101 Pet Peeves #1

#1 The Great Idea Wasted

I'm a sucker for new and interesting ideas. Give me a great "what if" and I'm hooked. What if Vampires turned out to be real and came out to the world? What if a part of our soul manifested itself as a physical animal? What if people could invade our dreams and steal our secrets? All of these what if's are from specific stories and personally I think are fascinating ideas. 

The problem arises when a story has this great idea, but at best it's a sub-plot or worse it's a side note alongside the story. 

I'll use Inception as the first example. (First it should be noted I liked the movie) Yes the movie was good, but it set up this idea that this technology was for "extraction," corporate espionage and such. Then went with "something no one else has been able to do before," namely "inception." If we never see what is normal, then how can we appreciate how difficult the extraordinary is? Not to mention the personal journey of the main character seems to be the most important point of the movie. The how was secondary. What I want to see is what extraction was like, and what lead to it being illegal exactly. Did someone uncover something they shouldn't? How common place was extraction before it was illegal? The world where someone can enter someone else's dreams is fascinating to me. It would be fascinating to find out exactly how they discovered what kind of people they needed to complete jobs, and how did they figure out that a kick can work. This stuff didn't pop up overnight. Did they have to start off without architects and realized someone had to build the world? There was so many places that the idea could have gone, that I was left disappointed that most of the story was finding out what had happened to the main character's wife.

Then there is a movie coming out soon (as I write this of course) that poses the question, what if time was literally money. How simple of a premise is that? But it's not one I've seen before. You work to earn time, and then you pay time for food, coffee and anything else you need. When you run out of time you die. Now the how this came about isn't what interests me, but the how somebody simply lives like that I want to know. Things like coffee would literally shorten your life, and the choice for frivolous things would be so much harder. Shorter but better quality life, or longer but potentially miserable life? From the trailer though the time could be switched for money really. The main character ends up being given a ridiculous amount of money, I mean time and is now on the run for guys who think he stole the money, I mean time. He meets a rich girl and falls for her. That sounds pretty much like any Hollywood movie about guy who gets item X and has to keep it away from the bad guys and falls for a girl along the way. Heck are there muggins in this world? How common is murdering someone for their life? Or is it easy to catch by following the time?

The problem I have with how these unique ideas are handled is they are often gimmicks to get people to put out the money for the stories/movies. The stories still fall into "formula #324" but this time in the future/underwater/etc.    

I want to see more using these unique ideas as the main point, not as settings. 

Solutions:

Try spring boarding off the unique idea. Ask questions, and try to make the idea more central to the story. What inspired the idea in the first place might be a great place to go back to. Ask if the base story would be the same if stuck in a different setting. Romeo and Juliet in space is still Romeo and Juliet. Star Trek though is an exploration of what might happen in space travel. Take the space travel aspect out of Star Trek and there is no story. Lastly don't shoe horn an awesomely unique idea into a story because you like the idea. Let the idea evolve and give it its own story. If it is that good of an idea don't ruin it.