Writing screenplays that don't annoy people

A couple of weeks ago I went to see Aeon Flux with my friend Ellie, who is a microbiologist molecular biologist. I enjoyed it fairly well; it had Charlize Theron being athletic in tight-fitting clothes, and the scenery and set dressing were very pretty. You will note that I had somewhat low expectations of the film. A couple of weeks before, we had gone to see Underworld Evolution, with about the same expectations, and both enjoyed it just as well.

Aeon Flux, on the other hand, annoyed Ellie immensely. (There follows a major plot spoiler but if that kind of thing matters to you you shouldn't be watching such films) Everyone in the society of Aeon Flux is cloned but they don't know it and they are inheriting subliminal memories from their originals, which are beginning to destroy the society. Ellie's peeve is obvious; cloning can't possibly have that effect. Her other peeve is that there is no film that involves cloning that doesn't include this memory inheritance trope.

I was highly amused. Last year Ellie had been sarcastic about my complaint that the cosmology of Serenity is just as ludicrous, and we agreed that everyone has their hot button for accuracy. It turns out that it isn't just science that you can get sufficiently wrong that people will complain.

I go to a screenwriting group run by a script editor in BBC Scotland, and we were looking at a proposal that she had submitted for Sea of Souls, and the producer's comments on the treatment. It involved a fantasy effect that she had coming about by shamanic means and eruditorum, who knows quite a lot about shamanism, really wan't happy about it. I also wasn't happy about the police procedure that she had described. She had quite different reactions to the two complaints. Regarding the police procedure, she intends to quiz me about how it is supposed to work, because I used to do forensics. Regarding shamanism, she said, in effect, 'Oh, well, it's fantasy and we only need a hand-waving explanation; this will do just as well as any other.'

I didn't push the point, but it seems to me that this is one of the reasons that SF and to some extent fantasy are so generally dire on the small and big screen. I have more thinking to do about it, but my first impression is that because SF and fantasy are not real, 'you can just make it up', whereas police procedure is something systematic that is amenable to research. This is not to say that CSI is any more accurate than Buffy. But I think you should have some kind of framework to what is happening, either science, or theology, or procedure, or what I called a 'unified theory of weirdness' when I was talking about the thing to Gary Gibson, who is also in the group. (Gary was delighted with that - he said he's going to use it as his blog name.) This is what made the X-Files so good initially, and why it sucked so much later on when they threw out their background framework in favour of the kitchen sink approach.

My second impression is that because television and film people tend to be arts and drama types, how something looks and plays is a lot higher priority than whether or not it is correct, as again evinced by CSI. Because of this I think there is a certain lack of respect for anyone who thinks that accuracy or consistency actually matters, which is odd because if you present them with a character progression that isn't plausible they will tell you in detail bordering on anal why it is wrong.

My third impression is that most media people, including many who produce SF, don't get SF. I've read film reviews that regarded Gattaca as a so-so family drama tarted up with extraneous futurism. Gary got to the short list of Tartan Shorts last year with a SFnal story and the panel, in discussing it with him, tried to strip it of all the SFnal elements. The concept of idea as character is one that they either haven't come across or don't give any credence to, as is using character and drama to explore an idea.

With Aeon Flux and Serenity, most of the money and time went into special effects and post-production, and I'm pretty sure that nobody involved would have had any kind of scientific background. Would it have mattered if they had, and particularly, had some say in what went into the films? To a certain extent it wouldn't. They were both gung-ho action films and the important parts were the chase sequences, fights and explosions. But if that's the level of attention to consistency that SF is saddled with in film and TV, then it makes more thoughtful stuff so much harder to get produced.