Warning: The following article is about spoilers.
It contains some.
It contains some.
When I was a kid going to movies back in the late Pleistocene, nobody knew what a spoiler was. In our neighborhood, I don't think the word even existed then as a way to describe the practice of revealing too much about a movie and spoiling it for somebody else. Most of the films my friends and I were watching - monster movies, swashbucklers, westerns and comedies - followed fairly predictable formulas, anyway. If you went to see something like "North To Alaska", or "The Three Stooges Meet Hercules", or "Horror of Dracula", you had a pretty good idea going in what you were going to get. Spoilers would've been redundant.
Today it seems like spoiler alerts are everywhere. At the same time, we're being bombarded with more information about movies than ever before, often before the films are released, and sometimes from the same sources that are warning us against spoilers. New York Times critic A.O. Scott might've performed a valuable public service early last year, when he rattled off (in print) the climactic and supposedly top-secret plot points of "Citizen Kane", the "Star Wars" saga, "The Crying Game" and "Soylent Green", potentially spoiling those films for an untold number of readers. But how much to reveal about a movie when you're reviewing it is kind of an open question. The lines aren't carved in stone.
For example:
Sidney Lumet's 1974 mystery "Murder On the Orient Express" starts out with a dozen characters, all played by famous movie stars, getting on a train. One of them is going to be killed by the end of the first reel. The others are going to be suspects. Most reviews won't tell you who plays the murder victim. Why not? It's not like the character's identity stays secret very long. And the rest of the movie isn't really about who got killed, but who did the killing. And then there's the end, where each actor gets to take a final bow, a kind of on-screen curtain call, except the one who played the murder victim, because he can't, because his character's been bumped off. Which doesn't seem fair somehow. Spoiler Alert: The dead guy is Richard Widmark.
Or take the 2010 Mel Gibson thriller "Edge of Darkness". To begin with, there's a significant plot thread running through this film that's exactly like what's going on in "The Lovely Bones". So if you say that to somebody who's seen "The Lovely Bones", do you spoil "Edge of Darkness"? And there's the way the movie ends, which you could compare to the end of "Hamlet", where pretty much everybody in the story dies. Is it okay to say that? I mean, Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet" more than 400 years ago, so presumably the cat's out of the bag on that one. But if you tie it to a relatively new movie, are you letting the cat out of the bag all over again, or just beating the cat with a stick? I don't know. And Mel Gibson did a version of "Hamlet" once, too.
My approach to spoilers is a lot like my approach to writing generally. I fly by the seat of my pants. I want to be fair, both to the movie I'm writing about, and to the reader who might not have seen it yet. I know there are times when I probably give too much away, and other times when I probably don't say enough. It's not an exact science, and there are spoilers in every review. But if you want to know what Chazz Palminteri figures out at the end of "The Usual Suspects", or the terrible secret Faye Dunaway carries around with her through most of "Chinatown", forget it. See the movie. Or go ask A.O. Scott.
