Perhaps there are not many films where a main character is not aware of there being a turning point in the plot but what about films where the main character misinterprets what the turning point of the plot means to them and we watch them making bad decisions based on their wrong judgement? Would that be considered structurally different from 'classical' narratives or would that just be classified as a slight tweaking of the plot mechanics?
This would seem to be important in making the audience feel as if they have received a different or new experience, something more than just what has been advertised. I usually consider the first couple of acts the 'TV listing' acts, as they are usually the set ups that are described in trailers and listings to entice people to watch the film. Just taking a couple of TV listings descriptions from the Radio Times for this week:The examples also confirm that character goals seldom endure unchanged across the length of a film. Revelations, decisions, disasters, supernatural events, and presumably others kinds of causes frequently cause major shifts in characters’ goals or at least in the tactics they employ in pursuing them. Even in what seems like a fairly straightforward thriller like Alien, the crew’s assumptions that they must loyally protect their spaceship are completely reversed at the end of the development, and the narrative turns into an attack on corporate greed and ruthlessness. Whatever one thinks of classical Hollywood films, they are usually more complex than the three-act model allows for.
Both the listings, like trailers, describe the initial plot and hint at the way things are going to develop later in the film. I think many commercial films present themselves as straightforward, simplistic tales and usually then use that licence to go off into the areas they really want to deal with in the final act, by which time they should have created their hold over their audience to be able to take them along with the story.Separate Lies - Upper middle class couple James and Anne have the perfect marriage. But when a hit-and-run incident occurs near their country retreat, a very different truth is revealed.
Hollow Man - When top research scientist Jericho Cane decides to sample his own radical disappearing drug, he is blissfully unaware that his newly acquired invisibility will bring his most violent tendencies to the surface.
That initial, simple 'trailer' story being complicated in the film itself in later acts would seem to be codified into films and can sometimes be the reason why an audience might find some films disappointing - because either everything has been given away in the trailer so there isn't any twist left to reveal or because the plot develops in too much of an different direction from what the initial acts (and therefore trailers) led an audience to expect.
An interesting example could be that of Takashi Miike's One Missed Call, which has an initial couple of acts so like Ring (including a couple of almost identical scenes, such as the one where the main characters find out about the curse through a group of schoolgirls grieving for one of their lost friends) that it made me wonder whether Miike was doing an elaborate parody of the whole cursed-whatever genre!
Then the pivotal scene of the film, the TV exorcism of the latest girl to get the mobile phone call, arrives and suddenly the film seems to build up some power of its own with an underlying anger at the exploitation of an impending "live on TV" death with a countdown clock, a bickering panel of 'experts' and a showbiz exorcist condemning the shallowness of the media. From the look of the scene and the use of it in advertising materials on the DVD, this would also seem to have been the big scene used in the selling of the film to entice audiences. However in working so effectively it would seem to work against the film being thought of as a parody of the genre, so it completely subverts the film again and leaves the film open to go in many interesting directions for its final section.
Unfortunately though this for me is where the film falls down - it does not become structurally unsound, the opposite in fact, as the film concerns itself with explaining the cause of the curse but with little sense of being a straight-faced Ring parody of the first section or of the satire of the TV studio section. The film ends up becoming the bland J-horror clone it was very close to commenting on in its initial acts and for anyone who had seen the advertising materials that build the plot to the studio exorcism it might seem like you are being driven at speed until that section finishes and then left to freewheel into a brick wall with the rest of the film!