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Words are losing their power. Not even Jason Bourne can save them now
- Animats 10y agoDialogue in Jason Bourne movies has always been low. But in this movie, it's approaching zero. The new Star Trek movie, "Fast and Furious in Spaaaace!", is not exactly dialog heavy. That's new for that franchise. But there are other movies. There's a new Harry Potter book out today. Kids were lining up at Barnes and Noble for it last evening. Words are doing just fine.
- bitJericho 10y agoThe dialog in the new st movie is exceptional bad. Particularly Kirk calling for the execution of the bad guy completely jarring and pretty much turning me off to the movie franchise from here on out.
- Gracana 10y agoThey seem okay as brain-dead action flicks, but they're star trek in costume only. I would to see a star trek movie in the style of a star trek TV episode, with suspense and strange phenomena and whatnot...
- TeMPOraL 10y agoThank JJ Abrams for screwing things up for everyone and keeping to do it. The last three Star Trek movies are Star Trek only in name, they're cheap action flicks and go completely against the spirit of the whole franchise.
- quantumhobbit 10y agoI'm similarly disappointed in those films, but I'm holding out hope for Discovery, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Discovery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Discovery . Looks to be mostly online and set in the original timeline. Bryan Fuller is involved, he wrote for Voyager and has a history of dialog heavy shows after that (pushing daisies is so underrated by the way).
- TeMPOraL 10y agoWe'll see. I'll hold out hope too, both for the series and for CBS not to kill it if it turns out to be good (like they did to Person of Interest). > pushing daisies Yeah, I've seen some of it; it's quite ok :).
- ajeet_dhaliwal 10y agoAgreed, after wasting time on Lost and the previous two Star Treks and Force Awakens I can't be bothered to watch the next Star Wars or the current Star Trek Beyond, the trailer just has a shoot up and explosions, what happened to discovering new civilizations and exploring space? It's all so weak and lacking the charm, grit and magic.
- humanrebar 10y agoExecution implies imprisonment. Killing an enemy to save lives on an active battle field is rarely controversial.
- bitJericho 10y agospoiler alert I don't think that applies in st beyond. Kirk was chasing an ex star fleet officer gone mad. He was a giant terrorist, and Kirk has always been one to flaunt the rules, but to order the killing rather than any attempt for capture was pretty shocking.
- Animats 10y agoI think you meant "flout".
- kijin 10y agoBourne in the latest movie looks much more tired and cynical than he used to be. In the first three movies he was actively trying to find out the truth about his past. Now he's like "Why the hell are you dragging me back into this shit. Leave me alone. I've had enough." Besides, Alicia Vikander can't seem to keep her mouth shut whenever she's on the screen. I think her character more than compensates for everyone else's lack of dialogue.
- lagadu 10y agoIt's approaching zero yes but is that a bad/unexpected thing, given the plot? Bourne spends the overwhelming majority of his time alone/fighting off hostiles except for two very short-lived moments. There was nobody for him to have a dialogue with and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Alicia Vikander's character on the other hand was in a position that allowed for plenty of dialogue and she did have it, she was involved in most of the plot exposition. Hell, I suspect her time-on-screen comes close to Bourne's. I just feel that criticizing a film just because the titular character doesn't speak much is a bad practice because there are situations where that's appropriate. Showing over telling is something that should be cherished. I'd rather criticize JB for doing very little towards advancing the Bourne story overall.
- danso 10y agoWith the exception of Star Wars: The Force Awaken, I haven't seen any of the blockbusters mentioned, though I wonder how much this article cherry-picks, given that the 2 top grossing movies this year (Civil War, Zootopia) [0] seem dialogue-dense based on their trailers despite being summer entertainment. Also, I would have attributed the disappearing of dialogue to our increasingly dumbed-down short attention spans, something that has been evident in Jerry Bruckheimer films. Also, Avatar, which had such shit dialogue that I found it hard to believe until I looked it up that James Cameron had written the screenplay for his Aliens, which has timeless (if brief) dialogue. That said, it's completely believable to me that the cost of making universally clever dialogue is much harder than just doing it in one language, and will be the easiest line-item to justify cutting with international audiences being increasingly prized. I've always been OK with reading subtitles but it wasn't until Inglourious Basterds did I realize how jarring and unusual it is to have foreign languages hold equal screentime to your own native language (which makes me respect IB even more for its artistic achievement). It'll definitely be a shame if plots themselves become increasingly dumbed down for international reasons. One thing the OP didn't mention in terms of the Chinese-market effect on Americans is the seemingly higher frequency of Chinese locales making cameos...though this is something I welcome, as the Chinese-based set pieces in movies such as Skyfall as Pacific Rim have usually been spectacular.
