To begin for those who may not know, PoV, stands for point of view, and in filming it is used to place us in a characters point of view as if we were seeing things through their eyes.
PoV shots in films aren't new, and not all of them are even bad, in fact when used correctly they give us insight into characters, or give us a perspective that can chill us to the bones.
One of my favorite PoV moments is in the first Halloween in which we get to watch Michael as he dawns the clown mask, grab the knife, and go onto murder his older sister and her boyfriend. (Also by first for those younger people I do not mean the garbage remake put out by Rob Zombie) This scene was new to most movie goers and I don't honestly know of another main stream movie that had a shot like this first. People weren't use to being this much in the action, and for scary movies the killer was usually a reveal, you didn't know who it was until the end.
But I'm losing track. This is about why full length PoV movies are terrible.
I just finished watching the travesty that is Quarantine, I have not seen REC but from what other say it is the better movie. This is not surprising for 2 reasons:
1. REC is the original and because of that it was most likely had more depth and less awful Hollywood clichés.
2. Being a better movie than Quarantine isn't saying much seeing as the movie is an hour and a half of crap.
To be fair parts of Quarantine were good, but those parts are so few and far between... ugh... lets move on.
Movies like Quarantine, Blair Witch, and to another way Cloverfield, all suffer from what I consider the exact opposite of what they are trying to achieve.
They want us to be lost in the movie, they want us to forget we are in a theater, or in our home, watching a movie, they want us to believe that people are actually in these scenarios.
This to me is just a terrible idea and I'll try and do my best to explain.
When I go to see a movie I know I'm going to see a movie, which means I turn on my suspension of disbelief, which means I'll let things go that are either impossible in the real world, highly unlikely, or fanciful. If you enjoy most any fiction movie at all you do this and may not even know it. It's how you can watch Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and think that it is one of the best movies ever made even though it involves things that are complete fiction.
I remember years ago the hype that surrounded The Blair Witch Project, for those who are too young to remember let me tell you it, that movie was one of the best promoted movies of my life time to date.
My family and I went to see this and we got stuck in the front row watching this PoV film, and all I could think was, "This is terrible, I know this is a hand held camera but damn, can't they at least try and hold it still."
But that wasn't the biggest problem, and this is where these films fall apart...
People film things in these movies that no sane person would film, their attention goes to what suits the film best but in all honesty that is probably the last place their attention needs to be, also, most of them should have dropped the heavy equipment long before the end, but then we wouldn't have these awful movies.
You see, when I watch these movies I'm suppose to believe they really happened, I'm supposed to stretch my mind around the fact that these are real people, really experiencing these things, but heres the problem, I know they aren't, and something about someone trying to make me think they are through this style of film making causes my brain to reject the movie as a whole.
I don't think I'm explaining this well enough, but I'm going to try one more time before I just chalk this up to learning how to blog and using this as an example of what not to do next time.
PoV is just too much, my brain for some reason never makes that leap, and before you decide I just nitpick to much, let me say I like a lot of bad movies, and I mean badddd movies. I love campy Godzilla movies, I love old episodes of power rangers, hell I enjoy the Super Mario Brothers movie more than I enjoy any of these movies. Because they never try to not be movies, they don't try to convince me that there real through the dumbest trick ever, an entire movie shot in PoV.
So not that my opinion is going to change the world, but directors please stop making PoV movies, they don't add anything to your movie except annoyance.
