There are some really powerful things in Williams’s performance. You’re right about the nature of Hollywood—you work with what you got. But Hollywood also eats its own tail. Filmmakers grow up watching films, and they tend to draw from other films, the same way that LLMs just kinda rearrange pieces from ingested text (which is an oversimplification, bear with me).

Like, there’s something special about The Lord of the Rings that is not there in, say, Wizard’s First Rule. I don’t want to pick on or make fun of things too much, but Wizard’s First Rule seems to more rearrange existing ideas in the genre rather than drawing from something else.

What I’m saying is that there’s a broader problem with stories in film and books where you can tell that the stories are written by somebody who leans too heavily on other stories and books. Movies are a kind of alchemy where writing, direction, and acting intersect so we can’t explain everything away as easily as we can with books, but I want to say that the monologue is weak in the script, and Robin Williams and Gus Van Sant manage to elevate it. The direction is absolutely stellar, the acting is on point, but I hate the actual words in the monologue.