16 KiB
Psychological reasons why people reject the Ghostbusters trailer and remake movies. [DC]
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Author: u/EGarrett *
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Score: 0
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Created: 2016-03-15T11:47:15
Post:
Comments:
u/ZeroNihilist [+10] (4 hours later)
I don't have any particular attachment to the original Ghostbusters film. I enjoyed it despite it predating my existence by several years. I vaguely recall finding it funny, but my memory is hazy since it's been over a decade since I saw it. I'm not really evaluating the remake in terms of the original because of that haziness.
The trailer for the remake made me laugh once, at around 1:26 with the "Let's go." joke. The trailer was clearly intended to be funny but all the other jokes fell flat or actually irritated me (notably, the part where the joke is "look at that violent irrational black woman").
I didn't care about any of the other complaints some people raised, like the CGI or the "four scientists" line or the cast. Remakes and translations from other media get that sort of thing wrong all the time, and is usually inconsequential compared to the script, acting, editing, etc.
The trailer has done it no favours from my perspective, as it doesn't inspire any confidence in the latter categories. That's not to say that I think it will be a bad movie. I'm reserving judgement until reviews come out and I'll probably see it if they aren't too negative.
Personally, I think the problem is the cuts used in the trailer. If a joke got a lot of laughs during the test screening, the people producing the trailer probably tried to include it but may have contextualised it poorly.
Looking at Paul Feig's other movies, they seem to do relatively well and have terrible trailers (I haven't seen Bridesmaids or The Heat, so I can't say how much I like them). I also looked at a few trailers from comedies I really liked and didn't laugh much at any of them. The few times I did laugh, I was remembering the scenes from actually seeing the movies.
Based on that anecdotal and brief test, I'd say that comedies are poorly represented by their trailers. In fact, you can see a recut of the Ghostbusters remake trailer that removed most of the jokes, which was substantially more popular with fans of the original.
TL;DR: I propose that trailers for comedies are usually much less funny than the movies themselves. The Ghostbusters remake could merely be another victim of this effect.
u/Jiro_T [+6] (4 hours later)
"Psychological reasons why people reject X" is generally Bulverism.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+5] Roll the Dice on Fate (6 hours later)
I don't think this was a very good analysis. Honestly, the green curtains don't always have to represent the main character's jealousy. Sometimes they're just green. In this case, people are rejecting the trailer - and by extension the film - because it was a bad trailer. The jokes fell flat, the plot was basically a rehash and didn't seem interesting, the actors didn't look to have the comedic timing necessary to make things funny, and the comedy itself was largely slapstick which I find boring.
Further, they didn't show us what kind of people the characters are, instead they just had a woman tell us what each of them is good at and from what I can tell they all seemed to be hackneyed stereotypes. She was basically talking to the camera, and from the looks of it that scene is going to be in the full movie which gives me serious doubts about the writing quality.
From my perspective, this video stated an obvious conclusion that no-one would argue with (that the trailer was bad and people were angry about it), then stuck in a bunch of random psychobabble in front of it. You could replace that explanation with almost any random thing and it would still be pretty much the same video, it didn't add anything or make things more clear. I don't feel like I understand the human condition any better as a result, which is a good sign that this was just fake wisdom.
People don't like it when they're got high hopes for a thing and it turns out to be bad. The greater the distance in quality between the new thing and the old thing, the more extreme their reaction. If this guy wants to make it more complicated than that, he should come up with a better theory.
u/EGarrett [-3] (9 hours later)
The trailer for Pixels is equally bad or worse in quality, has 20 million views, and 12,000 dislikes.
The Ghostbusters trailer has 25 million and 400,000 dislikes.
Your hypothesis fails to explain this.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+4] Roll the Dice on Fate (9 hours later)
Your hypothesis fails to explain this.
That's because I didn't make a hypothesis. What I did is note that in certain situations, people act a certain way. I made no move to explain why they do so. If I had made an alternate hypothesis, it would be entirely independent of your explanation, and mine being false wouldn't make yours true, as well as vice versa. It is a false dichotomy to imply otherwise. Top points though for copy/pasting the same response you made to someone else in a completely different thread.
