Lone Ranger

(photo from IMDB)

Our gym has a cardio theatre and we kept catching enough pieces of Disney's "The Lone Ranger" that we decided we wanted to rent it.  It's much grittier than the original movie previews let on (they really played up Johnny Depp's character in the previews; and he was good, but the movie isn't as funny antics as they made it out to be).  All that to say, it's a good movie and we enjoyed it.

What I really loved about it was how the story was told.  It opens with some events, but then takes you forward to way past all those events.  A kid meets a now old Tonto and begins to hear the story from him.  So then it goes way way back to before the events it first showed and starts, then intersperses the story with Tonto and the boy.  To make it even more fun, it leaves out events and then the boy will stop Tonto and ask him something and then it goes back and fills in, sometimes layering on what's already been shown.

That sounds about as clear as mud as I tell it.  But oh, it's so well done.  The more that I write the more I realize how hard it is to not only to come up with a story, but to tell it in just the right way.  There's a reason why ghost stories are told in whispers with the lights turned out, and why the movie soundtrack to a film can totally make or break it.  A story is made better by its telling.  I love it when I see stories told in a way that just makes the story so much better.

It makes me wonder, if we took a story we know and loved, and told the same story in a different way, what would we think of it?  If Schindler's List was told like a Marvel movie, or Divergent written lyrically, or Anne of Green Gables retold in a modern setting, what would that do to it?  Stories retold intrigue me.  I think that's why I love it when stories get told through a new perspective or lens.  It's why I love writing in multiple points of view, because the story is different depending on who is telling it, and how it's being told.