I love movies. Probably more than I should actually. I love dumb movies, crazy movies, some movies that are flat-out bad (I’m that guy you may have heard of who actually enjoys some of the films from The Asylum like Nazis at the Center of the Earth or Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies).

It follows then, that I also love discussing movies, and hearing what other people have to say about them. Movies are a cornerstone of our shared cultural experience, and there’s nothing quite like talking with someone about a movie you both loved (this works for books too, but books take more time and effort to consume, so you’re much less likely to find people who read and liked the same ones you did.)

But obviously everyone has movies they didn’t love —the stinkers, the bombs, the flat out flops— and we end up talking about these too. But there’s often something different about this kind of conversation. We want to talk about how the movie got it wrong, the bits that were broken, and how they could be fixed. But in my experience most of the time we miss the mark. We react to movies on such a visceral emotional level that it can be difficult to sort out the real root cause of the problems we that we can feel somewhere deep in our movie-loving guts.

But I believe we can do better. We can complain about movies more effectively. And here’s how:

1. Forget about Reality

I’m going to tell you something you already know. Movies aren’t real. There is no theme park in the Caribbean where dinosaurs have been genetically resurrected, no alien robots that can disguise themselves as cars, no thieves using proprietary military technology to extract information from your dreams. Everyone who is not a complete moron understands this. And yet there is still a strange tendency in those of us armchair critics to point out ways in which movies break with reality in certain ways as “flaws”.

“Why does this file transfer window fill the whole screen with a red progress bar and an exact ‘time remaining’ countdown?” we ask. “How did that guy fire 27 shots from that gun that only has an eleven round magazine without reloading?” “Are you trying to tell me that they knocked down half the city and nobody got killed?” We ask these questions because these things do not mirror our real world experience.

Interestingly, we don’t usually do this for movies that take place in a pure fantasy setting. On the surface the reason is obvious. Those are made up worlds, created for the movie. We have nothing to compare them to.

But what we fail to realize is that every movie world is made up. Movies have structure, and theme. Movies have carefully chosen color pallettes. Movies are painstakingly lit for visual and dramatic effect. They show us the things that matter and nothing else.

The real world is not like this. Ever.

We will have conversations and encounter situations today that will have no impact on the larger course of our own life stories. We will get bored. We will be boring. We will go to work for eight hours that will play out in real time. No cuts. No montage.

“Realism” is one long continuous shot from the point of view of a dullard. We would never put up with a movie trying to pull that over on us.

Of course, movies have a responsibility to keep us immersed in this unreal world they’re spinning on the screen in front of us, to make us believe the lie they are telling. But they must also convey their message as completely and succinctly as possible.

A realistic file transfer bar might not be visually visceral enough to convey the drama the filmmaker wants to get across (or maybe it’s confusing to show a regular sized file transfer window in front of a cluttered desktop, or an instance of Chrome with 73 tabs open). Stopping to reload might break the flow of a high stakes action scene (though it can be used to good effect in some cases.) And…lets be honest here, sometimes its cool to see some cities getting destroyed without having to go through the guilt trip of thinking about all the people that probably would have died if Godzilla fell into an office building.

So lets stop pretending that straying from reality ruins a movie. Good movies do it along with the bad. It’s just that in the bad ones’ we’re more likely to notice, and less likely to forgive.

2. Leave Your Cynicism Behind

This is possibly a more subtle version of the previous point, or rather, it’s the underlying reason the previous point needed to be made.

The reality is, we (and I’m talking mostly about the kinds of people who are most likely to read this post, “internet people” as I like to say) have a level of access to knowledge that is unprecedented in the history of the world. Odds are really good you’ve got a smartphone in your pocket, assuming you’re not reading this on one right now. Think about that for a second. Think about the amazing amount of knowledge you can access just by reaching into your pocket. You could start reading right now and never stop until your death and still not consume a fraction of the content available to you on TVTropes alone (okay that’s probably not true. But for science somebody is going to have to test it. Go ahead. We’ll wait).

If you find a picture of a weird looking bug that you’ve never seen before you can post it to Reddit and have six professional entomologists and one amateur etymologist identify it by the end of the day.

