#prequel starwars mcu blackwidow

[shepgeek]

The Problems with Prequels

Minor spoilers for Star Wars Saga and the MCU

The business of modern cinema rests on cracked foundations.

All studios scour the horizon for their next franchise, a golden ticket to bring audiences back over years, even decades to come, but how can they find a new saga without creating something original first? Current trends imply that only mega budgeted blockbusters can make it to the one-billion-dollar threshold, and since no studio is keen to take a huge risk on an unproven story, remakes are the current default.  That well, however, is already starting to run dry and, even when a new story catches on, another paradox soon follows: in any sequel, how can the second most interesting day for these characters be as compelling? Change the DNA of your property too much and you risk losing what made it special to everyone, but keep too closely to the progenitor and the repetition diminishes the original and erodes the sequels until you are left with a stale caricature and an exhausted resource. In recent years the MCU has changed this picture by never telling any particular overarching story, but instead creating vivid characters with verisimilitude to build momentum towards the moment when they can all parade across the screen together. Hollywood has tried to ape this model but the circumstances of the MCU’s birth have proven to be singular and, as Marvel starts to reach towards television, there is a sense that change is needed there too over the coming years. There is one option which many studios and artists therefore become drawn to and it is interesting that the MCU is exploring this in its next film, Black Widow. Prequels are neither a new idea nor are they unique to this format: C.S Lewis built his saga of Narnia books around The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe, retroactively tying decisions and characters into the continuity he had already established: a process now known as “retconning”.  For modern auteurs, this urge to extend the universes which they have already built complements a studio’s yearning for more and has led to many recent film series, of which one left an enormous legacy.

George Lucas had made one prequel in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, although little was made to distinguish Indy as an earlier version of what audiences had already loved in Raiders of the Lost Ark and, indeed, one key joke depended on events which were yet to transpire for him. Given that Indiana Jones had been Lucas & Spielberg’s American answer to James Bond, a franchise blithely indifferent to continuity, this was a prequel in name only and, when Lucas felt that the tech could deliver his vision of the Old Galactic Republic, his Star Wars prequel trilogy was conceived. The Phantom Menace casts a long shadow for many reasons, not least because it was and will surely remain the single most anticipated film in history. Given the internet’s infancy, global audiences were sparingly teased and, when combined with a 15-year gap since new Star Wars had been in the cinema, it led to a campaign that no film can hope to match. This was an audience who had been accustomed to showing patience for their stories, when it would be almost a year from when any film moved between cinema and home video and more years before television premieres- the idea of the emergence of a complete saga was sensationally exciting. That The Phantom Menace proved to be such a disappointment to many may well explain why the word prequel tends still to evoke negative impressions, but the reasons for this disappointment are interesting, complex and resonant 20 years later.

Where it was character (and Joseph Campbell’s storytelling archetypes) that drove Lucas’ original trilogy, the prequel trilogy finds its author in love with his universe, where the detail is almost overwhelming. Without the strength of those narrative pillars, however, but with the need to sow the seeds of Anakin’s ultimate downfall, Lucas is left playing with thinner characters. As before he cast well, with Liam Neeson’s unflappable maverick building a twinkling chemistry with Jake Lloyd. Ewan MacGregor is hugely charismatic, although his Obi-Wan Kenobi is very different across the saga, shifting from loyal student to frazzled parent to avuncular mentor. Padme begins as an ethereal child queen and only later evolves to become a glassy logician, flummoxed by having fallen deeply in love. Padme is honest to a fault, never reconciling her meticulous nature and passion for diplomacy with her doomed romance, making a pointed comparison with the sassy dynamo her daughter will become. Her blind belief in the Republic mirrors her faith in her husband and as both are steadily stripped away she is always interesting but rarely compelling: a feature common to all three films. The characters are who Lucas needs them to be, not who we want them to be, not least because he is perhaps loath to mirror and diminish what worked so well in the original trilogy.

After two decades The Phantom Menace remains visually stunning and shows off Lucas’ storytelling flair, with Ian Macdiarmid’s Palpatine steadily building into one of cinema’s great villains: look for the scenes on Coruscant for how he minutely licks his lips or how he is positioned to block the Queen from the camera. There is also the most thrilling and visceral lightsaber fight in the entire saga, the triumphant pod race and John Williams at his peak, complementing the astonishing Duel of the Fates with casual moments of genius such as his major inversion of Palpatine’s Theme at the final celebration. None of this, however, can detract from the storytelling decisions which run counter to the original trilogy to provoke the ire of purists, setting a pattern that would be abundant across the industry in the following years. The focus on politics remains stodgy but the choice to lean into the comedy is the most divisive element. JarJar Binks remains a character who is enjoyed by those who began their journey here but often despised by those who felt that their most precious story was being infantilised. This was compounded by the prominent role that Lucas gives to chance in Episode I, especially in the final act, whilst Anakin’s bristling petulance builds a wall between him and the audience in all three films. This is a trilogy where the villains always win and features possibly the single oddest romantic interlude in cinema: Anakin speaks of agony and torment when addressing Padme and he is permanently emotionally tortured to some degree. The films are deeply interesting and made with arguably greater storytelling flair, but, in seeking to avoid repetition with the original trilogy, they are not stories that compel us to care as deeply for those upon whom they centre.

