I am not entirely sold on the idea that movies have to have a good story to engage people. I used to believe the most important part of a movie was the script but the more I listen to people describing their favourite movies the more I hear less about plot and more about a particular scene, a particular actor, a particular genre.
When movies began the silent era was universal and they came from the history of literature and vaudeville, with stage entertainers who knew all about people’s emotions and what they thought people wanted. The discourse between literature and a reader is obvious and mostly unchanging for thousands of years because it came from the story of oral story-telling.
But movies don’t have to tell a coherent story for two hours to be memorable or even worth seeing. They can have stands, individual stories much shorter than the two hours, even no particular story at all but a series of events linked by some idea or some event. The reason is, as far as I can see, that movies are not about literature and story but about imaging.The image is everything.
And that works on a different set of parts of the brain where the visual transcends the reasoned. To such an extent that actors who do well simply bring their own personalities and characters to the part, hardly bothering to change emphasis, stance or even voice.