Why Modern Movies Suck - The Curse Of Multiverses

riddle me this dear viewer when you're a movie studio that's flush with cash but short on imagination and creativity and you want to keep exploiting an old franchise with a proven track record but you've written yourself into a corner with poor storytelling decisions and left your franchise feeling stale and played out or you've killed off characters that you wish you hadn't or maybe the actors are getting too old and too expensive what would you do if your answer is to hire talented writers to dig you out of the hole that you've made for yourself in a way that's logically consistent and emotionally satisfying or create new and interesting characters to replace the ones that are aging out or even take a chance on a whole new IP that might be risky at first but offers up greater creative freedom and rewards in the long term then clearly you're not thinking like a modern Hollywood executive no instead what you do is fall back on one of the laziest and contrived storytelling tropes since the rise of the Unstoppable infallible girl boss I'm talking of course about multiverses if ever you needed an example of something that sounds good on paper but becomes a complete disaster the more it's actually used then multiverses are the thing for you and that's not to say that it's an objectively bad idea by itself in fact what I hope to show with this video is that when it's properly implemented it can actually be a very effective storytelling device no the problems creep in when it's put into the hands of lazy hack writers who either can't or won't work within the rules of the established universe or lack the imination to move the story forward and instead devolve into the Cinematic equivalent of a hyperactive toddler banging different toys together now ium multiverses because let's be honest it's a pretty good catch all term for what's actually a much broader and more diverse problem in the industry and in reality it covers pretty much everything from alternate realities to branching timelines and lazy half exlained Recons of past events each method is slightly different but it all adds up to the same basic problem and that's what I'm Keen to tackle here today so buckle up as we embark on another adventure into why modern movies suck first up let us try to understand the reason for using multiverses in a story because there has to be some kind of motivation for doing them right well if I had to sum it up with two simple words then they would probably be what if see one of the great aspects of Storytelling is speculating on the road not taken and what effect it might have had on your favorite story and characters like what if Darth Vader offered Luke the chance to join him in Empire and Luke said you son of a [ __ ] I'm in or what if Saran managed to steal the one ring for himself or Obi-Wan Kenobi died instead of Qui-Gon Jinn or KH defeated Kirk and went on to build a new civilization for himself or general bison was finally able to build bison opoulos with an even bigger food courts all of these things are pretty interesting to speculate on because they allow us to indulge our own imagination and creativity to think about what we might have done if we were in charge of tell in the story Hollywood Studios understand that same desire and just like anything else where there's a lat in demand for something sooner or later they'll find a way to exploit it for money and really multiverses are the quickest and easiest way of doing it wish that Tony Stark had survived his final battle with Thanos don't worry we can just hop into a different dimension and there he is alive and well wish that Finn had become the Last Jedi instead of Ray well it happened an infinite number of times in other realities and all it takes is a jump into a space whale or a bit of [ __ ] around in the world Between Worlds to see it happen wish that Kyle ree was still alive after Terminator 1 nothing a bit of time travel can't fix pretty much anything is possible because you're no longer bound by the rules of the existing universe or even what happened in it up until that point it's literally a dream come true for any writer brought into a longrun franchise with a ton of lore and backstory and tedious rules to remember because it allows them to basically ignore all of it and do whatever the [ __ ] they feel like yeah so Darth Vader can shoot bolts of Force lightning out of of his AR now and I don't care that he's dead and that's impossible because this is a different reality you see hurry up and bring me another line oh yeah that's the [ __ ] The Avenues for exploring New Paths and possibilities are quite literally unlimited but so are the problems that they create and this is the heart of the issue here see the only reason we as the audience ever get invested in a story any story really is because of stakes if a character gets killed halfway through the story then just like in real life they're gone forever it doesn't matter how much you like them or how badly you want them to pull through they're dead and they're not coming back if they're a well-written character that the audience empathizes with then it creates a genuine sense of loss and grief almost like you've lost a real friend that right there is the power of Storytelling when it's done right and the more the writers raise the possibility that even the most popular characters can die and be lost forever the more they raise those all important dramatic Stakes because something that you care about is now in danger but what happened happens when you introduce multiverses into the equation well quite simply you remove any sense of stakes suddenly Death Becomes less of a permanent tragic loss and more of a temporary inconvenience a bit like restarting a level on a video game who cares that character X heroically sacrificed their life to save their friends because in an infinite number of other realities he's completely fine [ __ ] man if we really want to we can even grab one of those other versions and pull them into our own reality as a convenient replacement I mean we wouldn't want the audience to feel bad or anything which really is the narrative equivalent of having your cake and eating it on a personal level individual Stakes no longer exist because characters no longer exist as single unique entities that actually matter instead each one is just an insignificant variation of an infinitely larger hole with endless variety and complexity that can never truly die or succeed at anything and so there's literally no reason to get invested in their struggle because there's infinite variations of it out there it's the same problem when it comes to time travel which is another [ __ ] method of undoing past events and rewriting Your Own Story to suit your current needs like how many times do the Terminator franchise been ripped up rebuilt and Rewritten constantly changing and contradicting its own rules in the process everything we saw in the future was predetermined and trying to change it actually causes it to happen in