What Makes a Movie Great?

The Talented Mr. Ripley

In my opinion there are several factors that make up a movie. They are characterization, plot, acting, dialogue, direction and effects/setting. Every movie contains to some extent all of these. What makes a movie bad is when one or more of the above categories fails.

To me, the most important part of a movie is characterization. What I mean by that is there has to be someone in the movie that I like or at least root for to accomplish something; get the girl, win the big game, beat up the bad guy....etc. A movie has no heart when there is no one to like in it. The Talented Mr Ripley is a good example. Matt Damon play a psycho, Jude Law plays a snob and Gwyneth Paltrow's character is a naive spoiled rich girl. No one to really care for. The Godfather is a great example of the opposite. This family of gangsters kill people and have people killed on a regular basis. Yet they have such love and loyalty to each other that you can't help but be drawn into them. You like them even though they are vastly flawed.

You probably would think that plot would be most important to a movie. However, I will again point to The Talented Mr Ripley. It has a very good plot, but without a likable character the movie cannot rise to greatness. Think of The Big Chill which had a very simple plot but was very big on characterization. Now think of The Godfather which has both.

Dialogue is what makes a movie memorable. Special effects outdate. Scary scenes get copied and thus lose there impact. But dialogue is always there as fresh as it always was. Look at all the classic movies. They all have memorable lines. "Frankly my dear I don't give damn", "Heres looking at you", "I'l be back", "I'm king of the world!", "May the force be with you". I bet you were able to name every movie those lines came from.

Direction/Editing in my opinion is next in importance. This is how the movie looks. The constant tan look to everything in The Godfather, or the shadows of Citizen Kane What scenes we have to look at, and how. The brilliant desert shot of the sun on the sand in Lawrence Of Arabia. The camera moving from the inquiring Scarlett down the staircase to the leering Rhett. However, one flaw I find very annoying is when a scene is put into a film erroneously. In Doc Hollywood there is a nude scene that is so out of place in this otherwise family film. They do not even swear in this movie. The girl skinny dips in front of the 'Doc',and then plays hard to get during the rest of the film. The scene contradicts the entire film. This is not Basic Instinct, in which nudity was a co-star.

Acting falls short of direction because lousy acting can be directed around. Notice how the camera stays on Tom Hanks in scenes where Matt Damon is doing the talking in Saving Private Ryan. Great acting adds to a film when you realize you are not looking at an actor but a character. Robert Downey Jr did an incredible job of acting in Chaplin. He was impersonating one of the most famous images of the American cinema, and he pulled it off. The accent, the movement and the emotion. You watch the film as if it is Charlie Chaplin.

Special effects and settings are like frosting on the cake. If the cake is tasteless, the frosting won't make any difference. But if the cake is delicious than the frosting will make it all the better. Special effects definitely were a plus in Titanic. It raised the film above being just a tragic love story. Money and publicity was put into the special effects of Battle Field Earth. However, that was one tasteless cake. The same can be said of settings. The Talented Mr Ripley and The Sound Of Music both were films where the setting dominate several scenes and add directly to the plot.

Now, as you have probably noticed, I have not yet spoke of movie stars. The reason I have not is because they are the least important ingredient in making a movie good. They are very important in the publicity and marketing of the movie. But when it comes to the quality, a star guarantees nothing. The Blair Witch Project, most of The X-men, the cast of Star Wars, Jaws, and Vivien Leigh in Gone With The Wind were all fairly unknown before those films came out. Now you can argue it was the good casting that helped, but that is a moot point in that there is no way of determining it. So if you need a twenty-something, attractive female for a movie and the writing and direction is great then it really will not matter in terms of quality whether you hire Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta Jones, Angelina Jolie, Winona Ryder, Cameron Diaz or any other actress.

I guess the lesson here is that if producers and directors were more confident with their scripts they would not need a big name to 'save' the movie. But that is just in my opinion.