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beccaelizabethI recorded SWAT, the thing with Jeremy Renner, when it was on TV, so I just watched it. Mostly on fast forward.
That was not a good movie.
I have no idea what the cinematography thought it was doing but it seemed very invested in movement for the sake of movement. Like, shots that last a couple seconds and are suddenly from weird high angles and then down on eye level again, but for no reason. If you have trained yourself to look for language in what the camera is doing it's damn distracting, and the only message is WTF. Also, can we quit it with shaky cam and whip pans? Eyes don't work like that, it adds nothing to realism to make cameras do that, it just makes a significant portion of the audience feel ill.
I am very rarely inspired to complain about what the camera is doing. It kept interrupting. Why am I even noticing it? :-p
I also had the sound mostly turned off because random musical breaks do nothing for me.
But okay, whatever, that stuff I do not, as a scriptwriter, need to ponder.
I'm just wondering what the script thought it was doing. For really a lot of the time, but also, was it actually meant to be about an epic bad break up between romantic partners, or was there supposed to be an alternate reading that I purely can't find?
So the story goes, two guys on a SWAT team, Street and Gamble, guess which one does something risky against orders, he and his partner get some kind of punishment work, he quits instead. Partner stays and does the annoying job until someone notices he's cool enough to join the gang again. Training montage! They pass some test and go out to party and Gamble sees Street with one of his new team and comes over to be jealous at him. Only it's the only girl in the movie, so he's all 'is this your girlfriend', and job jealousy and sexual jealousy could not get more mixed together. Then next day SWAT have to transport this prisoner and they walk him in front of cameras and he yells he'll pay a hundred million dollars to whoever gets him out of there. So after that there's a whole lot of violence and different sides trying to grab this guy and get him places. Gamble has the best plan and totally would have got away with it if it weren't for his pesky ex (partner). So then he runs away and Street follows him and they have a fight where they each have the opportunity to kill the other and just decide to beat shit out of each other instead. And then I think I'm meant to see that Street kills Gamble by kicking him under a train? But I rewound it and all I see is Gamble falls down and screams and lands with a tidy gap between him and the train. And then Street goes back to his team and says they need to send a body bag back for Gamble. And then they get the prisoner to an actual prison, The End.
So okay, when I re-edited the film until it matched that description there, it's now about 67 minutes long on my recorder box. Wiki says it's 117 minutes so the bit I summarise as 'new gang, training montage' is like 40 minutes long? And I could not understand why any of it was in there. It's boring. We're watching an action crime thriller, apparently, but they're all sitting around meeting people and doing training. Training has absolutely no stakes. Nobody cares. We're here to watch shit blow up and nothing is blowing up. Fail. No amount of messing around with the camera can make school more interesting, even if it's shooting things school. And when we meet the new people we get a bunch of minutes spent on meeting them, only we learn things like 'Chris is actually a girl!' And, seriously? We needed an entire scene devoted to that? Oh, and to getting to see her in a sports bra, that was clearly crucial. *facepalm* So the whole middle is all the stuff where the team are not in danger, there's no stakes and no rewards that aren't part of the premise on the front cover ie they are a SWAT team. So why are we watching that? If there were people competing for limited places on a team then that would make some kind of sense, but everyone gets chosen first and then turns out to be awesome. They have nothing to overcome and... really, what was the point?
I realise I am also and coincidentally basically saying 'what was the point of any scene not involving Jeremy Renner'. And it's true I'm kind of biased that way. But since in this film my main reaction to him is *facepalm* and LOLs and 'all so young' because it's from 2003 and that suddenly looks like a really long time ago, I'm not actually that invested in seeing him. Despite the added interest from the way he spends the second half of the story running around apparently wearing a collar, it's not distracting enough to override a decent story. It's just that seriously, I don't understand why any part of this plot not involving Gamble or the prisoner that will incite the final confrontation actually exists.
The thing is once you take out the training stuff then it's just a film about Gamble and Street and their epic break up and I don't think it was meant to be sexual but I don't understand what else it was meant to be. Even the language used, about partners, far as I could tell Street doesn't get a new partner, just a new team, so where does this p word come from?
