Tuesday, March 22, 2011

'The Troll Hunter' - The Goal

by Tristan Mahlow 

Hi. 
Back from another movie night with a friend of mine.
This time we watched the interesting Norwegian mockumentary 'The Troll Hunter' (Trolljegeren). The plot in a nutshell: A group of young students make a documentary about a troll hunter.
But after the  first half hour we asked ourselves: What is the goal of that movie? The initial curiosity vanished (we see the first troll about 15 minutes into the film) - now we demanded something more from the movie!  But we were just shown the journey of the young protagonists. There was no clear goal they wanted to reach and so our tension to find out what happened waned after that first 30 minutes. Close to the end the story got more drive, when they had to find out, why the trolls are fleeing from their natural habitats, but this was way too far into the movie to generate much tension anymore.

Note to myself: Let my viewers know - early on - to what goal the protagonists work. Only that way tension can be created!

Have a nice day,
- Tristan

 Wiki; Rotten Tomatoes (N/A%); IMDb (7,4/10); Official Site;

2 comments:

  1. Hey Tristan-

    Real quick, for the sake of our online friendship, RobertPaulsen is merely a pen name I use when posting online. My name is Jason, good to meet you.

    Second, I really enjoy the direction you've taken this blog. I like the way you quickly get to the reason you did or didn't like the film. I especially enjoy the notes to yourself describing how you would use the information in the movie to better your own scriptwriting. Do you have a script in the making?

    Great ideas. Keep them coming.

    -Jason

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  2. Thanks, Jason! Good to meet you, too.

    I finally started to work on my scripts and will post the work-in-progress on this blog in the near future.

    Looking forward to hear from you,
    - Tristan

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