Christine Amsden

You’ve probably heard it before, but I want to share a recent reminder of how important it is to, “Show. Don’t Tell!”

This past weekend my husband and I watched the miniseries that began the first season of “Battlestar Galactica.” A number of our friends enjoy the show and as science fiction fans, we decided we should give such a popular show a chance. But the miniseries came very close to losing us. In the beginning, the enemies attack many human colony worlds with nuclear devices that kill countless millions. We see the explosions from space and hear about the disaster through radio communications, but we never get an up-close look at the disasters. We never see the people just before the first explosion hits or the mass hysteria after. We are kept at a distance and I can honestly say I have never been so bored watching millions of people die.

The miniseries did (just barely) manage to pique our interest at the end and we put the show on probation as we watched the next few episodes (which were also good, and we now plan to watch the show) but it got me thinking about the old writer’s advice that you hear so often that you might not even know what it means.

Showing means to put me in the middle of the action. It means that I want to see the details and really know what the characters are going through. I don’t want you to tell me that Susie is afraid. I want you to show Susie cowering in a bomb shelter with her mom, wondering if her father is dead, feeling the earth shake with multiple violent explosions. Show me that and you don’t have to tell me Susie is afraid — I’m afraid for her.

Tell means summarizing events or emotions, stating rather than evoking. It has its place in writing. We don’t usually need to follow characters around through every second of their day. They can usually use the toilet in private. They can fall asleep and wake up the next morning. At that point you can tell us that they fell asleep quickly or slept poorly.

I think telling is very good for tying together necessary gaps in the passage of time.

But what “Battlestar Galactica” did wrong, in my opinion, goes to the heart of what we mean by the old advice. When something is happening, make it happen. Make us live it with your characters. Get into the details, even if they hurt….no, especially if they hurt.

Painful.Now that I’ve summarized my movie-watching experience, I’ll get a little more specific.

I loved Spiderman 1 and 2. I was never a fan of the super-hero comics, but I have enjoyed many of the new super-her movies, and Spiderman was the best. The story was compelling and each of the first two movies brought together some added depth and meaning to tickle the imaginations of those of us interested in more than amazing computer effects and kick-butt action scenes. There was romance, a hero having to make sacrifices and hard choices, and a best friend turned enemy.

I eagerly anticipated Spiderman 3, which I expected to follow in the same vein. Boy, was I disappointed.

My husband and I actually left the movie with barely half an hour left to go. I never leave movies in the theatre. I would have left this one sooner, if it weren’t for the fact that I had enjoyed the first two so much and I kept hoping it would redeem itself.

We opened with some recapping and information dumping. Life is wonderful for Spiderman. He has everything he could possibly want in life. He’s going to propose to MJ.

Then we start setting up bad guys. Unfortunately, it’s plural, and none of them were well developed. Harry becomes the Green Goblin, of course, but this movie did not deepen the best friend turned enemy arc. All they did was give Harry some pretty darn convenient amnesia so they could rewind time and have him rediscover what he’d already found out, as if they could get the same reaction from the same revelation two movies in a row.

Enter Sandman, our next bad guy. I don’t know who he was in the comic books and I don’t really care, but in the movie he was a tender balance between unbelievable and corny. We are supposed to feel sorry for him because he has a sick daughter at home but it was a pretty underdeveloped situation, especially with how much was going on in the movie. Then came the unbelievable part — he falls into some physics experiment where the words “particle physics” were thrown in at random to try to make sense of how a machine could disintegrate a man and he could come back to life in the form of a sand monster. Yeah. Right. I mean, I managed to go ahead and suspend disbelief for the original spider bite and for Green Goblin’s strength experiment, and even for Professor Octavius’ mind-controlling AI, but this just stretched the limits of credulity a few notches too far. Maybe it would have helped if there was anything else compelling about the subplot. Maybe that was why I suspended disbelief before. Either way, I don’t buy it.

Then came dark Spiderman. A random blob of black stuff from space lands on Earth and follows him home, covering him in anger-enhancing parasites at just the right moment to disinterest me. Honestly, by the time that happened (at least an hour into the movie) I was already so bored I was ready to leave. I had hoped that Spiderman himself would have had something to do with turning evil — some human temptation — but it was not that eloquent. The black stuff gave him an excuse to act like an ass for a few minutes, pretending (incredibly unconvincingly) to be cool while, for some reason, women checked him out.

Finally, there was the photographer trying to get Peter Parker’s position at the Daily Bugle. I’m really not sure what to say about that one except — enough already! How many bad guys do we need in one movie?

Most of the movie was spent on the romance between Peter and MJ, though. That had its moments, but it was not the movie I went to see.

All in all, I checked my watch at least fifty times and finally tugged on my husband’s sleeve to whisper, “This is awful.” I was relieved that he agreed. He asked if I wanted to leave and I said yes, but still gave the movie another fifteen minutes before finally standing up. I was desperate for it to live up to the first two but in the end, could not bear to watch it spiral into oblivion. I therefore have no idea how the movie ends and frankly, I don’t care.

I highly recommend not watching this movie, especially if you liked the first two Spiderman flicks. It will disappoint.