Do Film Makers Ruin the Films, or is it the Fans?

 

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve really written anything substantial; mostly I’ve been wandering aimlessly around on G+ Marvel, DC Comics, and Transformers pages, so I might as well get back to basics.

So, fandom in general…what is it?  Well it’s an avid interest which can sometimes boarder on obsession on a single genre, character, or body of work.  DC Comics fandom exists in very broad strokes and can encompass hundreds or thousands of characters, comics, novels, movies, cartoons, television shows and video games.  Those that ascribe to this fandom have a vast and sometime oddly specific encyclopedia of knowledge concerning the body of work that encompasses DC Comics properties.

That can of course be narrowed down.  Maybe you are an avid Batman fan and thus might as well have a Master’s degree in all things concerning the Dark Knight.

Or perhaps you are a Transformers fan and thus have spent years, or perhaps decades devoting your free time to the property in all its incarnations.

Regardless of your fandom, whether it is to a publisher, property, or character, you have a vested interest in all media related to your fandom, and thus you take it very personally when you see it mistreated by Hollywood.

What sets fans apart from the general audience is simple, passion.  Fans have a passion for the characters, the story, and demand nothing but the best from the studio.  The general audience wants to take their dates on something that will kill two hours without having to resort to actual conversation.  And eat popcorn.  But do we, the fans, shoot ourselves in the proverbial foot when it comes to our expectations.

I’ve personally had the privilege to be on many sides of the spectrum during my professional life.  I’ve been a supervisor, a writer, and artist, an editor, and a fan.  It’s really as a supervisor and an editor, however that I’ve gotten the best perspective of how the whole equation works.  You have to dissociate yourself from the body of work, not only pick at the nuances, but the piece as a whole.  I can tell you if the whole of a story is great and then in the same sentence says “However in chapter 6, paragraph 4, and line 8 you use the word “burrito” as a verb and that can take a reader out of the scene.”  I’ve defended my employees’ actions and decisions before those casting judgement, and then once the situation is over I’ve reprimanded them for making the wrong choices or using poor judgement.  So I tend to analyze and sometimes over analyze a body of work, and I try to do so objectively from all points of view.

Take Transformers: Age of Extinction.  I’ve been with the franchise since 1985 when the toys hit my local K-Mart.  I’ve been with the robots in disguise through thick and thin, and so I had expectations as a fan when I heard the Dinobots were to grace the big screen.  I heard the outcries:  Optimus was too violent, the movie was too Michael Bay, the Dinobots had little to do, there were too many humans, etc.  I shared many of these viewpoints.  I was not pleased that Optimus was so willing to turn his back on humanity.  I was disappointed that no Dinobot got called by name or spoke.  I did feel the Transformers had little screen time.

Then I had to look at it from the general audience point of view.   I read the reviews from the critics, but the film still did amazingly well at the box office.  If it was such a bad movie, why were people throwing their money at it in droves?   Was it because people like bad movies?  Or was it a better movie than we gave it credit for because it didn’t appeal to our sensibilities?

If they made the Transformers movies just for the transformers fans, then they probably wouldn’t make their money back.  Changes had to be made to appeal to a wider audience, ones who weren’t familiar with thirty years of back story, by my count at least 20 independent animated series (counting the Japanese iterations since often story lines differed) and more comics than I care to count right now.  There was no way everyone was going to be satisfied with the end result.

The same thing happened not too long ago with Superman Returns, which was set in the same cinematic universe as the Christopher Reeve Superman films, at least the first two, with the latter two apparently excised from continuity.  The film harkened back to those old films, and avid fans of those films, myself included, loved the movie.  Yes we could pick out problems with it but we were still pretty entrenched in the nostalgia that we could look past it.  Yet the general audience and many of the broader DC Comics fans demanded more.  “Why can’t we see Superman get in a fight with someone?”  In Man of Steel they got their wish, and immediately came the cries “Superman doesn’t kill!  Why did half the city need to be destroyed?!”

Because Zach Snyder looked at the Superman mythos and decided to up the ante.  There was a call for Superman to fight someone, but that kind of fight is going to have an effect on the environment and for the most dynamic fight scene, you need a dynamic environment.  Why did Superman kill?  Because killing Zod fit with the tone of the story.

