Epic ... fail

A week or so ago I went to the cinema. I don’t go often, and when I do it is usually to see arty-farty stuff like the National TheatreLive performances (which are superb).

But this time I went to watch the latest, big ticket film. It was the wrong time of year to go really. The trailers that were showing were those for the summer blockbusters – Oblivion (Tom Cruise) and Olympus Has Fallen (Gerald Butler and Morgan Freeman). This year must be ‘O’ year, clearly.

One is apocalyptic, the other post-apocalyptic. Both involve a lot of running around, shooting things and – for the ladies – reasonably attractive and muscled men. It’s the standard formula: the world is facing some sort of apocalyptic event, and iconic building gets destroyed, the world survives.

They say there are just seven Hollywood storylines:

Rags to Riches

Quest (including logical quests, thereby mysteries)

Voyage and Return

Comedy

Tragedy

Rebirth (essentially one form of good-overcoming-evil, the chap who learns the error of his ways)

Overcoming the Monster (including all good-overcoming-evils)

I question all of these. Most particularly I fail to see the difference between Quest and Voyage and Return, other than the ‘return’ aspect. It also doesn’t really suit romances (though these are often ‘rom-coms’, and thereby falling into ‘Comedy’, albeit that the comedy element is often rather tenuous). One day I may make my own list...

Anyhow, these apocalyptic endeavours fall into the last category – Overcoming the Monster. The monster being whatever doom is threatening the world on this particular occasion.

The doom is varied. It could be natural (The Day After Tomorrow; TheCore) Extraterrestrial (Independence Day, Star Wars and Superman probably also fit in this category even though the hero is also alien) human (almost every James Bond) inhuman (Jaws, Jurassic Park) or intergalactic (Deep Impact, Armageddon). Admittedly, they started out not being very apocalyptic – Jaws only terrified a single town, for example. However as each summer has approached, the stakes have been raised, the terror has had to become greater, the target greater: the idea that “it was just a small town in America, nowhere near us” becoming less and less easily dismissed.

One of the risks with this it that as the threat becomes bigger and target wider, so it becomes more extraordinary, less believable, more farcical. The stakes get raised so high that the chips topple – a film tries too hard and becomes too epic for its own good.

But in addition to them each trying to outdo each other, so they also nullify us. We expect more bodies, more chases, more fights, more noise. Yes, one compromise is story; but the other is shock. Nothing shocks us any more. When Deep Impact was released, rather than raving about the storyline (though it may have suffered there from being released at the same time as Armageddon which had an identical storyline – there’s only so much you can say about a meteor) everyone was talking about the noise. It was the loudest film to have been released at the cinema up until that time.

There’s not much else you can say about them really. We know the story – there will be some sort of devastating threat; there will be an unusual or unexpected hero; there will be a death of at least one of the main characters (a low helps make the high higher, the overcoming all the more remarkable); a romance (for the ladies); a lot of special effects; and a happy ending. Oh, and probably a soundtrack featuring Aerosmith.

The most recent addition has been the destruction of an icon – the Statue of Liberty, the White House, the Empire State Building etc. They become more and more absurd. If you had said “the White House is destroyed in a massive fireball after suffering a direct hit from an alien spaceship” then an ordinary producer would have thrown it out; but since Independence Day, the producer would say “it’s been done before. Maybe a fleet of spaceships. Or the entirety of America. Or maybe it’s actually a super-volcano”.

It’s exhausting. In fact, it’s not any more. It’s boring. Just as overuse of antibiotics has made bugs resistant to them, so we have become ennumbed by excess. Whilst they try to think of newer, more epic, more novel ways, so in turn they seem less inventive, less distinctive, more farcical.

Perhaps it’s time for a change. Or at least a rest.