Delgo (2008) and World Building

As we near the end of October, we will be seeing more of the awards type movies released into theaters.  They will be endlessly talked about for no reason other than that they are up for the big awards at the end of the year.  The movies will win Oscars, BAFTAs, and Golden Globes, or at the very least be nominated for some of them.  Most of the movie Twitter people will be endlessly discussing which ones have the better chances of winning and which were simply steaming piles of poop.

There are of course the people that endlessly complain about the similarities between all of the award nominated films that come out in a year.  People will complain about anything, but this seems to be one of the major things that online movie circles will complain about at this time of the year.  The complaint stems from the fact that the vast majority of the movies being nominated have similarities in their concept.  Most of the movies are biopics about famous, respected people.  That’s how you get your Ray, A Beautiful Mind, The Theory of Everything, and Argo nominated for awards.  The movies are about real people and play out real stories (with some fictional liberties taken, of course).

I don’t want to take a look at a movie that is based in any sense of reality this week, though.  Instead, I want to look at a movie that is wholly original.  Delgo is a 2008 animated film set in another world inhabited with non-human characters.  It tells the story of the Nohrin and the Lokni, two species of humanoid creatures that have been fighting one another for fifteen years.  The movie takes a look at some very human things like racism and war without needing to be based in a real moment in time.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, which would make sense as I have written about completely different stuff for the entire post so far, I want to discuss world building and how Delgo did a decent job of it.  This is mostly going to be a ground up discussion, as Delgo is a wholly original world.  I will, however, quickly look at slight alterations to the world we live in because any discussion of world building must also incorporate that type of storytelling.  You know, the Planet of the Apes style of world where it is our world with slight differences that alter the course of history.

What is world building?

This whole post is probably going to make me sound dumb, but whatever.  If I come off as dumb, so be it.  At least I wrote something.  World building is when a writer or planner for a movie, book, game, or any other narrative form of art creates a world and expands it.  They can either make a new world for the sake of their story or take an existing world and twist it in a way that shows it differently.

An example of a world that is based upon our world is The Muppets.  These characters live in the same world as us.  But in this world, they are perceived as real, living beings.  Okay, I guess that’s also like our world.  Most of us understand that they’re really puppets though.  In the world in which their shows and movies are set, the characters are not puppets.  They’re called Muppets, yet that seems to simply be the name of their troupe.  Hell, in the 2011 film The Muppets, Jason Segel’s character has a brother who is a puppet, yet nobody seems to take notice of that.  The Muppets are treated like people.  The people behind the franchise created a world in which living puppets and people can coexist.

Delgo takes a slightly different approach and creates a world from scratch.  There is no basis within our world outside of the themes which the movie tackles during its runtime.  The land, the creatures, and the names are all fictitious.  Everything is a creation of the writers of the movie.  What makes this an easier approach to world building is that the writers don’t need to build a world within an already existing world.  What makes this a tougher approach is that there is nothing to build upon at the beginning since the writers are starting their work with a blank slate.  They must create every single thing within the world instead of working something into a world that exists.

Nomenclature

One of the most important parts of building a world is the naming of each and every part of it.  From the characters to the places, the names all need to feel like they are a part of that world.  When transposing your new world onto our real, existing world, it’s always best to find names that are rooted in some sort of lore that exists.  The show Supernatural does a good job of this.  The show depicts a darker side of our reality where monsters exist and people are trying to save other people from the monsters.  The people are known as hunters because they hunt monsters.  All of the monsters, or the vast majority of them, are based on monsters found in folklore and legends, so the names stay the same.  The one notable exception is a new monster that one of the main characters dubs “The Jefferson Starship,” which is a name based in the characters’ rock and roll background.  It all works because the show is set in a slightly different reality of Earth.

When creating a wholly new world, such as that in Delgo, the names just need to fit with each other.  There is no need to have them remain similar to the names in our reality.  The names of characters do not need to continue to be Robert or David or Carrie.  They can feel more exotic or made up, such as Delgo and Bogardus.  If the names are too weird, it might take a viewer out of the story, though.  The names of places can also have a more exotic tinge to them, such as Jhamora.  As long as the names are cohesive, it is fine.  Speaking of cohesiveness…

Cohesiveness

There are many ways in which a world can feel like a jumbled mess.  It all comes down to the different parts not fitting together in the right ways.  What a storyteller wants to do is find all the right parts that work together well enough to make everything gel.  A movie like Avatar is able to have an invented planet wholly realized with the different locations, the different creatures, and the different nomenclature.  Nearly everything fits together in a way that doesn’t feel forced, distracting, or out of place (Unobtainium aside, since that’s just a goofy name based on the element being unobtainable on Earth).  That’s the reason why so many people were depressed after how immersed they were in Pandora.

When you look at Delgo, they did a fairly good job of cohesion as well.  The different locations all feel as though they are a part of the same world, the names all fit together, and the character designs don’t feel out of place with one another.  The writers made sure that everything seemed appropriate within the confines of the world that they built.

