Luc Besson's Valerian doesn't follow the basic storytelling concept of "show, don't tell" - General

My biggest issue with the scene is that that MASSIVE orbital city only has a population of 30 million. Tokyo alone has 37 million people. This place should have many many more.

[QUOTE=DiBBs27;53097904]Constant narration in the way that is shown in this clip is extremely tacky. Show don't tell applies here. The fact that the writers tried to cram an entire setting into a scene of just a couple of minutes, it really destroys the sense of adventure and discovery in the film by just labeling and making statistics everything right off the bat.[/QUOTE] Not to mention it's a hugely missed opportunity. When a character goes on a ramble about exposition it could just as well be showed in visual through flashbacks and cutaways. Watching some character talk for 5+ minutes is boring. [QUOTE=DiBBs27;53097904]Imagine if starwars started rattling off all the planets, species, the names of all the jedi, what the different kind of imperial ships were called, etc. that where going to be featured in the films right off the bat in a new hope. It would look just as stupid as the above scene did.[/QUOTE] Allow me to introduce you to the Extended Universe, a strange place where Vader's suit has a fucking model number and instruction manual :vs:

As someone who was unfamiliar with the comics and only watched this movie for the first time yesterday, it was okay I guess. The casting was awful to be sure, but the stuff going on around their flimsy personal plot was at least enjoyable to watch. I think the exposition in the scene in the OP could have been handled during the chase scene, with the military guys on the comms explaining to Valerian what he was about to charge into during that scene where he was smashing through all the walls, or warning him not to fire on certain things when he was chasing the ship.

[QUOTE=EnlightenDead;53097871]Do you have anything to actually back this up because Show Don't Tell has been a writing technique for a lot longer than the 50s.[/QUOTE] There is actually a good amount of evidence in cases where show don’t tell isn’t the smartest idea when making a film. Case in point for the film Persona, if the movie followed the show don’t tell format, the film wouldn’t even work as a whole. Following stuff by the book is silly considering the French new wave scene broke a lot of the rules we had for movies prior to the 60’s. [media]https://youtu.be/NaTOpzYtV2I[/media] [editline]4th February 2018[/editline] Oh yeah, and the entire Before trilogy pretty much squashed the philosophy of show, don’t tell. Visual storytelling is obviously something I also prefer, but it’s short sighted to assume every movie needs to follow that concept, a good film should challenge the audience in many ways and bring something new to the table. I haven’t seen Valerian, but the movie looks like shit and honestly removing the dialogue does not fix that jumbled mess of a scene.

The big problem with Valerian is that it has a huge world it wants to tell us everything about without actually investing in the time to do so. Well, that and the fact that both our leads are about as expressive as a wall. Fucking Kit Harington looks Shakespearean next to these two dolts.

Exposition really isn't inherently bad. I mean don't forget that literally every Star Wars movie starts with a big scroll of expository text, which isn't even put into context in the setting. It's literally just text floating in space and it's the absolute first thing you see in every one of the movies. This is not a bad movie simply because its tells instead of showing. Almost every movie does that, almost every movie has exposition. This scene is bad because its completely pointless exposition presented in a really lame and boring way that drags on for way too long and happens far too early in the movie, before you've gotten invested in the world. It's bad because it's bad exposition, not because exposition is bad.

Also to add more context to my previous post because I feel like others will misunderstand, what makes for good direction in films is if you hit a balance of showing and telling. I prefer show, don’t tell, but I prefer a combination of both if the director is competent enough to be able to pull that off.