I'm assuming that this is either your video or the video of someone you know or work for, because the only thing your account has ever submitted are repeated links from this youtube channel. Most of them are downvoted or at 1 upvote, and half of them in subreddits with only a tenuous connection to the subject matter. So, I'm going to give you some advice.
First, when explaining something in a video you can't expect people to know about the things you've talked about in previous videos unless you have a legitimately popular channel. Relying on them as a core part of your argument is not a great idea.
Second, images and snippets of video from entirely different films have a place, and that place it not cluttering up the screen four at once (with four more as a constant background) so that the viewer has no chance to focus on any of them, let alone read them or figure out what their meaning is. At one point you had a map showing what I believe was the currents of the world's oceans show up on screen for a grand total of 1 second, and I'm not speaking figuratively. Consider using a smaller number of more carefully chosen images to give context to your points.
Third, the current voiceover comes across as mildly patronising. Presumably this was not your intention, but will still cause problems unless remedied.
u/EGarrett [+0] (22 hours later)
"That's because I didn't make a hypothesis."
Yes you did. You said, and I quote, " In this case, people are rejecting the trailer - and by extension the film - because it was a bad trailer. The jokes fell flat, the plot was basically a rehash and didn't seem interesting, the actors didn't look to have the comedic timing necessary to make things funny, and the comedy itself was largely slapstick which I find boring."
This describes Pixels almost exactly also. There's a massively different dislike ratio for Pixels on a similar magnitude of views. Your claim simply fails to explain this.
Your claims and your advice are of poor quality.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+1] Roll the Dice on Fate (a day later)
You don't get how arguments work in rational debate, eh? First, one person makes a claim. Then, another person points out problems with this claim and the onus is then on the person originally making the claim to explain these holes.
Whataboutism doesn't really do the job. Nor does shit slinging. Nor does pointing out an observation then failing to draw any kind of link between that observation and your original argument.
Instead what we've had to far looks like this:
Claim (you) (also spam, and not relevant to the subreddit)
Counterclaim (me)
Observation that is true but unconnected to original claim. Attack at counterclaim.
Explanation that counterclaim's truthiness is irrelevant for the purposes of proving claim. Advice of disputed quality.
Reiterating observation, still unconnected to original claim.I'm afraid this isn't the kind of subreddit where such tactics are effective.
u/EGarrett [+0] (a day later)
There was a counter-claim made, NOT a simple questioning of the existing claim. I don't think you understand how a rational argument works.
This is what we have so far...
I think A. No, it's B. It's not B because B can't explain thing X.
That's literally what happened. Trying to retract your claim isn't helping.
Now, would you like a mini-lecture on how people actually take in visual and audio inputs, and what makes them seem too busy or not too busy, since you tried to bring that up? Spoiler Alert: Your understanding of it is very simplistic and will fall apart immediately.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+1] Roll the Dice on Fate (2 days later)
You can get as subtly insulting as you like, but it still doesn't actually prove your original point. Also:
People don't like it when they're got high hopes for a thing and it turns out to be bad. The greater the distance in quality between the new thing and the old thing, the more extreme their reaction.
u/EGarrett [+0] (2 days later)
You tell me I don't understand a rational discussion, then you refuse to engage with the actual points. Mmkay. You've been lost on a passive-aggressive signaling attempt from the very beginning. Maybe, if people love a topic, study it honestly and for a long time, then work hard to make content for people and want to share it with you, with the understanding that IF they succeed, you'll enjoy the video and find it interesting, you might respond like a human being to those people instead of ignoring the content and being so disingenuous and nasty?
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+1] Roll the Dice on Fate (2 days later)
then you refuse to engage with the actual points.
I can't actually find them. Neither of us have really brought any up after the first few posts. I don't care enough about disputing a youtube video to create a full theory of how people react to bad remake trailers. You don't care to explain why your theory of why people react like that is any better than the many other plausible theories out there that would also fit the evidence of ghostbusters getting more dislikes than pixel.
I would normally have been nicer, but I don't like people who spam stuff in barely related subreddits.
We're done here, I think.
u/callmebrotherg [+2] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (2 days later)
I don't see how this is even barely related, to be honest, and I'm not sure why it wasn't removed to begin with. This isn't his first spam thread in the subreddit, either.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (12 hours later)
What does any of that have to do with what he said?
