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5 Writing Lessons Learned from Land of the Lost

Filed Under: Film, Writing Advice

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!

TAGS: comedy, movies, My Writing

POSTED: 9:29 am Mon June 08 2009 |