The second problem faced by any prequel is in the retconning stemming from the knowledge that everyone knows where the film must finish, and so excitement is fundamentally reduced. Knowing the destination robs a story of its potency and, in prequels, this is a requirement. Ridley Scott’s recent Prometheus films illustrate this as well as the studio pressures placed on major releases. Throughout interviews, it became increasingly clear that Scott was deeply invested in returning to the universe which he had helped to create and was artistically motivated to tell more stories centred both in theme and content around the nature of creation, but his Fox bosses were simply after some films containing the Alien. In Alien: Covenant the xenomorph itself felt almost superfluous whilst both that film and Prometheus tied themselves in knots to hint towards the established Alien films without explaining very much of anything. The effect for some was a new disappointment: the feeling that something had been promised but not delivered. Taken alone, Covenant is a thrillingly nasty sci-fi take on The Island of Dr Moreau, but few were expecting this when they paid for a ticket. When the storytelling cranks into gear to get the plot mechanism to begin to align with that of Alien, the dramatic effect is perplexing.

The final problem prequels now face, however, furthers this issue into the very nature of authorship. Back when Scott and Lucas began, the process by which a storyteller settled on their final draft was private, and they had wiggle room for later should they need it. Looking back at Episode IV there is a clear sense that Lucas had decided that Darth Vader was Luke’s father but the rest feels like it was up for grabs: Luke and Leia’s kiss in The Empire Strikes Back is the clearest example that he had not fully decided to have them as siblings, but when later films came out any concerns over discrepancies would vanish into corners of 80s fandom. In the modern era, however, everything needs its own website, and everything must immediately make sense. In The Phantom Menace Qui-Gon’s early line about “the living force” has since been assigned colossal significance and the extended Star Wars universe spills over with such speculation, much of it considered canon. In “A Certain Point of View”, a recent anthology of short stories built around background characters, there are many wonderful illustrations of this, including Yoda’s incredulous reaction to Obi-Wan choosing to bring him the dreamy and unfocused Luke to train instead of his super confident badass sister. This is to say nothing of the role that fan fiction takes in any of the world’s great franchises and it brings into focus any prequel’s final curse: anyone who loves these worlds, when presented with a definitive ending point that the story must land upon, will have either thought up many routes there themselves or read about possible versions of that story and so whatever the storyteller picks will be tinged with disappointment.

In consuming more of our favourite stories, we unravel the mystique of the storyteller, reacting with fury if ever it appears that they are just making this up, which, of course, is exactly what they always are doing and always were. Most in the audience do not want to see what is behind the curtain and, for those that do, they demand a surprise be waiting. Filmmakers, however, think of an idea first and then spiral outwards from it, inventing details to fit the direction in which they wish to head. That is not, however, how they ultimately will tell the story, but this process is dangerous once the universe is already grounded and inevitable in a prequel. The freedom they once had is greatly diminished even though, from their perspective, this is always how they have worked. J.K. Rowling ‘s “Magical Universe” (a clunky title for an author so gifted in nomenclature) is the one remaining major cinematic prequel franchise still in play and it is currently struggling with many of these issues. Where the first Potter book is exemplary in setting up almost implausible levels of detail for the six that followed, the Newt Scamander films have a more meandering tone which has been accused by some of the familiar flaw of being more interested in the world than the people. From this criticism and reduction of our storytellers, further problems emerge: Rian Johnson’s superb The Last Jedi had the courage to make bold new choices but was targeted by trolling campaigns, whilst the final season of Game of Thrones (a show based years of expert teasing and the joy of speculation) was inevitably cast as a failure when the infinity of possible directions it could take was finally reduced to one. Modern audiences demand that details are foreshadowed but grumpy if specific payoffs are not met. We seem increasingly desperate for more of our stories but are yet increasingly less satisfied with what we receive, and one wonders where the next turn in our storytelling will take us. Our narrators have seen their power reduced in this medium and are exploring new ways of keeping us sat in the dark, waiting to be told a good tale.

The Star Wars prequels have defined how we consume modern blockbusters and, for any franchise that follows, these three problems of repetition, retconning and the abundance of scrutiny have left franchise entertainment facing an uncertain future. Black Widow, then, becomes hugely interesting as it faces these problems, not least because, as with Solo, we have just seen and made our peace with the title character’s final destination. Given that emotional resonance, does anyone care what happened in Budapest?