Lately, with the proliferation of geek culture, every summer season makes me feel like a hobbit in a mushroom store. However, this past year, I was sorely let down. The slate seemed so promising: Thor: The Dark World, Man of Steel, Iron Man 3, The Wolverine, Elysium, Pacific Rim, Star Trek Into Darkness, among many others. However, looking back, the summer's offerings didn't measure up. At best, most of them were entertaining but ultimately forgettable. At worst, they insulted my intelligence as an audience member.
And looking back, these films had a lot of failings in common. For the next couple of weeks, I'll be talking about some of the issues that big Hollywood blockbusters are having that prevent them from being classics, and consign them instead to the scrap heap.
Note: Since this is a writing blog, I'm going to be talking mostly about problems with the story, characterization, structure and so on. We all know that shaky-cam is the worst thing to happen to action movies since Michael Bay, no need to belabour the point.
Problem # 1: The main character doesn't have an arc.
This is storytelling rule number one. In any story, in any medium, your character has to have a journey, and change in some fundamental way. In so many of these films, the character doesn't have a significant emotional arc. They start the movie as one person, and they finish it not having significantly changed.
Take Thor for example. At the start of The Dark World he's a prince of the Nine Realms who doesn't really want to be king when he'd much rather be dating Jane Foster. And at the end of the film, that's still his emotional state. The argument could be made that it is his struggle between kingly responsibility and selfish desire that is his journey - but he doesn't visibly struggle with that at all. He doesn't actually struggle with much.
The only emotional change Thor goes through is grieving for his mother with Loki. Which just goes to show that good as Chris Hemsworth is, he really shines when acting opposite Tom Hiddleston, but that's because in those scenes, he actually has emotions to play (beyond nobility and scowling). And even in the 45 minute chunk of Thor: The Dark World where Loki is featured, I'd argue that Loki's emotional arc is more significant.
Thor is by no means the only hero without an arc - he's just the most recent example to my mind. Certainly Elysium had the same problem. Many films this summer had a related problem - the unearned emotional arc, which I will be talking about in a future instalment.
One film this summer that did succeed in giving the character an emotional arc, is Iron Man 3. The ever-lovable Tony Stark is dealing with separate but related personal crises in the film (apart from the fiendish plot of the Mandarin.) He's suffering from anxiety attacks (possibly even PTSD) after his adventure and near-death with the Avengers. As a result, he's channeling his feelings not into delicious pie (which most of us do) but into building an arsenal of Iron Man armours. These armours are a not-too-subtle metaphor for the way Tony is shielding himself from his feelings rather than dealing with them. As a result, he's alienating the people closest to him (Pepper, Happy, Rhodey).
Tony only comes to realize this after he's been literally stripped of his armour and forced to survive on his wits (with the help of a precocious youngster.) At one point in the film, he has a panic attack when he hears his armour isn't going to be ready to help him take down the Mandarin, and the kid tells him: "You're a mechanic, right? So build something." This a) gives Tony the impetus to build some improvised gadgets and storm the Mandarin's lair and b) reminds the audience that this is, in part, Tony's problem in the first place - he resorts to building things rather than confronting his fears.
By the end of the film, Tony has concluded that he doesn't need the armour to be a hero. In fact, the armour was a crutch, a symptom of his larger emotional baggage. So at the end of the film, as a Christmas present to himself and Pepper, he blows up his arsenal of armours, and removes the shrapnel from his heart, signifying he no longer needs to rely on his technology to be Iron Man. He starts out in one emotional place, and ends up at another.
Not that hard, right? Except apparently it is, because I'm at a loss to think of another blockbuster this year that had a protagonist with an arc. Give me your thoughts in the comments!
*Honorable mention to The World's End, which is probably my second-favourite movie of the summer, and which features Simon Pegg in a very emotionally honest performance, arc and all. However, I am hesitant to name it a 'blockbuster'.
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