This past week­end, I spent my hard-earned money to see the new Land of the Lost movie. In terms of enter­tain­ment, I do not feel that I got my money’s worth out of it. So here I sit, try­ing milk­ing a blog post out of the film in order to get some writ­ing lessons from the thing. I’ll be damned if I am going to actu­ally waste money in these hard eco­nomic times!

I guess my child­hood appre­ci­a­tion of the orig­i­nal series col­ored my expec­ta­tions for the film. No wor­ries, it won’t hap­pen again. At least, until G.I. Joe comes out. And Transformers 2. Ahem.

This post is going to be rife with spoil­ers, but hey, if you don’t want to see the film (which you shouldn’t), or god for­bid, saw it already, then those won’t bother you. Lessons behind the cut. Oh, and yes. I’m dis­card­ing my usual “don’t say it if you can’t say some­thing nice” ethos here, because, well, some­times you wake up on Monday morn­ing and want to tear apart a bad film. Onward!

1. A use­ful comedic trick: tak­ing some­thing that is sup­posed to be stu­pid and mak­ing it devi­ously intelligent

This never fails to crack me up. In Gremlins 2, the Brain grem­lin was by far the fun­ni­est of the mutated grem­lins. Here, the real star of this show, eclips­ing Will Ferrel in every way, was the Tyrannosaurus Rex, aka “Grumpy.” Grumpy, right from the begin­ning, dis­plays unchar­ac­ter­is­tic intel­li­gence. He doesn’t speak, but the ani­ma­tors do a great job with the facial expres­sions, show­ing com­pre­hen­sion of what Ferrel’s char­ac­ter is say­ing, and plot­ting to get that smarmy sci­ence bas­tard no mat­ter what it takes. In one of the few laughs for me, the dinosaur gives Ferrel a present to show just how well he under­stands what he is say­ing when lec­tur­ing about the T-rex’s men­tal abilities.

2. Prologues are not always necessary

The film opens not with the cast of char­ac­ters, or the Matt Lauer Today Show seg­ment drained of all humor by round-the-clock trail­ers on TV. The film opens with some ran­dom astro­naut char­ac­ter stag­ger­ing through a jun­gle, pro­claim­ing that the scenery doesn’t look like New Mexico, and try­ing to call back to base on his radio.

In a film like Land of the Lost, open­ing with this doesn’t serve any sto­ry­telling pur­pose. Everyone knows that the char­ac­ters are going to end up in the Land of the Lost. And if they don’t, what the hell are they doing watch­ing this film?

I rec­om­mend any­one who feels the need to write a pro­logue to the bulk of their story seri­ously exam­ine their impulse. Does it really serve a pur­pose? Good, if so. Use the pro­logue in this film as an exam­ple of what not to do.

3. Slavish devo­tion to the source mate­r­ial in an adap­ta­tion results in a prod­uct weaker than the original

But a will­ing­ness to alter the source mate­r­ial doesn’t guar­an­tee great­ness either.

I read an inter­view recently, prob­a­bly via Io9, about how the writer of the film made sure to not famil­iar­ize him­self with the TV show before doing so. He wanted to write some­thing that cap­tured the essence of his mem­ory of the show, rather than slav­ishly recre­at­ing the orig­i­nal show with a larger budget.

In prin­ci­ple, I agree with this idea, and it’s some­thing I think we SF/F writ­ers could learn from when we write pas­tiches or homages to Golden Age SF. The idea isn’t to write a story that lit­er­ally could have been pub­lished in the 1950s. The idea is to cap­ture the way that story made you feel when you read it, and to com­mu­ni­cate that emo­tion with some­thing new.

The Land of the Lost TV show is very much a prod­uct of its time. A fea­ture length film about a father and his two chil­dren would not have been a good comedic vehi­cle for Will Ferrel. The idea of his char­ac­ter Rick Marshall actu­ally breed­ing is enough to make me recon­sider my stance on forced sterilization.

I don’t think Hollywood fig­ured otu the cor­rect bal­ance of orig­i­nal mate­r­ial with fresh take on some­thing SFnal until the first Spider-Man movie. Before that, they always erred too much in either direction.

4. The female pro­tag­o­nist serves one pri­mary pur­pose: bait for the male char­ac­ters in a plot point

Apparently, the pri­mary role of a woman in a story is to pro­vide sex­ual ten­sion with the lead (a male) and then to be cap­tured by the vil­lain in order to advance the plot in the most ham-fisted method possible.

Okay, no. Don’t do this. Write com­pe­tent female char­ac­ters that evade cap­ture. Have them res­cue your idi­otic male lead. Will Ferrel’s Marshall would be even more appro­pri­ately pathetic with his tar­get audi­ence if he was so incom­pe­tent that Holly had to res­cue him. “Duh huh huh, he got res­cued by a girl.”

It’s really time for this hoary plot point to be retired. It’s absolutely the most lazy method of advanc­ing the plot ever. It’s not even used to cre­ate ris­ing ten­sion here. It’s just cre­ated to nudge the plot, which has sceeched to a halt, back into action.

5. Potty humor never fails

Deus ex machina? How about viri ex dinosaur’s ass? Sorry, my Latin is rusty. Judging from my audience’s reac­tion, this kind of thing is really funny.

Yeah, okay. Potty humor is funny. But by this point in the film, I had given up all hope of actu­ally laugh­ing at anything.

Okay, so there. I now feel bet­ter about hav­ing paid to see the film in the the­ater. At least it was a matinee!

Tagged as: comedy, movies, My Writing