In which I revisit old articles from Filmquisition and Unreality.
Is it just me, or do all of the films that are coming out this year
look really familiar? This isn’t me whining about how Hollywood’s running
out of ideas, nor about how there are too many sequels or remakes or reboots. I like sequels, or
at least the good ones.
While the first film of a franchise is generally worried about laying out
the ground rules and setting up the world, sequels are free to bend (and
sometimes break) those rules and explore those worlds. Even reviled
sequels (like Alien 3) usually bear at least some worthy fruit (like
the Xenomorph’s ability to appropriate physiological traits from those it
impregnates).
I’m commenting on the oddly specific type of sequels and remakes that
are coming out in 2015: developing on or revisiting the same group of
Generation X blockbusters that were ubiquitous throughout my and many others’
childhoods. We’ve gotten latter day Star Wars, tired Jurassic Parks and
increasingly convoluted Terminators before,
but never quite like this and certainly never all at once. They all seem
less concerned with moving their various franchises forward as much as
they are about returning to square one: exploiting what made the original films
so appealing to begin with.
Take Jurassic World, for instance. The series’ first
film presented the absolute marvel of genetically engineering dinosaurs and
putting them together in a high tech zoo. Sure, there was corporate
espionage and chaos theory thrown in for good measure, but the soul of the film
was the simultaneous wonder and terror of bringing Earth’s most ancient
monsters into the 20th Century.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park‘s concern wasn’t so much
replicating the success of Jurassic Park, but on-upping it. It wasn’t
enough to revisit the theme park, they had to bring them to the mainland
and let them run amok in downtown San Diego. Despite its better
intentions, Jurassic Park III was born of the same “one-up the
original” mindset (although let’s face it, the God-awful script didn’t do it any
favors). It wasn’t enough to have the Tyrannosaurus Rex – an animal whose
name translates into “Tyrant Lizard King” – as monster to beat. They
instead had to go with the Spinosaurus, a dinosaur that few people knew, let
alone cared, about.
While it might appear on the surface to be following the exact same
pattern of “Jurassic Park, only
better” that the other sequels went with, what we actually see is a return to
form for the series. Despite their names, what was the one thing that
none of the other sequels had? A park.
Jurassic World begins
with a functional, sustainable, dinosaur-laden theme park that has been around
for so long that the novelty of its existence has worn off.
The eventual
result of this – that the corporate powers that be engineer hybridized,
designer dinosaurs – is more in line with the spirit of the first film than
either of the sequels. The reason why the dinosaurs were able to break
free and terrorize the film’s protagonists was that splicing dinosaur DNA
with sex-changing frogs resulted in giant, carnivorous lizards to spontaneously
change their sex in order to reproduce at an unregulated rate.
Purposefully making them more dangerous is simply the next step in human
stupidity.
While the problems with the Star Wars prequel
trilogy are far too numerous to address here, suffice it to say that they
largely boil down to the same general point: the films did not resemble
the originals. The set and ship designs were too slick, the CG too
obvious, the action too omnipresent and the characters too obnoxious. It
was so focused on what it could do with modern special effects that
it forgot what it was supposed to be doing with it: telling a compelling story
with likable characters.
If the series’ creator couldn’t do Episodes 4-6 justice, what chance
do a bunch of Disney executives looking to make back the more than $4 billion
investment that they made on the franchise? As it turns out, a really
good one. It’s easy to forget that between the billions spent to buy the
rights to the series and the hundreds of millions spent to produce, advertise
and distribute each film, Disney won’t make anything back if people do not like the movies
enough to sit through all of the sequels and spin-offs that they have planned.
As a result, Disney has been hell-bent on making a product that
people not just want to see, but will pay through the nose in order to do so
(in many cases two and three and four times). That’s why the film (and
its surrounding marketing) have gone back to the series’ basics. The trailer
prominently features Tatooine; the ships and droids very closely resemble what
were in the first films; the last twenty-odd seconds was completely devoted to
an aerial dog-fight between Tie Fighters and the Millennium Falcon.
Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Peter Mayhew, Anthony Daniels
and Kenny Baker are all reprising their roles from Episodes 4-6 and Abrams has
been a broken record about the use of puppets and physical props throughout The Force Awakens‘ highly
publicized production. Disney knows exactly what Star Wars fans want to see
and has no problem selling it to them at $10 a ticket.
The Terminator franchise
has been so focused on moving the story of John Connor into the future that its
creators seemingly forgot that series owes its whole existence to time travel.
Why have a lone robotic assassin attack one person along a linear
timeline when you can send the second (or third, or fourth) one(s) to reinforce
the initial one whose mission failed? Why not send it back to just after
the events of the first movie, when Sarah Connor is weak, alone and pregnant?
Why not revisit the same night again and again and again, like every Back to the Future film seems
to revolve around November 5, 1955 in Hill Valley.
Obviously there are very good reasons to not do this, but my point remains: if your
central premise is something as wibbly-wobbly as time travel, why not bend the franchise
back in on itself? Why not make it entirely about its own existence?
After the disappointing reception of Terminator Salvation, the stewards of the franchise
must have finally asked themselves this same question.
Terminator Genisys turns the franchise into a temporal ouroboros: taking the present-day timeline (now the
post-apocalyptic future of the first film) and bringing it back to that fateful
night when Kyle Reese landed in 1984, only things aren’t quite how we
remember it. Something went wonky in the timeline, so now Sarah Connor is
already the badass that she would become in Terminator 2, with the Schwarzenegger Terminator
in tow, and the T-1000 (or at least some approximation of it) is the opponent
that they have to square off against. It’s basically the premise of the
first film meets the characters from the second one which, from the outside
looking in, looks to be all kinds of awesome.
2015’s blockbusters aren’t concerned building off of the
past successes of their franchises as much as they are about outright
reliving it (literally, in Terminator Genisys‘ case).
It’s not about being the next film in the series, but about keeping as
closely to the first as possible. It remains to be seen exactly how well
this year’s trend will pan out, but I expect that we’ll be seeing a lot more of
it in the summers to come.
So what summer blockbuster are you most looking forward to this year? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.
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