History

No world is complete without a history behind the events that are unfolding.  This aspect helps to build up the lived-in feeling of the world.  A good use of world building creates a world that feels like it has existed for years.  A world cannot be formed based only on the current events.  There needs to be things that led up to it, relationships between the characters and their surroundings or one another.  Having a past to your world makes it seem more real, rather than a façade.

If I’m going to look at something recent to describe good world building, I need look no further than the show Game of Thrones.  Sure, it’s based on a book, but they have the same world, so just follow me here.  What we’re seeing on screen is a series of events unfolding as a bunch of different characters fight for the iron throne.  There is more to the world than that, though.  We know through stories and legends in the series that there was a war about fifteen or twenty years prior to the current events that put the Lannisters on top and left the land the way it is.  We also know that white walkers are a thing long before they become a major threat in the show.  There are backstories to every family, every land, and the throne itself.  The world is dense and feels more realistic because of each of the details.

The same can be said of Delgo, though not to the same extent.  The movie manages to build up these two species of living beings and gives a history to their conflict.  That at least gives some background to the war that we see play out through the movie.  However, there isn’t much more backstory than that.  The world still feels like a complete world, to an extent, but there was much more that could have been done to make it denser.

The Look

Finally, we come to how the world looks.  Between the people and the locations, everything needs to have a similar look.  If it is too similar, the world might seem small.  If there is too much difference between everything, the cohesiveness of the entire world will collapse.  There is a fine line that must be walked on without ever falling to one side or the other.  It is basically the fictional world equivalent to having different cultures and environments.

Let us look at Star Wars, or its bad movie knock-off Starcrash.  There are many planets in the universes of these movies and the different planets each have their own look and fee.  The people on the planets are different, the environments on the planets are different.  Hoth and Tatooine are very different, one being a desert and the other being snow covered.  The creatures on each planet also have a unique look.  It’s a good way to build the universe.

Delgo doesn’t go quite as deep into building their world.  There seem to only be two environments, the stable land of the Lokni and the floating islands of the Nohrin.  Neither location seems to be all that different other than where they are.  The land looks the same for both locations.  The character design is different, however.  The Nohrin resemble fairies while the Lokni resemble lizard men.  The two are humanoid enough that it is easy to believe they would be warring nations.  The world building was good on a character design level.

There are other elements that can make or break world building.  I won’t get into them right now since it’s 5pm on Sunday afternoon and this post has to go up today.  I only have so much time to get this post up for you guys to read with the blog name still being accurate.  So I’ll leave you with this.

Delgo isn’t as bad a movie as I was led to believe.  It is by no stretch of the imagination a great movie.  It is serviceable at best.  But it builds a decent world and tackles some important concepts.  I enjoyed parts of the movie and that made it worth the time I took to see it.

Now I have just a few notes before we’re done:

• I mentioned Starcrash in the post, so I’ll link to it.
• Louis Gossett Jr. was in Delgo, marking his fifth Sunday “Bad” Movie.  All four previous movies were in the Iron Eagle franchise, so he is now third in the most frequent actors list.
• Michael Clarke Duncan made his third appearance in the Sunday “Bad” Movies with Delgo.  The other two appearances were in A Crush on You and D.E.B.S.
• Val Kilmer’s second Sunday “Bad” Movie is Delgo.  His first was 7 Below.
• Chris Kattan also made an appearance in Delgo, after having been in Foodfight!
• Have you seen Delgo?  Have you heard of Delgo?  What do you think of Delgo?  Comments section.
• If you want to suggest a movie for me to watch in a future week of the Sunday “Bad” Movies, you can comment the movie too.  Or tell me on Twitter.
• Next week’s movie is Dead Before Dawn, a Canadian horror/comedy, made before Ryan Murphy invented the genre mash.  So, be here for that.  I’ll see you next week.

Fateful Findings (2014)

Certain movies catch the attention of general audiences.  Most of the time these are the action movies of the summer, but there are also the good and bad movies that come out at other times of the year.  For the sake of this blog, I’m going to focus on the bad side of the scale.  A few times a year, a movie comes out that is so bad that I need to watch it.  It’s not one of the obvious movies like this year’s Pixels where people just heap loads of critical hate upon it.  I’m talking about the ones that start with a quiet rumbling of how bad they are.  The lesser movies that gain a cult following before exploding into the popular cultural mind.  Movies like A Talking Cat!?! or The Room.  These are movies that people didn’t know about at first.  They gained traction and became infamous for their being bad.

One of the ones that has come to my attention since its release in 2013 is Fateful Findings, directed by, written by, and starring Neil Breen.  If you haven’t heard about it, that’s okay.  This entire post is going to be dedicated to letting you know what the movie is all about.  Neil Breen is a director of low budget features, typically the kind that get buried to never be seen by anyone but the hardcore fans of that kind of thing.  His two other films, Double Down and I Am Here… Now aren’t too well known outside of the cult festival circuit and the bottom of the Netflix library.  The movies have been funded by Breen himself, using money that he has made in his day job as an architect.

Fateful Findings is a movie that fits multiple genres without really fitting any genre.  It has overly dramatic moments, a conspiracy angle, supernatural elements, and romance.  Neil Breen tried to make this movie relatable to everyone while actually making it relatable to nobody.  One of the biggest factors in making the movie feel like a jumbled mess is the uninteresting stories that trample all over each other.  I want to use this post to describe the many storylines so that you might better understand the issues that this movie has.