[QUOTE=VagueWisdom;53107085]There is actually a good amount of evidence in cases where show don’t tell isn’t the smartest idea when making a film. Case in point for the film Persona, if the movie followed the show don’t tell format, the film wouldn’t even work as a whole. Following stuff by the book is silly considering the French new wave scene broke a lot of the rules we had for movies prior to the 60’s. [media]https://youtu.be/NaTOpzYtV2I[/media] [editline]4th February 2018[/editline] Oh yeah, and the entire Before trilogy pretty much squashed the philosophy of show, don’t tell. Visual storytelling is obviously something I also prefer, but it’s short sighted to assume every movie needs to follow that concept, a good film should challenge the audience in many ways and bring something new to the table. I haven’t seen Valerian, but the movie looks like shit and honestly removing the dialogue does not fix that jumbled mess of a scene.[/QUOTE] "Show, don't tell" is not exclusively about visuals vs. writing. It doesn't [I]literally[/I] mean "Show with scenes, don't tell through dialogue". Hell, it's a philosophy that originated in a medium that doesn't even have visuals to begin with, as the video states: [quote]Although the phrase 'show, don't tell' has been embodied by cinema, its soul lies in literature. Authors insisted on making the readers experience the narrative, by emphasizing actions, and feelings, rather than with superfluous adjectives, and heavy-handed exposition.[/quote] [img]https://puu.sh/zh7jm/bbd48af91f.jpg[/img] He does go on to bring up the visuals-dialogue dichotomy in the very next line, but that is only one meaning of the concept. It's just so common for filmmakers to convey meaning badly, by relying on characters who will describe things outright (common, in big part, due to film's nature as a medium that starts on paper, and is then transferred to the screen), that, despite the literal meaning of the phrase not conveying its full scope, it's still a very useful and applicable definition. In reality, "Show, don't tell" means nothing more than "Make things interesting, and don't be blatant." Say you're given a script for an action movie. In this scene, retired Spec Ops agents Jawline Jones and Hunko McBrown are at a bar, looking to recruit another pair of biceps. "Why did you bring us here, Jones?", asks McBrown, to which Jones replies by pointing at a wrestler-turned-actor who is currently suplexing a staff member. "That's the toughest guy I know" That's flat, generic, and uninteresting in every way. You could try to apply "Show, don't tell" to this scene by removing Jones' line, and just showing the bar fight. But that's not particularly interesting either. If, however, you tried to have the wrestler comically barging into the conversation, with an anecdote about himself before McBrown is even done asking why they're there, that would still be "Show, don't tell". The point of the phrase is to make you find more entertaining ways to convey the meaning you want, not to always reduce a scene to its visuals or discourage the use of dialogue.

[QUOTE=Zukriuchen;53109787]"Show, don't tell" is not exclusively about visuals vs. writing. It doesn't [I]literally[/I] mean "Show with scenes, don't tell through dialogue". Hell, it's a philosophy that originated in a medium that doesn't even have visuals to begin with, as the video states: [img]https://puu.sh/zh7jm/bbd48af91f.jpg[/img] He does go on to bring up the visuals-dialogue dichotomy in the very next line, but that is only one meaning of the concept. It's just so common for filmmakers to convey meaning badly, by relying on characters who will describe things outright (common, in big part, due to film's nature as a medium that starts on paper, and is then transferred to the screen), that, despite the literal meaning of the phrase not conveying its full scope, it's still a very useful and applicable definition. In reality, "Show, don't tell" means nothing more than "Make things interesting, and don't be blatant." Say you're given a script for an action movie. In this scene, retired Spec Ops agents Jawline Jones and Hunko McBrown are at a bar, looking to recruit another pair of biceps. "Why did you bring us here, Jones?", asks McBrown, to which Jones replies by pointing at a wrestler-turned-actor who is currently suplexing a staff member. "That's the toughest guy I know" That's flat, generic, and uninteresting in every way. You could try to apply "Show, don't tell" to this scene by removing Jones' line, and just showing the bar fight. But that's not particularly interesting either. If, however, you tried to have the wrestler comically barging into the conversation, with an anecdote about himself before McBrown is even done asking why they're there, that would still be "Show, don't tell". The point of the phrase is to make you find more entertaining ways to convey the meaning you want, not to always reduce a scene to its visuals or discourage the use of dialogue.[/QUOTE] Oh no, that was the point I was trying to communicate, but it seemed as if people were trying to enforce the whole idea of the philosophy to an extreme degree from the vibe of it. Admittedly I didn’t communicate it well enough and for that I apologize, it’s just that it should be a balance rather than one or the other. [editline]5th February 2018[/editline] That’s also why I made another post below the original to add more context so people didn’t misinterpret what I meant.

man, this conversation is reminding me of a nerdwriter video i saw forever ago, talking about Ghost in the Shell and it's 2 minute long scene just showing the world and teaching the viewer about it through these shots. [media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXTnl1FVFBw[/media]