the first place actually no forget that we just changed the future to make it better now nah actually the future was always going to happen this way you only managed to delay it we sort of agree with that idea but here's a bunch of additional tacked on [ __ ] that you never wanted or needed nope in fact now we've gone back and messed with the past as well because we're [ __ ] idiots wait hold my beer ignore what everyone else said because we've got an even worse story line in to replace it at a certain point it becomes a complete waste of time to care about anything that happens in those movies because the next one's probably just going to undo everything you just saw the T800 sacrificing himself for the good of humanity was an awesome scene in Terminator 2 but now that I've seen it happen like three times in three different movies it's not quite so special anymore now believe it or not Hollywood writers actually understand this problem that multiverses and branching timelines create for the audience unfortunately their solution is almost as bad as the problem it's trying to solve because it involves ratcheting up the stakes to literally astronomical levels now it's not just a group of likable characters you care about that are in danger or even the entire human race it's literally the entirety of all existence across the Multiverse wow that's really big and big equals good right wrong because here's the thing the human mind isn't really designed to comprehend the world in terms of infinite possible realities across infinite universes especially not on the kind of visceral emotional level that you need to sustain dramatic tension instead it becomes nothing but an intellectual exercise as dry and disengaging as a stock market summary you understand the words that are being said and what's being risked on an intellectual level but you don't really feel the magnitude of it because how how can you how can you even begin to comprehend something so impossibly vast this problem also gives rise to a phenomenon that I can best describe as antagonist dilution like remember agent Smith from the Matrix remember how he was this really Sinister intimidating antagonist because he was intelligent and ruthless and physically powerful and basically unkillable and it took Neil literally dying to discover the power needed to defeat him he was a pretty good villain I liked him then cast your mind forward to the Matrix Reloaded Smith was able to replicate himself to the point where Neo ends up fighting dozens if not hundreds of them all at the same time remember how much less intimidating and interesting he became because individually he was no threat at all and his only strength laying his sheer weight of numbers that right there is antagonist dilution just like with the multiple realities problem our primitive monkey brains are conditioned to view characters as individuals not as facets of a much larger hole antagonists are much more effective and memorable when they're conglomerated into a single powerful entity rather than a collection of weaker individuals is one of the many reasons that K the Conqueror was a [ __ ] terrible idea as a villain not withstanding Jonathan Major's ridiculous overacting and career-ending legal problems it's that we can't really view antagonists as a threat when you show them getting beaten again and again by lowlevel characters and try to wave It All Away by saying well that's just one example of them there's millions of other more dangerous versions out there don't you know no we don't and we don't care how dangerous he is as a collective whole because that's not how we view people and we never will now much as I've shat on the concept of multiverses I also want to make it clear that the real problem lies in the implementation the overuse and the lazy shortsighted focus on novelty over meaningful storytelling rather than it just being a fundamentally bad idea in the first place plenty of movies and shows have made effective use of alternate realities like the T episode tapestry where a Dian peard laments The Reckless Youth that ultimately landed him in this position in the first place and is given a chance to see what his life would have been like if he'd lived more sensibly and cautiously yeah he ends up Surviving but the problem is that he becomes a boring [ __ ] who never amounts to much of anything to the point where the real Bard decides he'd rather die as the man he is now than live on as the one he just saw it's a potent reminder of the importance of taking risks seizing opportunities and making the most of what life has to offer and it's all contained within a single episodes another example comes from Red Dwarf a British sci-fi comedy scene series about a group of weirdos and Slackers stranded millions of years from home in the episode Dimension jump a new version of Arnold Rimer arrives in our reality from a different Universe better known in this case as Ace Rimer unlike our version this one's charismatic charming and heroic everyone else is smitten with him except Rimer himself who takes an instant dislike to him because he assumes the guy must have had all the opportunities and lucky breaks that he never got he's a living example of what Rimer could have been if he'd had a better lot in life and it feeds into the persecution complex that pretty much defines his character throughout the show but in a neat little twist we ultimately find out that Ace was kept back a year at school when he was still a kid while our rumor was allowed to go on and graduate as normal instead of breaking him the humiliation of his failure forced Ace to work harder and better himself ultimately becoming a much stronger and more capable man as a result whereas our rimor became complacent and blamed everyone else for his failures in life it's an interesting little character study and an excellent example of how failure can be the making of a person or the breaking of them it all just depends on how you deal with it I could go on and on with this stuff but the point I'm making here is that multiverses can be a useful tool in giving characters and the audience a different perspective on things they normally take for granted but they function best when they're used sparingly neither of the examples I gave here had world changing consequences for The Wider show they were part of they didn't try to frame themselves as epic confrontations where the fate of all reality hung in the balance they were just little Windows into other possible futures that eventually snapped shot once they'd served their purpose and in both cases they were used to support excellent writing rather than compensate for his absence that right there is the big difference between them and it's one that Hollywood writers would do well to remember anyway that's all I've got for today go away now

Channel: The Critical Drinker

Views: 1,159,983

Keywords: critical drinker, review, funny, best, feminism, feminist, disney

Id: 7wbze2o3WuY

Length: 12min 20sec (740 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 22 2024