Damon Lindelof has copped to the notion that hiding Khan’s identity in the lead-up to Star Trek: Into Darkness was a mistake. Considering how big a part of that misdirection, deception and outright lying involved on that particular topic in the marketing and publicity for the film, that’s no small admission. But it raises the issue of how much of a movie the marketing should reveal and how much should be kept hidden.
The “DON’T SHOW ME SPOILERS” people are out in full force now that we’re just a few weeks out from the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the marketing is shifting into higher gears daily. Between the new TV spots that seem to pop every three days, the toy sets and children’s books that appear to offer additional, previously unknown details about the story, spoilers are harder and harder to avoid if you’re consuming any sort of media. Bryan Lowry at Variety goes down the road of The Empire Strikes Back and reminisces about how someone spoiled the “Vader is Luke’s father” twist for him ahead of seeing the movie. And J.J. Abrams has made comments about how he doesn’t want to reveal too much and ruin the movie for anyone.
I have a long-standing frustration with spoilers. The very people who cry about not wanting plot points ruined for them are often the same ones who share every leaked set photo, speculate about what each shot in a new trailer may mean and so on.
IF A MOVIE CAN’T HOLD UP WHEN YOU KNOW THE STORY, IT’S NOT THAT GOOD
More than that even is my belief that if a movie or TV show can’t hold up if you know every single twist and turn of the plot, it wasn’t a great movie to begin with. I get that the best experience of a movie or TV show is one that’s fresh and unblemished by fore-knowledge. But for me it comes down to my belief that plot twists are a kind of slight of hand that doesn’t impact the overall quality of a film.
Put it in terms of rewatchability. Is The Empire Strikes Back any less enjoyable the 25th (or 75th) time you watch it than it was the first, when presumably you were gobsmacked at Vader’s declaration and spent weeks debating with your friends whether he was telling the truth or not? And if it is, doesn’t that speak to the quality of the film overall, not the power and efficacy of a big “A HA!” moment as the story pulled the curtain away suddenly for a surprise reveal?
This also gets to my problems with the kind of lists that pop up in the wake of movies like Creed, where writers will instantly attempt to put that movie on a “definitive list” of the movies in a series based on quality. Those lists attempt to put a movie they’ve just seen on the same scale as a movie they’ve been living with, either directly or through the way it has permeated throughout the overall cultural landscape, for decades. That’s an unfair weighting for all movies. You can’t fairly rank a movie you’ve seen once alongside one you’ve seen multiple times. It just doesn’t work.
Let’s all agree that spoilers are here and are going to be what they’re going to be. And let’s ask ourselves if the damage they do to the enjoyment value of a movie is real or if the movie itself is flawed to begin with.
