4th May 2004, 8:40 AM
Yup. Sometimes by not telling or showing, you're creating a better character.
It doesn't always work, but when it does it's awesome. In the 1960's in "The Thing" you never saw the alien... ever. Since they didn't have a huge budget the director and producer both agreed that an alien is probably beyond most of our human comprehension, so it isn't seen and works really well. In Man On Fire (Directed by Tony Scott, brother to Ridley Scott), Denzel Washington's character goes through immense pain and tries to drink it away, and has scars on his hand. We never learn why he has this pain or those scars and just maybe, a backstory was never writen to explain why, but you leave the theater thinking about it and wondering who he is and what happened to him, as if he was a real person. Good stuff.
It doesn't always work, but when it does it's awesome. In the 1960's in "The Thing" you never saw the alien... ever. Since they didn't have a huge budget the director and producer both agreed that an alien is probably beyond most of our human comprehension, so it isn't seen and works really well. In Man On Fire (Directed by Tony Scott, brother to Ridley Scott), Denzel Washington's character goes through immense pain and tries to drink it away, and has scars on his hand. We never learn why he has this pain or those scars and just maybe, a backstory was never writen to explain why, but you leave the theater thinking about it and wondering who he is and what happened to him, as if he was a real person. Good stuff.