When I started this blog, I thought that reviews would be easy filler content. I read a lot, I watch movies pretty often, and I tend to have a lot of ideas about how stories work (or don’t). But aside from two posts early in the blog, I’ve mostly stayed away from reviews. It has often occurred to me to write more, but I never go through with it, no matter how much I have to say on a given story, because I never know how I’d end it. Reviews almost always have some kind of verdict, usually stated at the start and reiterated at the end like a thesis statement. The finality of that judgement always scared me, because I never knew which question to answer: should I say whether or not it’s good, or whether or not I liked it. It’s rare that I have a clear answer on either one of those, and when I do, it’s rarer that they’re the same.
To explain this point, I’m going to compare two pieces of media that have no business being discussed in the same post: the hyper-violent neo-noir film Drive and the children’s fantasy cartoon The Dragon Prince. These two really don’t have anything in common aside from being a series of still images shown in quick succession so as to create the illusion of motion: one is animated and the other is live action, one is a TV series and the other is a movie, one has mostly bloodless violence and the other shows a human head crushed flat by the heel of a man’s shoe. But I’ve seen them both recently and had opposite reactions to each. If there were some perfect formula for determining the quality of cinema, I suspect Drive would rank high and The Dragon Prince would be mid-to-low. But I didn’t enjoy Drive at all, and I loved The Dragon Prince.
Drive is about a nameless and almost entirely silent getaway driver who falls in love with a woman, tries to help her unlucky husband get out of debt with a gang, and reacts poorly once things go wrong. The film is a wonder to look at, with a kind of enormity even its dingy settings. The action scenes all have just the right number of elements: never cluttered, always clear, and very memorable. As art, you have to say it’s well crafted. But, when the credits rolled and I closed the laptop, all I felt was that I should be feeling more. There wasn’t any symbol that I wanted to dwell on, no character relationship that I wanted to imagine further. What happened happened, it was beautiful and terrifying, but I couldn’t find any more of it to hold onto at the end.
The Dragon Prince only came on my radar because it was created by the writers from some of the all-time best episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was my favorite show growing up. The mythology isn’t exactly complicated, but it’s a lot to summarize, so suffice it to say that it’s a journey story set in a pretty generic fantasy world (magic, elves, dragons, monarchy, etc.). There isn’t any part I can fasten myself onto as something that I really like. The characters display a racial and sexual diversity not often seen in children’s shows, but while that’s a good thing societally, it doesn’t automatically make for good storytelling. The animation is a weird 3D-2D hybrid, and the best you can say about it is that you get used to it. The setting is something we’ve all seen a thousand times since Tolkien. And the writing reveals that this really is a show aimed for kids: humor that’s mostly fart jokes and sarcasm and dialogue that states every theme or plot development over and over, always in the clearest possible terms, never giving the audience the satisfaction for figuring something out for themselves. It’s that last point that really bugs me, actually, how the writers never trust the viewer enough to let something stay unstated.
But maybe ambiguity is overrated. Drive never spells anything emotionally meaningful out too clearly, especially since the characters hardly ever talk. There’s no dialogue in the scene where the hero falls in love, just some beautiful shots and pretty good music of two people hanging out by a stream. With every character left an enigma, though, you start to wonder if there really is anything to them at all, or if they’re just vehicles for all these wonderful shots that don’t come together into an actual story worth caring about.
And maybe that explains what it is about The Dragon Prince that I like, actually. It says what it wants to say: when characters are friends or rivals or enemies, you can always tell right away. When they feel something, they don’t hide it, and even if it gets a little overplayed, at least it’s there. And with that kind of openness right from the first episode, it’s hard not to care about the characters and feel whatever they do, even if what they feel is inordinate joy at some stupid fart joke. Maybe that’s why Drive needs to trade in cool detachment, actually: it’s hard enough watching anyone get shot or stabbed to pieces, it’s just too much to watch that happen to someone you like.
I don’t mean to say that nuance or subtlety are always bad for storytelling. But these two examples show a larger point, I think: that maybe it’s best to trust your instincts on what you think is or isn’t good. Drive just seemed like it was good because it had legitimately great visuals and sophisticated pretensions, but neither of these make for a good storytelling. And if that means I like a stupid (but not that stupid) children’s show more than a film festival award-winning movie, then fine, I’ll take it.
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