Fan service and its disastrous consequences

Hollywood keeps assuming that they know what we want, but sometimes what they think we want is only a rumor.

It has been years since I started wondering about this. Perhaps 7 years, and that happened while I was walking out from one of the most depressing experiences in my life – enduring to the piece of shit that was titled Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Some people call it that, while most of us just call it “that film that almost made me pull my eyes out”.

I guess it was around 2005 when I was walking through a magazine store and saw one that read “Rumors about the new Indiana Jones movie”. Holy shit. New Indiana Jones movie? Is this shit for real? Is my geriatric hero coming back for another adventure? Is an older Short Round coming back to annoy make us laugh again? Fuck, yeah, I’m in.

I bought that magazine and read it from cover to cover. I don’t remember all of it, but these are the things I do remember:

(a)        Indy might have a son (Oh, shit).

(b)        It might involve aliens! (Oh, please, God, no)

(c)        It will feature the appearance of the “warehouse” from Raiders of the Lost Ark (because, of course, you should remember that that is where they stored the Ark of the Covenant, duh).

(d)        It will be set in South America (because, that is relevant… I guess).

(e)        Marion Ravenwood might return! (because we need her back, right? Right...?)

Unfortunately, all of these rumors turned out to be true in the most depressing and insulting way possible. It is clear that George Lucas had this idea a long time ago, but what was hard for him was convincing Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg to get onboard with it. The film, as we know, as a disaster. I do not know anyone that enjoys watching that piece of shit, and every Indy fan wishes it’d never happened.

But one thing that has left me wondering all these years is, how much of this film was actually thought of since its inception? How much of it was made up by Lucas as he went along, hearing these rumors and incorrectly assuming that what we wanted to see was what was being rumored?

It might have been one of the many mistakes this movie made. I have no idea why someone thought it would be a good idea to have Indy fight aliens (I guess…?), or re-encounter some person that, a very long time ago played the beautiful Marion Ravenwood (sigh), and that she would have a secret son that was also secretly Indy’s? Man, that whole concept seems ridiculous. But it happened – and we all wasted two hours of our life watching it (sigh again, goddamn it!).

Side note: Imagine a world where this film was the best thing ever. Just imagine it without drifting. Shit, I want to live there. End of side note.

Anyway, this is not the only case in which I felt something like this had happened. Another example was Prometheus. For all its flaws, I really do not hate that movie at all. I actually enjoyed most of it, exception made to the things I just simply did not get (damn you, black goo and all of those Lindelof plot points!) and some of the weird characters (geologists or whatever) that somehow manage to become horror movie clichés on a time that such kinds of things have become obsolete (those sort of “Irish”, kind of “I don’t know their accent”, people are weird as fuck, and they do not work for the story at all).

Fassbender and Rapace rock, though. But that’s off topic.

As the film was nearing its end, we had to sit through a weird scene showing the “alien” from “Alien”, also called the xenomorph or the xeno-something. This creature felt completely out of place in this movie, even if it was supposed to be set in the same universe as the Alien franchise. Did Ridley Scott actually decided to include it there for fan service, knowing that the rumors indicated that it would (or should?) appear? I don’t know. But this scene just doesn’t work.

How many films have simply not worked by trying to give fan service? How many plot points have mutated beyond our understanding only because the filmmakers thought that was simply what we wanted to see because it was rumored?

I really do not know. But in these two films (and many others that were not reference here), Hollywood tried to give fan service for things that were simply not the best ideas from a storytelling and creative point of view. They both were too involved in the plot of the movies as a whole, and the consequences were pretty much disastrous.

What I’m trying to say here is that, sometimes, fan service is not enough to make a movie good. Sometimes it is simply better to ignore the rumors, and the best example has to be Jurassic World (why? Well, because it’s trending and because I loved that fucking film), where the story had nothing to do with what we’d heard or read before. I remember reading dozens of message boards stating that the film would feature ridiculous things such as (i) human/dinosaur hybrids; or (ii) a plot involving something about the diseases that made the dinosaurs extinct coming back. One of those ideas sounds ridiculous. The other, well, maybe not. In the end, none of them are as good as the actual story of Jurassic World.

I guess we can all agree – Hollywood does not always make the best decisions whilst trying to give fan service. Fuck, even Sam Raimi ended up shoehorning Venom into the last act of Spiderman 3 because, well, I don’t know. Because he thought this would be the last Spiderman film and he was afraid that fans would hate him if he did not include their favorite character.

I guess the thing here is that you should let the story flow. If you can service the fans, then do it, but not at the expense of the story. Just because some dude at a message board thought it would be a good idea does not mean it is actually a good idea. Sometimes fans think or speculate about what could be seen on a film, but that does not mean that the film should actually include those things. Many different circumstances have different consequences, but it is clear that, most of the times, you need to find a story that has to be independent from what you think or hear the people might or might not want to see.

