The Craigslist Killer (2011) and Sticking Too Close to the Source

An exciting real life story can be the greatest asset to a good filmmaker.  Recent movies have greatly benefited from real life stories.  These include Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, and Lincoln.  Each of the three movies was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, this last round.  Some of the best movies of each year are movies that are written with some real events in mind.  But there is one thing that they have in common, when taking these events as an inspiration.  These events are just that for the movies: an inspiration.

A movie that is based on a real event needs to add or remove certain pieces of information in order to make the overall product more cinematic.  When a movie does not do this, it does not feel like a movie.  This is the problem that I found within the television movie The Craigslist Killer.  The movie simply tried to retell the events that transpired without making it into an entertaining movie.  It felt like a hollow shell of what could have been an exciting tale of murder, deceit, and detective work.

Creating a cinematic tale should be the first thought when making a movie.  It should feel like a movie and not just a dramatization of real events.  If points within the story need to be moved around, or removed, then they should be.  On that same note, if something needs to be added into the story to make it feel more like a movie, then it should be.  This is the same for adaptations of books or plays.  Unless the story is completely cinematic, it should not be a direct adaptation with no changes at all.

The problem with a movie like The Craigslist Killer being a direct adaptation, rather than an inspired movie, is that the tension is not allowed to build in the proper way.  The relationship side has to build like a loving relationship, the murders have to occur, and the detective work needs to take place.  It all must happen in order, as well.  This causes the pacing and tone of the movie to go awry.  It’s one of those cases in which people say “It stayed too true to its source.”  The Craigslist Killer stayed too true to its source.  It was like watching Unsolved Mysteries, and seeing the re-enactments only.  The re-enactments are good enough, but they don’t have the same sort of cinematic touch as a well written narrative.  When the entire movie is the re-enactment, you feel almost no connection to what is happening.  You are watching the story instead of being a part of the story.  You are disconnected.

To state my point one more time, a movie based on true events can just as easily be good as it can be bad.  It all depends upon how the filmmakers go about crafting the story.  Sticking too close to the source can bog the story down with shifting tones, or improper pacing.  I think that The Craigslist Killer could have been an exceptional thriller about some of the dangers of the internet, but due to the desire to stick to the real events, it failed to be anything more than a recreation of something that actually happened.   Was it because it was a television movie?  Was it because they thought the story was strong enough as it was?  Or was it a lack of faith in the project by the people behind it?  Something was lost in translation between the events and the movie, or perhaps it wasn’t translated at all.  This is one case in which the real story sounds better than the movie adaptation. 

 There are a few notes that I'm going to make before I finish here:

• If you have any suggestions for bad movies, leave a comment, or tell me on Twitter.
• This is the second Lifetime movie covered in the Sunday bad movies.  The first was A Nanny for Christmas.
• I just wanted to say that this movie includes the first appearance by a Baldwin in the Sunday "Bad" Movie posts.  Billy Baldwin, thanks for popping the Baldwin cherry.