“Tone Movies”

Ah, Comic Con. That time of year where Hollywood takes over San Diego and tries to wow the geeks with footage of upcoming “blockbusters”.
One star of Comic Con the last couple of years has been Zack Snyder, director/writer of “300” and “Watchmen”. This year he is promoting his first original film, “Sucker Punch,” which will be released in 2011 and will have “100s of layers” to analyze.
Coincidentally, Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” has been critically and financially successful, burning up the box office. The film, a cohesive, tight script keeps spiraling towards what seems to be out of control, but remains emotionally centered.
While both Snyder and Nolan are both very successful making films, one is called a genius by the press (Nolan) and the other is called a genius by his promotional team (Snyder in promo for Watchmen). What is the difference between these two storytellers?
Well, only one of them is actually telling a story. While Nolan’s films may be calculated – the story clicks together like a well-manufactured trap. Snyder’s films aren’t about emotion or story, they are as I would argue, “tone films”.
“Tone films” are movies with style over substance where the look and feel of the film are given greater importance than a story and great characters. These films may be “awesome” but I don’t think they will ever be considered “great”. The great movies, I would argue doesn’t matter what they look like because story and character fully involve you into the film. Just because something looks cool, it doesn’t necessarily move the story forward. There’s a reason they’re called movies – the story should continually move forward and move the audience to some kind of emotional response. While the fight scenes in 300 are cool in slow motion, they don’t essentially move the story forward and challenge the characters, making the movie like a shiny tin man without a heart inside of him.
To the screenwriter, story and character should be the focus of the script. It’s no wonder that Pixar is continually successful, they hammer story like no other studio. It’s like “Field of Dreams” – if you build it (a successful story) they will come- even the geeks.