Steven Spielberg's Into The West

[poliphilo]

As soon as I heard the voice-over I knew it was going to be dull.

Our hero meets some groovy, fur-lined mountain man. As they ride off down the misty river he explains in voice-over how aforesaid mountain man was the most extraordinary human being he'd ever met.

Voice-over is a way of avoiding having to dramatise anything. Who needs character-revealing incident when you can have shots of horsemen riding off down the misty river and a voice telling you how exciting it all is?

The hero is boyishly handsome. The heroine is so classically good-looking you'd hardly guess she had Native American genes. The whites are bigoted (of course). The Indians are spiritual (of course). "We have a wheel that gets us from place to place, they have a wheel that takes them to the stars".

The usual racist, stereotypical junk- and not even fun.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

We had been forewarned by the Newsnight review. I'm relived that it did turn out to be as dull as they said it was because we watched Master and Commander instead.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Master and Commander is a much more convincing slice of historical fiction.

[zeeshanmn.livejournal.com]

Voice-over is a way of avoiding having to dramatise anything.

Absolutely agree.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's like it says in the scriptwriter's manual- "show, don't tell".