Something I’ve come across is that there are people who like some of the scenes from a movie who confuse that with liking the whole movie. This is understandable in a movie like Dr. Strangelove, where people simply forget all of the dull parts where nothing happens. It’s much weirder when it comes to a profoundly stupid movie like Legion.

If you haven’t seen it, I have a review of Legion up on my YouTube channel called Legion: World’s Stupidest Movie?

It probably is, by the way. It’s a horror movie in which Jesus is about to be born a second time to save humanity (again?) and God “got tired of all the bullshit” so he sends a legion of angeliac zombies (demoniacs, but they’re angels, and mostly behave like zombies) to try to kill the Christ-child before he can be born so that humanity won’t be saved and God can kill everyone. Only the renegade angel Michael (who cut off his literal wings when he rebelled against the order to go murder the Son of God in utero, because humanity is worth saving) and seven random people in a diner in the middle of the desert stand against the army of angeliac zombies who are attacking them. Oh, and this time it’s not a virgin birth, the waitress carrying the second coming of Jesus just got knocked up during a one-night stand almost nine months ago. (In a special feature on the DVD, the writer/director says that this is actually a retelling of the story of Abraham and Isaac.)

I published that video eight years ago, and, as of the writing of this post in the year of our Lord 2024, I still occasionally get comments on that video from people telling me that they like that movie or I’m missing the point.

Movies are complex things, as are all stories. They involve many parts and due to human fallibility the parts often don’t all fit together. Movies add several layers on top of this because there are the actors, the costumes, the sets, the performances, and the music which all can have their own virtues and capture the audience’s attention. You can have a terrible movie with great acting, or awful acting done on beautiful sets, or awful sets with magnificent music. Now, it’s often the case that quality tends to go together, but it doesn’t always, and in movies it’s especially the case that someone can have far better visual taste than they do narrative taste.

You can see that same thing, though it’s more subtle, in novels. You can have a novel where the dialog is excellent even though the characters’ actions aren’t consistent, or are taken more from tropes than the characters themselves, or aren’t what human beings would do but are only driven by the plot. There are authors who can paint fabulous scenes which are vivid and compelling even though there’s no way that they come from what happened before.

To give an analogy, consider a baseball triple-play. The batter takes a mighty swing and hits the ball deep into the outfield, so deep it will surely be a home run, then in a breathtaking move the outfielder leaps up, kicks off of the back wall, and manages to catch the ball a full ten feet off the ground. It’s an amazing out. Then, without throwing it, the first basement suddenly has the ball and is midway between first and second base, tags out the guy who was running back to first base, then throws the ball into the dugout where it pops out of the opposite dugout and into into the glove of the third basement who tags out the runner who thought he’d gotten a home run but instead had to run back to third base, just a half inch away from the plate as he’s dramatically sliding. Is this a great scene in total? No, because baseballs don’t suddenly teleport and that’s integral to the plot. On the other hand, you can enjoy the descriptions of each play as long as you don’t pay any attention to what connected them.

I don’t know why, but a lot of people have trouble admitting that what they like in a story isn’t the story, but just some of the scenes, or something common to the scenes such as the dialog or narration.