The Great Wall

William has come to China for rumored gun power, but what he really needs is trust. Therein lies his vulnerability, even if he views it better not to trust. Yet it could be that he is just afraid; Commander Lin Mae thinks so. The protagonist wants one thing, but in order to get it he must overcome a critical flaw. This is the basic form, or dynamic, of a screenplay. I submit that because film is an excellent medium in which philosophical principles can be explored and wrestled with, the protagonist’s vulnerability, raised to a principle, can efficaciously be more salient in a film than merely in the immediate struggles of the protagonist. In other words, the principle at issue in the protagonist’s flaw can play a more expansive role in a film, deepening it in the process.

Trust, to have faith. Trust is our flag. “Trust in each other, in all ways, at all times.” This is what the Chinese army is about, Commander Lin Mae tells William. She asks him to do a physical task—essentially bungie jumping off the Great Wall—to show that he can trust. He refuses the request, retorting “I’m alive today because I trust no one.” Not trusting, in other words, has served him well. Lin Mae then declares, “A man must learn to trust before he can be trusted.” Yet Ballard trusts William and Tovar enough during the first battle to cut them loose from being prisoners. They prove trustworthy and fight with the Chinese against the beasts, saving the west turret. He earns General Shao’s praise. Implicitly at least, William values trust, or at least being trustworthy; he does not have to fight the beasts. Opposing Ballard and Tovar, William decides to stay and help the Chinese army rather than escape. The former thief, murderer and liar has a character arc—he is changing—and yet Lin Mae does not trust him. Such trust only comes when he takes part in the final battle, literally saving her.

I contend that The Great Wall (2016) could have played more with the issue of trust by teasing out problems with Lin Mae’s claim that a person must trust in order to be trusted by others. The film does not reconcile this claim with Ballard trusting William by letting him go even though he did not at the time trust. Furthermore, the film could have critiqued Lin Mae’s claim that the people in the army trust each other. In such a hierarchical organization wherein giving and receiving orders are the standard protocol, does trust go beyond mere self-preservation? Lastly, does the difficulty that Lin Mae and others in the army have in trusting William mean that the army cannot be trusted? If people in the army only trust each other, which is relatively easy, can they really be considered to be trustworthy? In short, film need not be so superficial concerning a basic principle underlying the protagonist’s flaw. 

Inferno: A Sequel that Goes Up in Flames

With the allure of additional profits to be had, Hollywood has been all too willing to torch high-quality brands as if with perfect impunity. A case in point is the film, Inferno, which followed The De Vinci Code and Angels & Demons in the Robert Langdon film series spanning ten years (2006-2016) based on novels by Dan Brown.

Noticeably absent from Inferno were any traces of theology, which had given the first film such narrative force, are arguably even sustained the second film. On first seeing the title, Inferno, I expected the film to involve the Christian concept of hell (hence Dante’s Inferno). L’Inferno, the 1911 European silent film, for example, is loosely based on Dante’s classic text. The film was an international success, taking in more than $2 million in the U.S. alone.[1] In contrast, the 2016 film received generally negative reviews and did not do well financially in the U.S. Rather than being about hell, or even religion,  Inferno is about climate change and over-population combined with biological warfare. The link to religious symbolism is tenuous at best, so the justification for the protagonist, Robert Langdon, is insufficient.

Film can indeed handle substantive theological issues. Films such as Rosemary’s Baby, Agora, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and The Devil’s are but a few stellar examples—exemplary still because their respective producers did not risk the brands by attempting to squeeze out more profits from a line of diminishing sequels. In contrast, the reputation of The Exorcist was diminished by Exorcist II: The Heretic and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist; both films, justifiably receiving stinging reviews, departed from the original storyline without bothering to be faithful to the original.

Producing sequels until the marginal revenue approaches zero is not a good business model for Hollywood. It is indeed possible for ensuing scripts of sequels to burn, or at least tinge, the original even long after it has been made into a film. Even from a business standpoint, the box-office flop of a sequel can negatively impact sales of the original film because of the hit to its reputation. Contradicting elements of the original story, such as occurred in sequels to The Exorcist, burn holes in the believability of the storyline itself. Was or was not the African boy, Kokumo, possessed by the demon Pazuzu?

In short, too much of a good thing can be counter-productive. If the reputation of a film’s “brand” means anything, it should be protected rather than prostituted out. Rather than pushing for sequel scripts, producers with one hit “under their belt” can better satisfy their economic and personal-brand self-interests by looking for another unique script. In the case of films with a theological dimension, scripts that engage a viewership with substantive problems rather than superficial protagonist-antagonist “drama” are the best bet.  

---

[1] Antonella Braida, "Dante's Inferno in the 1900s: From Drama to Film." In Antonella Braida, Antonella and Luisa Calé, Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2007): 47-49.

