• From: Red Deer, AB
  • Registered: 2009-11-23
  • Posts: 4,044
  • User Karma: 664

Topic: "The Most Important Thing"

Alright, so you know how you can sometimes just start randomly thinking about a thing and it leads you down a really weird long path of what-ifs? This is what happened at work today, and I wanted to throw it to the group.

So there's the idea of "Your movie should be about THE most important event in that character or universe's life" that gets batted around here a lot. But I got wondering about how far that can get pushed. Specifically I was thinking about Pacific Rim, as you do, and obviously the story we got is THE most important story about that universe, it's about how the war ended. (I think that's suitably vague as to not be a spoiler). But there are tons of stories that take place in that universe that, while not THE most important would be incredibly interesting and make great stories.

And then I got wondering what would happen if GDT decided to tell one of those stories first. Would it still work? Would a story about the creation of the Jaeger program still work on it's own? What about a Saving Private Ryan-esque story about a team of Jaeger's during the Jaeger extinction? Would they work outside the context of the story we got?

And I'm not asking if "We're allowed to" or something like that, obviously rules are meant to be broken, but how far can it pushed, at what point is a story disconnected enough from THE MOST important aspect of that universe/character that it no longer ceases to work?

The example I got hung up on was the idea of World War 2. Imagining WW2 as a fictional universe that we are going to tell a story about, obviously looking at it from a story-telling point of view where your story it about the most important aspect of that universe, in most cases I think people would point to the end of the war. Clearly that's the important bit, but in reality there are THOUSANDS upon thousands of real stories that we tell and re-tell and invent new stories that fit into the structure of WW2, and the vast majority of them are INCREDIBLY interesting and fascinating, so where do those stories fit into this idea?

So anyways, that's my rambling, discuss! I'm curious what y'all think.

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  • From: Kent, England
  • Registered: 2010-02-09
  • Posts: 1,327
  • User Karma: 146

Re: "The Most Important Thing"

Goldman's quote (I think it's Goldman) refers to the protagonist too, so it's not necessarily true that the end of a war be the most important story to tell. Different people are going to remember different events in their lives as being the most important. Your WW2 example is a good one for this, given its immense scope. A little girl growing up in occupied France might have the defining moment of her experience be tasting chocolate for the first time after being liberated. The most important event a 19-year-old soldier from Brooklyn might have would be storming the Normandy beach and having his best friend killed. Someone in Bulgaria is going to have a completely different life-defining moment during the war as someone in Egypt. And as the war effectively ended at different times for different people, the end of the war becomes an elusive issue.

Also, in the specific case of WW2, it wasn't one climax that ended the war but an inevitable conclusion that was dragged out over many years. It wasn't an attack on the death star or beheading of a snake. Instead, you have lots of key turning points, which I would argue are much more dramatic than the final surrenders. I wonder whether Montgomery looked back on accepting the German surrender or defeating Rommel at El Alamein as the most important thing he had ever done? We have two films about Pearl Harbour, the start of the war, but I don't think we have any that show the Japanese surrender on the Missouri. Looking back on Band of Brothers, the last episode is probably a bit anti-climatic even. One of my favourite WW2 films is The Heroes of Telemark, which is about Norwegians delaying German development of the atomic bomb by destroying their heavy water stockpile. Did it kill thousands of young men or involve capturing a strategic bridge? No, it's one of many key moments contributing towards the allies' ultimate victory.

I'd argue that a good test is to ask what if it didn't happen? What would the character have become? What would the universe be like without that event?

There was a recent story in the papers over here about how at the start of the first world war, Britain sent over untrained volunteers at the very start to help shore up the defences in Belgium to give time for the main force to arrive. They were all killed or captured but ultimately stalled the German advance enough to create, in essence, the stalemate that would later claim so many lives. They arguably changed the course of the war and history, but remain unknown and unrecognised. History is full of such stories.

You also have to factor in proximity to the event. Take 9/11, that has to be the most important event in a lot of people's lives - yet the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan could be a mere footnote to those same people. Conversely, you have people there at the start of a conflict like Iraq who couldn't care less about the end of that conflict.

Interesting that you bring up Pacific Rim, as I feel the story we got was the least interesting 'expression' of that universe. The wider world in general excites me, from a conceptual point of view, but the movie is a poor execution of world-building (lots of things don't really make sense, and it contradicts itself). The prologue scene is the best part of the movie, and I want to see that movie. Here I think it's a case between important vs interesting. For the main character, the most important moment in his life was probably in the first act. I do think that the first Jaeger is a far more interesting story to tell than the last Jaeger, though that could just be a case of not liking the story they told about the last Jaeger.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere. - Carl Sagan

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