Blog – Buzzkilling Brain
Not everybody is a talker during movies (thank God), but there are some things every single one of us has said at certain moments while watching a movie. Things like ‘Yeaa… RIGHT or ‘Are you serious?’ or the slightly agitated ‘Oh come oon!’ Yep, I sure heard those things being muttered or shouted by my movie watching neighbor once in a while. But since I’m getting older I noticed I’m more and more turning into that neighbor…
I honestly can’t help it. But these last few years I noticed something is happening to me when I watch a movie that sometimes makes me burst out these buzzkilling phrases while everybody just wants to enjoy the freaking movie. What’s happening to me is that my brain alerts me on illogical or unrealistic elements in the movie that takes me out of the experience.
Yep, I just want to enjoy the freaking movie, but my logical brain sometimes just takes over. It’s like all these years of living in the real world with studying, working and not walking away from explosions looking awesome has taken its toll on me being able to just take the movie for what it is and not nitpick on all the reality-defying details.
Now that I think about it, this process of my brain acting like a smartass spoiling my fun started earlier than I thought. I should have recognized the red flags when I was a kid watching cartoons. I’m sure you will recognize this too. When you turned into that black belt cartoon watcher after checking out Transformers and the Turtles about three hours a day, you discovered you could know what element in the cartoon was going to move instead of staying stationary because of subtle color differences in the illustration. It seemed such an innocent little quirk you discovered, not knowing it would grow into something bigger that would turn you into that overanalyzing moviegoer.
Okay, I am getting a little dramatic here. But you catch my drift right? Talking about drifting… how about that Rose drifting on that HUGE piece of wood in the end of Titanic? She sold the viewer she was unable to share her spot with Jack, but the audience just wanted to crawl into that big screen and scream frantically at Rose two persons would fit and float just fine on that thing.
But the physics the movie chose to go with served the plot well, squeezing some extra tears out of the audience. And that’s why you sometimes have to go with the unrealistic and illogical rules the movie decides to go with. If people decided to NOT suddenly split up in horror movies guys like Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees would be out of a job.
And lastly: try to use that buzzkilling brain of yours to fix the plot holes and little mistakes. Give yourself a fighting chance to enjoy the movie and make up a reason why the ‘mistake’ in the movie might not be so illogical after all. I did something like that when I watched the first Matrix movie. I did not know that it was the start of a trilogy, and the first movie obviously had a pretty open ending. That kinda bugged me out, but I chose to fix the open ending in my head. So when Neo took off like a rocket in the last scene, I made it like: “Well that’s it, this dude is a freaking badass demi-god now and is going set things straight!” And that was the end for me.
And boy… do I wish it would have stayed like that.