Ladies, Gentleman, Gentleman pretending to be ladies, let me--for a moment--take a break from my usually blindly optimistic reviews of the latest hot releases to take a moment to review something a little larger--Hollywood, franchises, and more importantly, franchises based around trilogies.
This could be seen as a follow-up to my Indiana Jones Review, as I've had a good while to mull over the film, and others like it. Also, I'm considering, in lieu of the upcoming Etrian Odyssey sequel, to post a review of the first one. Would anyone be interested in reading one? I'd like to know.
---
Hollywood's biggest blockbusters of late have been one of two things--adaptations of popular comic books or novels, or else sequels to 70's and 80's franchises long thought dead. Remakes also fall into the second category.
But I've never understood something. Why is it that, when somebody decides to build a franchise, they build a franchise into the form of a trilogy? When have trilogies been proven to be the best way to do sequels? Why are trilogies so god damn popular?
Pirates of the Carribbean is a swell example. The original movie is a wonderful film. It's action-packed, funny, and had a wide-reaching scope. It sat comfortably with just about every audience, because there was something for everyone. For adults, it was a gritty story with interesting characters, violence, and a sense of realism behind it. For younger, post-fetal spawn, there was magic, skeletons, pseudo-musical moments, and plenty of laughs. The movie walked a narrow line, but it walked it well, with a drunken, ambling swagger, and proved itself to be the most popular movie of the year.
Two years later, by popular demand, we came to know that a sequel was being made. But not just any sequel, nay--the second movie would, in fact, be the second chapter in an eventual trilogy! Fans poured in from either side, vitrolic and furious on one, hopeful and optimistic on the other, and everyone started raving about how it was our generation's Star Wars.
The movies came and went, and what was left in their wake was sheer, unbridled disappointment. There were a lot of aspects of the original PotC film that were ill-suited for a large, continuous plot. For one, the story effectively was over at the end. Every plotline was resolved, the villains were dead or brought to justice, and the heroes all reached happy mediums that allowed them to exit the stage without ambiguity. Because the ending was, in fact, so nicely brought together, in order to justify a sequel, shit had to change. The neat romance of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly was challenged, twisted, wrenched apart and redone with all the extra angst and guilt and whatnot that was wonderfully absent from the original, and Captain Jack Sparrow turned from a lovable rouge to a manipulative, self-serving git. This, of course, is a symptom of a disease known as "unintended star syndrome" where a SUPPORTING CHARCTER (all caps, yes, but Jack Sparrow was, in the original, a supporting charcater) is made into the star/lead role of a sequel due to his popularity. This bothered me a fair bit, because Jack Sparrow was the perfect supporting character. He was the balance to draw attention away from the inherent sappiness that is present in the hero archetype--he was darker, edgier, wackier and more over the top, providing great instances of comic relief and he also was a great plot device, constantly being a sort of literary juice mixer to blend seperate characters and plotlines together in order to make the movie cohesive. He was, in a way, a better version of Han Solo, and this worked because the story was NOT about him. He was a very large part, as he was the principal supporting character, but he was not the main character. Will was. Orlando Bloom, rather. HE was the main character, he was the main plot device, he was the one who made the story happen, and Jack Sparrow SUPPORTED that, DROVE that, and thus, he was a great SUPPORTING character.
So, when the last two films of the trilogy focused on HIS exploits, HIS antics, I found myself at a loss, because in order to make Jack Sparrow more interesting and dynamic--more of a main character--he had to be altered. He was no longer a lovable rouge, he was a conflicted, self-serving **** who seemed to delight in backstabbing everyone he could for no better reason than just because he cared only about himself. Throw in some insipid love triangle between him and Keira Knightly and Orlando Bloom and the movie just about fell apart, because the main formula was altered. The easily accessible PotC film was changed into a dark, convoluted and almost obnoxiously NERDY epic, involving more monsters, more magic, and far, far less realism or believability, to the degree that even DEATH wasn't a threat to these people anymore. Literally, people die and it doesn't really seem to stop them. I mean, has the threat of death REALLY become so passe that it just isn't enough to justify danger? The ending of the second PotC movie doesn't really help matters because it also rips off Empire Strikes Back to a fucking T. Jack Sparrow/Han Solo apparantly dies/gets frozen in cryptonite (essentially the same thing), which leads the erstwhile "protagonists" to seek out and rescue him from Davy Jones' Locker/Jabba the Hutt.
