Avengers and Twelve-Part Structure

I had been thinking about movies and the studio-system's somewhat slavish devotion to "three act structure", which more and more I'm seeing as a big problem in modern cinema, and too often I'm seeing that same advice being given to novelists. And that's a shame, because three-act structure is bad advice for movies, and it's downright horrible for novels.

That's partly because "three act structure" is more or less another way of saying "beginning, middle and end".  And that's where a lot of screenwriters and novelists get into trouble: "Act 2 problems" or "the murky middle".  It's because, when you come down to it, "rising action" doesn't really give you a lot to go on.  It's a fancy way of saying "more stuff happens until the finale", but that tends to get translated into wheel-spinning and "refusing the call" (in Campbellian terms) as a way to mark time until the finale happens.* 

This is the problem in using tools of deconstruction and analysis and trying to use them for construction and creation.  They aren't meant to be used that way.  Now, admittedly, I did use deconstruction and analysis to create the Twelve-Part Structure, but I did it as a means of making a tool of construction and creation.

I could probably go on for a bit on the perils of three-act structure and using analysis tools for creation, but I won't.  I will, however, point out how things that succeed at being at engaging don't use three-act structure.  And when I saw the Twelve-Part Structure so evident in Avengers, I was pretty damn gleeful.**

Some spoilers from here on out.

Establishment: Loki shows up out of the Cosmic Cube, enthralls Hawkeye and Dr. Solveig, SHIELD fails to stop him.  With this, we establish the world and the stakes-- namely, this is a world where stuff like this happens.
Incitement: Gather the Team sequences: Fury talks to Cap, Natasha shows her skills and recruits Banner, Coulson talks to Tony.
Challenge: Loki begins his "distraction" plan in Germany, where Hawkeye does the real plan.  Cap fights Loki, and then Tony shows up and subdues him.
Altercation: Thor shows up to take Loki, and then Tony and Thor and Cap all fight each other over essentially jurisdiction issues.
Payback: Loki is locked up, but all the Team squabbles with each other over petty tings.  In other words, Loki's subtle discord is sewn.
Regrouping: Natasha gets info out of Loki, the Team gets a better sense over what's actually happening.
Collapse: Intergroup squabbling reaches a fevered pitch, as they discover SHIELD's plans for the Cosmic Cube. Hawkeye attacks the Helicarrier.
Retreat: Hulk smash, Tony and Cap work on keeping the Helicarrier in the air, Loki escapes and kills Coulson.
Recovery: Tony and Cap fix the Helicarrier, Natasha smacks Hawkeye's head back together, Bruce wakes up with Harry Dean Stanton.
Investment: Coulson's bloody Captain America cards, Tony gives his Big Speech to Loki, and the portal of Alien Destruction opens up.
Confrontation: BIG. DAMN. FIGHT.
Resolution:  Hulk smashes the puny God.  Tony throws a nuke at the aliens. Natasha closes the portal. Loki is captured, Thor brings him home.  Fury gives a speech.  Shawarma.

Yeah, you could break that into "three acts", but you'd be being pretty reductive about what actually happens.  Whedon was essentially given "three acts" by the studio people (namely, "Heroes come together, then they fight each other and split apart, and then they come together for Big Damn Fight").  With a lesser script that could have ended up as more wheelspinning non-action-- or worse, some kind of Plot Coupon collection in lieu of an actual story in the middle.***  Instead, with a more complicated structure, you get a FAR more engaging work.

--
*- Another superhero movie example: Green Lantern.  That's just full of wheel-spinning until the third-act turn where Hal Jordan, the supposedly fearless guy with near-limitless power, finally decides that maybe he should try and do something.  And by "do something" I mean tell a bunch of people he previously blew off that they should do something.  
**- I am NOT claiming that Whedon is aware of my Twelve-Part Structure, or that he necessarily used it or a similar framework.  It's more that Twelve-Part Structure fits as a framework quite nicely.
***- I'm looking at you, Percy Jackson movie.

Avengers Assemble: But more women next time, hmm?

This past weekend The Avengers went down in comic-book movie history.  It broke box-office records, making over $200 million in just one weekend.  More importantly, it was a success in terms of its goals-- bringing together the Big Damn Heroes of the Marvel Universe from their individual movies and teaming them up in a big, satisfying way. 

So it goes without saying that Avengers 2 is a lock.  They even threw in the obvious Sequel Bait in the credits sequence.  I'm just hoping they lock down the details relatively soon, because I'm already excited.  Unfortunately, I can't see them getting it together earlier than Summer 2015.

