Control: PYNIT vs. Monkey Man
I, Dalton Lewis, watched three movies recently and wanted to talk about them. Two of them were slow-burn horror movies about ideas, and one was a literary, psychological superhero film set in India. All three did some things very well.
I watched two movies about pretty young nuns in trouble (PYNIT) this spring. One was called The First Omen, and the other was called Immaculate. They both starred pretty young actresses in their early twenties playing insanely beautiful teenage nuns who wanted to be faithful to god and expected the church to do the same.
Here’s the problem:
They copied elements off of each other.
Both movies feature beautiful young nuns who visit Europe in order to become nuns. Both movies feature slow burns in which strange things happen increasingly to the nuns. Both lead to horrifying crimes committed against the nuns.
One of the main surprises is the same in both movies. Before spoiling anything I would like to say that if you are a diehard horror fan then you will have no problem watching either of these films. They both develop scary situations and scary problems without having teenagers butchered by a madman with a knife or jump scares and a swirling ring of objects and a screaming priest. They avoid all that.
Now…
Spoilers…
In both movies the bad guys are trying to create demonic children. In both movies they have created children — many of them — who didn’t survive being born. They had kids over and over, trying to have a male child to be the Antichrist. In both movies some of the main Christian people are Satanic people, and the Christian people must fight the overwhelming power of the Satanic people.
This is fine. It’s effective. I just don’t understand how both movies had the same plot. Someone copied off of someone else. This is not the first time this has happened in Hollywood. Despicable Me and Mastermind are another example of this conceit. Also Deep Impact and Armageddon from twenty-five years ago. People regularly both come up with the same ideas at the exact same time — with the exact same plots and beats to deal with.
I don’t believe in coincidences.
So someone copied off of someone else’s paper.
This is bad.
I don’t like it — as a writer, this is shady. I am even more frustrated that there is no real way to know whose idea this was.
Quit copying on each other’s tests, Hollywood!
It isn’t cool.
I already reviewed Immaculate earlier so I’ll focus on The First Omen in the rest of this blog post…
There’s an effective set of scenes in which the nun — Margaret — is taken into a club to dance and drink and try to have adventures. There’s also a nice scare later when she talks to her guy friend — who she likes — and things go in a bad direction…
Several bizarre deaths happen in this movie to deal with the fact that there isn’t a big bad guy killing all the nuns in the story. The movie is about ideas — scary ideas — and that’s fine. It doesn’t have a lot of big fights, just a terrifying situation in which a character is victimized.
Character progression happens when Margaret begins to realize that the people on the Christian side might somehow be on the Satanic side, and she cannot simply trust the people in her life. I liked that observation — that bad people are hiding amongst the good people.
Tension builds slowly as the nuns and their convent seems stranger and stranger and ominous events happen and Satan appears more and more in their lives…
Then there’s the monkey man…
The other movie I saw recently was Monkey Man. It starred Dev Patel. He played Monkey Man — a character who didn’t convey his birth name to the audience of the movie. He’s a nameless Indian poor kid wanting to stop the corrupt assholes in charge of India — and trying to influence the Indian election.
In the movie his character is a vigilante trying to avenge the death of his mother and a lot of other poor people by the rich elite. He develops into a living weapon in order to fight back against the criminal elite.
This movie has lots of fight scenes and bad guys with screen time. This movie has bad guys drinking and smoking and killing moms and mistreating normal people in India.
Dev Patel gets a job as a dishwasher — and then a waiter — working for the people who killed his mom. He gradually learns everything that he wants to know in order to destroy all of his enemies. This is a superhero story with literary elements. He reminisces about his experiences growing up in the forest in India with his mother.
The tension in the movie builds when Monkey Man tries to con the rich corrupt people into thinking that he is happy being a mindless employee doing low-level service work for them.
He fights in the arena for money. He usually loses on purpose in order to make money to pay for his life. This makes for interesting scenes and conflicts in that he works for people who make a lot of money and provides a dishonest service for them.
This movie has a wonderful series of fights — beautifully choreographed. The fights are beautiful, clearly a work of art. I was impressed that this had so much more action and murder and violence than the horror movies. Still, all three movies had interesting concepts and elements. I was jealous of the development of the main character and his mother and his friends and their relationship with the bad guys. This — and The First Omen — both have corrupt upper-crust elements, but in Monkey Man they seem more ominous and powerful and dynamic. They do more.
All in all I think that pretty nuns in trouble are wonderful people with unusual, slow build adventures in Europe, and Monkey Man is an excellent superhero who protects India from all the bad guys. The movies that have come out recently are intelligent, well-made films.
Three movies came out, and they all tried to be works of art. They all lost out in the box office numbers battle to the giant water monster and the giant primate punching a dragon and another primate. They did, however, show us movies that tried very hard to be real movies. I appreciated the effort.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