This is a very good thing. But the downside it that we have all the answers. Our world has few wonders and even fewer mysteries remaining in it. We’ve likely seen more movies than our parents did, and we’re almost certainly better versed in how they’re constructed. And while this is not a bad thing per say it means that it’s hard to come into a movie with an open mind and just be awed. Sometimes it seems like we thunk ourselves down in our seats, cross our arms, glower at the screen, and rasp in our best Clint Eastwood voice, “Okay, show me what you got.”

If we’re not careful we can spend the whole movie analyzing, dissecting, criticizing, forming our opinions before the credits have even begun to roll.

And maybe this isn’t a bad or a good thing. Maybe it just is. But it means its so much harder to just enjoy a movie. We like to criticize the kind of people who flock to Adam Sandler movies or the Transformers franchise, as if it were a sin to enjoy yourself at movie that didn’t score above 60% on the Tomatometer. (This is the part were I confess to having had a fair amount of fun at the latest Transformers movie in spite of its flaws, and you dismiss everything that I’ve said.)

It should not be our goal to stop thinking, but maybe we should strive to do a bit less judging. Because it’s only a hop and a skip from condemning a movie, to condemning the people who liked it.

3. Something about Story

Those last two points were negatives: “Thou Shalt Not…”

But I believe that we should be able to discuss the things that actually don’t work in films (whether or not we personally liked them.) And beyond the more superficial aspects of things like cinematography and acting which I am woefully under qualified to comment on, the deciding factor that stands between good movies and bad, is story. Now this is a big big topic. Thousands of books have been written on the various aspects of storytelling, and if you read each one of them, I doubt you would have learned everything there is to know about the subject. So rather than try to break down all the things that could be said about story, I’m instead going to lead by example, and discuss the failures of a movie I’ve already mentioned I somewhat enjoyed: Transformers Age of Extinction.

a. Characters and Arcs.

We’re going to talk about Mark Walberg’s character here (a friend of mine refers to this movie as Marky-Mark and the Funky Bots which is pretty much my favourite thing ever). At the beginning he starts off as an interesting enough guy. His character is a failure. He’s an inventor, but none of his inventions work. He’s a father, but he’s losing his daughter’s affections to a boy, that she’s dating. Le gasp. His home is being foreclosed on, and he’s resorted to buying junk to repair and sell to make up the bills.

The movie sets you up to understand that this is a man searching for purpose and meaning in his life. And then it drags you through two hours of things exploding and him never finding that purpose or meaning. His inventions are never a success. He never learns anything about himself. Instead he saves the day by punching people and shooting things. There is no fulfillment for him in the end. But there is money. Lot’s and lot’s of money. (Yes this is incredibly representative of what the movie represents as a whole. And very likely it’s intentional seeing as they find Optimus Prime in a movie theatre, shot to pieces and basically dead, and he’s dragged home and brought back to life by a man who desperately needs a paycheck. Why does no one talk about how deliciously self-referential this movie is?)

b. Pacing

Dear lord, Michael Bay, can we take a break for like two minutes? You do some really cool looking explosions, your CG robots are top notch, and you fill a frame with more skill than most people give you credit for, but you have to understand, anything that happens for forty-five minutes without interruption, no matter how “cool” it is, is going to get boring. Let your movie breath a little.

Remember how when you made Pain and Gain you didn’t have 80 bazillion dollars to fill the screen up with giant robots so you actually did character development instead? Remember how that resulted in a movie that people weren’t ashamed to say they liked? That can work here too.

I can see you trying to do character stuff, but you crammed it all together at the beginning. Give us a little ebb, a little flow, a little variety.

In Conclusion

The TL;DR here is “don’t nitpick”. We experience movies scene by scene, moment by moment, so it’s easy to believe that if we didn’t enjoy a movie it is some individual scene or single moment that somehow “broke” the film. But most often the problems in film are storytelling problems, and those can hide below the surface. Finding them can be a challenge because they require considering the movie as a whole, as well as understanding the principles that make good movies work.

I don’t ask that everyone like the things I like, and hate the things I hate. I only want to have more reasoned discussions about why some films work better than others.