Now we're getting into the nitty-gritty of why every modern Hollywood blockbuster seems exactly the same. There are tropes and basic structures that have been used by screenwriters in perpetuity; then there's Save The Cat!, a book by veteran movie scribe Blake Snyder, which goes a little further than that. Save The Cat! literally gives the formula for a successful screenplay, breaking it down to the point that the book will tell you exactly on what page certain things need to happen in order for a story to work. These "beats" are used so widely, that they can be applied to basically any film produced in the last ten years (and possibly before). One of the big beats in the Save The Cat! structure is the "false victory". If we're hearkening back to the three-act structure, this would happen in the second part the one that's meant to trick you into thinking it's all over but, because you're a savvy cinema-goer, you know that it isn't really. There's still a good twenty minutes to go. It's when they think they've won the final Scare Games challenge in Monsters University, when capturing The Joker feels like the end of The Dark Knight, when Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl take down that room full of criminals. The idea of a false peak was around way before Blake Snyder (who, by the way, only had two original screenplays produced: Blank Check and the universally-reviled Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot) gave it a name, but since it got quantified like that? You'll find it everywhere. In Gravity, there's the bit where she imagines George Clooney saving her. In Guardians Of The Galaxy, you assume crashing Ronan's ship killed him. In The Great Gatsby...erm...
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
