There's something that's been bugging me for a while, now.
How have films swung the pendulum back from not having enough material to pad out ninety minutes to having too much for two-plus hours?
Seriously; over the last five or six years there's been an absolute landslide of films that have struggled to make it to the theatrical release mandated (at least I think it's mandated, it's been a while since I checked) run time of ninety minutes; a lot were, in fact, closer to eighty plus credits, and some barely cleared seventy-plus.
It was the same rationale, I would assume, as why American TV series (or, at least, the ones I watch) have switched season lengths from 22 to 12 (either that or it's a subconscious affiliation with Firefly's brevity of time).
But recently the swing back to longer films - at least, in blockbuster terms, and it's quite revealing how many films I own that are in the >90 minute category and aren't very good - and, with that, there have been one or two examples of films that feel like they could actually benefit from being split apart or expanded upon.
A counter-example of this would be The Avengers, because such a good job was done of fleshing out the world in the films prior to that (and why there's such a lack of love for Captain America, I do not know, but anyway) that the film could just start at a breakneck pace and continue that way from thereon in (although, as they Honest Trailers does say, you do get to watch Iron Man fix an engine for twenty minutes).
I know there's a lot of brackets and sidebarring here. It's semi-stream-of-consciousness at the moment. All part of the fun.
But The Avengers did have one or two odd elements; Hawkeye had been barely introduced in Thor before he got hit with the AHA YOU ARE NOW EVIL stick in The Avengers and spent the first hour or so being an antagonist before the power of Scarlett Johannsen's cranial trauma re-aligned him.
And how Thor was able to cross to Midgard - sorry, Earth - when that crossing had been decisively all kinds of fishheaded up at the end of, well, Thor, which was explained away in one throwaway line.
And the enemies could have used some more explanation, as well, because as it stands they were Just Another Nameless Alien Race trying to take over Earth because they... Well, just because it was something to do, as far as I could tell. And decidedly organic-looking soldiers all fall over when their connection to the home dimension is cut, as if they're radio-controlled.
Oh, yeah, I should probably have posted the mandatory spoiler warning by now, really, but hey, if it's too late, it's worth pointing out; Robert Downey Jnr. Is Actually Iron Man In Real Life.
Seriously.
Expanding on the theory above, though, there's two films I'd like to talk about that represent opposite ends of the should-they-shouldn't-they theory of expansion in film terms.
At one end, there's Looper, which I saw only a few days ago.
I loved it; there's no denying that.
And having seen previous films by Rian Johnson, I kind of went in expecting the pace to be a little... odd. Not bad, not better than anything else, just different - because, for instance, The Brothers Bloom had very odd pacing, and Brick before that had a pacing of it's very own and thank you very much but you can't touch it. If you were being unkind - and I remember a few people being so - the word glacial was bandied about, because there is a certain slowness to these films that you don't find anywhere else.
There's a word I'm particularly fond of that I learnt ten years ago and never truly forgot; entelechy. I had it mentally filed as "a slow movement towards an eventual completion", or like the unfolding of a flower; slow, precise, ends in something beautiful unless you're a hay fever sufferer.
I like to think that Rian Johnson's films are basically entelechy on celluloid (that is, virtual celluloid, these days) in that they can't be rushed, and wouldn't benefit from it if they were.
Don't misunderstand me; I came here to write tonight fully expecting to say how Looper should have been much faster and the pacing different and and and... Then I stopped, and thought about it, and, well, if the pacing were faster and it was just balls-to-the-wall action, what would make it any different from any other action film out there?
So maybe it's time to celebrate that sort of difference. The only film I can think of with a comparable kind of pacing and structure is Way of the Gun, which just kind of unfolds with a slow creeping terror about exactly how things are going to end, including sudden broken glass.
The Dark Knight Rises, though - which I saw not quite so soon ago - had a completely different feel to it viz pacing.
In that it was a wonderful film, with a deep, decent emotional payoff at the end (although, as Cracked point out, a slightly unbelievable one in practical terms).
