A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

The Incredible Hulk, or rather, Bruce Banner and not the Hulk himself, is one of the greatest characters ever created. I can already hear the groans of undead snobs rolling over in their graves and preparing to claw their way up through the dirt and grass (and maybe concrete) just so they can sink their decaying teeth into me and eat my brains for daring to say something so sacrilegious, but bear with me. In his very conception, the Hulk has every bit as much to say about humanity as The Lord of the Flies or any other treasure of literature, because he’s a metaphor for the constant struggle we all face to reconcile our animal natures with the demands of civilization. Everyone has a raging beast of some sort within, whether it has humungous fists and a hard right jab or maybe just a really acid tongue, and everyone has to struggle to restrain that beast in order to get along with other people and fit into society. To borrow a term from Ursula K. Le Guin, the Hulk is just a literalization of the metaphor of that beast, and as such, you can do virtually anything with him. He’s a fantastic tool for writing stories that are not only exciting and larger than life, but also deep, emotional, philosophical, and universal.

The latest attempt at bringing the Hulk to a wide audience, though, The Incredible Hulk (starring the great Edward Norton as Bruce Banner and an unfortunate CGI creation as the Hulk) fails to realize most of that potential, because the creative team behind the film turned the struggle within Bruce Banner from a war between his two natures — and by extension, all our two natures — into a detached clinical problem involving pulse rates and some multicolored goop that can be viewed under a microscope. I’m not saying science fiction (or the trappings thereof) shouldn’t be involved in a Hulk story; that would be silly. But instead of Banner struggling with his own impulses towards anger, his own desire to smash, and his own very obvious need to civilize himself and maintain the restraint of civilization at all times, we just see him watching a heart rate monitor and trying to keep the number from getting too high when he runs. In other words, the writers turned the Hulk from a tragic flaw that arises from Banner’s very nature into an arbitrary problem that could have happened to anyone, and in so doing they stripped the universal, relatable metaphor out of the story and thus deprived the audience of an absolutely essential point of emotional identification — the very thing that makes a story work in the first place.

I imagine they did this to try to make Banner more “likeable”, since that’s one of the big watchwords in the studio system nowadays, and a guy with an anger management problem doesn’t necessarily seem “likeable” on the surface, but that’s what good writing is all about: making a flawed and very human person likeable anyway so that we all care about his struggle.

The movie is actually both more successful and somewhat more sadly flawed than I’ve let on, though, because in other areas, the writers did take some advantage of the metaphor. With the exception of true, dyed-in-the-wool, no-exceptions pacifists, most people probably agree that anger and even violence have their place and are sometimes appropriate. Killing someone in self-defense when he’s trying to cut your heart out with a chainsaw, for example, or defending a child from a marauding priest with a raging hard-on, would probably seem appropriate to most people. The key is deciding where and when violence and anger are appropriate, and using them only in those times and places — and then only in appropriate measures. With Emil Blonsky, the villain of the film (played wonderfully by Tim Roth) we get the perfect foil for the twin characters of Banner and Hulk: someone who wants to be all id all the time and has no use whatsoever for restraint. In fact, in turning himself into the Abomination, he completely and utterly repudiates civilization and thus creates the ultimate justification — indeed demand — for Banner to let the Hulk loose: to defend ordinary civilized people from monsters like Blonsky.

As far as it goes, this is absolutely terrific writing.  Banner and the audience both get to see the consequences of embracing anger (e.g. the Hulk) without any kind of limit, and Banner is also forced to learn that sometimes the Hulk (i.e. anger) is actually a necessary and good thing.  The problem is that Banner’s decision to willingly become the Hulk and fight the Abomination hasn’t been set up as the culmination of a struggle within himself between his desire to be peaceful and his very human urge to lash out. It’s not the resolution of a character arc in which he finally realizes he’s been trying to make a false choice and he suddenly has to look at everything he thinks he knows in a whole new light. It’s not even a particularly meaningful character arc point at all, because Banner has been so sanitized and stripped of depth that the choice doesn’t actually mean very much at all.