This sets up the third movie in both respective trilogies, but while Star Wars had the sense of restraint to keep the main focus (kill the Empire) prevalent throughout the trilogy, PotC, being forced into a cohesive plot when it really shouldn't have been, had no greater focus. We didn't really know who the bad guys were, what the ultimate goal is, and the fact of the matter is, by the end of the third movie, you are hopelessly lost. In fact, the only way to enjoy the third movie is to watch it a second time, because now that you know what happens, you can try desperately to figure out WHY. The trilogy collapses upon itself UTTERLy by the third movie because, in its impatience, the narrative loses everything that made the first movie great in the first place. The lamentable fact was, if they DIDN'T try to make it a trilogy--if they, instead, opted to make it like Indiana Jones, a series of seperate adventures involving the same characters--the movies would have been much better. Alas.
On the subject of Indiana Jones, it was a great unintentional trilogy. The film makers never TRIED to make it a trilogy, a trilogy just sort of happened, and it works because the stories are really just three seperate movies with the same characters, and each one is brilliant--even Temple of Doom has some truly excellent moments. Now, twenty years later, they decide to make a sequel for absolutely no reason besides curiosity or desperation. Desperation, certainly, on George Lucas' part, because the man has proved time and time again that he actually serves no purpose in existence except to make things that we all HATE. The fact that Star Wars, the original trilogy, is so damned good has turned out to be the exception, not the rule, and not even Spielberg can really prevent Indiana Jones from putting the final nail in its own coffin, and cracking the wood in the process. The newest Indiana Jones flick has, effectively, ended the series. if they do try to go anywhere with it, the result will be trashy, stupid and even more half-hearted than before. But, at least Indiana Jones had the decency to wait twenty years before killing itself. PotC never even let itself get that old--all hopes of it becoming a classic franchise have been killed by its stupid attempt to be a trilogy, which returns us to the point of: Why a trilogy?
The Matrix had to be a trilogy. Why? Who knows. I never saw it coming--a sequel seemed unneccessary, but break it down far enough and there's actually some really good storytelling behind it. The Matrix at least keeps a focus throughout the series, complicating things only enough to keep them interesting, and ends on a cheesy, but relatively deep note. Sure, the original film's extremely deep symbolism and allegory gets muddied a bit, and stretched out too far, but at the end it is certainly still there, and we got the Animatrix out of it, which is simply brilliant, but why a trilogy? The original didn't NEED a sequel. It was a one-shot action movie, and in that regard it was brilliant. Why keep going? If the only reason to continue a story is for it generate profit, than it is a poor reason to do so. Stories are written to be complete, to say what they have to say and then leave. If you try to take a story and stretch it out, the end result is something like the Wheel of Time series, which became so ponderous that I couldn't read past the fifth book--but if something takes more than five books to tell me something, I start to doubt just how interested I am in really finding out what that something is.
Star Wars was a trilogy, fine. That worked. Honest to God it did, even if Return of the Jedi was mostly idiotic, it still bloody worked, because the entire trilogy resolves the major plotlines--Luke Skywalker becomes a Jedi, and the evil Empire is defeated. It takes three movies, but it happened, and it worked. The prequel trilogy SHOULD have worked, but it didn't. Why? We can blame the acting and the writing, sure, but the honest answer is because it was unneccessary. It really was. Look, there have BEEN prequels to Star Wars written. There have even been sequels. They are called the Extended Universe, and they fill comic books, novels, video games, etc. They fill in gaps, they tell us what we want to know, and most of them do it FAR better than the prequel movies did. Boba Fett, for example, has a very well-written backstory told across a number of books which is almost completely washed out by Lucas' films, which add so much idiotic, inconsequential fluff that they fail to really do more than show off how fucking PRETTY we can make compuertized images look.
What about Lord of the Rings? That was a trilogy, and it was brilliant, but the ONLY reason it was was because the story itself has survived 70+ years and retained an extremely healthy fanbase. The story itself WAS a novel, it WAS intended to be a trilogy from the get-go, and J.R.R. Tolkein did the hard part for us by already giving us the story beforehand. All Peter Jackson had to do was film it and make sure it didn't lose any of its original beauty, and thank heavens for him, because it didn't and it worked.