EDIT: Speaking of "having to do with" things -- what does this video have to do with rational(ist) fiction? Nothing in that movie makes me think that it correlates with what's in our sidebar.
u/traverseda [+5] With dread but cautious optimism (8 hours later)
You are posting a lot of links to the storyBrain channel.
I think you're crossing the self-promotion line.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+2] Roll the Dice on Fate (9 hours later)
Huh, really going with the scattergun approach, isn't he. Same video, slightly different thread titles, 8 different subreddits.
u/callmebrotherg [+1] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (2 days later)
He's also claiming to not be StoryBrain, which is refuted by a few other comments that he's made elsewhere on reddit (thank Bayes for comment history).
u/Escapement [+5] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (6 hours later)
On a meta level, I sort of hate this video completely independent of the actual point it was trying to make. It reminded me of a lot of the RedLetterMedia criticisms of the filming style of the prequel trilogy of Star Wars. Namely, the creator is shoving so much shit on the screen that it actually becomes distracting and makes me lose track of what's going on. A busy, complicated frame can work, but simple scenes that show one thing well are much better than complicated bullshit showing five things badly. This was just excessively poorly composed. I don't know if the creator is trying to be ironic or something and making a bad video on purpose?
The actual points it was trying to make seemed facile to me, but I have no emotional investment in the original ghostbusters and this was the first I heard about the trailer for a new one (or, in fact, that there would be a new one).
u/EGarrett [+1] (9 hours later)
I've found that any idea, if it's logical and clearly-stated, will sound as if it's obviously right. You can only see how obvious and right it really is by noting how many other options also sound obvious but are actually wrong.
For example, several people have said "there's nothing special about the dislike, it's just bad filmmaking" Which sounds facile and obvious too, until you realize that the Ghostbusters trailer has literally 40x more dislikes on a similar number of views as the Pixels trailer (400,000+ vs 12,000). So sounding obvious doesn't mean that it's an easy conclusion to find or that it's right or wrong.
u/eaglejarl [+3] (7 hours later)
For me, the reason I'm not excited about this remake is because it's a palette swap. The writing process seemed to be:
- Open script of original Ghostbusters
- Search and replace all names and genders
- To prove that it's not plagiarism, insert some hackneyed (attempts at) jokes about crazy black women and how women love hats.
If you're going to write fanfiction, the first rule is not anything about Frodo and lightsabers. The first rule is "it must be different in some significant way from the canon." If you retread the exact same steps with different names you have contributed nothing to the reader's experience.
u/EGarrett [+1] (9 hours later)
Good point.
u/tinkerWithoutSink [+3] (44 minutes later)
That was pretty good, pretty clear look at some of things going on when people see remakes. He told a story that fits really well and is insightful.
Would have been more rational/convincing to me if he had talked about why he thinks these are true, or that competing ideas aren't. Hard to do though, especially in a short video.
u/embrodski [+3] (3 hours later)
Ah! Fascinating, thank you! I didn't have any problems with the trailer, and now I think that was in large part because I hated the first GhostBusters. The hero obviously should have been Egon. Instead the movie focused on this asshole Venkman who I couldn't stand, who is shown in his very first scene to be a terrible human and basically an anti-scientist. (in general I hate all of Bill Murray's characters, with very few exceptions) So I guess I was kinda glad that the remake was doing away with all that crap. Which is exactly what everyone who liked the first GhostBusters will hate. Insight acheived!
u/Wiron [+3] (7 hours later)
Recognizable brand grabs people's attention, bad quality makes this attention negative. It has disadvantage of being comedy. Action movies can defend themselves with decent action scenes in trailers. But when jokes doesn't work in comedy, there's nothing left.
It's also really hard to joke about unfunny joke. Way above level of typical internet humor. Normally few jokes and memes would defuse tension. Simple jokes like "Terminator: Genisys - Revenge of Dyslexic". But without them things that are mostly upvoted are complains.
Complains generate more complains. Bashing bad movie is social activity. People are connected in how much they don't like it, they try to outdo each other how much they hate it. That way we end up with huge backslash.
u/callmebrotherg [+1] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (13 hours later)
How does this have anything to do with rat!fic?