MovieChat Forums > Vantage Point (2008) Discussion > Would have been better if the vantage po...

Would have been better if the vantage points contradicted each other

posted 12 years ago by P-K-One
12 replies | jump to latest

When I watched the movie I had hoped for something like "Rashomon" (An old Japanese movie where the story of a crime is told from different perspectives but each time the teller lies in some aspects of the story to make himself look good). But sadly all the vantage points tell the same story. It's just that every person adds a new facet, a new detail or an additional storyline which makes the whole thing pointless. If every person tells the same story, why do I need 8 people to tell it?

I think the movie would have been better if it was told from the perspective of an investigator who investigates the assassination a week after the fact and questions witnesses. Some of the witnesses have misinterpreted something they saw (thought they saw somebody with a remote detonator but it was just a cellphone,...), some are involved and try to hide it, some are security personal and realize they screwed up but try to look like heroes...and the investigator has to piece what happened together from the stories by cross examining them.

[–] granitodiaz 12 years ago

it would be worst, it would have even more plot holes

[–] P-K-One 12 years ago

Do you even know what a plothole is?

A plot hole, or plothole, is a gap or inconsistency in a storyline that goes against the flow of logic established by the story's plot, or constitutes a blatant omission of relevant information regarding the plot.

These include such things as
unlikely behaviour or actions of characters,
illogical or impossible events,
events happening for no apparent reason, or
statements/events that contradict earlier events in the storyline.

If a witness gives a false statement, either because he remembers incorrectly, did misunderstand something or is lying to the investigator, that is not a plothole.

Plotholes, jumping the shark and rip-offs...Everybody throws those words around but about 1 in 50 people knows what they actually mean.

[–] granitodiaz 12 years ago

yeah, why not make the movie and give every witness some heroine, that way every vantage point is going to be very different, and by your logic, a better movie??

[–] P-K-One 12 years ago

You are probably just talking crap to get some attention. It's what I always assume when people throw buzzwords around and don't know what they mean. But on the off chance that you are actually somebody worth having a discussion with or that my initial post was misunderstandable I will clarify what I mean.

Let's say that the movie contains a sequence of events that can be represented by letters. Each letter represents an event, grouped letters represent linked events (for example if it's the same person doing a series of things). The movie tells the story like this (vantage point followed by sequence):

1: AA A
2: AA A AAA AA
3: AA A AAA AA AA AAA

And so on. Everything you see on screen is accurate and each new vantage point just adds something.

What I am talking about is not having everybody tell drug crazed incoherent crap but rather something like the following:

You have an actual series of events:

AA A AAA AA AA AAA A AAA A

Then you have an unquestionable source like a security camera but that source can't see everything. It has a limited vantage point but what it sees is 100% accurate (shown as red in the following and what it can't see as 0)

00 A 0AA A0 00 000 A A00 0

Then you have witnesses that also have limited vantage points. Their telling is accurate in some actions, and false in others. And they are involved in some of the things we see (If somebody is talking about himself it is in blue). Let's say 3 witnesses for starters:

1: 00 0 000 00 AA AAA 0 000 0
2: AA A A00 00 00 AAA A 000 0
3: 00 0 AAA AA 00 000 0 AAA 0

As you can see the second sequence of witness 2 is one that has been recorded by the camera. But what if he says something that contradicts the camera? Is he just mistaken or is he intentionally lying? He is also on camera in the 7th sequence but here what he tells is accurate. Why would he lie about one thing but not about the other? Or is he just a bad observer? How accurate are his other observations?
He has seen the first action from the third sequence but it's not what the third witness says he has done at that time. Who is telling the truth? Is the second witness wrong (after all, he was already wrong about the second sequence that we have on camera) or is the third witness involved in the attack and now tries to cover up his tracks?
What if you have three witnesses who all tell the same thing about events you know happened (because you have them on camera) but tell mutually exclusive versions of other events. Which one are you going to believe? Which ones are honest mistakes and which ones are lies?