We don't NEED trilogies. We don't need sequels. Really, we don't. PotC didn't. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade didn't. Hell, it was even called the LAST CRUSADE. Last, being the key word. The Matrix didn't. Movies only need sequels--no, STORIES only need sequels if there is a legitimate reason for them, if there is still a story left to tell, and if that story can expand or enhance the original. That is the only reason we need to make a sequel out of anything, ever, period. I mean, god damn, LOOK at video games. Seriously? 13 Final Fantasy games? Of those, only 5 are actually worth your time--those 5 are VI, VII, IX, X (arguably) and XII. MAYBE IV, but I really don't see what the big fucking deal about FFIV is. That means that there are eight other entries in the series that aren't really neccessary. The first game is, hell, it's basically just a better version of Dragon Warrior! And the Dragon Warrior...sorry, Dragon QUEST series is arguably better than the Final Fantasy series, because if you can stomach the cumbersome menu system, you'll find that each iteration expands the original formula while retaining the basic things that made the games good in the first place, and it does it with a "story arc" format that genuinely works.
I apologize for how long this has been. If you've sat through all of it, you are truly a person of high caliber. Ultimately, my point is this: We need to stop thinking everything needs a sequel. We need to stop fucking making Trilogies. Hell, even the HOBBIT is getting a sequel--it's getting two movies! I have news for you--the Hobbit HAS a sequel, and it's called the FELLOWSHIP OF THE FUCKING RINGS.
Stop making trilogies. Stop driving every good idea into the ground for profit. Stop trying to have too much of a good thing. I know nobody important is going to read this, but you all might, and you all are the folks that encourage them to do this, because you all--we all, because I'm just as guilty--will go out and WATCH Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, we'll watch Attack of the Clones, we'll watch Matrix Revolutions, we'll watch Pirates of the Carribbean: At World's End, we will DO IT, and until we stop, they are going to keep pulling the same shit over and over again until anything we once valued in movies, in stories, in ANYTHING is driven into the ground and beaten to fucking DEATH.
This could be seen as a follow-up to my Indiana Jones Review, as I've had a good while to mull over the film, and others like it. Also, I'm considering, in lieu of the upcoming Etrian Odyssey sequel, to post a review of the first one. Would anyone be interested in reading one? I'd like to know.
---
Hollywood's biggest blockbusters of late have been one of two things--adaptations of popular comic books or novels, or else sequels to 70's and 80's franchises long thought dead. Remakes also fall into the second category.
But I've never understood something. Why is it that, when somebody decides to build a franchise, they build a franchise into the form of a trilogy? When have trilogies been proven to be the best way to do sequels? Why are trilogies so god damn popular?
Pirates of the Carribbean is a swell example. The original movie is a wonderful film. It's action-packed, funny, and had a wide-reaching scope. It sat comfortably with just about every audience, because there was something for everyone. For adults, it was a gritty story with interesting characters, violence, and a sense of realism behind it. For younger, post-fetal spawn, there was magic, skeletons, pseudo-musical moments, and plenty of laughs. The movie walked a narrow line, but it walked it well, with a drunken, ambling swagger, and proved itself to be the most popular movie of the year.
Two years later, by popular demand, we came to know that a sequel was being made. But not just any sequel, nay--the second movie would, in fact, be the second chapter in an eventual trilogy! Fans poured in from either side, vitrolic and furious on one, hopeful and optimistic on the other, and everyone started raving about how it was our generation's Star Wars.
