Atomic Blonde

[spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] ATOMIC BLONDE Script Analysis: Guns are No Fun by Jacob Krueger This week we are going to be talking about Atomic Blonde by Kurt Johnstad. I would like to start this script analysis by talking about the way that I saw Atomic Blonde, because this was actually my first experience with 4DX. I went to a 9:15 screening and I am wondering, “Why am I spending $28 on this screening?” But it was the only screening that I could make. I show up, and I have no idea what to expect, and it’s not until I sit down that I realize the seats are on a platform that moves.   There are fans and lightning effects, and when it rains in the movie, it sprays water on you. There are little air bursts that hit you every time a gun goes off, and the seat will shake you or kick you in the back when a fight scene is happening. And basically, this is the worst and most distracting way that I have ever seen a film.       Rather than sucking you into the film, it actually shakes you out of the film. It reminds you that you are seeing a movie-- that you aren’t experiencing something real. And I am not telling you this to complain about 4DX, even though I think 4DX is a total nightmare… I am telling you this because oftentimes, as screenwriters, we make the mistake of inadvertently doing 4DX in our own screenplays. Rather than simply telling the story that we want to tell, simply pulling our audiences into our story in an organic way, we get so obsessed with all the bells and whistles that we end up distracting our audience from what makes our screenplay powerful. We get so obsessed with all the things that that are supposed to make it a “commercial” experience that instead of pulling our audience into the movie, instead of augmenting their experience, all those bells and whistles end up distracting from their experience, taking them out of the movie, shaking them out of the reality of the film.   If you’ve taken my screenwriting classes you have heard me talk at length about the idea of screenplay formatting as a way of hypnotizing the reader.   Ultimately what we are trying to do is to use formatting to capture the visual eye of the reader-- whether they are creative or not-- to allow our movies to play in the little movie screen of their mind. And bad screenplay formatting happens when we fail to do that-- when we either require the reader to supply their own creativity to make our screenplay cool or when we start shaking them with improper rhythm or with overly technical scene headings or with things that they can’t see or with dense action or with images that aren’t specific, that don’t play out exactly the way that we see them in the movie screen in our mind. Sometimes our action, the way we put it on the screen, the way we write our dialogue can be like those annoying jets of water and those annoying sprays of air and the shaking of the seats: they can shake us out of this world that we want to experience.     So we have spoken at length about the idea of how sometimes our formatting can become our 4DX, can become that thing that is supposed to augment but instead shakes us out of the experience of the movie. What we haven't talked about as much is the way that sometimes our ambition -- our impulse to complicate what could be a beautiful and simple experience-- can shake our audience out of what should be a really great story. And for me this is very much the experience of Atomic Blonde.   Atomic Blonde wants to be a Quentin Tarantino movie. And there is no doubt that to the extent Atomic Blonde succeeds, it succeeds because of its extraordinary fight sequences.   Whatever the flaws of the film-- and there are many-- those fight sequences are really impressive on a number of different levels. The first is that this writer is deeply aware that guns are no fun.