Diminishing Returns in Nerd Flicks

I'm a self-proclaimed nerd. I'm into geek stuff. I like Star Wars and comics and video games, and I've come of age in a time when these things have ceased to be niche. On the one hand, I find this to be a very positive development. It's nice for any marginalized community – even one so superficially marginalized as fanboys and girls – to be invited out of the darkness and into the light. The millions of dollars that film studios have put into turning Marvel and DC comics into movies have resulted in some great production values and the casting of some incredible performers.

Unfortunately, as no shortage of writers, YouTube personalities, and other critics have posited – the influx of finance has changed the stakes of the storytelling game by making it less about telling stories and more about selling them. The summer blockbuster mill is a multi-billion dollar industry, and passion for creative narrative has given way to money lust.

I am, of course, elated to see all of my private hobbies from middle school given a seat at the table of culture-at-large. What I've seen of the execution has just left me perpetually-apprehensive about what is to come. We're working on diminishing returns here. After seeing Deadpool, Civil War, and X-Men: Apocalypse last year, I skipped Suicide Squad, Star Trek, and even Doctor Strange. I'm hoping the new Logan film is good (even though the first two Wolverine flicks were trash) based primarily on the fact that it's rated R. It'll probably suck, but I'll probably see it anyway. I'm almost definitely gonna skip the next Spider-Man movie while it's in theaters, and this Han Solo movie is in very real danger of being the first Star Wars movie released in my lifetime that I don't see in theaters.

I was very much not excited about Disney's acquisition of that particular franchise, because they already have a license to print money and that seems all they're interested in doing. That said, I enjoyed the first two offerings, but they were flawed in some basic ways that I can forgive as a super-fan but not as a critic of media. Character development suffers in both films, for disparate plot reasons that translate from a few core film-making issues. Generally speaking, with Star Wars, Star Trek, and all of the comic book movies, we're suffering from the creators struggling to pick an audience.

I mean that they'll toe-dip into the murky waters of obscure lore as a nod to the core base of interest, but they paint with broad and largely-vapid strokes so that the films are marketable to record-breaking film audiences. The stories themselves are largely forgettable and hollow, as are many of the characters, despite their widely-impressive acting pedigrees. As a substitution for showing real growth of characters or explanation of motivation, we get witty quips implying that all the important stuff happened off-screen. We mostly just see explosions, and sooner-or-laer audiences will find even those spectacles boring. As a substitution for real world-building we get endless cameos to show the universe is interconnected.

Most importantly, the films fail to find real endings. A cliff-hanger is something that comes after a conclusion. You have to tie a bow on the story you're telling, and then you get to hint at more to come. What we have instead are a sea of films that truly just act as commercials for sequels and spin-offs. There can be no actual surprise, either, with Disney and WB letting us all know everything they've got planned out for the next decade and change. Even without that element, though, this seems a very fixable problem.

The stories don't need to be more complicated – they're convoluted enough with jargon and lore. They don't need to be more serious. It's perfectly acceptable for Disney-Marvel to be goofy pseudo-camp while WB-DC tries to be dark and edgy. It's cool for Star Wars to rely on the serial adventure model and for Star Trek to try to recreate the magic of the original television show (though they seem to largely be missing the philosophical points, as they have in the films since the 90s). All the stories need is to follow the basic three-act structure – setup, confrontation, resolution. It's that last one that's the issue. Give the characters clear motivation as to their involvement with the plot, and have the change in some way by the end. Then let it end. There exist literally thousands of super hero comics with characters whose histories are near or past 100 years. You can have your sequels and you can have your spin-offs, but it's all empty if you let it wander without any aim besides endless self-perpetuation.

To sum it all up, I am personally a huge fan of movies, and of all the geeky things that used to be ignored and taboo. I'm very happy to see that the general themes and specific intellectual properties of my youth are being given a shot on the silver screen. I just want the end products – the motion pictures – to be something worth watching. All the studios have to do is direct their writing teams to create real arcs – character arcs where individuals develop from the beginning to the end, and story arcs where the plot has an actual resolution. I'm no expert. It's elementary.