Last night I saw Zombieland, Hollywood’s latest foray into the ever-popular zombie genre. It’s a great movie – I’m a huge afficionado of the walking-corpse horror subset, from bona-fide classics such as Romero’s Dawn of the Dead to such Z-grade splatterfests as Troma’s hilariously awful Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (which, trivia fans, stars a pre-fame and spookily young Billy Bob Thornton). Zombieland is a welcome addition to the former category – it’s smart, funny and hugely enjoyable (any film that uses a banjo with deadly force and references Don Quixote gets my vote), but as for the script… well, Fellini it ain’t.
Naturally, I know it’s not supposed to be. And truth be told it’s only one part of the script that rankled and pulled me out of an otherwise seamless post-apocalyptic shotgun-a-thon. The characters are great – Woody Harrelson’s Tallahassee is easily the most wittily endearing zombie slayer since Bruce Campbell’s Ash – the dialogue’s spot-on and the story, while pretty thin on the ground, is more than made up for by the joyful, hyperkinetic pace. So what, I hear you cry, am I whining about?
That, my friends, would be signposting.
Signposting, otherwise known as seeding, is a narrative technique where pay-offs that occur later on in the plot are hinted at earlier, usually by some offhand snippet of dialogue or character quirk. Heck, even musical cues and careful shot choices can do it. In the hands of a master, this can be done with such nefarious skill that the audience doesn’t even know they’re being manipulated – a good example of this is the run-up to the twist at the end of Fight Club. But there’s an increasing trend in Hollywood to ante-up the signposts to the level of monstrous, Vegas-style neon billboards, and Zombieland contains, unfortunately, one of the most egregious examples that batters you around the head with all the crashing subtlety of a blood-spattered banjo.
I won’t ruin anything by letting you know what this particular narrative offence consists of. If you’ve seen the film you’ll know what I’m talking about, and if you haven’t, you’ll pick it up fairly quickly when you do. Not only does Hollywood seem to think that modern audiences are the kind of feckless cretins that need to be continually led by the nose, the particular piece of info in Zombieland is highlighted so frequently and blatantly that the pay-off, when it comes, is all but diminished.
None of us want a constant barrage of Finnegans Wake-style impenetrability in our films, but neither do we want moronic, step-by-step predictability. We’re not stupid – in fact, I’ll go out on a severed, undead limb and say that modern moviegoers are more clued in on the technicalities of narrative than ever before. There’s got to be middle ground. Confusing us can be awkward and often irritating, but there’s never an excuse for being patronising. Let’s enjoy the surprises as they come, and please, for the love of good storytelling, can we leave the signposting to the Department of Transport?
Meghan Walsh
2 years, 7 months ago
From my friend, Jer, as a comment to my googlereader share (the internets are complicated, no?):
This movie was like the epitome of mediocre, it wasn’t funny, wasn’t gory (ok it was sort of, but it was mostly black zombie puke and cutting away when woody uses hedge clippers? wtf), it was half assed and relied heavily on a celebrity cameo to inject humor into the stale plot. The sign posting was terrible, little girl can’t hit a target, woody tells her to exhale, hits target, later in the movie she’s missing left and right and lo and behold she tries it and it works. They focused on it like it was some big amazing plot point.
Land of the Dead was funnier (unintentionally), Dead Alive was way funnier, and Shaun of the Dead made this movie look like it was made by naked mole rats.
And I forgot evil dead 2/army of darkness, woody harrelson is no ash because he was invincible, ash wasn’t and more often than not screwed things up, that’s what made him so funny.