{"id":456,"date":"2006-06-13T11:59:04","date_gmt":"2006-06-13T16:59:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=456"},"modified":"2006-11-21T07:37:55","modified_gmt":"2006-11-21T12:37:55","slug":"scorched-earth-filmmaking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=456","title":{"rendered":"Scorched Earth Filmmaking"},"content":{"rendered":"

I use the term “scorched earth filmmaking” to refer to movies that take established stories and kill off or greatly alter major characters for dramatic effect. Doing so might<\/em> make the movie more potent, but it does so at the expense of anyone who might try to make another movie. Sure, you could make a movie adaptation of the A-Team<\/a> where all of the characters die except Murdock, but if someone wants to make a sequel it’s going to be a mess. It won’t be the A-Team, it will be the A-Guy, and it will suck. <\/p>\n

This is pretty much exactly what happened with the “Mission Impossible” franchise. In the first movie, they changed one of the members of the team into a bad guy, who killed off the rest of the team. (Except, sadly, for the character played by Tom Cruise.) Most of them died in the first few minutes of the movie. If the writers wanted to tell a story about a team of spies that is betrayed by one of its own members that’s fine, but they didn’t need the established MI characters for that; they could have just made up their own story and it would have worked just as well. This showed a great deal of contempt for fans of the show. Anyone who had any investment at all in those characters was probably pretty upset to see them all wiped out. In the subsequent movies, only one character from the original show is left, and there is almost no connection to the original show at all. Later writers couldn’t make a “Mission Impossible” movie, because there was nothing left of the original characters. So, they have been forced to come up with rather generic action movies and slap the Mission Impossible name on them. <\/p>\n

The Batman movies did this too. Each one tried to burn through as many villians as possible, often by taking several fearsome foes and diminishing them by making them part of a sqabbling “team”. The effect was that the next person who tried to make a movie would have a smaller selection of lesser foes to draw from, and they in turn would compensate for this by using as many as they could get away with. Each film seemed less like an attempt to make a great movie and more like an attempt to make sure nobody could make another one.<\/p>\n

The Spiderman movies are (so far) doing a great job of keeping the franchise going without sabotaging future efforts. Based on my experience with Batman, I fully expected Spider-Man 2 to have two of his major foes team up and both get killed off. This would have upped the stakes and forced the next guy to burn through three<\/em> villians. Instead, they had Spidey fight just one, and they took the time to make him interesting. As a bonus, they left things open for some of the other possible foes (The Lizzard, another Goblin) so that next movie will have a lot of freedom in choosing who Spider-Man will face. This is the very opposite of scorched earth filmmaking, and I admire them for it.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to the latest X-Men movie… (spoilers ahead)
\n
\nFair warning: I didn’t see the movie yet. I’ve read some spoilers and I’ve heard that it’s good. But that’s not the point. <\/p>\n

It was profoundly stupid to kill off Xavier and Cyclops. So the writers wanted to make a story where the stakes were high? Fine. But the X-Men ran for decades without feeling the need to off these two crucial characters. What is the the next writer supposed to do? Xavier was the leader of the X-Men. He had the money and brainpower to keep them all together. <\/p>\n

But even more bothersome to me was the change they made to Magneto. In the previous movies, he was a very interesting villian. He loved mutants, including his X-Men foes<\/em>. Note that it was always in his power to kill off the X-Men if he wanted. But he didn’t, because of his compassion for them. He always hoped he could pursuade Xavier or his followers to come around to his way of thinking. Xavier had similar hopes, that he could win over Magneato fair and square, without using his mind powers. <\/p>\n

Magneato’s actions were driven by his belief that mutants were now the dominant spieces on the planet, and that humans were simply very dangerous animals that needed to be killed or driven away. This aspect of his character was missing in this third installment. I’m talking about his “pawns go first” attitude and the way he carelessly threw away lesser mutants. <\/p>\n

So now if anyone wants to make another movie, they must do so without two key characters, and with a much less interesting villain.<\/p>\n

Scorced earth filmmaking is reprehensible. Any idiot can make a story more dramatic by sacrificing characters. The problem is, you can only sacrifice a character once<\/em>. It takes a special combination of lazyness, lack of talent, and indifference to the original story and characters to make a decision like this.<\/p>\n

A shame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I use the term “scorched earth filmmaking” to refer to movies that take established stories and kill off or greatly alter major characters for dramatic effect. Doing so might make the movie more potent, but it does so at the expense of anyone who might try to make another movie. Sure, you could make a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dream-cast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}