What makes a great story? Why Star Wars is better than Avatar?

It's been a whole month since my last post...that speaks volumes about the amount of free-time I have.

Work commitments have been piling up, and organizing a wedding isn't a walk in the park. Just the other day, I went to Ikea which doesn't sound like much until you understand that I get a headache when I shop too long. Any shopping complex that requires a map to navigate is too big for my liking, and it's a great irony of nature that my fiancee can't get from Shah Alam to Klang without the GPS turned on, but can navigate this maze of Ikea which I'm sure was created by an Evil Swedish King intent on making me look foolish.

Between now and then I've watched Saving Private Ryan (I never remembered Vin Diesel in it), Das Untergang , GoodFellas, The Good The Bad and The Ugly , Sinonmbre and two episodes of Star Wars. I also managed to watch the new Toy Story 3 (which is the best Pixar Cartoon EVER) I wondered why something like Star Wars (the original trilogy) outranks Avatar which has so much more vivid Graphics and hyper-realistic effects?

Here's why:

I've always wondered what makes a good story, why some movies seem to succeed while others don't. It's not a straight forward formula, but I do know why movies succeed. Most of the movies I watched introduced to me a new world of fascination and wonder. Star Wars is obvious, it's a whole new Galaxy, it's a whole new re-imagination of reality same goes for Avater, but even the other movies introduce us to worlds we don't know about.

Saving Private Ryan showcased the lives of standard American GIs running into Paris shortly after D-Day, it's a story or reluctant soldiers marching into a mission they never truly believed in. In the end Tom Hanks explained that they just do what they're told so that they can go back home, the soldiers mission is not to kill the enemy, a soldiers mission is to go back home.Fantastic..all 3 hours of it.

Das Untergang, was the flipside of it all. It reveals Hitlers last days to us, as the allies close their grip on Berlin and how Joseph Groebbels refuses to leave the Fuhrer and kills his children to avoid capture. It's just 2 hours of raw emotion, revealing a world we never considered exist, asking the question of "Was Hitler Human?" .

GoodFellas is an biography of a wise-guy, a gangster. It's a world where killing isn't unusual and Gangsters using connections and fear to get what they want. It's a great show made better by great acting, but the story, the story of gangsters and how even though they're criminals...they're the heroes in the movies. Gangster movies are strange in that they make us love the 'bad-guys' they make us understand why they became gangsters, they make us love their arrogance and wish we were like them.

The Good The Bad and The Ugly isn't an out-an-out Western. Set during the American Civil War, Clint Eastwood acts as blond cowboy venturing in search of gold. It's a great movie, and like all Westerns involves a lot of shooting and riding. I don't know why we love Westerns, I guess we love to live in a world of no rules, and every man fended for himself.

Either way, unless you're a Jedi Knight, a Cowboy in the wild west, a Gangster or a Soldier in war, these movies offered a glimpse into worlds we can only imagine. Worlds we're probably not going to experience in real life. It offers an escape from the drudgery of 9-to-5 jobs and normal 'ordinary' lives we lead. We all crave the excitement of war, or a fight, we crave to be the hero or to have one. Each story reveals new worlds with unlimited possibilities to us, each one brings something new. I call this the landscape of the story, and while it's possible to create great stories with normal landscapes (of office workers in 9-to-5 jobs), a landscape helps captivate our imagination and getting us to pay attention, sometimes the landscape is the story.

Peeling away the landscapes of the stories reveal great depth (all great movies have this), but the landscapes they have are equally important. It's impossible to separate the landscape from the story, a story of boy who fights an entire war against his father is great, but would Star Wars have made it to where it is, without things like "The Force" or "Light-sabres" or "Jedi Knights" or "Hans Sole"..and Darth Vader?

Take Avatar for instance, while the imagery was breath-taking and the landscapes were great, the story itself lacked any depth. It was monotonous, it was single dimensioned, there was no twist, no extra layers...you could predict the ending half way through the movie, you couldn't have predicted "No Luke, I am your father". 

That's why Avatar is in the list, that even though it lacked any REAL story-telling depth, the story was in the landscape. The landscape was captivating enough to hold our imaginations,it held us in as they explained a story of Man going to war in far-away planet against Aliens who download and upload content into their planet. It's amazing, and it can create a movie.

However, having just a pretty landscape isn't the story in itself. It merely creates a condition for a great story... that's where Star Wars has the edge on Avatar, and that's why it's higher on the list.

Next is the characters, while you remember Darth Vader, and Hans Solo, the Skywalkers, can you name the guys from Avatar? But that's for a later post. 

That's my 2 cents. Don't spend it all in one place