Regeneration

Early in the movie, Neil Breen’s character finds some “buried treasure” as a child.  It’s not really buried treasure though.  It’s a mushroom that turns into a small box.  In the box, he finds a black stone.  For the rest of his life, he has this black stone with him.

Fateful Findings quickly jumps forward to an adult Neil Breen being hit by a car.  As he lays dying in the street, he clutches the black stone in his hand.  The black stone keeps him alive and magically heals all of his wounds.  After he is healed and back home, the regeneration is never really a focus of the movie again.  It is something that happened, and that’s it.

Pills

I probably should have noticed this storyline in Fateful Findings coming into play far sooner than it did.  The story is a domestic story between Neil Breen and his movie wife, in which she is addicted to the painkillers that he has received for his injuries.  It seemed to come out of nowhere.  At one point he’s using the painkillers, then he decides he doesn’t need them anymore and she starts complaining about needing them for herself.

It was an odd moment in Fateful Findings when I realized that addiction was going to play a part in the story.  Neil Breen’s character is doing his writing thing and his significant other asks if he has taken his meds.  He says he doesn’t need them and dumps them in the toilet, without flushing.  She then takes them out of the toilet.  I thought that she was taking them out so that he would eventually take them, but I later found out she took them out for her own addiction and she wanted him to stay on the painkillers so that she could have them.

This storyline was a weird addition to the movie because it was meant to cause a rift between the seemingly happy couple.  With some of the later stuff that happens in the movie, this story was completely unnecessary.

The Other Couple

While Neil Breen is in the hospital, we are introduced to the other major couple in the movie.  These other two people, along with the daughter of the woman, are even more domestically troubled than Neil Breen and his lady.  They even get to the point of violence.  They throw things at each other, yell, and use weapons.  It all comes down to the man treating the woman poorly because she doesn’t have sex with him as much as he would like.  In the end, they don’t fit together well and end up paying greatly for it.

The Other Couple’s Daughter

The two people have a daughter.  Actually, I think she’s the woman’s daughter, and the abusive husband is just a stepfather.  She watches everything that goes on with the couple.  She hears the yelling, sees the fighting, and witnesses the violence that it comes to.  She is the product of a broken home.

It only seems fitting that her parental issues would cause her to do some crazy things.  She’s a teenage girl, and she’s sneaking into Neil Breen’s home to swim naked in his pool and shower herself in his washroom.  Of course it freaks Neil Breen out.  It’s weird.  She is a terribly written character that didn’t need to be in the movie at all.

The Secrets

We discover partway through Fateful Findings that Neil Breen isn’t actually writing the novel that he’s been talking about writing.  Instead, he is hacking into government websites and finding all of the dirty secrets that he can find and share with people.  He is going to expose the underbelly and take down all of the bad people in the USA.  There isn’t much more to say about that part of the movie.  It seems really out of place in a movie that has been mostly about relationships and the drama within them.

The Romance

Fateful Findings begins with a scene showing Neil Breen as a child having the best summer of his life with a girl that would move away soon after.  His narration said that he would never see her again, but that wasn’t entirely true.  When he fell victim to a car accident, she would be one of the doctors that took a look at his injuries.  They rekindled their romance when he discovered who she was.

The romance between these two characters could have been the sole story of the movie, and the movie probably would have been better for it.  Forget the pills causing a rift between Breen and (what I assume is) his wife.  Instead, they get torn apart by the love that he has for this childhood crush.  It would have been more compelling and made more sense in terms of story.  Make this part the focus and forget about all the other drama in the movie.

As a whole, the stories all feel fairly separate from one another.  Fateful Findings seemed like a bunch of different ideas that Neil Breen had, tossed together because he just wanted to get them out there.  He would rather have the movie out there in a rough form than take the time to harness his ideas.  They’re too important to sit on.  It hurts the movie.

There are ideas in Fateful Findings that could have made for great movies.  The mixture of them created a mess of a movie that isn’t enjoyable to watch.  I’m interested to see the other movies that Neil Breen has made, but I’m not interested in revisiting this one.  Once was enough for me.  It’s easy enough to see how this ended up gaining the kind of cult following that other bad movies seem to get.  It’s terrible.

There’s still a little bit more to this post, however.  The notes:

• Fateful Findings was suggested to me by @robtrench.
• Early in the post, I mentioned two other Sunday “Bad” Movies.  They are The Room and A Talking Cat!?!
• Have you seen Fateful Findings, or any of the other Neil Breen movies?  What did you think of them?  Talk about this movie, this post, or anything related to them in the comments below.
• The comments section can also be used for suggesting future movies for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  I’m always looking for movies that I can potentially watch for this blog.  If you want to suggest to me on Twitter, that’s fine too.
• Next week’s movie is Delgo, a movie with one of the worst box office openings ever.  It is second only to The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure (for movies opening on 2000+ screens), which I have already covered for the Sunday “Bad” Movies. I’ll tell you all about Delgo next week.