So looping back around to where this all started…did the movie makers ruin the film, or did the audience ruin it for themselves?  With everything art related, there isn’t a right or wrong answer…it’s all subjective.  Art, beauty, entertainment in general is all in the eye of the beholder.  I can criticize bad movies, but I can also appreciate them.  Batman and Robin was probably one of the worst comic book based movies ever created, and it bombed at the box office, and I hate it, but I can also appreciate it from a certain point of view.  It’s stupid beyond belief but it’s a harmless stupid.  It’s something I can pop in with friends and we can riff on.  I can watch it alone and view it through the same lens that I view the Adam West television series.  If I don’t take it seriously, then it’s not that bad.

Just to clarify, it’s still bad, but in the same way the Adam West series was.

So do I shortchange myself when I expect too much from Hollywood?  Probably.  Should I stop expect the very best product they can make?  Absolutely not.  Yes at the end of the day Spider-Man, Superman, Batman, the Ninja Turtles, and Transformers, these are all very silly concepts but that doesn’t mean they should be done sloppily, but maybe I should curb my criticism a little because before I know it, they will roll out with something else.  Maybe the next iteration will be better, maybe not, but at least we can enjoy the ride.

Thanks for reading.

Transformers: Robots in Disguise 2015 Review-Legion Class Underbite

Again, this is a figure that shows that the RID 2015 line needs to have a "Scout" class, something between Legion and One-Step Changer.  Basically he is just too small for his own good.  I picked this little guy up because, well, I'm like 99% of America and am on a budget, and I wasn't willing to shell out $10 for the One-Step based on it's reported manufacturing flaws.

Now that doesn't mean this is a bad figure.  Not by a long shot.  I honestly thought he was going to be very simplistic but I was pleasantly surprised with how complex he can be.

 

I draw attention to the figure's rear, which of course is where everyone wants to look.  Anyway, in what could have easily been a lazy flip around ended up being a moderately complex action.

Now in a departure from the rest of the line, where in most everyone eventually takes on an Earth vehicle mode, Underbite here offers no excuses or apologies, turning into some kind of Cybertronian tank thing, which honestly looks like it fell out of one of the new Batman games by Rocksteady.

 

Then there is the issue, as I stated above, about scale.  He's only in scale with two characters: Optimus Prime...

                       
                                                                    And Grimlock...

 

So, is he worth it?  Well as always that's completely subjective.  If you are a completest or on a budget, I'd say yes.  He doesn't feel cheap or flimsy and while he may be WILDLY out of scale, he's still a really well put together figure.

 

Thanks for reading.

 

 

The Hero’s Journey: The Path of Sam Witwicky

                First off, I want to say, I do not hate nor do I blame Shia LaBeouf for anything.  People like to rag on him because it’s easy.  He started out a child actor, and as a young adult actor was given roles in movies that weren’t great, but that’s not his fault.  He did his job and, in the context of the end result, did it well.

Yet, we aren’t necessarily talking about him today, at least not directly.  We are talking about a character he brought to life, one Sam Witwicky, probably the most hated and derided character in the Transformers movie franchise.  However, he’s not even that bad of a character.  We have to look at what he represents, how his actions inform where he is at during the stages of his life that we see. 

In Transformers, the first live action endeavor, we meet young Sam, a high school student desperate for two things; 1) a car, and 2) to get with the girl of his dreams Mikaela Banes.  Now looking backwards in time, through the lenses of age, reason, and experience, we can criticize his choices, his actions, and his motivations…but would we really have acted much different if put in his position?  Think about it the target demographic of your average Michael Bay film…its Sam Witwicky.  That is who Michael Bay plays to, and that is the mindset of the average white heterosexual male American teenager.  You want a car that will help you get noticed by the girls.  That’s it.  Your world is hormones and you have no idea what you are doing.  At no point during the film did Sam really take charge of the situation.  He has strong feelings about Bumblebee and insists he be released, but had it not been for the intervention of Lennox and his team, along with the U.S. Secretary of Defense, he would have been overruled and kicked to the curb.  The only reason he was even there to begin with is because he’s had immediate contact with the aliens.  He has no special skills, talents, or information.  The only time he says something that everyone else in the room doesn’t already know is when he points out that Megatron is a huge threat.  They were going to find that out in a few minutes anyway and it never shifts the tone or the weight of the situation.