So I have read slash xovers with these guys and, yeah, I totally get it, if this film had any point then that was the point.
But that's a really big if.
That was not a good movie.
I have no idea what the cinematography thought it was doing but it seemed very invested in movement for the sake of movement. Like, shots that last a couple seconds and are suddenly from weird high angles and then down on eye level again, but for no reason. If you have trained yourself to look for language in what the camera is doing it's damn distracting, and the only message is WTF. Also, can we quit it with shaky cam and whip pans? Eyes don't work like that, it adds nothing to realism to make cameras do that, it just makes a significant portion of the audience feel ill.
I am very rarely inspired to complain about what the camera is doing. It kept interrupting. Why am I even noticing it? :-p
I also had the sound mostly turned off because random musical breaks do nothing for me.
But okay, whatever, that stuff I do not, as a scriptwriter, need to ponder.
I'm just wondering what the script thought it was doing. For really a lot of the time, but also, was it actually meant to be about an epic bad break up between romantic partners, or was there supposed to be an alternate reading that I purely can't find?
So the story goes, two guys on a SWAT team, Street and Gamble, guess which one does something risky against orders, he and his partner get some kind of punishment work, he quits instead. Partner stays and does the annoying job until someone notices he's cool enough to join the gang again. Training montage! They pass some test and go out to party and Gamble sees Street with one of his new team and comes over to be jealous at him. Only it's the only girl in the movie, so he's all 'is this your girlfriend', and job jealousy and sexual jealousy could not get more mixed together. Then next day SWAT have to transport this prisoner and they walk him in front of cameras and he yells he'll pay a hundred million dollars to whoever gets him out of there. So after that there's a whole lot of violence and different sides trying to grab this guy and get him places. Gamble has the best plan and totally would have got away with it if it weren't for his pesky ex (partner). So then he runs away and Street follows him and they have a fight where they each have the opportunity to kill the other and just decide to beat shit out of each other instead. And then I think I'm meant to see that Street kills Gamble by kicking him under a train? But I rewound it and all I see is Gamble falls down and screams and lands with a tidy gap between him and the train. And then Street goes back to his team and says they need to send a body bag back for Gamble. And then they get the prisoner to an actual prison, The End.
So okay, when I re-edited the film until it matched that description there, it's now about 67 minutes long on my recorder box. Wiki says it's 117 minutes so the bit I summarise as 'new gang, training montage' is like 40 minutes long? And I could not understand why any of it was in there. It's boring. We're watching an action crime thriller, apparently, but they're all sitting around meeting people and doing training. Training has absolutely no stakes. Nobody cares. We're here to watch shit blow up and nothing is blowing up. Fail. No amount of messing around with the camera can make school more interesting, even if it's shooting things school. And when we meet the new people we get a bunch of minutes spent on meeting them, only we learn things like 'Chris is actually a girl!' And, seriously? We needed an entire scene devoted to that? Oh, and to getting to see her in a sports bra, that was clearly crucial. *facepalm* So the whole middle is all the stuff where the team are not in danger, there's no stakes and no rewards that aren't part of the premise on the front cover ie they are a SWAT team. So why are we watching that? If there were people competing for limited places on a team then that would make some kind of sense, but everyone gets chosen first and then turns out to be awesome. They have nothing to overcome and... really, what was the point?
I realise I am also and coincidentally basically saying 'what was the point of any scene not involving Jeremy Renner'. And it's true I'm kind of biased that way. But since in this film my main reaction to him is *facepalm* and LOLs and 'all so young' because it's from 2003 and that suddenly looks like a really long time ago, I'm not actually that invested in seeing him. Despite the added interest from the way he spends the second half of the story running around apparently wearing a collar, it's not distracting enough to override a decent story. It's just that seriously, I don't understand why any part of this plot not involving Gamble or the prisoner that will incite the final confrontation actually exists.
The thing is once you take out the training stuff then it's just a film about Gamble and Street and their epic break up and I don't think it was meant to be sexual but I don't understand what else it was meant to be. Even the language used, about partners, far as I could tell Street doesn't get a new partner, just a new team, so where does this p word come from?
So I have read slash xovers with these guys and, yeah, I totally get it, if this film had any point then that was the point.
But that's a really big if.