When discussing motion pictures online, a 140-character limit does not necessarily provide a lot of room for in-depth character analysis or cogent analysis of symbolism and theme. So Twitter may not be the best place to go to describe a film well. But to describe one very badly, grossly oversimplifying the story, and perhaps missing the point entirely? That Twitter can do, has done, and likely will keep doing for the foreseeable future. The hashtag #ExplainAFilmPlotBadly was trending earlier this week, prompting users to come up with their own deliberately terrible, misleading synopses of famous films. The results are nothing if not efficient, skipping over all the extraneous parts and homing in on what is truly essential about a movie. Pixar’s heartwarming yet not terribly sanitary Ratatouille, for instance, received this blunt précis:
And The Hunger Games, it turns out, was really about how Jennifer Lawrence selfishly hogged the spotlight.
Naturally, the Star Wars saga was reduced to its core, too. Multiple times, in fact.
Like many things on the internet, #ExplainAFilmPlotBadly serves as an incredible time saver. Why devote two hours of one’s life to watching a motion picture when reading a one-sentence-long tweet gets the job done in a fraction of the time? And for the truly impatient, there are nice roundups here and here that essentially act as summaries of the summaries. Soon, all will be encapsulated.