Essentially Sam is an unwilling participant in his story, his life has been high jacked, and that is a common element on the hero’s journey.  Often the main character will be forced along his quest by a collection of circumstances.  Luke Skywalker initially rejected Obi-Wan’s offer to become a Jedi.  Bilbo Baggins rejected Gandalf’s offer to become Thorin’s resident burglar.  Young Arthur initially scoffs at the notation that he might actually be the King of England.  Yet just like those narratives, there comes a moment where Sam, likely without thinking about it, accepts his place in the story.  Sam, after the incident at the Hoover Dam becomes a delivery man.  His job is to take the cube from point A to point B.  He has to run the ball down field and it is everyone else who heroically fights off the Decepticons to give him a clear path.  That’s not where he takes his place.  No, again that is just Sam following the direction of everyone else, like you do at that age.  You may think you are forging your own path during your teens, but how much of your own life is decided by other people?  Teachers, parents, principals, doctors, friends, parents of friends, your entire life is dictated by committee.  It wasn’t until Optimus offered himself to take on the cube’s immense power and sacrifice himself that Sam made his own decision.  He and he alone, chose to shove the cube into Megatron’s spark, killing him.  This was the Hail Mary throw.  This could have ended disastrously, but it worked.

However that doesn’t mean that Sam has control of his life now.  Quite the opposite, in Revenge of the Fallen (which I’ll talk in more detail about in a later essay), Sam has returned to his tried and true methodology of taking cues from everyone else, and it makes sense given his age.  Sam is going into college, which means he wants to take control of his own life, but he can’t quite get there.  That is very common for that demographic.  Going from high school into college is a transition period that becomes very complicated very quickly.  He continues to defer to those around him and again, he is summoned into the Hero’s Journey.  His life is defined by those around him and he reacts at lot like how many of his contemporaries react.  I think it’s here that people take issue with Shia LaBeouf because he portrayed a character who isn’t really that likeable, but that is typical for that age group.  People aren’t upset because Shia’s a bad actor or plays a bad character, but rather that the character he portrayed is a reflection of that subsection of society.  They are angry because they see themselves in the character.  A result of writing, or lack there-of created a movie that hit a lot of the same notes as the first.  Which is pretty accurate since your freshman year of college often feels like a rehashing of your high school experience.    That doesn’t excuse the production, but it does inform why they did what they did when they did it.

Where the Hero’s Journey really comes full circle is about the middle of the third film.  The beginning of the film featured another transition for the character, going from college to the world of adults and trying to find a job.  Sam is dealing with a lot at this point, he’s complaining that he got a medal from the president and saved the world twice and can’t tell anyone about it.  On one hand he’s feeling entitled because of all that he did, but on the other hand, he really didn’t do that much.  Again, his Hero’s Journey had him essentially run the ball to the goal while everyone else fought the battle.  In the second film, all he really did was plug a new battery into Optimus Prime.  Had it not been for the intervention of Jetfire, Optimus likely would have been killed again during the ensuing battle.  Sam is placing a lot of important emphasis on his past, which is what you do when you are fresh out of college.  You are hung up on what you did, but what employers, what adults, what the world wants to know is “What are you going to do now?”

That question becomes an essential theme for Sam during the movie.  As the world he knows is stripped away from him through the violence of the alien war and the betrayal of former allies, he is left with those around him telling him what to do, or rather, what not to do.  Remember our first two films?  His world was loaded with people telling him what he needed to do, what they needed him to do, but now there is no one telling him to take this here and do that, to plug that in there and restart that.  Now they just look at him and say they’ve got nothing.  Nothing he’s done to this point matters, not anymore.  He now has to ask himself “What are you going to do now?”

This, like I was saying, is where he comes full circle.  He finally has agency in his story, he picks himself up and says “I’m going in and I’m going to save the woman I love.”  Even Epps who has come with him to the edge of the city says it’s a lost cause, but he chooses to push on, and honestly, Shia sells that moment.  That is the end of the kid and the beginning of the man.  This time, people are taking cues from him, following his lead.

I was actually kind of glad that the character was absent from the fourth film, not because I didn’t like him, but rather because it was time for his character to move on.  I don’t think Michael Bay and his team would have been able to really shape the character any further, and Shia was having so many problems at the time I don’t know that he would have been able to devote much energy into continuing Sam’s story even if he wanted to.

Ultimately Sam’s story will always be one of contention because the lens of nostalgia is not a forgiving one.  I don’t know that I would mind if they revisited the Sam character later on down the road, but I would ask that they give him a new story, one where he decides where he goes from now on.

Thank you,