Slumdog Millionare

Recently I saw the movie Slumdog Millionaire with my girlfriends. This provocative movie started out as an Indie flick and grew in popularity until it found it’s home in the mainstream media. I feel that his movie has so many different aspects that made it such a good movie, that if used, one could translate into non-fiction writing. To start off, this movie had a lot of character build up. The director allowed the audience to build a relationship with the characters. You know that sufficient character development has been build when you get to that part of the movie where you yell at the main character to duck or run faster, you want them to succeed, you feel for them. Once you feel for the characters, it doesn’t matter what the rest of the movie is, you care what happens to them.

Depth is another element that is essential to movies and writing. Obtaining background information, about a character or a concept, lets the audience understand where the character is coming from or how they got to where they are. Slumdog millionaire did this by telling the story of how the main characters met and developed relationships over the years. It is really disappointing when you read a book or go to the movies and the concept surrounding the movie is amazing you just want to know more about it, and it ruins it entirely. This element is closely related to character development, but this element could also be used in
conjunction with ideas or concepts around a premise of a movie or book.

A very important, yet simple element that is used in this movie that is essential to every text is the outline: introduction, rising action, climax, falling action. Very basic but important part of any story, it has to build to something; for example, you couldn’t write a story about going down a slide, only describing your feelings and how bad you wanted to ride it, yet never telling the audience if you did it or not.

Another element that could be used in both in movies and writing is what I like to call the ‘time element’. In Slumdog Millionaire, the movie is made up of two sections, the current time, which is usually the character telling a story , which is the second part of the story. In Slumdog Millionaire, the main character is in a police station telling the detective his story, and how his journey through life lead him to know all the answers on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. So the movie is separated into two distinct times. I personally think it would be awesome if you could pull this off in a non fiction writing, it certainly would keep me entertained, it gives it almost a mysterious feel about it, because you know the outcome, but you don’t know how it got to that point.