A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

So you’re hanging out with your buddies on a Friday night and you decide you’re all going to see a movie.  Now imagine you have two choices: a movie about people doing things, and a movie in which people sit around and then maybe a few things happen in the end because other people were busy doing things offscreen.  That wouldn’t be a very hard choice, would it?  But believe it or not, the new Narnia movie, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, winds up being the latter kind of movie, not the former.  Oh, it sounds plenty exciting — the Pevensie kids are summoned back to Narnia, where they have to defeat an evil king who’s about to invade and kill all the talking animals, and they also have to restore the rightful king to his throne in the invading kingdom so there can be peace between the two nations — but in the end, it turns out that every last thing the Pevensies did or even thought about doing was pointless, and in fact they shouldn’t have even tried, because the whole mess was just a test of their faith in Aslan, and all they were supposed to do was to go meet him, whereupon Aslan would take care of everything.

That doesn’t exactly give the audience a vicarious feeling of triumph and accomplishment, does it?  So no wonder the movie underperformed pretty significantly at the box office, casting doubt on whether the next installment in the series will even be made.

Movies have to be about characters doing things — doing the things ordinary people are afraid to do, or wish they could do, or know they have to do but fear doing… whatever, just as long as they’re doing something, anything, making choices that result in actions.  Writing passive characters who just drift through life while things happen around them is a classic newbie mistake.  In this particular case, the filmmakers were adapting the widely-beloved novel by C. S. Lewis, so their options were probably limited (maybe the best choice would’ve been to not make the movie in the first place, because it sure was expensive) but Lewis was writing a Christian parable more than he was writing a story, and unfortunately, it shows.