Vantage Point

(Blog post 5 ~ Question 3 )

This weekend I went out and saw the movie Vantage Point with a good friend of mine and when I came home to work on my blog I couldn’t help but connect the two together because Vantage Point is exactly what the book is talking about.

First I’ll sum up a little bit of Vantage Point. It’s a high octane action movie about different people’s views, vantage points, of the shooting of the president in Spain. You get to see the story in the eyes of a FBI guard, a tourist, the terrorist organization and someone completely unrelated to the whole event. I don’t know why his view was important but it was just thrown in there for some reason. About 1/3 of the movie is a car chase and there are explosions covered from every angle possible. Sound interesting? Hate to disappoint you, but it was a snooze fest. In fact, the guy behind me actually fell asleep and was snoring quite loudly through the majority of the movie. Is this really “what the people want?” I don’t think so at all. But, like the book said, it’s a lot easier to make this sort of movie and release it globally. You don’t need a translation for an explosion or are car chase, but in today’s world that isn’t engaging enough.

Even though I had to sit through that boring movie, I’m glad that I was there in that theater reacting with the rest of the audience to what we were watching. I think that in other theaters people were having the same reactions and soon I hope that it will start reflecting in box office sales. We, as an audience and a people, are looking for more than just an explosion or car chase or gun fight in films now days. The audience is craving story and substance and characterization and if a movie, TV show or story doesn’t have it then it is going to fail. It’s good to know that our society is more intelligent than that.