We only have eyes for the plot

Nerd behavior has infiltrated our wider culture to an objectively disturbing degree, as egos full of entitlement and misogyny spread their utter nonsense into the mainstream. And one of the ways it's ruining everything for everybody is in the writing we get about movies.

It's a dumb thing to worry about in this shitfest of a world, but we have to get our pleasures where we can, and I do get great pleasure from well-written essays about the very best in cinema, because the very best in cinema is always worth writing about. It won't change the world, but it'll help.

But a lot of modern writing and criticism about film is all about the plot, and only the plot. Hung up on holes or twists or general developments, as if that's all that matters.

It's really not. Plot is a vital part of the storytelling process, it's the frame the story is built around. But it's not the story itself. Great movies can have the slenderest of stories, and the most tightly wound tale can be undone by performance.

One of the most successful thing the Marvel movies have really done - apart from making literally  obscene amounts of money - is move the discussion of quality to each film's role in the ongoing mega-plot, and we can all overlook the same washed out cinematography, the same boring, grainy realism of men in tights.

This leads to all those fucking useless three hour video lectures about how a fucking Star Wars doesn't work, because they don't like bits of a story, when really we're all just interested in the kickass lightsaber fights and spaceships exploding in the loud vacuum and heroic figures standing strong against intergalactic bullies. 

And after years of reviews of comic books that only talked about the writing - with a, at best, cursory mention of the art - that's seeped into the wider world. Ignoring that a story can be told in characterization, or even in the movement of the human body through space, it can be told in the medium of the non sequitur, or satire, or dance.

I'm getting increasingly obsessed with style over substance as I get older, and will take a good, dank and visibly morose mood over a good twist, every time. This starts in the comics, when I buy them almost purely for the art these days, and it goes into my movies. There are people who see them the same way I do, but they can get buried in the shouting about plot holes.