When I watched Liam Neeson face his ex-wife and children in a sullen manner, and talked about his love for his daughter, he almost thought he had chosen the wrong family movie, but when he was about to adjust his expectations, he watched him again. When I was alone in the kidnapper's lair, I was instantly impressed by the screenwriter's ingenious design and the director's rhythm. The strong internal drive of blood has inspired the amazing energy of this seemingly cowardly man. With the resourcefulness, skill and kung fu accumulated over the years, the former agent has turned Paris into a black and white. Punched through the screen.
This is a very simple story. It is just family affection and crisis. The wonderful handling of these two basic points makes it destined to be fascinating. These two elements must be combined skillfully. If you only care about family affection, it will become a tear-jerking emotional drama. Rescue has become a dazzling action movie that is only looking for. They continue on Taken 2 and 3. The two main dishes cooked have not changed. The combination can still arouse the original desire of diners, but the heat of the big meal is no longer accurate, so that the taste becomes weak.
I can't help comparing the opening chapters of Taken and Taken3. Looking at the rhythm and direction of these two elements in the same series of movies, we can understand the classic model of laying out family lines.
In the first 5 minutes, by laying out the protagonist's first time to attend his daughter's birthday party after many years, not only the family relationship system is clearly explained, but also the amount of information is huge, including character, motivation and influence on the plot. :
1. Relationship overview: The man who lives alone is sober while watching his daughter's 5-year-old birthday video alone - his feelings for her daughter are still the same as when he was still with her when she was 5 years old, and he feels guilty for missing her daughter's growth. Heartache;
2. Emotional suspense: what is the gift he is carefully preparing? After going to the store many times, he finally placed an order to buy an outdated karaoke machine - he is delicate, melancholy, and his thoughts are a bit outdated, but he does not forget to support his daughter dream;
3. Relational conflict: A conversation with the security guard and his ex-wife when he came to the party in the lively luxury garden villa - he is no longer a guardian, and his ex-wife is still dissatisfied and despised by him, and hopes that he will keep a distance from his daughter, but he is stubborn She insists on hand-delivering gifts, opening gifts on the spot, and taking pictures with amateur cameras. Her daughter has grown up, but she is still cute in the eyes of her father. There is still an exclusive secret between them: her daughter wants to be a singer.
4. Emotional setbacks: But these efforts were all in vain at once. The tall black horse gift from the stepfather instantly attracted the daughter to cheer and turn away. The carefully selected small gifts were put aside, and the stepfather said, "She No longer a little girl" and made up for it again - he could no longer meet his daughter's material needs for her father.
5. Emotional closure: Although his momentum has taken a turn for the worse, he ignored the embarrassment and smiled knowingly after pasting the newly developed photo on his daughter's birthday record - even if his daughter made him feel sad, he was still regarded as a treasure. On his birthday, he completed the task given to himself.
Even if it starts with the trivial history of the family, the rhythm is fast, and it is completed in one go. At the same time, the emotions are reversed several times, and the tone is set: he will face all the difficulties that will be born because of his daughter, alone and tragically.
After that, the family line still revolves around her daughter - after retiring, she settled in the local area in order to repair the relationship with her daughter; she was unwilling to find an ordinary job to make a living, but accepted a security job in a concert in order to meet her daughter's favorite singer; reluctantly agreed with her daughter He went to Paris but asked to inform him at any time and sent his daughter to leave in person; he did not receive a call from his daughter as agreed and became nervous to ask his ex-wife... After a series of plots, the father's affection for his daughter continued to strengthen until the daughter sent a cry for help around 25 minutes into the film. A powerful father finally stood up and suppressed the aura of his ex-wife and stepfather. A large number of family relationships make up one-third of the entire film. It is natural to advance layer by layer, and the emotions come naturally and produce a sense of drama of reversal. While forming a strong resonance with the audience, it is adrenaline for him to become a heroic agent and exotic hand-to-hand racing. Greatly increased, and finally settled on the daughter's rescue of the family reunion, which earned the audience tears and satisfaction.
As for the opening scene of 3, because it already has a rich history, the screenwriter defaulted that the audience knew everything, so they did not elaborate the emotional foreshadowing. Five minutes before the beginning of the chapter, I will show off the Russian gangsters behind the scenes, which is undoubtedly a compromise - going straight to the family chapter is completely like 1, it will seem nothing new, and the evil forces brought in first will disrupt the classic rhythm. . So when I finally returned to the family chapter familiar to the audience, I still used birthday stalks to evoke memories. Let's take a look at the amount of information this time:
1. Relationship overview: The choice of a giant doll as a gift is more inappropriate than the previous karaoke machine - he is reluctant to admit the fact that his daughter has grown up.