- Blackthorn 10y agoI wonder if there's somewhere that lists line counts in films so we can compare? I've seen both Zootopia and Civil War and they both felt dialogue-dense (and good!).
- ACow_Adonis 10y agoAn analysis of word/n-grams/length in English subtitles vs movie run times would suffice, and I believe both are available, but probably not in a well structured format. Flesh-Kincaid vs year of release in those subtitles would also be interesting... /just planting seeds of ideas or there in hacker space because I'm too lazy to do it right now.
- wwwdonohue 10y ago
- joshschreuder 10y agoOn the flipside, Bojack Horseman, an animation on Netflix just did an episode in season 3 which is deliberately dialogue free for the majority of the episode, and it comes across as a brave and interesting move. This runs counter to the rest of the show's run which is quite dense and dialogue driven. I can't say I've ever seen an episode of animated television like it in recent times.
- the8472 10y ago> and it comes across as a brave and interesting move https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush_(Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush_(Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer...
- Ntrails 10y agoGentlemen status: Creepy As Fuck.
- gilleain 10y agoDexter's Lab had a silent episode "DiM": > Dexter makes an angst-ridden trip to the hardware store to buy a new light bulb for his lab. Note: This episode is almost dialogue-free; the only dialogue in the entire episode is Dexter's punch line at the end.
- tujv 10y agoAn even earlier example is The Prisoner episode "Many Happy Returns". Almost half of the episode is without dialogue.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- golergka 10y agoThis article describes the phenomena as if something existing - blockbuster movies - is changing. However, this is not the case. Blockbuster movies of yesterday were US/Europe blockbusters; truly worldwide blockbusters are simply a new thing, not an existing one. I bet there's still a lot of big movies targeting US/Europe being shot; but movies that truly (commercially) target the entire world is a completely new thing. And I wouldn't get sad that for the time being, that thing is simplistic and bland: a new level of truly worldwide culture has to start at some common ground for everyone. It doesn't mean it will stay there.
- protomyth 10y agoNo one likes someone talking over the fireworks on the 4th of July or narrating a rollercoaster ride, so why would people need much dialog in event films? We go for the bigger than TV spectacle. We don't need the theater to get adult, dialog driven movies since we have great adult, dialog driven television which have the long length to give the dialog some effect. Movies are not the place to think anymore. If they can slide in great dialog than cool, but it doesn't seem to be a requirement. Heck, I'm more mad that Honest Trailers[1], CinemaSins[2] (Everything wrong with X in Y minutes), and HISHE[3] have so much damn material because of spectacle over plot. Plots that make us wince[4] is the greater tragedy. or... its hard for a screaming kid to screw up an action scene, but the little whippersnapper can certainly screw up a drama 1) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL86F4D497FD3CACCE https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL86F4D497FD3CACCE 2) https://www.youtube.com/user/CinemaSins https://www.youtube.com/user/CinemaSins 3) https://www.youtube.com/user/HISHEdotcom https://www.youtube.com/user/HISHEdotcom 4) https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/07/16/ https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/07/16/
- Houshalter 10y agoMovies are about telling stories. It's hard to do that without dialogue or "thinking". There was a time when people were wowed solely by special effects. But CGI is so routine now long sequences of eye candy are just boring.
- protomyth 10y agoI don't think its hard to tell a story without much dialogue. I don't think "thinking" and "dialogue" are linked as I've seen some really un-thinking dialogue and some visual thinking without dialogue. Given the box office, I don't think CGI is boring, just poorly done CGI without a point. I think a good plot and structure is more important for movies today than just the dialogue.
- rangibaby 10y agoMad Max is a bad example. Max never spoke much after his family died in the first film.
- Apocryphon 10y agoSame with Only God Forgives, which is a heavily stylized Nicholas Refn picture.
- unsignedqword 10y agoOnly God Forgives is excellent; most of the characters being relatively mute (especially Ryan Gosling's character) worked really well for it.
- tnecniv 10y agoIs it? I wanted to watch it, but the reviews seemed mediocre.