Well, come to think of it, just because some random blogger thought you should not give fan service when that shit just doesn’t always work does not mean that fan service within a movie is a bad idea. Maybe the blogger GWar does not actually know what in the fuck he’s talking about. Maybe a blogger, just like him, thought it would be a good idea to have Shia play Indiana Jones’s son. Make of that what you will.

Follow me on twitter and keep the conversation going: @gabrielguerrame. 

Our weekend after another awful Fantastic Four

So, which were the film news?

Oh, yeah… Fantastic Four bombed this weekend. And that was sad. It was sad as hell.

It’s not sad because it bombed, it’s sad because (a) we saw it coming for months; and (b) because it did not bomb because people didn’t feel compelled to watching it due to bad marketing. It bombed because it was an awful movie. It bombed because the people involved in making it did not believe in it, and it is actually quite hard to make something when you don’t really think much of it.

It’s a shame, because your work is only as good as the effort you give it. Somewhere along the line, these people, whether it was Josh Trank, the studio, or both - lost faith in what this movie could be. Personally, I watched and kept on wondering what a great film it could have been. We have comic book movies on theatres every other week these days, and most of them have been following a very steady formula that, while good, does not leave much room for innovation most of the time (I say most of the time, because who could forget films like Guardians of the Galaxy?). How awesome would it have been if we’d gotten a perfect monster-like superhero film?

My favorite part of this flawed film was watching the Fantastic Four wake up on that dark government facility and watching their bodies mutate. This is the stuff nightmares are made of. I think Josh Trank really had something to say when he made this, but his scope was all wrong. 

Christopher Nolan has said, on multiple occasions, that he aimed for specific focus on each of his Batman films. Whether it’d be a Lawrence of Arabia-like soul searching film like Batman Begins or the crime thriller such as Heat that was The Dark Knight, he always gave a specific tone to the films.  And, as we all know, it worked. Those were perfect films.

In that sense, I get what Trank was trying to do with this. So, what is the difference between this film and Nolan’s? The latter got what he was doing, which was a superhero movie first and a whatever genre film next. This is a superhero horror story, sure, but, a superhero movie all the same. This is not meant to be boring, it is meant to be, well, super… or something.

This would all bring our reason behind superhero movies to question, but that is really not what I am trying to do here. What I am trying to say is that I’m sad. I’m sad because I wanted this film to be good, I wanted to like it. I hadn’t realized how much the Fantastic Four meant to me until this weekend. I remember the 90’s cartoon (Don't need no more!), and I remember loving it. This is the third time I have left the movie theater sad and frustrated after watching an awful Fantastic Four movie.

Speaking of which, remember 2005? Remember that, in that time, we hardly got any good superhero movies? For every Spiderman, we got a Daredevil. The last glimpse we’d gotten of Superman on film was The Quest for Peace. The fucking Quest for Peace (side note, we were still doomed to sit through that awful and fantastically boring Superman Returns a year later). Don’t think I forgot about the Batman reboot that came out in that same year, but, as I said, we hardly got any good superhero movies.

Out of a need to watch these awesome superheroes, I went to Netflix and watched the 2005 atrocity that Fantastic Four is. I don’t think I’d ever watched it since leaving the theater back then. Ioan Gruffudd (or whatever that dude’s name is) is still awful ten years later. Jessica Alba is still boring as hell as Sue Storm (you just don’t buy it). The Thing’s makeup is still fake as hell. But there is a silver lining to all of this. See, as much as I hate this movie, I still have to give it some credit. The chemistry between these people, especially between Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm, is next to perfect. They feel like a family (Marvel’s first!), and they seem like people you’d want to hang out with (except Gruffudd, cause his name sucks and, well, because, fuck Gruffudd).

For, in the 2005 Fantastic Four, for each step forward, it’s two steps back. The story really doesn’t work. The product placement is off the charts. I’ve never seen anything more fake than the stretching effects for Mr. Fantastic. This film is also sad, because it had potential, it really did. So, in a way, it is very similar to this new film. For all my hate towards it, there were some things I liked from this 2015 Fantastic Four (drafting this shit would’ve been a lot easier if the films, at least, had different titles). Miles Teller is awesome as Mr. Fantastic. That scene with the newly discovered powers is pretty good. The fact that young Reed Richards uses a Nintendo 64 controller to build a teleportation device is, well, awesome.

But as the film went on, I kind of, sort of, felt depressed. I felt depressed because watching this film was like waiting for something good when you know nothing’s going to happen. As mentioned, if the filmmakers did not believe in it, why would we?

Am I tired of waiting for my perfect Fantastic Four movie? Fuck, no. I will be waiting for an awesome Fantastic Four movie all my life if I have to. I know it’s out there, in the mind of some awesomely talented filmmaker. And I still can’t wait to see it.