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

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.