A Sequel By Any Other Name (a rant about movies)

What's in a name? A rose, by any other name, would probably smell even sweeter, but you'd sell fewer of them in February. Consider the following:

• Star Wars: Episodes 1-3
  
• Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines
  
• Predator 2
• Starship Troopers 2
• Alien 3
  
• The Chronicles of Riddick (aka Pitch Black 2) and the animated version
  

The above films all suffer in comparison to the other movies in their respective series. In fact, with one exception (which I'll leave to the reader's inner geek to pinpoint), the above movies would have been better films if they'd wiped all reference to the original(s), and implemented just a hint of new (and mildly original) branding.

When you're changing the premise so drastically and/or ignoring facts of the canonical series history, why even call it the same movie? The answer, of course, is to make money off gullible fans of the original. Blood-sucking betrayers in the production office put short-term profit above the fan's long-term satisfaction.

• If Revenge of the Sith wasn't a Star Wars film, we'd all be happy with "Well, it ain't Star Wars, but it's slightly edgy space opera with a bigger budget than most such movies get, so it's kinda fun." We could all forgive some lackluster performances and let the film stand on it's special effects budget alone if it just wasn't associated with Star Wars. But since it is a Star Wars film, "it ain't Star Wars" is the most damning thing you could ever say. What's more, the Greek Tragedy elements would have played out better if they weren't hobbled by the viewer constantly thinking "in the past 20 years I never once imagined this story played out like that."

At this point, you may think I'm about to pan the new animated Star Wars film. I'm not - though perhaps only because I haven't seen it yet. It looks kinda fun, but I'll wait for it on netflix. There was a time in my life where I had to buy (and pay full price for) anything with the Star Wars brand, but that brand has burned me, so now it's just a rental. (There's a lesson there, if you're listening, Hollywood: Don't dilute your brand.)

No, I am here to discuss something else. I'll get to it in before the end of this, I promise. But, as I often do, I'm going to engage in some verbal meandering on the way there.

You see, I've clung to the above concept (namely that most sequels would be better films if they weren't labeled as sequels) for years. I've walked out of films shaking my head and saying "they either needed to be more respectful to the original, or create a new product identity entirely." When a new film has a pre-established name, we hold it to different standards than we would a random film without the champion pedigree.

It goes beyond that crass measuring stick, though. Sometimes a film can be innovative, and merit-packed as the original, but still somehow unsatisfying because too much changed.

• I love Twin Peaks - but Fire Walk With Me was so different it probably should have been a new Intellectual Property with a parallel story. Lynch's Dune also had little connection with Frank Herbert's Dune, and might have been better under it's own flag. Lynch figured that out though, learned where the line was, and his later films are better for it. Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and all of Twin Peaks probably take place in the same universe as Blue Velvet, but are stronger films for only sharing visual and thematic clues with each other, not treading directly upon one-another's cannon and metaphysics. Wild At Heart is great for existing simultaneously in that world and another more famous setting, but certainly would have sucked if titled "Twin Peaks 2" or "Wizard Of Oz 2". Lynch's genius there is learning that it's better to be "the new film from David Lynch" than to be "Blue Velvet VII."

Lynch isn't the only one to figure this out. Quentin Tarantino learned the same lesson, and managed to do so before his second film released.

• There's little threads that connect Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, not just to each other, but also to Jackie Brown (and thus Rum Punch and several other Larry Elmore novels), From Dusk Till Dawn, True Romance, Natural Born Killers, Curdled, and The Getaway (The Jim Thompson novel with it's creepy sci-fi ending, rather than the various film versions). There's this huge shared universe, but you can dislike any one film in the series without it impacting your enjoyment of others.
  You don't watch Jackie Brown and say "I wish they'd incorporated the Aztec vampires, it hardly feels like Reservoir Dogs 6 without them," for which we are all very thankful.
  