- unsignedqword 10y agoIt's a love-it-or-hate-it movie. It's compared a lot to Drive, of which I felt OGF was better anyway, but many would disagree
- viraptor 10y agoIt's not the same Max in the Fury Road, so I'm not sure that applies.
- enneff 10y agoI find it funny that she mentions Gravity as an example of a film with little dialogue. My biggest complaint about the movie was that it had entirely too much dialogue. So much pointless, clichéd exposition about the characters, as if Bullock's needed any kind of emotional background. It really ruined the movie IMO.
- Apocryphon 10y agoI've always considered that Christopher Nolan movies to have some fairly quotable lines.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- unsignedqword 10y agoI find that with the quantity of dialogue, I tend to observe the opposite trend in a lot of story-driven videogames: many lines will be devoted to elaborating on needless backstory, reducing characters down to walking encyclopedias. Many of these games have a hard time taking advantage of their medium as far as their story goes. Her touching on the loss of quality in dialogue, not just quantity, seems like the more important problem. To me, meaningful and good dialogue is important - whereas dialogue for the sake of dialogue tends to suck. I'm not saying that everything that comes out of a character's lips needs to be important plot points, but writers and producers should think more about what they're trying to accomplish in their work when a character needs to say something. I think a piece of bad dialogue hurts more than if that character were to say nothing.
- zubat 10y agoGame dialogue definitely has an weak point in defaulting to an expository mode, and when this happens it's usually in tandem with a lot of other kitchen-sink elements that are "immersive" or "world-building" but don't respect the player's time or attention. Games that gun for interactive story remain in a perpetual struggle for maximizing the agency of both players and authors, and the compromise is frequently to distort the timeline and social situation as needed, on command, so that instead of cutting down on quantity, players can sample the experience à la carte and then cut short or resume any scenario when they're bored. But it's still a problem if you're like me and feel obligated to view all the content no matter what. There are known patterns now, but it's still a work-in-progress field. Movies, on the other hand, have a definite limit to how much they can cram in, and so they're more inclined to use time efficiently. As in games, dialogue is extremely convenient as a way to do exposition, but the medium holds many other possibilities. Since there isn't conflict over agency, it's easier to make more elements in a film "inevitable" by design. For a game to present many of the set-pieces shown in movies, it has to carefully coax the player to move in the right direction and look in the right place at the right time.
- nl 10y ago"Winter is Coming"
- mikeash 10y agoI don't care about the quantity of dialog, only quality. The article doesn't even attempt to present any evidence that quality is down, aside from a rather silly poll about iconic film lines. I'd like to see some historical comparisons, too. We tend to imagine movies as containing more than they do. 43 lines doesn't strike me as particularly small. It's one more line than I count for Darth Vader in Star Wa^H^H^H^H^H^H^HA New Hope, for example.
- Houshalter 10y agoVader's lines were proportional to his screen time though. If Luke was mute the movie would have sucked.
- dahart 10y agoSome hand-picked blockbuster movies having less dialogue demonstrates the decline of language? What does short, fluffy blog posts with titles unsupported by their brief content demonstrate? Even if movies did represent trends in common language usage, which I doubt, using fewer words could represent the opposite of the title's conclusion -- it could be that words are becoming more efficient, and thus more powerful, over time. Anyway, some people actually studying common vocabulary usage patterns seem to come to the opposite conclusion, when they use data and not their favorite movies. https://bostonreview.net/blog/claude-s-fischer-how-gss-got-it-wrong https://bostonreview.net/blog/claude-s-fischer-how-gss-got-i...
- arca_vorago 10y agoI think the best way to understand the decline of meaning and subtlety is to see something that has it rather than try to talk about what doesn't. I have recently realized that this is one of the things I pay attention to the most when it comes to deciding. Two great such examples of shows with meaningful, but often terse, yet still subtle and even duplicitous would be Peaky Blinders and Marco Polo. Here is a great example scene from Peaky Blinders: https://youtu.be/MzYrtG7dCg0 https://youtu.be/MzYrtG7dCg0
- tonmoy 10y agoCherry picking BvS and Mad Max to prove a point seems like something I'd have done when I was in the 5th grade.
- jksmith 10y agoAgree. This article is reaching. Jeremiah Johnson, Hell in the Pacific, LeMans, etc were certainly short of dialog, but were artsy and tasteful in presentation. OTOH, "Hateful 8" includes usual Tarantino mainstay heavy dialogs that work. Wasted read, move on.
