Cartoon dilemmas

Finally, the death of Joseph Campbell. Or the first signs that viewers might finally be tiring of scriptwriters doing a find and replace on The Hero's Journey. Writing in the Wall Street Journal Austin Grossman discusses the inherent faults of the superhero movie:

Much as I love the superhero genre, I almost never like films about superheroes. No matter how terrific they start out, the third act degenerates into two people diving away from a giant green explosion, and bloated speeches that make me feel sorry for a talented and honorable actor. It becomes clear that at some point the director or screenwriter or studio has lost their faith in the material, and started copying out of the Robert McKee/Joseph Campbell textbook.

I've written about the third act Big Face Off here and here. That Grossman's article is in the Wall Street Journal shows how much money is in this genre. (Full article here.) It's going to get worse: Kenneth Branagh is making Thor and there's a Green Lantern trilogy FFS and... and... look, I've stopped caring. The biggest problem with comic book movies is that they have to work as a series. Characters can't die, even when they fight using powers that can destroy anything, so conceptually the characters undermine themselves.

Worse, the Marvel universe is really a neighbourhood. The different characters bump into each other again and again, "fight" again and again, and never win. There's no story: only the promise of a story, the raising of tension. There's no resolution, no release. I think that's why the hype preceding comic book movies is more enjoyable than the movies themselves. It's like the cover of the comic, which was always so much better than the contents, or those great two-page splashes that Jack Kirby drew of, say, foreshortened SHIELD agents crawling around a giant machine and so on. The rest of the story was all fretting over dilemmas that were never resolved. 

Ridley Scott is directing two Alien prequels, which would be better news if they weren't going to be in 3D. 3D cameras don't work well shooting low light and 3D projection can't cope with fast edits. Quick: what are the two basic filmic elements of the Alien movies? You got it. Because the Alien prequels will be prequels it won't spoil them to reveal they're about the "space jockey" - the dead pilot of the alien spaceship in which the Alien eggs are first discovered. The jockey figure was a static prop designed by H.R. Giger for effect not narrative so the idea of a movie about it is only slightly less exciting than the back story of the cat, Jonesy. Scott knows where to point a camera but the idea sounds like it's not going anywhere.

I have a soft spot for Alien because Dan O'Bannon's original script is one of the great acts of knuckle-down writing heroism. He wrote it in the wake of Alejandro Jodorowosky's Dune, for which O'Bannon was hired to do special effects. When Dune collapsed, O'Bannon was screwed:

I found myself back in L.A., flat broke, My car I’d given away. I had no apartment, all my belongings were in storage, and I ended up on Ronnie Shusett’s sofa, and it was there that I wrote Alien. I knew that I wanted some of the artists that I had met on Dune to work on Alien, and in particular Giger to design the thing. So some of my experience with Dune went into Alien. But the main reason that I wrote Alien at that time was that I needed money, and the only way I could think of to make any money and get off of Ronnie’s sofa was by writing a spec script that the studios would like and buy.

In the official book about the making of the film O'Bannon recalls going in and waking up Shusett in the middle of the night to tell him excitedly about the movie's title ("it's a noun and an adjective!") and Shusett rolling over and going back to sleep. I'm quoting the latter from memory. My copy of the book is in storage.