5. The Untold Stories
Hollywood needs to stop with the prequels already. I know there are people out there who believe that a prequel, if well-executed, can bring fresh insights to beloved properties, can reinvigorate franchises and fan-bases, can even rekindle long-thought-dormant qualities that may have been put out by the crushing weight of franchise continuity. Rubbish! Those qualities only exist when the film is approached from a place of creative enthusiasm: when a writer or director has an interesting story to tell within a pre-established universe, that can lead to interesting results. But thats not how Hollywood works. All Hollywood sees is the basest fan-urges, the desire to fill in all ambiguities and plot-points with cold, hard visual facts, and then sets out to deliver exactly that as cheaply as possible; its the lowest, dumbest form of creative thinking and it yields the lowest, dumbest form of movies. Films that exist solely to cash in on iconography and emotional investments built into other, good, movies and characters. Now, defenders of prequels in theory have three films they like to break out as examples that it can work - X-Men: First Class, Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes and Abrams' Star Trek. And its true, those are three good movies. However, Ive got some major caveats. Those are good movies, but none of them are actually GREAT movies. Simple re-watches reveal that each is deeply, fundamentally flawed on a script level, with numerous dumb plot points, clunky exposition and head-scratching story/character decisions. Surprise, surprise, most (if not all) of these moments are products of tying the films into the larger mythos of the series (Im thinking Spock-in-the-cave or Everything having to do with James Franco here). While these moments dont ruin the movies, they do significantly mar them, holding them back from true greatness. Each of those films (and Id bet any other example you come up with) take HUGE liberties with the canon of the series they are purported to take place within. Is this a complaint? Nope. These deviations are often the very thing that make the stories interesting, compelling narratives. But by making those deviations, the filmmakers are basically severing ties with the initial franchises, and setting off on their own tangents. Which is fine, but its also the one thing prequels are designed NOT to do. So, put simply, the only way to make a good prequel is to cheat and not actually make a prequel at all. (This is especially true of RISES which goes out of its way to tell a story that runs counter to every bit of mythology established in the initial APES films. Imagine a prequel trilogy where Yoda kills Anakin halfway through Episode II and no one ever mentions him or Darth Vader ever again.) More than that, the obsession with prequels betrays the inherent laziness and cowardice of the Hollywood development process - instead of taking chances and building new things, theyd rather rehash old, proven formulas and successes over and over again, trusting to the Pavlovian desire of fanboys to come running, money flashing in hand, at the first sign of something familiar. And the sad thing is, the fanboys almost always pay up, which leads us to the last point