Oi. It’s been a week, but last weekend was pretty darn cool, so I guess it balances out, I guess? High hopes for this weekend, I guess. Maybe I get some writing done!
Some episodes of Wheel of Time are on FreeVee! Which you can watch for free! Just, with ads. I’m checking it out, and I might get a Saturday Note out of it. They said they would put all of the episodes, but right now there are only the first three and the season one finale.
This one was inspired by a video I saw about Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Don’t know how much that will come up in the essay!
Spectacle Over Story
After the success of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Disney was interested in a sequel, because it’s a company whose current ethos is built on going absolutely nuts when it comes to the possibility of making obscene piles of money. But even though two sequels were greenlit, pre-production and a finished script were taking too long, so Disney started putting up deadlines and ultimatums. The crew only had storyboards and a basic outline of a script, but they decided to kickstart production right away, bringing their writers alongside them to the sets so that they could rewrite as needed and allow the actors to improvise much of their performances.
The result, of course, was Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End, films we look at nostalgically now, but are really kind of Plot messes. Sure, given they had storyboards for big sequences, there are big, memorable action sequences, and there are great, quotable lines, but the Plot, characterization, and worldbuilding is across the map. Characters will double cross each other at the drop of a hat, important Plot elements are introduced long after they should, and people are introduced who do almost nothing in the overall narrative.
This is a spectacle over a story. The makers of the movie are so invested in bringing you spectacle, that they’re not doing the work for that spectacle to have meaning.
This is a recurring problem with movies these days–though it’s not just limited to movies, it’s more noticeable there. And it’s not entirely new; I remember watching the Director’s Commentary on the deleted scenes from Eragon, and seeing scenes from towards the end of the film that provided interesting tidbits from the book or fleshed out the world slightly, only to hear the director declare that it was cut because they wanted to get straight to the battle as soon as possible. This was stupid, and I said so back in 2007. Though in hindsight, it’s entirely possible that it was a studio decision rather than the director’s fault.
Because we need to keep in mind that studio meddling is a massive factor in movie making these days. The third Captain America movie was planned to be an actual Captain America movie, but before the writers got past an outline, Kevin Feige poked his head in and declared that they were going to do an adaptation of Civil War. This got a nod in the press conference that announced it, as first they declared the movie would be titled Serpent Society before revealing it was an elaborate joke and bringing Robert Downey, Jr. on stage.
Marvel, in general, has a problem with this. On the topic of superhero fatigue, Kevin Feige recently replied that it wouldn’t be a problem because Marvel Studios has over eighty years of storytelling to adapt into film. But they’re not doing that–they’re in many cases adapting big name stories from the past thirty years or so. Sure, the Civil War movie turned out well enough–I’d argue it’s a pretty good movie–but they didn’t choose to do that film because it was what made sense for the story. Cap and Falcon were looking for Bucky, there was A Thing going on with Sharon, and there were questions about Cap’s place in the modern world. Wrapping all of that up with the Civil War storyline doesn’t make much writing sense, but it does make sense if you know that Civil War is Marvel Comics’ most famous crossover story and made tons of money, even if it remains pretty controversial in its execution.
“You want to see Cap fight Iron Man? We’ll give it to you!” No, it doesn’t have to make sense, but it makes a very memorable movie. Thankfully, again, the movie mostly works, but it doesn’t fit here, especially apparent because its major status quo changes are almost all completely discarded. The Sokovia Accords are ignored almost every other instance they’re brought up, Sharon Carter is basically discarded until Falcon & Winter Soldier, and the Avengers splitting up isn’t actually a major factor in their battle against Thanos–Cap isn’t there to help Tony because he just happens not to be there when Tony’s out on a walk with Pepper.
Perhaps the worst example of this is surprisingly not owned by Disney–Star Trek: Into Darkness. Spoiler alert, the movie is meant to be a remix on Wrath of Khan, with different takes on the key characters and a couple of the key moments. But it doesn’t make any goshdarn sense because what makes Wrath of Khan work is that it’s a sequel to a specific episode of Star Trek’s original series, and it builds on the characters that we’ve gotten to know over the years.
Into Darkness isn’t that. So when Kirk lets himself be killed to save the crew, and Spock screams Khan’s name dramatically, it feels as if it’s a weak echo of a much better movie, especially when Kirk is revived before the film’s runtime ends.
[By the way, “weak echo of a much better movie” describes a lot of the revivals, reboots, and live-action remakes we’re getting nowadays.]
We don’t know these versions of the characters, we’ve only seen them in one other movie, where they’re still figuring themselves out. There’s no connection or reason for enmity between Kirk and Khan. It’s just there, because Wrath of Khan was a good movie, and since we’re reviving Star Trek, we want to give the fans something memorable, even if we haven’t done any of the legwork for Khan, or a character like him, to appear and have the same effect on the story.
I almost titled this something like “Plot Over Story” or “Plot Over Characters,” but it’s a bigger issue than both of those. If you’re going to put spectacle in a story, it’s got to be earned. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if it’s earned, but introducing a notable reference, big climax, or massive change in the character relationships or status quo, you HAVE to do work in Plot, characters, and worldbuilding for it to have the intended impact. You can’t just have one of the heroes turn omnicidal to get her made-up children back (Multiverse of Madness), or suddenly drop the hero in the ancient Egyptian afterlife after ten years of being a non-fantasy setting (AC: Curse of the Pharaohs) just to have big, epic set pieces! These things take work! They take skill! And if they’d been built up, they’d fit the narrative, but without it they just feel weird.
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