joyless myopia

there comes a point in many series where you finally realize that the creator(s) have no intention of ever delivering on the rampant potential from the earlier episodes. it’s a turning point, usually in the later volumes of a finite series, where you realize that it’s too late to have the rug pulled out from under you. by this point awesome shit should have been happening, and it’s not, and there’s not going to be any. ever.

in my head i’ve started referring to this as the point of diminishing returns, and you can primarily thank george lucas and the wachowski siblings for this term, and for utterly failing to reinvigorate franchises of their own creation.

neither can really use the excuse that they’re mediocre writers or directors, because they both proved in their first flick that they are, in fact, quite talented. a little rough, but sophomore efforts are supposed to improve, not degrade, your skills. not to mention that they both surrounded themselves with insanely talented people in all the disciplines needed to make insanely cool movies.

peter jackson and sam raimi learned their lessons on low budget movies, and when they went for the transition to huge mainstream sagas, they didn’t get lazy. a larger budget doesn’t mean you don’t have to work, it means you have to work ten times as hard to make sure the final product is still good. you’ll no longer get credit for having shitty effects because of a $20 budget. and it worked. the lotr and spiderman franchises are solid movies.

the matrix sequels and the prequel trilogy, on the other hand, are classic examples of movies with just enough quality and potential to be consistently disappointing, and both were outclassed by their own animated side projects.

the harry potter books reached the point of diminishing returns in book six. technically book five, but with two books remaining, there was still time to bring it back. instead, we get a bunch of talk about how lord voldemort is the greatest evil wizard who has ever lived, and he hasn’t really done anything. i mean, yeah, he’s killed a few people, but that just makes him a killer, not a world conquering menace. in a world of dictators with nuclear weapons, a guy who can point his magic wand at you and make you die just isn’t threatening.

i know, i know, potter isn’t lotr and shouldn’t be compared, but still. rowling has gone to great lengths to tell us how nasty voldemort is, but compared to the average homicidal maniac, he’s really not that bad.

when scott was in the hell levels of doom 3(another point of diminishing returns) we decided that hell really isn’t that bad. all you need is a shotgun and a can-do attitude.

the point where the matrix lost me was when neo went blind in revolutions and realized he could ’see’ agent smith inside of bane. this where six months of build-up finally fell apart. from the cliffhanger of reloaded, there were two ways to go: either neo has a magic connection with the machines, or the real world isn’t real. one of these choices is awesome, and one is ridiculous.

the main problem i have with the prequels, anymore, is that lucas has ruined darth vader. in the classic trilogy, vader was space hitler. killing his own men right and left, blowing up planets, totally wailing on his own son, and catching blaster bolts with his hands.

in the prequels, vader is a whiny bastard, and the extent of his evil actions is slaughtering people for no apparent reason, and killing his own wife. there’s never any satisfying transition from good to evil. lucas has talked about how luke and anakin had the same origins, but he’s failed to justify why ani is a murderer and luke is a hero. other than, you know, because. same reason anything happens in the prequels: to set up what’s already been done.

he nearly had a good idea there with the midichlorians, where anakin, after being chopped up by obi-wan, loses half his midis and thus half his force potential, and becomes a failure in all aspects of his life, including his sith aspirations. except that that makes lord vader a failure. if the series is now ‘vader’s story’ as lucas has stated so often, then why make your major character both unlikeable and irredeemable? vader doesn’t make mistakes, he chooses to be evil, but he has no real motivation. he’s just an asshole.

vader barely even LOOKS cool anymore, not compared to designs like darth maul and greivous. a charcoal briquet in a quilted suit who can barely defeat and old man and a half-trained whelp is not a serious threat.

making vader badass again would be one of the goals of my theoretical ’star wars 2000′ remake, but i doubt it’d really be worth the time to do it. the more i think about it, all i’ve managed to fix are surface details. when you get down into the detailed workings of lucas’ universe, you find out that he really hasn’t put that much thought into it. he’s got good big ideas but the details fail him.

i spend a lot of my time terrified that i’ll make the same mistakes in my own works.