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

There’s something fundamentally un-Die Hard-ish about the latest entry in the Die Hard franchise. Oh, it’s an action movie all right, and it stars Bruce Willis as a cop named John McClane, but that’s where the similarities end. This John McClane isn’t much of a wisecracker; wisecracking has been reassigned to a character named Matt Farrell, who’s played by Justin Long. This John McClane doesn’t seem to have any problems with authority; in fact, he gets along with government types just fine. This John McClane zips all over the landscape, never getting trapped anywhere. And this John McClane faces a villain with amorphous motivations and ill-defined goals. Only the last issue is a problem with Live Free or Die Hard as a movie, but all four mean it’s anything but a real Die Hard flick.

Lajos Egri opens his excellent book The Art of Dramatic Writing with one of my favorite passages on the subject:

A man sits in his workshop, busy with an invention of wheels and springs. You ask him what the gadget is, what it is meant to do. He looks at you confidingly and whispers: “I really don’t know.”

Another man rushes down the street, panting for breath. You intercept him and ask him where he is going. He gasps: “How should I know where I am going? I am on my way.”

Your reaction — and ours, and the world’s — is that these two men are a little mad. Every sensible invention must have a purpose, every planned sprint a destination.

Yet, fantastic as it seems, this simple necessity has not made itself felt to any extent in the theater. Reams of paper bear miles of writing — all of it without any point at all. There is much feverish activity, a great deal of get-up-and-go, but no one seems to know where he is going.

Everything has a purpose, or premise. Every second of our life has its own premise, whether or not we are conscious of it at the time. That premise may be as simple as breathing or as complex as a vital emotional decision, but it is always there.

We may not succeed in proving each tiny premise, but that in no way alters the fact that there was one we meant to prove. Our attempt to cross the room may be impeded by an unobserved footstool, but our premise existed nonetheless.

Whenever it comes in your particular version of the writing process, eventually you have to figure what it is you’re really writing about — what point you’re trying to make, how everything in your story ties together, and why any of it matters. (Personally I call this “theme” rather than “premise”, but that’s a subject for another day.) Some writers manage this subconsciously, at least some of the time, but I always prefer to understand what I’m doing so that I can be sure to do it again next time.

But to get back to the subject at hand, what does this have to do with Die Hard?

Die Hard is about doing the right thing even when everyone thinks you’re wrong. Die Hard is about fighting the system — and everyone who wants to destroy it. It’s about being the fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench, the pain in the ass, remember?

Live Free or Die Hard, however, is about none of those things. It’s a pretty entertaining action movie (albeit often a silly and poorly shot one) but it’s not a legitimate entry in the Die Hard franchise.

The irony is that by choosing the subject of computer hackers, the filmmakers had the opportunity to make a perfect addition to the series. A lot of hacking is about publicly and visibly breaking the system to prove that it’s vulnerable and force the powers that be to fix it, and every hacker knows that corporate and government types Just Don’t Get It. Hackers are the quintessential iconoclastic outsiders, just like John McClane, and McClane and Farrell should have had to contend with a bunch of misguided “my way or the highway” government types who were sure they knew exactly how to deal with Thomas Gabriel but who were actually playing right into his hands. That would’ve made Live Free a real Die Hard, and just as importantly, it would’ve rung true and genuinely resonated with our fears about crackers, computer terrorism and a government ill-prepared to protect us from them instead of just paying them lip service.

Oh, well. Chalk up another one to the Department of Missed Opportunities.

It’s fashionable in some circles to beat up on Spider-Man 3, but while there’s no question that it fails to live up to the standard set by its two predecessors, it’s actually a moderately entertaining and partially satisfying movie. The problem is that its authors tried to cram too many characters, too many narrative threads and too many different themes into the story. There’s not enough time to adequately dramatize and satisfactorily resolve them all — but simply making the movie longer wouldn’t have helped, because some of its themes have nothing whatsoever to do with the others.

Part of the movie concerns Peter Parker’s internal struggle with the arrogance that can easily come with power. This dilemma is magnified by his infection by the Venom parasite, which makes him a stronger Spider-Man but also strips away his inhibitions and heightens his negative emotions, making him more selfish, more arrogant and more likely to act on his anger.

The foundation of his character arc also could have meshed extremely well with his ongoing external conflict with Harry Osborn over Peter’s role in Harry’s father’s death. Harry is rich and has some of the selfishness and arrogance that often come with wealth, particularly inherited wealth, and his emotions drive him to take bloody revenge on Peter. The two characters, therefore, had the potential to dramatize one of the basic themes of the Spider-Man mythos — namely that with great power comes great responsibility — and to organically explore the internal tension between selfish arrogance and selfless nobility. When Harry imbues himself with super-strength and sets out for revenge without care for the consequences to anyone else (to the city in general, which would lose its protector if Harry succeeded in killing Peter, but also to any innocent bystanders caught up in the whirlwind of their combat and to Mary Jane and Aunt May, two people he ostensibly cares about) Peter could have been given a rude awakening, seeing his own Venom-exacerbated but nonetheless real selfishness and arrogance reflected in Harry, and deciding to renounce both his unhealthy emotions and the extra power offered by the parasite.

Unfortunately, neither this theme nor the effect of the Venom parasite are adequately dramatized. Yes, Peter Parker does cavalierly injure and defeat Harry while wearing his black suit, and yes, there are some extremely funny scenes involving his stuck up behavior towards women, but we never really see the appeal of the parasite — its upside, the reason Peter wouldn’t just throw it away immediately — because we never actually see the extra power the black suit grants him, and instead of serving as a dark mirror for Peter’s newly dark self, Harry suffers from amnesia and meanders out of the story for awhile.

Much of the problem stems from the fact that the movie throws an additional villain into the mix: Sandman, whose thematic nature is utterly at odds with the rest of the story. The Sandman material is about feeling the need to do bad things for good reasons (Flint Marko, who becomes the Sandman, attempts to steal money to save his daughter’s life) and learning to see the shades of gray in life when people want everything to be either black or white. In the end, Marko renounces his criminal ways, and rather than obeying the letter of the law, Peter lets him go. This is fertile ground for a story and could have made a fantastic Spider-Man movie by itself, even potentially tying into the Harry Osborn storyline, as Harry too has done things that require forgiveness, and forgiving Marko could have enabled Peter to forgive Harry — and Harry to forgive Peter. But that would have been a very different movie, one that didn’t involve Venom or Peter’s struggle with his personality and with unhealthy emotions.

The schism between the two disparate themes and narrative threads is most evident in the scene when Sandman and Venom form an alliance to take down Spider-Man. This is entirely in character for Venom, who is driven by the petty emotions of rage, jealousy and vengeance, but utterly out of character for Sandman, who just wants to be left alone so he can try to help his daughter. The Flint Marko whom we’ve gotten to know simply wouldn’t actively seek to kill Spider-Man, let alone deliberately endanger the life of an innocent woman in order to accomplish that goal. The authors of the film try to use this development to merge two fundamentally incompatible story lines, but that simply cannot work.

So that’s the lesson of Spider-Man 3. Both stories it tries to tell are intriguing and partially dramatized, but the movie as a whole is thematically scattered all over the place instead of being tightly focused. Every movie, whether it’s a blockbuster or an aesthetically challenging micro-budget indie, needs one fundamental theme underlying the entire story. Every scene, every character and indeed every subsidiary theme is just an aspect of that single foundational master theme, and a movie requires that all the relevant aspects of that theme be dramatized if it’s going to be complete, just as all the colors of light are required to combine to form true white.