Why do modern screenwriters insist on showing the end of a TV show or movie first and then tell the story of how we got to that point after? It drives me nuts!
It seems that jumping around with the timeline in movies and TV shows has become very fashionable. My wife and I recently watched a TV series that kept switching between three different timelines every 10 minutes or so, and without much of an indication as to which timeline was currently in play.
My wife watched the series through to the end, but I stopped watching. It wasn’t only because I struggled with identifying the correct timeline, more that I simply could not be bothered. I am not a patient man.
Whenever a TV show or movie begins with a climactic scene followed by an onscreen message along the lines of… “Three weeks earlier“… I groan. I hate that! Imagine if books adopted that same approach, describing the end of the story first and then going on to relate how we got there. I guarantee that’s a book very few would bother reading.
While I’m on the subject, it seems to me that modern movie makers are of the opinion that lots of shoot-’em-up, punch-’em-up, and manic car chase action scenes compensate for a very thin storyline. As far as I am concerned, they don’t.
It begs the question, what has happened to talented screenwriters who can tell a story? Remember movies like The Shawshank Redemption? An absolute classic, and not because of action or special effects, just a superb story well told and acted.
They were the sorts of movies that withstood the test of time. Whereas many modern movies, consisting largely of gratuitous violence, will be seen today and forgotten tomorrow.
Am I being a tad harsh here? I am, after all, a cantankerous old man.
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