From personal experience and discussion with other informed voices in the film community, I’ve developed a shorthand set of thumb rules: ten film commandments, my decem praecepta. This series of articles breaks down what I’m on about.

Continuing on:

“2. Thou shalt have no deus ex machina before me.”

💀

Latin for “god from the machine,” deus ex machina springs from the sudden and/or unexpected introduction of a solution unearned, like Perseus brought back to full health by his father Zeus in Clash of the Titans to save the girl, win the day, and become a hero. It’s the will of the creator… or in film parlance, the will of the writer/director. It’s a gray area often viewed as a cheat even having a literal god (small ‘g’) as a character, but it’s equally attributed to lazy writing.

For any storytelling, there must be rules. Stories too often break their own rules, from the effects of alternate realities using time travel to exactly how many fireballs a wizard can unleash before running out of spells. In the film Stargate, Colonel Jack O’Neal conveniently never notices Daniel Jackson resurrecting Sha’uri using Ra’s magic/technology… because if he had, couldn’t Jack drop everything and bring his dead son back to life? Or remember how all those ad flyers ended up in the vault from Ocean’s Eleven, a clever bit of movie magic to make the heist work since no one carried them in before the cash was carried out?

A further issue is the forced plot point, where things happen to the characters simply because it’s the next line item in the plot outline. This is most often an utter failure of the script to even attempt to tie events together because the writer/director playing god has willed that the next terrible thing will occur. In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the jungle sequence not only veers off into the ludicrous but grants the heroes a get-out-of-danger-free card, inexplicably self-aware they’ll be successful no matter what they try because, you know, how else can we get to final set piece, right?

The best way to address these situations in film is a bit of Marvel Comics magic: the no-name, non-bronze, no-prize. Don’t break the rules; show viewers why the impossible thing actually works within the magic or sci-fi rules… or get thee back into the screenplay and make damn sure it does. In the words of writer/director Billy Wilder: “If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.” Of course, Mr. Wilder also said his most important rule of filmmaking was “don’t be boring” (see my first film commandment).

Disclaimer: these are my opinions; feel free to articulate your own in the comments. 💀

Moving along:

“3. Thou shalt not make too many mysteries.”

---

---