Friday 15 April 2011

The difficult third act

There's some good ways to end films. So good, that they've been repeated lots of times.

1. What if two people are complete opposites but find themselves becoming romantically involved through a series of unlikely events? This sometimes happens, and everything goes well through the first act. Something funny will happen that they can talk about later, like almost getting killed by a crazy ostrich on a peaceful walk though a park. This happiness will continue well into the second act until it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. One says 'I don't want to talk to you anymore.' The other one says 'Fine! I don't want to talk to you either'.

Time passes. Maybe one of them is going to get married to somebody else. Maybe they're leaving the country and going to place without phones, post, or any means of contact. This is when the tried and tested third act comes in. One of them (usually the man) decides that they do like the other one after all, and rushes to wherever it is they need to rush too. They get there just in time. They grab the other's hand and give a long, emotional speech - 'remember when that ostrich almost killed you? That was the happiest time of my life.' Then the woman looks into his eyes and replies 'like I said, I really don't want to talk to you anymore'. And then leaves. Never mind.

2. In a controversial sequel to the previous film, the man returns home and keeps going about his daily life. Then there's a zombie apocalypse. Or, even better, a possessed zombie apocalypse. They're not just the undead, they're possessed by the devil too. It all resulted from a disastrous scientific experiment involving radiation and holy water. It's the end of the world now. Some people survive because they're just better at running away than others. Others perish and become possessed zombies. It's all very bad, but there's one place where the really bad thing lives. The survivors don't know that when they hide in the building.

It's dark because it's night, and the lights don't work because the possessed zombies attacked the power lines. Now they're trapped in this building until morning, with only a torch and their wits to keep them alive. 'Don't go upstairs,' somebody says, 'there's something really bad up there'. But when all his friends get killed and possessed there's nowhere else for Survivor A to go in the third act. So he ventures into the bad thing's lair. After a few tense moments he's possessed and becomes the ultimate embodiment of evil, ready for an appearance in the next film.

3 comments:

  1. Two sounds like Quarantine, but that’s a guess. I only watched the first ten minutes and know it’s a remake of a foreign film with el Diablo as the villain. One certinally sounds like every romantic movie ever made. Aside from that ostrich maybe.

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  2. Yeah, I recently watched REC, and REC 2. Plenty scary rooms of doom in that.

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  3. And this is why I don't watch very many movies. Although, I guess books can do the same thing if you read crappy ones. Oh, well, I'd still choose my portable paper entertainment defices over a movie any day.

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