- Freak_NL 10y agoI wonder if Tarantino's films aren't just the (welcome) exception to a trend of less dialogue though. Some quantitative analysis to back that up would be interesting; you are right that this article does seem anecdotal in evidence.
- Mathnerd314 10y agohttps://xkcd.com/311/ https://xkcd.com/311/ More budget = more action scenes = less dialogue In the far future, special effects alone might not suffice to sell films, but for now it's enough. The other trend to consider is films lengthening; there are multi-part series and also the Netflix streaming model. A 6-hour film can maintain the same (high) action-to-dialogue ratio but still have room for a plot.
- WalterBright 10y agoThe older I get, the more action sequences and special effects bore me. But dialog and situation driven plots, like Primer and House of Cards, are very interesting.
- alixaxel 10y agoInteresting. Resembles MinSpeak in a lot of ways.
- smikhanov 10y agoDialogue is now a playing field of TV series. In Mad Men, for example, all they do is talk all the time. Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Girls and other similar shows are very dialogue-heavy. Add to that what most established mainstream film directors (Fincher, Soderbergh etc) say about TV series: "Feature-length films are not relevant and TV is where most of the development happens in this sector of art" (something I personally don't think is true) and you get the drift.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pluma 10y agoI wonder what those stats would look like for 1980s and 1990s action movies (e.g. anything with Schwarzenegger in it). I severely doubt the phenomenon is new and I think it's more the author trying to make a point by cherry-picking from already rather "silent" genres than analysing a general trend.
- Freak_NL 10y ago> (e.g. anything with Schwarzenegger in it). I can vividly imagine Hollywood directors ordering their script writers to aggressively trim any dialogue spoken by a Schwarzenegger or a Stallone to one-liners and grunts after actually viewing the first couple of test shots.
- Grue3 10y agoAnd yet everyone remembers "I'll be back", or "Hasta la vista, baby!". Any memorable lines from recent movies? I can only come up with ironic memes like Bane crashing the plane with no survivors from The Dark Knight Rises.
- icebraining 10y ago"Why so serious?"
- Grue3 10y ago"It's simple, we kill the Batman".
- summerdown2 10y agoI think this might just come down to a difference in directors. A few years ago, when Aaron Sorkin and Joss Whedon were making blockbusters, no-one would have complained about the lack of dialogue. Certainly I can remember lines from Whedon's Avengers film, such as: "Puny God" and "That's my secret, Cap. I'm always angry." and of course: "It's good to meet you, Dr. Banner. Your work on anti-electron collisions is unparalleled. And I'm a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster." More here: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Avengers_(2012_film) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Avengers_(2012_film)
- skywhopper 10y agoThe international marketing considerations are interesting. But the assertions about The Kids These Days are baseless. Instagram and Snapchat are mostly visual forms of communication, sure, but meanwhile, texting is as popular as ever, the fan fiction community provides a huge dynamic workshop where aspiring writers hone their craft and avid readers learn all about tropes and are encouraged to critically analyze what they're reading, and when teenagers get together in real life, they talk just as much as they ever did. Recent trends in language change are being driven by this new generation, and it's exciting to watch it happen. The Kids These Days are alright.
- FeepingCreature 10y agoXKCD did it also. https://xkcd.com/1414/ https://xkcd.com/1414/ The generation that grew up with the internet is not gonna be bad at writing. Videos are great, but text still rules.
- bogomipz 10y agoThe Guardian's take is interesting but I don't think the app economy is driving such a trend. There's been a fundamental shift in movie making in Hollywood. This was precipitated by the loss of the Blue Ray and DVD market on which they could always depend for additional revenue stream. Often times a very lucrative one for a popular movie and $40 price point. With the loss of this revenue stream Hollywood seems to be intent on movies that are as universally appealing as possible. And lack of dialogue furthers that end. It's easy to dispense with dialogue if you are filling that void with shooting, explosions, car crashing and gratuitous violence. For a different take on lack of dialogue, a highly recommend Robert Redford in "All is Lost." A a beautiful and completely compelling movie with no dialogue, and a single actor and a single setting. Of course Hollywood didn't finance this film and it takes an extraordinary actor to pull this off.
- icebraining 10y agoThere's also Essential Killing, another movie with barely any dialogue (maybe four sentences, and none by the protagonist, played by Vicent Gallo).