Quote:
Originally Posted by Haven
But when you've got a squad of Marines to kill off in about a hour and a half film you use these stereotypes to quickly familiarize your audience with the paper thin characters without having to spend much background on them.
The audience goes, "oh there is the grizzled NCO... i don't need more explanation on him... lets see... ahh yes the green second LT... i bet that is going to be trouble."
|
Good stuff. The expectations of the audience are powerful tools for story-telling. In many ways, writing a screenplay or a novel is rather like conducting a military operation. There list of things that probably ought to be accomplished is much, much longer than the list of things that can be resourced. In a film with as many characters as "Aliens", there isn't time to develop all of the characters, all of the themes, and so forth. At the risk of using the US Joint Chiefs from the Second World War as literary critics, the term "economy of effort" can be applied to even so grand a film as "Aliens".
Webstral