But - to me, and only to me - it felt like it should have been two films.
This is just my opinion, and bear in mind opinions are like elbows - everyone has at least two - but bear with me as I put this together for all y'all.
How about this:
The Dark Knight Falls
(Because it's a pun on Knightfall, i.e. night fall, geddit? etc etc oh god help me please)
Ignoring the shittiness of the pun - but acknowledging it nonetheless - you could have a good ninety-to-one-twenty minute movie setting up an epic confrontation between Batman and a more fleshed-out, more understandable Bane. You wouldn't need contrivances like Bruce Wayne's money being fraudulently stolen in its entirety in eight minutes through a glorified iPad; you could actually have Wayne/Batman being slowly and completely stripped of his assets, his allies, his equipment and, at the conclusion of the movie, his ability to fight.
This would allow for much more exploration of the motivation of, well, everyone, and more character setup time. Hell, there'd even be more time to explain how Bane managed to get the Gotham construction companies to create the absurdly spacious sewers (thanks, TV Tropes!) necessary to hide his equipment and his army, and more time to introduce Selina Kyle rather than just her getting a pearl necklace from - no, let's stop that amazingly vile joke right there and then. But more setup time for Selina would also have been nice, because in the film although we know her motivations are questionable there's the whole thing of whether she does feel genuine, total angst about selling out Batman to Bane.
And equally there would have been more time to spend on John Blake and Miranda Tate, with equally more time to spend on myriad little plot things and such here and there and everywhere.
And at the end of it, Bane still breaks the living shit out of Batman.
The Dark Knight Rises
One of my main issues - and don't get me wrong, I raise it from no platform of experience of my own, but it's just something that bugged me - was Wayne / Batman's recovery time. Although it's been a while since I saw the film, it did seem to boil down to
10 Back Broken
20 GOTO Turkish (?) Prison
30 Receive rope-based chiropracty
40 Do press-ups
50 All better! Go fight now.
Again, if the first film had been spent comprehensively breaking Wayne, the second would have had more time to devote to how he raised himself back up to fighting condition and found the inner strength necessary to make the jump without the rope. To do so so quickly kind of trivialises the matter, although in a way it's productive in terms of stating just how kick-ass Wayne really is when everything's up against the wall, and such.
An extended run-time would have allowed for more time to show just how the GCPD were coping with their enforced prison time underground, too (and heaven knows there's a raft of characters from Gotham Central that could have been brought in in big or little ways).
Plus... The close-to-final scene in Florence was genuinely effective (I... Well, I got a lump in my throat, I'm not really ashamed to say). But it was telegraphed earlier in the movie; if things had been split into two, then it might have had even more emotional heft when it made the viewer recall Alfred's speech from not just an hour and a half ago, but from the previous film entirely. It might have been more rewarding, that way.
Then again, it might not. Because how would it have worked, this way? Release one film in May and another in September? There would have been pros and cons to this approach, i.e. extra box-office versus extra pr spending and the need to maintain the attraction between two films for the entirely mainstream audience as opposed to just the specialist sector, all sorts of things like that. Plus it would have made keeping schtum about all the plot twists and secrets just as hard.
And god knows there probably would have been a Previously On The Dark Knight recap at the start of the film. Nobody wants that.
I can't actually think of a way this has been done before except for, maybe, the Matrix sequels, which were - if memory serves - exactly a year apart.
But I'm not a studio executive, a marketing mojo, a film director, a screenwriter or an economist. I'm just a fan with an opinion that's probably wrong and an overactive imagination.
At the heart of it, a film plot is just a series of events in one long progression. The best films make this look effortless or make it look like that's not what's happening at all.
At times, The Dark Knight Rises felt to me and probably only to me like event -> event -> event -> end.
But it was still a beautiful piece of filmmaking filled with amazing actors evidently giving everything to the final piece in a trilogy (pre inevitable reboot, of course) and it should be celebrated as such.
But maybe...
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