Superhero Movies
I'm a superhero movie junkie. I was hooked on a few comics as a kid (X-Men, The New Mutants, Spider-Man, and a few mini-series. And I've also followed Straczinsky's Amazing Spider-Man series for the last couple of years, and Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men for a bit (I'm a fan of their television shows - and their writing makes a good transition to comics).

So I'm a sucker for a good super-hero movie. My favorite, actually, has been The Incredibles. I even managed to sit through Electra - as sucky as it was, it was much better than Batman and Robin, from the mid-90's. And tonight, I watched the much-anticipated X-Men III: The Last Stand.

I enjoyed the movie. I had a good time. The special effects were great. The fight scenes were awesome. But ultimately, it was only an "okay" movie. It didn't live up the previous films. I left feeling like I'd witnessed an awesome spectacle, but my emotional investment in the characters was only what was left over from the previous films. And what sucked was that it included an event - a character - that had been eagerly awaited since the the very first movie. ALL the comic book geeks were waiting for the appearance of Dark Phoenix. And it happened. And it was kinda - well - blah.

The problem was that there was TOO MUCH STORY.

This latest installment pulled out all the stops, and brought in tons of eagerly anticipated characters. Hank McCoy - the Beast. Callisto. Angel. Juggernaut. Arclight. Kitty Pryde and Piotr Rasputen as full-fledged team members. Moira MacTaggert. Dark Phoenix. And the events..! Pyro and Iceman duke it out! The mutant "cure"! Major characters dying or being permanently changed! The Danger room! And even a cameo Sentinel appearance!

It suffered from the same problem as Batman and Robin - TOO MUCH STORY, not enough time to tell it. You ended up with about a dozen five-minute stories that you could barely follow, and got introduced to new characters in a whirlwind of introductions. But because they have to share screen time with so many others, they get maybe three lines in and they are done.

The most intense superhero movies tend to be much more focused, one-on-one battles, combined with the hero's internal struggle. You have Peter Parker trying to sort out his failure of a personal life and going up against the Green Goblin. In his sequel, his own dual-identity is his big struggle, resulting in a temporary loss of powers and false happiness - and he's got his big one-on-one with Doctor Octopus. In the original Batman (which was a box-office mega-hit), you had Batman squaring off against the guy who "made" him... the Joker. In Batman Returns, young Bruce Wayne is fighting his personal demons in a fruitless effort to undo his parents' deaths... and battling his own mentor (and a powerful minion - it's definitely possible to have multiple villains).

Even in a more ensemble movie, the good ones have a focus. The first X-Men was about Wolverine, and to a lesser degree about Rogue. It was about being different - Rogue was trying to find a place to belong in a world that rejected her, and Wolverine didn't care about fitting in at all - until he found a friend he cared about. Then there was the battle against Magneto and his forces --- but the real battle was for Wolverine to save Rogue from Magneto. In the Incredibles, the focus is entirely on Bob Par, as he tries to reconcile his meaningful glory days with his drab, ordinary existance as a family man and 9-to-5 worker. Oh, and his big battle is against Nemesis, who has evil big plans against the world but is more importantly killing off Bob's friends and is targeting his best friend and his wife.

I don't know what it is about these movie producers / directors / writers, but they seem to take the attitude that if one villain is great, then a dozen villains "raises the stakes" and is a dozen times better! If the dual-plotline rocks, then adding ten major plotlines must really improve things!

No, all it does is clutter things up and make it much harder for the audience to care.

X-Men three acted like it wanted to be about Dark Phoenix. Which woulda been GREAT. and about a quarter of the movie was about that. But then it got lost, and in the last half of the movie she doesn't have much to do but walk around looking ominous. There was a GREAT opportunity in place to tell a VERY appropriate story about the government's misuse of power - turning what was originally billed as a voluntary thing to save people into a weapon to control them. Shades of the anti-terrorism laws of recent years, maybe? But even that gets glossed over as the movie rushes to cover ALL the territory it is scoped to cover.

Batman & Robin did the same thing. You had THREE villains with almost equal billing (one was the minion of Poison Ivy, so not so much), plus the introduction of Bat-Girl, plus young Grayson's chafing under Bruce Wayne's restrictions, plus Alfred's illness, and I can't remember what else (I haven't been able to bring myself to watch the whole thing again). You could probably pull out any TWO elements and made a great movie out of it. But no - they ended up with a collossal mess. And because they realized it was sucking, they decided to go back later and film some new and improved action scenes - further robbing the exposition from what little time it had to help the audience figure out what was really happening.

I heard a rumor tonight that the next Spider-Man might be in the same boat, with possibly three villains, plus the introduction of Peter's ORIGINAL girlfriend, Gwen Stacy. I am dreading the possibility that it's going to become another cluttered, jumbled mess.

Keep It Simple! The most powerful plots are the focused ones! If you want to raise the stakes, you do it by increasing the threat of the main antagonist, not by watering him down by introducing lots of secondary antagonists that are only loosely under his direction. You deepen the protagonist's relationships with those who will be threatened - instead of weakening them by having him meet fifty new friends in passing.

And don't think for a second that there's not a game-design analogy hiding here, even without the direct correlation between storylines. A game that focuses on doing one or two things REALLY WELL is going to be far and away better than a game that tries to do it all but only does a mediocre job at best at each one.

Labels: Movies

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 9:13 PM (Permalink)