Instead, Banner just sits around sulking about how bad it sucks to be him and how he can’t be with the woman he loves and everyone’s chasing him and it’s just not fair, and then some shit happens, the end. There’s some good, fun stuff in the movie, but overall, it’s a big missed opportunity, and the money folks could’ve made a heckuva lot more money off their investment if they’d just paid more attention to the script.  It’s understandable that they didn’t, because they’re money people after all, not script people, and script people need money people just as much as money people need script people, but the problems in communication between the two are a subject for another day.

Last night I watched an interesting little Italian thriller called The Backwoods.  (Well, actually, it’s called Bosque de Sombras, but it stars Gary Oldman and Paddy Considine along with actors of various other nationalities, so I’m going to stick with the English title.)  Anyway, it’s not bad, though it also has some pretty serious flaws, but one scene in the latter half of the story got me thinking about a common problem in movies: Mexican standoffs in which one character just arbitrarily gives up.

Without spoiling anything significant about the movie (which isn’t good enough to recommend, but also isn’t bad enough to recommend against) there’s a scene in which a character, we’ll call him Arygay Oldmanay, has a gun drawn on another character.  He’s got the other guy dead to rights, no question about it, but then a third guy sneaks up behind Arygay and points a gun at him.  Now, in the broader sense of the term, this is a Mexican standoff, because neither side has an advantage, so the situation is deadlocked.  Yes, the third guy can shoot Arygay, but only if he doesn’t mind Arygagy shooting and killing his friend.  (OK, screw this “Arygagy” stuff; he’s just Gary from now on.)  So you’d figure that Gary would realize that the gun in his hand, which he has pointed right at the third guy’s friend, is his only piece of leverage, the one thing keeping him alive, right?

If so, you’d be wrong.  As in a really startling number of other movies, Gary lays down his weapon and gives up.  Why?  I can only guess that he’d seen too many movies, and he just thought that this was what he was supposed to do in situations like this, because it sure doesn’t make a damn bit of sense to me.  Now, if I were in Gary’s position and some kind of expert marksman had a high-powered sniper rifle with a laser sight trained right on my skull and the marksman assured me that he could turn out my lights the instant he saw me even think about pulling the trigger and long before I actually did it, meaning that the deterrence value of my weapon was genuinely neutralized, then maybe I would lay down my gun.  Otherwise, not on your life.  I’d threaten, I’d bluster, I’d bluff, I’d bargain — I’d do whatever I could to stay alive, but the one thing I wouldn’t ever do is conclude that surrender is the only option.  So when Gary gave up, it yanked me right out of the movie, which up to that point had at least created a pretty effectively creepy atmosphere.

I realize it’s hard to come up with a creative solution to a problem that’s already been put up on screen a million and a half times, but at least don’t just punk out on the problem — do something that makes sense, both narratively speaking and for the characters in the situation you’ve created.  Otherwise poor saps like me will continue to waste valuable rental dollars on disappointing movies, and then we won’t watch anything else you do in the future!

So you’re hanging out with your buddies on a Friday night and you decide you’re all going to see a movie.  Now imagine you have two choices: a movie about people doing things, and a movie in which people sit around and then maybe a few things happen in the end because other people were busy doing things offscreen.  That wouldn’t be a very hard choice, would it?  But believe it or not, the new Narnia movie, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, winds up being the latter kind of movie, not the former.  Oh, it sounds plenty exciting — the Pevensie kids are summoned back to Narnia, where they have to defeat an evil king who’s about to invade and kill all the talking animals, and they also have to restore the rightful king to his throne in the invading kingdom so there can be peace between the two nations — but in the end, it turns out that every last thing the Pevensies did or even thought about doing was pointless, and in fact they shouldn’t have even tried, because the whole mess was just a test of their faith in Aslan, and all they were supposed to do was to go meet him, whereupon Aslan would take care of everything.

That doesn’t exactly give the audience a vicarious feeling of triumph and accomplishment, does it?  So no wonder the movie underperformed pretty significantly at the box office, casting doubt on whether the next installment in the series will even be made.

Movies have to be about characters doing things — doing the things ordinary people are afraid to do, or wish they could do, or know they have to do but fear doing… whatever, just as long as they’re doing something, anything, making choices that result in actions.  Writing passive characters who just drift through life while things happen around them is a classic newbie mistake.  In this particular case, the filmmakers were adapting the widely-beloved novel by C. S. Lewis, so their options were probably limited (maybe the best choice would’ve been to not make the movie in the first place, because it sure was expensive) but Lewis was writing a Christian parable more than he was writing a story, and unfortunately, it shows.