The movies came and went, and what was left in their wake was sheer, unbridled disappointment. There were a lot of aspects of the original PotC film that were ill-suited for a large, continuous plot. For one, the story effectively was over at the end. Every plotline was resolved, the villains were dead or brought to justice, and the heroes all reached happy mediums that allowed them to exit the stage without ambiguity. Because the ending was, in fact, so nicely brought together, in order to justify a sequel, shit had to change. The neat romance of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly was challenged, twisted, wrenched apart and redone with all the extra angst and guilt and whatnot that was wonderfully absent from the original, and Captain Jack Sparrow turned from a lovable rouge to a manipulative, self-serving git. This, of course, is a symptom of a disease known as "unintended star syndrome" where a SUPPORTING CHARCTER (all caps, yes, but Jack Sparrow was, in the original, a supporting charcater) is made into the star/lead role of a sequel due to his popularity. This bothered me a fair bit, because Jack Sparrow was the perfect supporting character. He was the balance to draw attention away from the inherent sappiness that is present in the hero archetype--he was darker, edgier, wackier and more over the top, providing great instances of comic relief and he also was a great plot device, constantly being a sort of literary juice mixer to blend seperate characters and plotlines together in order to make the movie cohesive. He was, in a way, a better version of Han Solo, and this worked because the story was NOT about him. He was a very large part, as he was the principal supporting character, but he was not the main character. Will was. Orlando Bloom, rather. HE was the main character, he was the main plot device, he was the one who made the story happen, and Jack Sparrow SUPPORTED that, DROVE that, and thus, he was a great SUPPORTING character.
So, when the last two films of the trilogy focused on HIS exploits, HIS antics, I found myself at a loss, because in order to make Jack Sparrow more interesting and dynamic--more of a main character--he had to be altered. He was no longer a lovable rouge, he was a conflicted, self-serving **** who seemed to delight in backstabbing everyone he could for no better reason than just because he cared only about himself. Throw in some insipid love triangle between him and Keira Knightly and Orlando Bloom and the movie just about fell apart, because the main formula was altered. The easily accessible PotC film was changed into a dark, convoluted and almost obnoxiously NERDY epic, involving more monsters, more magic, and far, far less realism or believability, to the degree that even DEATH wasn't a threat to these people anymore. Literally, people die and it doesn't really seem to stop them. I mean, has the threat of death REALLY become so passe that it just isn't enough to justify danger? The ending of the second PotC movie doesn't really help matters because it also rips off Empire Strikes Back to a fucking T. Jack Sparrow/Han Solo apparantly dies/gets frozen in cryptonite (essentially the same thing), which leads the erstwhile "protagonists" to seek out and rescue him from Davy Jones' Locker/Jabba the Hutt.
This sets up the third movie in both respective trilogies, but while Star Wars had the sense of restraint to keep the main focus (kill the Empire) prevalent throughout the trilogy, PotC, being forced into a cohesive plot when it really shouldn't have been, had no greater focus. We didn't really know who the bad guys were, what the ultimate goal is, and the fact of the matter is, by the end of the third movie, you are hopelessly lost. In fact, the only way to enjoy the third movie is to watch it a second time, because now that you know what happens, you can try desperately to figure out WHY. The trilogy collapses upon itself UTTERLy by the third movie because, in its impatience, the narrative loses everything that made the first movie great in the first place. The lamentable fact was, if they DIDN'T try to make it a trilogy--if they, instead, opted to make it like Indiana Jones, a series of seperate adventures involving the same characters--the movies would have been much better. Alas.
On the subject of Indiana Jones, it was a great unintentional trilogy. The film makers never TRIED to make it a trilogy, a trilogy just sort of happened, and it works because the stories are really just three seperate movies with the same characters, and each one is brilliant--even Temple of Doom has some truly excellent moments. Now, twenty years later, they decide to make a sequel for absolutely no reason besides curiosity or desperation. Desperation, certainly, on George Lucas' part, because the man has proved time and time again that he actually serves no purpose in existence except to make things that we all HATE. The fact that Star Wars, the original trilogy, is so damned good has turned out to be the exception, not the rule, and not even Spielberg can really prevent Indiana Jones from putting the final nail in its own coffin, and cracking the wood in the process. The newest Indiana Jones flick has, effectively, ended the series. if they do try to go anywhere with it, the result will be trashy, stupid and even more half-hearted than before. But, at least Indiana Jones had the decency to wait twenty years before killing itself. PotC never even let itself get that old--all hopes of it becoming a classic franchise have been killed by its stupid attempt to be a trilogy, which returns us to the point of: Why a trilogy?
