One Big Leap

I use the phrase One Big Leap a lot when talking about movies. Especially when discussing what didn't work. I'm getting tired of explaining it every time, so I'll explain it here.

"One Big Leap" refers to the one big leap of faith that I'll give a movie when I'm watching it. After that leap, it needs to make sense. This could also be looked at as a movie following internal logic. Given the world of the story, does everything else make sense? It's not a difficult concept and I use it as a blanket term. I think it's easier to explain with a couple examples.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 fails pretty miserably at this. Obviously, it's one big leap to say that there's a world where heroes and villains like Spider-Man can exist. Given that, there's no reason why in the city of New York every major character happens to know each other. They need to lay more pipe for, say Gwen to just happen to date Spider-Man and know Electro personally from work.

Serendipity doesn't actually fail the test in my mind. The whole point of that movie is that Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack are fated to be reunited, so all the close calls and near misses are tied to the same big leap. If there was no talk of destiny or chance in the movie, then it would fail badly due to so many contrivances for them not to meet again until the end.

Coincidence, contrivance, and misunderstanding are all things that build up. If the movie requires a character's cell phone battery to die at the worst time, that's fine. If the movie requires two unconnected characters to lose their phones in order to setup a meet-cute (I'm looking at you, Before We Go), that's less acceptable.

Movies that rely on characters repeatedly phrasing something in a way that no human talks in order to keep a miscommunication going that the rest of the movie hinges on is bad writing. That fails.

I hope that explains what I mean. One big leap is a shorthand for saying "I don't like bad writing". This isn't an exact science either. Most movies have small gaffs. Look at something like Superbad. Trying to track Officers Michaels and Slater's timeline working together makes no sense. None of that is important to the plot, so I don't really care.

If I can remember to, I'll keep a log of any time I run into this in movies from now on.