Every now and then the success of a movie surprises me a little, and May 2008 is one of those times.  Why is Iron Man doing so well?

The villain’s plan is the most important part of an action movie or a thriller, but the plan in Iron Man isn’t just generic, it’s not even sketched out very clearly in the first place.  And to make matters worse, whatever exactly it is, it has something to do with selling arms to bad guys in other parts of the world who want to use them on their own people, or maybe on their own immediate neighbors, meaning it has no direct effect on any of the characters in the film, on any of the people they care about, or even on most people in the audience in most parts of the globe.  So the stakes suck.

(Oh, and note to manufacturers illegally selling arms: don’t leave your company’s name prominently stenciled on the boxes.  I mean, duh!)

Just as importantly, the resolution of the protagonist’s character arc (his growth, or the lesson he learns) has to be intimately bound up with the defeat of the villain’s plan — it’s literally the way the protagonist changes and improves as a person that enables him to finally defeat the villain — but in Iron Man, the creative team actually made Tony Stark’s character development part of the problem!  He starts out as a stereotypical weapons dealer who’s unmoved by the harm wreaked by his work, but when he’s kidnapped by terrorists and he sees the toll his weapons take up close and personal, he vows he won’t sell any more weapons until he figures out some way to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands and being used against innocent people.  Sounds like a neat idea, both in terms of weapons and character design, right?  But while his solution is the Iron Man suit, something that can’t be used against innocent people because he’s the one piloting it, the suit immediately complicates matters enormously when the Dread and Terrifying Mr. Generic, I mean, Obadiah Skid-Marks, or whatever the heck the villain’s name is, copies the suit and not only makes a much bigger, stronger version of it but plans to sell boatloads of them to bad guys all over the world!  Kind of makes the whole Iron Man suit concept look like a really bad idea, huh?  Sort of makes you wish Tony Stark had just stuck to being a heartless weapons dealer and left well enough alone, right?

Well, imagine instead if the Dread and Terrifying Mr. Generic actually had a really cool villain’s plan: sell (or even give!) a whole bunch of weapons to terrorists so they can stage a huge attack on the United States… which would force the US to buy lots and lots and lots of weapons from the Dread and Terrifying Mr. Generic in order to fight back, making him super-rich and mega-powerful!  Then maybe he wouldn’t be so generic, and people in the audience would really care about (and understand) his plan and the efforts of the hero to stop him.  Even people in other countries would care a lot, because nobody without a vested interest in the proceedings wants the US to go to war.  Let’s face it, war pretty much sucks infected corpses for everyone.

If this were Stane’s plan, then Tony Stark’s character growth would be perfectly and completely bound up with the conflict of the story: his earlier uncaring self would have enabled his co-executive Mr. Generic’s devious villainy, and his new, better self (and the Iron Man suit his new, better self created) would be required to defeat Generic and his terrorist army — and better yet, he could defeat them without even starting a war at all.  That would be awesome.  That would be an incredibly satisfying ending.  And since we’re at war now in the real world, and because it often seems like there are no good solutions, just more problems, it would give the audience a huge cathartic release of all the tension and fear they’re carrying around because of real-world events — tension and fear which can’t, at the moment, be released in the real world.  That’s called taking advantage of the zeitgeist.

