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.
No comments:
Post a Comment