Opinion Piece - 90 Minutes is the Perfect Film Length and You're Wrong if You Don't Think So

Yeah, it's a deliberately antagonistic title and I'll get properly to the argument soon but I'll open with my defence of films that are longer because the one thing I'm not saying here is that films over an hour and a half are inherently bad. Obviously I love tonnes of films that are everything from ten minutes longer than that to another hour and a half longer. Hell, my favourite film of all time is Fight Club, a movie that's closer to two and a half hours. Really, the general point I want to make with this article is that films should be the lengths their stories need them to be, no longer. Take Mulholland Drive, a film that comes in at just under two and a half hours. The reason that film gets to be that long is because about an hour and a half of it is the TV pilot David Lynch originally made but he had to add the right nightmarish elements to both make it a true cinematic experience and to round off the plot that makes sense in a self contained way. Apocalypse Now has to be as long as it is to properly capture that fever dream feeling of descending further into both Marlowe and the jungles of Vietnam. If it was 90 minutes, you'd be in the wrong head space as the climax rose and came down with that sickening crunch. Basically I'm being a film snob and saying only people who know what they're doing should be making films over 90 minutes.

I want you to think about your favourite modern rom-coms, think the last ten years or so. The chances are, a lot of those are Judd Apatow films which are usually perfectly fine. I'm going to use The Big Sick as my example here as it's the one I've seen the most recently, two hours long and also the most critically acclaimed. See, it's a great, sweet, funny movie and one that I thought was thoroughly worth seeing but like many recent rom-coms, it lasts a little too long. With that transition between the second and third act, the movie takes a moment to be serious and like a "proper" movie. That's all well and good, emotional resonance and all that but it completely annihilates the pacing of the film. If it kept the consistent tone, didn't take too long to dwell on everything, it would be a pretty much perfect film. Take Trainspotting, a very, very different film but one that's about 90 minutes. It's directed by Danny Boyle who is now considered something of a master of his craft but was very much a fledgling director with Trainspotting. That said, by keeping his film tight, he is able to hit every emotional note needed from hysterical to tragic without boring the audience. It's a whirlwind and one that could be pretty tiresome if it lasted any longer but by hitting that 90 minute sweet spot, Trainspotting is fondly remembered as one of the all time classics of British cinema.

What I find fascinating though is the sheer amount of bad movies that sit around the 90 minute mark. At this point, I'm becoming something of a scholar in the study of so-bad-they're-amazing films so let me take you to class here. Films that are so bad they're good are a genuine art form and by sticking to that 90 minute mark, you just cannot get bored of them. The same with great films, bad films don't have long enough to get tiresomely bad when they're less than 100 minutes. You want examples? I got them, from Miami Connection and Troll 2 to the hysterically incomprehensible worlds of Neil Breen and The Room, the very best of the very worst all adhere to this golden rule. Using The Room as an example because it's a film I've pretty much studied at this point, if you watched two hours of Tommy Wiseau acting poorly, directing poorly and humping poorly, it would make you angry. Instead, his incompetence is a raging inferno, burning powerfully, impressively but quickly enough that it isn't too damaging. There may be an art to making a film that's so bad it's good and hitting that 90 minute mark is a vital first step.

I hope I've got my point across well enough here. It's not a snobbery thing of "I know better than you", it's pretty much the opposite. If a director is good enough to know what they're doing, their film will be the perfect length. Otherwise, it never hurts to skirt a little closer to that 90 minute mark, giving the audience the space to want more from you, because who wants to be the film that gives the audience way more than they actually want.