Quote Originally Posted by Gamer Girl View Post
This seems to happen to me a lot. I'll sit down to watch a movie or TV show or read a book. Quite often something I've heard good things about. The story will star off OK and move along with a basic plot. And then suddenly, the plot goes askew and you sit back and have to wonder ''what the heck is going on?''. What was once a nice story with a plot, just suddenly goes the wrong way. Often it's quite simple, the characters just pick 'route B', but some times it's just down right crazy. And you can't help but think, if they would have just stuck to the basic plot the story would be much better.
While I don't necessarily agree with the Total Recall example, I do think that you've hit on a couple of trends that are really disappointing:

"The Rugpuller" - There's probably something on tvtropes all about this, but for me it seemed to really blossom into a problem in the first couple of years following The Sixth Sense. Everybody (maybe every producer/production company, not every writer/director) felt the need to cram rugpulling reveals into every project just so the story might go from omg! to ZOMG!?!. Of course, that only works when (a) it is well-written and developed as part of the actual story devised by the writer/s; and (b) when the entire audience doesn't spend the first 75% of the story looking for the rugpuller.

"The X-Files Redux" - Every TV series should have a complex, multi-phasic overarching plot, rife with conspiracy, unknowable truths, and crazy plot turns, that takes X seasons to resolve, where X is unknown to everyone involved, thus can not possibly be written in a fashion that will have internal consistency or be comprehensible to anyone - even if they have the writers notes and a plot chart. Why is X unknown? Because that's how long the series will air on television, of course...

So instead of writting a good story, everyone's trying to land the next big thing, the next must-see-TV, the next "We're so clever we should get awards" script. That, and the power of the focus group with input, or the production meeting with network execs like those from Simpson's episode who suggest that "Upping the cool quotient by 17%" will make the main character a winner.

Yup, sometimes the basic plot, well written and acted, wins.