The Matrix had to be a trilogy. Why? Who knows. I never saw it coming--a sequel seemed unneccessary, but break it down far enough and there's actually some really good storytelling behind it. The Matrix at least keeps a focus throughout the series, complicating things only enough to keep them interesting, and ends on a cheesy, but relatively deep note. Sure, the original film's extremely deep symbolism and allegory gets muddied a bit, and stretched out too far, but at the end it is certainly still there, and we got the Animatrix out of it, which is simply brilliant, but why a trilogy? The original didn't NEED a sequel. It was a one-shot action movie, and in that regard it was brilliant. Why keep going? If the only reason to continue a story is for it generate profit, than it is a poor reason to do so. Stories are written to be complete, to say what they have to say and then leave. If you try to take a story and stretch it out, the end result is something like the Wheel of Time series, which became so ponderous that I couldn't read past the fifth book--but if something takes more than five books to tell me something, I start to doubt just how interested I am in really finding out what that something is.
Star Wars was a trilogy, fine. That worked. Honest to God it did, even if Return of the Jedi was mostly idiotic, it still bloody worked, because the entire trilogy resolves the major plotlines--Luke Skywalker becomes a Jedi, and the evil Empire is defeated. It takes three movies, but it happened, and it worked. The prequel trilogy SHOULD have worked, but it didn't. Why? We can blame the acting and the writing, sure, but the honest answer is because it was unneccessary. It really was. Look, there have BEEN prequels to Star Wars written. There have even been sequels. They are called the Extended Universe, and they fill comic books, novels, video games, etc. They fill in gaps, they tell us what we want to know, and most of them do it FAR better than the prequel movies did. Boba Fett, for example, has a very well-written backstory told across a number of books which is almost completely washed out by Lucas' films, which add so much idiotic, inconsequential fluff that they fail to really do more than show off how fucking PRETTY we can make compuertized images look.
What about Lord of the Rings? That was a trilogy, and it was brilliant, but the ONLY reason it was was because the story itself has survived 70+ years and retained an extremely healthy fanbase. The story itself WAS a novel, it WAS intended to be a trilogy from the get-go, and J.R.R. Tolkein did the hard part for us by already giving us the story beforehand. All Peter Jackson had to do was film it and make sure it didn't lose any of its original beauty, and thank heavens for him, because it didn't and it worked.
We don't NEED trilogies. We don't need sequels. Really, we don't. PotC didn't. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade didn't. Hell, it was even called the LAST CRUSADE. Last, being the key word. The Matrix didn't. Movies only need sequels--no, STORIES only need sequels if there is a legitimate reason for them, if there is still a story left to tell, and if that story can expand or enhance the original. That is the only reason we need to make a sequel out of anything, ever, period. I mean, god damn, LOOK at video games. Seriously? 13 Final Fantasy games? Of those, only 5 are actually worth your time--those 5 are VI, VII, IX, X (arguably) and XII. MAYBE IV, but I really don't see what the big fucking deal about FFIV is. That means that there are eight other entries in the series that aren't really neccessary. The first game is, hell, it's basically just a better version of Dragon Warrior! And the Dragon Warrior...sorry, Dragon QUEST series is arguably better than the Final Fantasy series, because if you can stomach the cumbersome menu system, you'll find that each iteration expands the original formula while retaining the basic things that made the games good in the first place, and it does it with a "story arc" format that genuinely works.
I apologize for how long this has been. If you've sat through all of it, you are truly a person of high caliber. Ultimately, my point is this: We need to stop thinking everything needs a sequel. We need to stop fucking making Trilogies. Hell, even the HOBBIT is getting a sequel--it's getting two movies! I have news for you--the Hobbit HAS a sequel, and it's called the FELLOWSHIP OF THE FUCKING RINGS.
Stop making trilogies. Stop driving every good idea into the ground for profit. Stop trying to have too much of a good thing. I know nobody important is going to read this, but you all might, and you all are the folks that encourage them to do this, because you all--we all, because I'm just as guilty--will go out and WATCH Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, we'll watch Attack of the Clones, we'll watch Matrix Revolutions, we'll watch Pirates of the Carribbean: At World's End, we will DO IT, and until we stop, they are going to keep pulling the same shit over and over again until anything we once valued in movies, in stories, in ANYTHING is driven into the ground and beaten to fucking DEATH.