• Kill Bill does much the same with every Kung Fu, Samurai, or 70's Exploitation film ever made, including a couple of Pam Grier flicks, loosely knitting it all back to his other films.
• Strangely enough, there is a From Dusk Till Dawn 2 and 3, so not everyone involved in Tarantino's films learned the lesson. One of those FDTD films features Ambrose Bierce as a character, and he takes vampirism in stride like his short stories were nonfiction. One of Bierce's stories included a supernatural creature named Hastur, which Robert Chambers then developed further in The King In Yellow, which H.P. Lovecraft later incorporated into the Cthulhu Mythos. As a result, this net of interconnectivity could be taken to ridiculous extremes that even Tarantino probably didn't expect or intend. By a certain strange way of looking at things, Dracula, Cthulhu, and Randall Flag all exist in the same world as Vincent Vega.
  Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a way to get from Mallory Knox to Gozer the Gozerian without once having to resort to traditional Kevin Bacon methods.
  

All of these subtle connections enrich the viewing experience, without dragging the other films down.

I imagined it to be the great truths of motion-picture story-telling:

• #1: alluding to other tales in your movie enriches both films
• #2: if you're changing the premise significantly, it's better if it's not an official sequel

Last night, watching total crap via netflix, at least one of those two concepts was at disproved for me. I'm thoroughly convinced that 10,000 BC couldn't actually have stunk any worse if it was named "Stargate 2: The Prequel."

• The CGI was better than I'd been warned - only the Sabertooth tiger really looked fake, mostly just in it's second scene, and fur is hard to do right on a computer.
• Some folks took issue at mere existance of the terror birds - those folks just haven't watched the right BBC specials. Those suckers were the dominant hunter for a couple million years before mankind and sabretooth cats. While there's no evidence they and man lived at the same time, it's less inaccurate then cave-men vs dinosaurs, which most people take in stride.
  
• The multiculturalism was pretty refreshing, and I was okay with minor anachronisms and the unrealistic multicontinental travel. Like Lord of the Rings or Indiana Jones, there's something really compelling about a story set before a sweeping epic panorama of history and culture.
  
• The anticlimactic 300 reference ten-minutes from the end was a little more overt than it should have been, especially coming so soon after the film adaptation of the same. 5 years from now that same event would be a cute homage.
  
• The acting sucked as bad as everyone said it did, and the director made it worse by portraying the "hero" as a self-hating spineless idiot for the first 45 minutes of the film.
  
• But the thing that really ruined the film for me was the decision that 7-ft tall alien gods have no magic because magic isn't real in our setting, yet later in the same damn scene, it turns out the peyote addict with a brain tumor can raise the dead hero from 2,000 miles away. Integrity, self-consistency, high-concept, or just a theme: whatever you call it, movies need it, and this one lacked it.
  
• The year 10,000 BC is itself only a theme if you include only things that realistically existed in 10,000 BC - the terror birds likely went extinct around 2,000,000 BC, the pyramids at Ghiza were started around 2,500 BC (by a very different culture than depicted in the film), the Sahara was a fertile wetland between 12,500 and 8,000 BC, Plato's Atlantis didn't sink beneath the ocean till sometime around 9,500 BC, horses were domesticated circa 4,500 BC and the stirrup invented between 800 and 500 BC. Despite putting a date in the title, the film couldn't decide what year it was actually set in.
• Why the heck did the entirely non-supernatural arab slave raider have the weird Goa'uld voice affect? Why did the films obvious StarGate alien not have it?
  

Those last three flaws in 10,000 BC bring up one more "truth" of motion picture story-telling...

• #3: The audience will accept any one crazy notion, no matter how outlandish, if you summarize it in the opening 15 minutes of your film.
  They'll do the same if you put your one crazy notion in the last 3 minutes of the film ("the twilight zone ending") but some percentage will resent you for having tricked them.
  If you have more than one crazy notion (with no logical connection between them), or introduce your crazy notion in the second or third quarter of the film, no one will be able to suspend their disbelief, and everyone will resent you.
  Craziness up front works, surprise ending can work, but waffling never works.