Yet, when I heard that Vince Gilligan was making a sequel about Jesse Pinkman’s fate, I was thrilled, to say the least. Not because I cared about Jesse, but because Gilligan is one of my top 3 most favourite directors. Actually, top 2. Well, since Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s failure with “Wild Pear Tree”, Mr.Gilligan is my most favourite director. A kind that you’d queue up for hours and blindly throw your money at.

Now, the 2 hours of El Camino is over and I am not as enthusiastic as before.

El Camino is a finely directed and produced movie. It is thoroughly well-written, too. Murad argues that it does not contribute to the overall story line, but maybe it was never about the story line. I could easily write a dozen of very decent quotes from El Camino. People from all walks of life could talk about Jesse’s situation and decisions for hours. And that is the art that Gilligan delivers, which he usually magnificently weaves into a superb story line. So, no matter how perfect, the story line has always been secondary. Therefore, it could very well be that Gilligan didn’t seek to contribute to the overall story with El Camino, hence why he failed in that department (read Murad’s opinion on why and how he failed).

But this failure was not what made me uncomfortable watching Jesse driving off in Alaska and the credits rolling.

Let me go back to saying that Vince Gilligan is my favourite director and I adore his work like no one else’s. Every time I say this, tho, I pause for a second and think about Hancock.

Until now, that feature was his only mediocre work in the past two decades. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, as he was not the one who wrote the original script, it was his first feature, etc. But El Camino completed “the Gilligan puzzle” for me.

Vince Gilligan has a peculiar story-telling technique. He sets up the scene carefully and sweats every detail, gives us insight into the characters’ emotional situation, provides the necessary background (isn’t he big on flashbacks), and then triggers the action. No wonder that action ends up making perfect sense and leaving a lasting impact. And apart from being a genius writer and a skillful director, he needs one essential ingredient to achieve these – time. Which he usually has plenty of. Take Better Call Saul – four seasons in, and it is only just stepping into what the story is really about. Long story short, it is Gilligan’s signature to roll a slow introduction into the action.

He does not have that luxury in a feature film.

If you tried to elevator-pitch Breaking Bad, it would have sounded mediocre at best. Unlike Inception, Slumdog Millionaire, Catch Me If You Can, et. al. Yet, Breaking Bad is a masterpiece that made a bold mark in the history of cinematography. This paradox is rooted in the fact that its storyline is secondary. Thinking of El Camino, that is the one phrase that comes to my mind – an elevator pitch of upcoming series.

Murad said that El Camino felt like three movies squashed into one. I claim that each one of those three could be made into a season, especially considering Gilligan’s narration techniques. That’s exactly what I watched in those 2 hours of Netflixing – an abridged supercut of 3 seasons of a brilliant series that will never exist.

Going back to “the Gilligan puzzle” – the missing piece is his elevator-pitching skills.

Now that Jesse Pinkman sorted his vacuum cleaner, are we back to Saul Goodman’s path to his Hoover MaxExtract 60? I certainly hope so, and I want to see my favourite director back at doing what he does the best.

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The film begins with a dog running thru snow covered land of Antarctica. The second and you see a chopper in pursuit of the dog and guys in the chopper throwing hand grenades and shooting from sniper rifle at the dog. That’s it. For the next 5 minutes you’ll be wondering what the hell is going on. As well as the members of American research mission to whom the dog is running too. Of course, american prefer to shoot and then ask questions and next thing you know is exploded chopper and shot to death guys, who appear to be crewmembers of neighboring Norwegian base.

A perfect hook for the watcher. Now you are dying to know what was happening, why the norwegians were trying to kill the dog and why the dog is so quiet. So does the Americans. They fly to norwegian base, find it destroyed in fire and found out pieces of information about what’s happening. And of course, not only the information, but also the reason for the whole chaos.

via Case study 2. Run, puppy, run!.

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What you see is 30 minutes section with ape screams and classic music playing over flying objects in endless space. These 2 sequences boring at first, deliver everything that a viewer needs to know about the film. Pre-human monkeys fighting for the source of water and mysterious black monolith, transforming forever their lifes and perhaps serving as a jump-start to human evolution. And then thrown bone into the sky transforms into space station, in the infamous scene, which in return waltzes with the space ship approaching for docking followed by the masterpiece of Strauss – “The Blue Danube”.

That’s Kubrik’s magic, which he delivers with great passion and precision. Yes, it looks nice. But it is boring and it was supposed to be. That’s the reason it is so difficult to watch, as director wants you to relax, empty your stressful mind and just enjoy the beauty. And it occured to me that if you really know movies and movie theory you will appreciate the movie even more.

Nevertheless, I’d like to mention the way information is delivered to the viewer. After enduring 30 minutes of visual adventure, the director presents us with the main plot of the movie: send a space research unit to the Jupiter. There are no voiceovers, not even a single debriefing for researchers. What does Kubrik do? He shows a government official travelling to a space station for a secret meeting. Meanwhile having conversations with different people, we learn bit by bit the main background of the movie.

First he meets russian scientists, which ask him about the secrecy and the epydemic at American base. Then he enters the meeting and discuss the reason of secrecy with fellow government officials. Later on, on the 3rd chapter of the film, crew of Discovery mission is listening to the interview conducted by BBC with them and HAL-9000 supercomputer, where the information about the flight and the abilities of HAL are presented in very interesting manner.

That’s how viewer is finally presented with the information.

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So many times, you have said that film doesn’t meet half of the published material. Reason? Well, first of there are crappy directors. Second, there are limitations of time and pace for the given feature film. Third, financial limitations and unrisky behavior of studio executives. But there’s also the biggest reason not a lot of people CAN understand: its JUST IMPOSSIBLE to translate some publications into visual representation. Of course, some might mention that nothing is impossible, but then that’s why you still grunt about films made on your favorite books.

So how the directors resolve this huge issue? They add voiceovers. This is the biggest trick that they use. Get hold of some sexy voiced actor (namingly, Morgan Freeman or James Earl Jones) and make him read straight lines monotonically and precisely. Hence, whenever you hear the voiceover in the movie it means that director/screenwriter reached the point where they can’t explain/show whatever needs to be brought to the audience, by using either dialogs, on screen events, emotions of actors or just simply by forcing the watcher to understand themselves.

Interesting thing is that directors know this. They understand that a passage in the story stating which college the protagonysts finished or his/her hobbies or his/her crazy background information needs to be presented in a way that it’d be convincing, natural AND WON’T TAKE LONGER THAN FIRST 15 MINUTES of the movie. That’s why you usually see a hero in his “favorite” t-shirt with huge college logo on the front. Or the 10 second camera pan over the hero’s room, showing enormous collection of toy cars. Or the hero explaining to his close friend something THAT friend should have known already, taking into account that this friend is close. “hey man, wanna go to the party? there will be bunch of girls there!” – “no, bro sorry, i have a girlfriend” – “hey man are you still seeing that girl who lives in new york and we’re in LA?” – “yeah man we promised to wait for each other”.

Of course, most of the time the viewer “eats” it, as much of information is new for him (and surely made much more convincingly sophisticated). But next time just pay attention and you’ll see the same pattern happening on the screen. It is a formula.

So what makes a movie great? Being able to do these stuff in a way that noone notices. And there are a lot of movies. And I will mention these movies in my next note.

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