle. The thesis of “the critic” is that movies nowadays tend to use a reverse order of importance (spectacle first), killing the quality of story telling.

I tend to agree. Even in cases when the plot is thin because there is a greater emphasis on the other elements (the opera “The Magic Flute” comes to mind), the plot and the characters are still critical to create an emotional bound with the audience. For example, with Redline, we still had to learn why the characters so much want to win. Even in Tron Legacy, with its thin plot, still exposes to a great length the characters and motivations (thought). Their plots are simple, but not all movies need a deep, complicated intellectual plot or one with endless twists and turns to be engaging, as long as characters and motivations are well established.

So, Roger Ebert wrote a scathing review for “The Raid: Redemption”, and had to defend it. Somehow, I agree with him. Why? For three reasons.

First, movies can be forgiven for lapses in plot if they make it up in being art. Not just a spectacle, but something about human nature. Not all movies need to be life-altering, but often times in the stylistic approach and in the way the characters live in those fictitious worlds, it can tell something about what we are or what we should be. It could be as simple as the “coolness” of how JP in Redline doesn’t take racing too seriously, the melancholic computer landscapes of “TRON: Legacy” or the unreal-ness of “A Scanner Darkly”, they all have an artistic point to make, even if clumsily told. (Similarly, badly worded poetry can still be good, as so on.)

Second, you can make it up even with a lack of artistic depth with masterful originality. Not just being original, but being good at what was just invented. Being “same but better” is not sufficient to push the medium to new territories. Again, the many animated movies I hold dear all tend to have that “you’ve never seen something like that before, and we’ll be bold at it”.

Thirdly, it’s about the message. To put it back into context, “The Raid: Redemption” is maybe the best martial arts movie out there. But it’s not art and it’s not much original. But to top it off, it’s about people killing other people and almost nothing else. No wonder Ebert drew parallels between that movie and video games. Even in the highly-competitive Redline, racers don’t actually hate each other. In “Yellow Submarine”, it’s about “peace and love through music”. I could keep on going. The whole movie of “Raid” is akin to “violence porn” (like “Human Centipede” is about “horror porn”), where “porn” means devoid of anything of human sensibility. It could be the best movie of its genre, but if in the end it glorifies meaningless violence, why should I even care?

In the end, Ebert’s criticism of someone’s review (err, lawsuit) of Drive is the same as my criticism of Monji’s review of Redline: you have the wrong expectations for a movie’s genre, but it’s still OK to have expectations about movies in general. Most comments on Ebert’s post are trash, so I skipped them. But on Monji’s post, I loved that “Rubi-kun” drew parallels between Redline and the original cut of “The Thief and the Cobbler”, another flawed animation masterpiece. And that is my point: Sometimes flawed movies can be the most beautiful and touching ones, and absolutely worth viewing.