Dallas Buyers Club

The maturation of a story’s protagonist—as “growth” eventuated through the progression of the narrative—provides a source of dynamism that can keep a film from being static, or falling flat for lack of character development. At the same time, a good screenwriter is careful not to overdo it, lest a character’s internal transition occur too quickly in terms of the story to be believable. In Dallas Buyers Club, Ron Woodroof—played by Matthew McConaughey—“turns on a dime” in his attitude toward gays. The flip is hardly believable. The question is why.

When a physician informs Ron that he has AIDS—beyond being HIV positive—the rodeo enthusiast and electrician by trade reacts vehemently against the implication that he had contracted the disease from sex with another man. Even from that point, he refers to a gay man as Tinkerbell. The implication is that Ron is severely prejudiced against homosexuality, and his context being that of rodeos in Texas makes this interior state very believable.

Yet without giving the viewer a sense of sufficient story time having elapsed, Ron latterly chokes Tucker, one of his rodeo friends in a grocery store for refusing to shake hands with Ron’s business partner, the cross-dressing, AIDs infected Rayon, played by Jared Leto. Even for Ron to have lost his strong prejudice is hard to fathom, as he could have worked with, and even come to like Rayon without losing his distaste for homosexuality; for Ron to violently force Tucker to shake Rayon’s hand is apt to strike the viewer as sheer artifice on the part of the screenwriter and director. It is as though Ron were a Janus-like fictive caricature rather than a character based on an actual person.

Taken to an extreme, a character’s quick “about face” can leave the viewer wondering where the antagonist went. Indeed, the distinction between a protagonist and an antagonist can become confused, infecting even the structural integrity of the narrative itself. In the 2014 film Godzilla, Godzilla loses all his monster lore built up through preceding films to become—all of a sudden—the savoir of San Francisco. What had been a fight between Godzilla and two other dinosaurs is all of a sudden Godzilla protecting the city and its human inhabitants from the radiation-eating male and female animals invented in this film-version. The switch from antagonist to protagonist simply is not believable, and the story itself suffers as a consequence.

Fortunately, remedies exist. Using story-time rather than short-circuiting can be part of the mix. Lincoln says in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, “time is a great thickener of things.” A montage can give the viewer a sense not only of time passing, but of a character undergoing maturating learning as, for instance, from sustained suffering in the process. Signs of an interior change vital to the narrative can begin in the montage, or otherwise patently as the story resumes. Staggered thusly (like a recurring, subtle melody in the string section of an orchestra) and so only gradually anticipated by the viewer, when the change finally manifests full-blown as vital to the story, the realized “growth” or change is credible. This credibility can actually contribute to the suspension of disbelief that is so vital to the believability of the story and thus its constructed world and characters. 

Godzilla

The allure of the technological advances in film-making is particularly pressing in the action genre. Three challenges come to mind—that of how to have the film stand as a metaphor for something that is both good and bad in “real life,” develop a relationship storyline amid the digital effects that enable such tremendous scale of action, and restrain the visual effects lest they manifest as a sort of visual diarrhea. Godzilla (2014) is illustrative of what can happen when a film-maker is not up to these challenges.

As a sci-fi film, Godzilla performs the requisite function of standing for something going on in society at a distance. The monsters who eat nuclear fuel deliver the message, albeit filtered through the science fiction, that nuclear power is dangerous. Interestingly, just as not all of the monsters in the film turn out to be bad, nuclear technology has its good point in holding promise in blowing up the bad monsters who ironically eat nuclear fuel. If nuclear technology, like fire, puts us in a sort of a double-bind, so too do the monsters in the film. Unfortunately, turning Godzilla into a “savior of the city” at the end and not simply a foe of the nuclear-eating monsters violates the Godzilla character inherited by the film. A similar problem is in the Twilight films, which violate vampire lore not only by having them out in daylight, but also by glittering like jewels in the sunlight. Stephanie Meyer wrote a romance, rather than a vampire story, and the film-maker tried to have it both ways—monsters who aren’t really monsters. So too, Godzilla ends up not as a monster and yet technically so, presumably to embrace as a symbol the ambiguity in our attitudes toward nuclear technology.

The film also falls short in melding its human story with all the digital glitter. The problem is in how the two very different scales (the digital technology extending the larger) are related. As the monsters get “up close and personal” with the human protagonist, such intimate contact between such vastly different scales is too contrived to be believed. The distortive effect includes much too much significance being attributed to the scientist’s grown son. In other words, the narrative is distorted by the film-maker’s attempt to extend the larger scale (possible with the digital toys) while still having the emotional heart-tugs from a “human interest story.” The attempt is clearly to make the son the hero who saves the city even as Godzilla is dubbed “savoir of the city,” but the narrative itself supports neither. The son did not have such a role, and Godzilla was merely fighting adversaries rather than trying to save the humans. In the end, narrative itself gets sacrificed on the altar of special-effects technology. Given the complexity in the human relation to nuclear technology, constructing a workable narrative would have been quite a feat anyway—the eye-candy just making the achievement of suitable substance all the more daunting.