This kind of investigation and contradiction makes a vantage point story interesting. Telling the same story 5 times does not. The vantage points simply did not add anything to the story.The story could have been told from one perspective throughout the whole movie and nothing about the story would have changed.

[–] DeAd_MiKe_187 7 years ago

I admire the detail in that response!

[–] SteveH2002 12 years ago

Yeah - you may be right. It would take some skill to keep the story straight and presented in a manner an audience could track, and to keep the story moving forward. That approach may not necessarily do away with one of the drawbacks of VP - namely, you're going over the same scene time after time after time.

[–] P-K-One 12 years ago

Obviously it would be harder to do and not be for everybody but the way this movie is now, it's for nobody really so I don't think this is a KO criteria.

As to the repetition, you could probably get it done right with 4 "witnesses" and if each of those agrees on everything but 3 or 4 key scenes, the amount of repetition would be minimal. After all, you can basically show everything they agree on only once and since each of them gives a different account of those key events, the scenes would not really repeat themselves because they would be different every time.

But even if you have some repetition it's going to be a different kind of repetition. In the movie as it is, you can basically see a certain scene and know that you have 3 minutes to go to the bathroom because you have already seen what will happen next. In the version I propose that would not happen because even if you have already seen this particular segment you can't know if it's going to contain the same action in the testimony of the next witness. And if the alterations are fairly small sometimes (The investigator spots a detail in the retelling and from this draws the conclusion that this particular witness is lying) you can even get the audience to see the same action again with a certain amount of attention and tension because they are looking for clues, too.

Finish all of that with a scene that raises the question if all of the witnesses lied because they were in on it and you might have something that will keep people talking for a long time (For example have a stunning woman in a red dress who everybody remembers seeing as one of the key terrorists and have all witnesses agree that she managed to escape after planting the bomb. Finish the movie with a news crew reporting about the terrorist plot and how all the suspects could be apprehended during the investigation, make sure that you see a piece of red cloth somewhere in the rubble for a moment but don't draw any attention to it. Have the audience wonder if that was the red dress, if that means the woman died in the blast and if that means that the witnesses were actually the terrorists.)

[–] Jaouad-El 11 years ago

they can't 'cause the movie tell a story in a real time there is no one here who is in charge of the story, you're suggestion could be if they are some FBI or CIA agents trying to figure out what's happen with witnesses and suspects

[–] P-K-One 11 years ago

My original post:

I think the movie would have been better if it was told from the perspective of an investigator who investigates the assassination a week after the fact and questions witnesses.

Your post:

they can't 'cause the movie tell a story in a real time there is no one here who is in charge of the story, you're suggestion could be if they are some FBI or CIA agents trying to figure out what's happen with witnesses and suspects

No *beep* Einstein. I am stunned that you came up with the idea of witnesses and suspects. I wish I had thought about a scenario like that, you know, with an investigation after the event...

Seriously, why do you even bother to answer to a post that you clearly did not bother to actually read?

[–] Jaouad-El 11 years ago

Well I'm just saying that's your idea is totally different of what's the director wants of this movie to be, that's mean your idea is not some thing you can add or remove no this is gonna be a new movie with a new script and scenario.

[–] d_henderson1810 11 years ago

I just said this in another post, and I agree.

For example, Dennis Quaid was too busy noticing the fluttering curtain to see the asassination. Forest Whittaker saw it through the lens of a video camera, which is different from seeing it with the naked eye. Sigourney Weaver would have seen it through a video screen. The President's entourage saw it from a window of a building etc.

So, what each of them saw would be different, even though it is the same incident.

It doesn't have be that they lie (although one character should big note themselves and be exposed), but each saw it from a different "vantage point", meaning they noticed different things about the same incident. The different accounts could be pieced together to find who the killer is.

[–] Seth_Rogue_One 8 years ago

Yeah I was hoping it would be something like that too like people seeing not only events but people and their actions in different views, but it would take alot longer than 84 minutes to make that movie... They did a fine job still tho IMO

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