This week at Sundance, a movie premiered that I was fortunate enough to see a month and a half ago: Frozen. It’s a great little film that builds tension through a realistic portrayal of ideas, putting its characters in a frightening, real-world situation. It’s about three kids who get stuck dangling on a ski lift above a slope that will be closed for the following week. Many of us have thought about that very scenario when we've ridden ski lifts in the past. I know I have. Well, they made a movie about it. The reason I mention all this is not to review the film – I’ll do that later – but rather to talk about a very strange phenomenon that this highlighted, something of a pet peeve of mine: people who think they’re smarter than the movie. You see, Frozen is the single most second-guessed movie I’ve seen in years, and listening to the people outside the theater was enough to make me want to pull my hair out.
The very worst thing you can do walking into a film is assume that you know more than the filmmakers do. It happens all the time, but it is a huge flaw with many critics and filmgoers. You see enough screwball antics in films that you begin to be able to call bullsh*t from a quarter-mile away. But far too many people allow their few successes to convince them that A) they are right a significant portion of the time and B) the filmmakers didn’t put any real time into their creation. The truth of the matter is that most of the time both assumptions are wrong. Recently I found myself walking out of Avatar into a gaggle of critics debating the various things the movie got “wrong.” Now let’s forget for a moment that Avatar is one of the most heavily researched films in history, with various physicists, geologists and biologists all writing about how amazed they are with the film's attention to detail when it came to scientific fact, from planetary orbit details to the fact that rock formations follow magnetic lines. Here were these critics arguing: “Really? A multimillion-dollar Avatar and they don’t have access to a GPS chip? I have GPS in my car, for crying out loud.” It stopped me in my tracks.
“Do you know how GPS works?” I asked.
“Well, yeah. I think so.” Said the critic.
“Really? That it involves several dozen satellites orbiting the Earth in medium orbit? And with only one real basecamp on Pandora, I’m guessing they haven’t begun dropping tens of millions of dollars on satellites so they can track the whereabouts of well-paid people on a hostile planet with no way home but to come back to camp?”
“Oh. Yeah. I didn’t think of that.” It goes without saying that this group of folks were the people that didn’t quite enjoy Avatar as much as everyone else.
Frozen, on the other hand, wasn’t as well researched as Cameron’s 12-year passion project, but it still was heavily researched. I talked to director Adam Green after the screening for some fact-checking. He told me there were two things they got wrong, which they did for artistic license. I won’t spoil them here, but neither was something people were complaining about. Everything had its reason and there were a number of technical advisors who helped keep the production on track. But that didn’t stop people from second-guessing and ultimately ruining their enjoyment of the film because their “knowledge” of the facts contradicted the film’s reality.
And that’s the real crime: People killed their enjoyment because they assumed at the outset that they were smarter than the film they were watching. Sometimes it's easy to deflate those egos and help recalibrate your friends; sometimes it’s not. I’m certainly not condoning “turning your brain off” (as the cliché goes) but sometimes you have to give the filmmakers a little credit. They spent a lot of time making that film. Oftentimes the people involved went to a lot of effort to get it right. Is the benefit of the doubt really too much to ask from an audience?