2. Relationship contradiction: I don't know that my daughter is about to become a mother, but she still mentions having a child - the daughter is unsure and neglects him, making him embarrassed.
3. Emotional setback: The boyfriend appeared, interrupted the father-daughter reunion, and asked about the giant panda who broke into the two-person world-he is no longer possessed by his stepfather, but faces a new crisis: possessed by his boyfriend and his daughter The only intimacy, he became an intruder.
4. Emotional closure: The boyfriend said that his daughter was following the rules, and she had to buy peach yogurt in the fourth row of the refrigerator every day—it was a comfort for her daughter to continue her character, and the speaker had no intention of listening. He remembered this rule and used it later. It arranges a meeting.
This family line is still complete, but it lacks suspense, the setbacks are not strong enough, and the emotional closure is hastily. After that, he began to meet his ex-wife to continue the relationship, and then negotiated an adult relationship with his ex-wife's husband. At this time, the daughter is no longer there. is what drives the story.
Since then, the family relationship has changed from a father-daughter relationship to a husband-and-wife relationship. At 14 minutes, the daughter was entangled in whether to talk about the pregnancy. The rhythm was obviously chaotic. It has been 20 minutes, and the husband and wife relationship has not been fully demonstrated. A reversal event occurs. Because there is no such a foreshadowing of the relationship with the ex-wife, the death of the ex-wife is as confusing as the sudden insertion of the plot at the beginning of the film. Her death is to get Liam Neeson into trouble, and the role of her daughter in the reversal of the incident is also It was only the person the father would definitely contact and became the target of police surveillance. At the end, the emotional line settled on the daughter's pregnancy. It seemed to echo the beginning, but in fact it had nothing to do with the reversal incident. The ex-wife seemed to have died in vain. As light as a feather. The lack of moving emotions as support makes the second half of the fight scene degenerate into pure fight scene.
"Continuation is not as good as before" is the law, and it is precisely the best way to show the difference in the script. The family line is fragmented, and even if the protagonist faces a crisis, it is difficult to form a distinct drama. 1 It's not that there is no love between husband and wife. After the two faced the kidnapping of their daughter together, the feeling of dependence and being depended on is still sincere, but it is not the emotion that promotes the plot. In 3rd, the ex-wife became the motive for the protagonist to fall into crisis. Not only did he not set the stage, but also let her die directly, which is really not a good idea.
The failure of this trick is not because the relationship between husband and wife is not as deep as the relationship between father and daughter. Russell Crowe's love for his wife in "Three Days of Dangerous Love" only showed for 7 minutes at the beginning, plain but highly concentrated, and continued to be wronged wife after that The appeal to the court continued to show that in the 24th minute of the film after the failure of the final appeal, the moment when the decision to take his wife to escape from prison broke out-the laying out of the family line accounted for about one-fifth, and also interspersed with the protagonist and his son and father. The parallel is not contradictory and makes the theme of "family together" richer and more moving.
It is not only action movies that need to use family affection as a foundation. In the hard sci-fi film "Interstellar", the profound father-daughter relationship also occupies most of the pages before the protagonist goes to heaven, and runs through it, and finally ends at the end of the film, and has a lot of children and grandchildren. The daughter finally saw her father, whose face had not changed, came back to meet her, and each fulfilled the emotional appeal when the father and daughter were separated.
There are many more examples. Needless to say, Hollywood, which is rising day by day, can handle scripts with more than two elements with ease, such as "Flying the Taiji Flag" brotherhood + war, "Old Boy" father-daughter relationship + thriller, "Horror Live" couples Love + crime. On the other hand, many films and plays in the domestic market can be considered successful if they can present an element brilliantly. "Family affection" can have a chemical reaction with almost all types, because it is the purest emotion of human beings, and it can resonate everywhere, and how to deal with this clue can see the gap, including the rhythm, authenticity, and delicacy of the layout. Degree, everything is the key that the screenwriter needs to carefully polish. (The author of this article is Li Lin: a young writer, screenwriter, living in Beijing. Because of his Scorpio background, he really loves black classical stories and chapters. In the novel "Talented Clothing", after working in Internet startups and Fortune 500 companies, I experienced the fascinating charm of urban life, began to explore the inexhaustible source of stories in modern life, and turned from novels to film and television script creation.)
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