More Examples Of Bad Screenwriting

Here are some recent examples of crappy story telling that you should avoid in your own writing.

The Walking Dead Like many television shows, The Walking Dead is uneven. The quality of the story ebbs with the story arcs, sometimes succeeding with a high level of tension and intrigue, other times devolving into triteness and predictability. Overall, I enjoyed season two, but the writers keep repeating the same mistake over and over.

Nothing bugs me more in a television show than when the characters change their personality wildly from episode to episode. I’m all for character progression, but don’t change a character dramatically just to create a false sense of conflict. People invest in these characters. First Daryl is a real hick, then he’s kind and caring. Then he hates everyone, then he’s standing up for Rick. Then he wants to leave and be on his own. Then he’s a hero again. Stop fucking around with Daryl just to suit that episode’s plot.

It’s like in the new Battlestar Galactica, where every few episodes characters completely adopt a new personality to fit the latest story arc. Character should drive plot, not vice versa. If you need to spice things up, add some new characters. That’s why the story line with the other fleet was so good. They added new characters, created a tense situation that devolved into civil war, and they did so without changing any of the characters we already cared about. And that’s why the story line revealing that four of the characters were secret cylons was so bad. It didn’t make sense when taking the back story into consideration and smacked of desperation.

Oh, and by the way, the black character keeps disappearing for several episodes at a time. Was he sick or something in real life? What’s going on? Stop being so racist.

Prometheus What a beautifully shot film, but what a mess of a story.

Why is Guy Pearce pretending to be dead? Why does the android poison two of the main characters? What is motivating Charlize Theron? The plot is murky at best, and just seems to be an excuse to reenter the Alien universe. None of the threads is successfully tied up. As a viewer, we have no idea why the aliens are acting the way they do, why David is acting the way he does, why anyone from the corporation thought this was a worthwhile investment, or why Guy Pearce didn’t just go into hibernation and wait for science to find a cure to whatever is ailing him.

But did I mention it was beautifully shot?

The Amazing Spiderman Overall, a very satisfying reboot. But probably what frustrates me more than anything is when a movie ignores common sense for no good reason. Sometimes a writer writes himself into a hole and finds it difficult to plausibly rectify the problem. Other times, he is just too lazy to fix something that could easily be amended.

After Dr. Connors fails to get the results that Oscorp is looking for, he gets fired. But then he’s still allowed free rein of his lab. I don’t know if the screenwriters have just never had a corporate job, but there is a 0% chance that he wouldn’t have immediately been escorted out of the building after getting fired. Security would have made sure that he didn’t take any proprietary research that belonged to the company. There’s no way he’s allowed to keep his key card for even a few minutes.

And what really gets to me is that the movie easily could have been rewritten so he had to sneak back into the lab. You’re telling me they have a multimillion dollar budget, and they couldn’t just do a small tweak to get that part of the story right. Despicable.

The more that I think about it, the more I feel sorry for that black guy in The Walking Dead. At least in Star Trek they had the decency to kill that guy off early in an episode.

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