Some of you may be figuring I’m completely full of ass because Iron Man is making tons and tons of bank and looks to be a monster success, but after some thought, I came to the conclusion that there are two basic reasons for that.  One, the economy sucks and the war sucks and everything sucks and there seems to be no way out, so just like a really full balloon can wind up being popped by a lot of things, even a brush with a sticker magnet on the fridge, not just by a really well-sharpened needle, people were primed for release and Iron Man provided it.  And two, which is kind of a variation on one, it was the first movie of the summer, and whatever its flaws, it provided some definite summer pleasures, including Robert Downey Jr.’s awesome lead performance, nice acting all around, some really fun effects, a few good suit sequences, and the first appearance of a popular superhero character in his own movie.  But I’ll make you a bet that unfortunately nobody will ever be able to collect on either way: if the script had been structured and written better, the movie would’ve made even more money.  A lot more money.  And it would’ve built even more interest in the inevitable sequel.  Unless someone has a time machine or a scope that can look into alternate universes, there’s no way to prove I’m right, but I’m sure I am.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen has a small but extremely devoted following — enough to warrant a beautiful new Blu-Ray release of the film — but to many of its fans, the fact that it never caught on with a larger audience in any of its releases remains a mystery. Certainly the basic notion of a group of old friends and compatriots coming together for one last caper has great appeal; it shows up very effectively in plenty of heist films, for example. And when you add the twist that the characters are all old and forgotten by a world that’s moved past them, and they want to show everyone that they still have what it takes and that they shouldn’t be discounted, the concept acquires some real beauty and heart. So when I recently watched Munchausen again, hoping to find that my original lukewarm reaction was a mistake, I was hugely disappointed to find that I liked it even less than I used to.

Munchausen, as you might expect, is the story of Baron Munchausen, but he’s a completely unlikeable jerk. He’s selfish and egocentric, he treats other people like doormats, and he never, ever makes any kind of sacrifice whatsoever on anyone else’s behalf. This is just a quick blog entry, but one example of his awful behavior is enough: we find out that he left his faithful servant and good friend Berthold (the guy who can run really, really fast, played by Eric Idle) to rot in a birdcage prison on the moon for twenty years because he just didn’t give a crap, and he’s only rescuing him now because he needs Berthold’s speed. But since there apparently are never any real personal stakes for Munchausen himself (even when he gets killed, he just comes back) why couldn’t he have rescued Berthold a long time ago? This just isn’t a good way to make the audience like the Baron and root for him.

Perhaps Gilliam and his co-screenwriter, Charles McKeown, recognized the problem with the Baron on some level, because they added a little girl to the story, Sally (played by a very young Sarah Polley) to serve as a sort of surrogate POV character. After all, wouldn’t a spunky young kid without a malicious bone in her body melt anyone’s heart? But she doesn’t help. First, it’s the Baron’s story, not hers. He’s integral to all the major turning points of the story, and he goes through all the major character changes, such as they are. She’s pretty much just a bystander. And second, her character isn’t even developed to the degree she could have been as a bystander. So she’s really just window-dressing.

Finally, the stakes of the story are never adequately dramatized. Munchausen’s quest in the film is to save the city from the Turkish army besieging it, but the only citizen of the city we ever meet is its unspeakably repugnant leader, The Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson (played by Jonathan Pryce) and frankly, I’d rather get trampled and beheaded and cut into little pieces and then have all my little pieces shat upon by some soldier with a bad case of food poisoning than put up with that guy in charge for so much as one extra minute. Give me anything but Horatio Jackson, PLEASE! In fairness, a city is made up of a lot more people than its mayor, or president, or whatever the heck office is indicated by “The Right Ordinary”… except the only other characters we meet who are even temporary residents are members of the theatrical touring group owned by Sally’s father — and you guessed it, Sally’s father is also a huge jerk. That means that Sally is literally the only person we could conceivably care one whit about saving from the Turks… and she isn’t even in danger, because she’s off with Baron Munchausen rounding up his former servants to help break the siege! So who cares what happens? If anything, I was rooting for the Turks to raze the city and then dance on The Right Ordinary’s corpse in the rubble!

So, to recap, if you have a nice little film career going, you stand a very good chance of destroying it and rendering yourself unemployable if (1) you make a film with a complete asshole of a main character and do nothing whatsoever to make him likeable; (2) you make sure there are no larger stakes in the story to make the audience care about anything or anyone onscreen; and (3) you spend an ungodly amount of money so that the backers of your movie take a huge bath and have to eat lots of crow.

All in all, it’s too bad that it turned out this way, because aside from the story, there’s much to like here. (Though I know, that’s sort of like saying, “So aside from 9/11, how did you like New York City?” to a tourist who picked the wrong day to visit us.)  The production design is extraordinary — it’s practically an illustrated encyclopedia of Terry Gilliam’s artistic obsessions — and the acting is excellent, there are some great jokes, Uma Thurman is absolutely luminous… but there’s just no reason to give a crap about anything that happens.