If I have one complaint about Avengers, it is that it comes too close to the Smurfette Principle: the team is Black Widow and five guys.  This is not Joss Whedon's fault, I'm sure.  Knowing his work, he probably did a lot of fast talking just to get Maria Hill in among the cast. But I know that the team of the movie was essentially handed down by studio edict.  So, hopefully, Avengers 2 is going to rectify that.  Though, reasonably, there are only so many New Avengers that can be added, and they aren't all going to be women.

It seems like they really might get the Ant-Man movie off the ground, so he would be a likely add.  With him, it's pretty easy to add Wasp to the team (if she isn't a key part of the Ant-Man movie, which she totally should be).  And it wouldn't hurt to maintain her original background, if for no other reason than to be a counterpoint to Black Widow: a socialite heiress with a solid head on her shoulders.  She's not Paris Hilton; she's Ivana Trump.  If, you know, Ivana had superpowers. 

My other key choice would be Ms. Marvel, aka Capt. Carol Danvers.  Since it's looking like Avengers 2 will be going cosmic, her origin of being an Air Force pilot who is empowered when exposed to alien technology would fit in quite nicely.  Plus Ms. Marvel ought to be (but isn't really) Marvel's equivalent of Wonder Woman: the universe's most notable female hero.  Frankly, the Marvel Universe doesn't have someone would quite fits that bill.  Black Widow isn't it.  Nor is Invisible Woman, Elektra, Phoenix or Storm.  Let's give Ms. Marvel a proper showcase.

I would personally love to see Mockingbird show up in Avengers 2, and she has the advantage of fitting into the world of the Marvel movie-verse quite easily.  SHIELD agent turned hero, with strong emotional ties to Hawkeye, and like Hawkeye and Black Widow, she's a highly skilled "normal" instead of superpowered. Though it works best if she and Hawkeye are married, so unlike having a strong professional bond that he and Natasha have in the movie, they can be a hot couple who kicks ass.  The Mr. and Mrs. Smith of the Marvel Universe.  Of course, her actual comic-book background is pretty damn close to movie-verse's background for Black Widow.  So close as to seem redundant.  And while I'm a big fan, she's a bit too obscure.  (Though, apparently, they are considering an Alias-like show starring her for ABC Family, that will be tied to the Marvel Movie-verse.  So, you never know.)

Those would be my choices.  Many fans seem to be pushing for Scarlet Witch, though I respectfully disagree.  I understand the reasoning: she was the second woman to join the team, she's a long part of Avengers history.  But given her backstory is entangled with elements that the Marvel Movie-verse can't use (mutants and Magneto), and you'd HAVE to bring Quicksilver along with her... eh.  It seems too much.

The Revolving Door of Death

This video hit the internet this weekend, as a sort of side-door promo for "Chronicle", but it's pretty entertaining stuff in its own right.

Now, I've always said it's pretty easy to take any story, book, TV show, movie, or whatever else and talk about it in a reductive, distainful manner.  You can rant about anything, and be accurate (and this rant is, for the most part, accurate), but not actually be honest about what really happened in the story.

I do think this one is pretty accurate and entertaining, and relatively honest.  Let's face it, there's been plenty of craziness over the past however-many-years in comic books.  (Comics, everybody!)  Death of Superman is hardly the craziest story out there. 

But one bit in which this recap is a bit dishonest is the idea that Superman coming back to life killed "death" in comics, and hurt sales in a way which Action Comics never recovered from.  The revolving door of death had always been a common trope in comics.  No one stays dead except Uncle Ben and Thomas & Martha Wayne.  Death is not a permanent condition in that world.  No one was upset that Superman came back; him coming back was pretty much assumed from the get-go.  If anything, they were mad about how it was done, with a bit of handwaving that essentially said he didn't REALLY die, he just went into a "healing coma", while still claiming that he DID really die.  It's classic having-cake-and-eating-it situation.  Superman coming back wasn't earned.  He just woke up when he needed to. 

Is that dramatically interesting?  No, it's lame.  That's what made people mad. 

If anything was killed by the Death of Superman, it was the idea of manufacturing a Collector's Item out of whole cloth.  Tons of people bought the Death of Superman issue and vacuum-sealed it, forgetting that the thing that makes a collector's item worth something is its rarity.  The bubble finally burst on the collector boom of the late 80s and early 90s, and sales of EVERYTHING dropped.  People weren't buying anymore with the hopes that they were squirreling away a fortune to be cashed in 30 years later. 

Still the video is fun, and it reminds one that if you want your stories to matter, then the consequences have to pay off.  Death can't be the same thing as a bit of a nap.

Breaking the glass and hitting the Big Red Button

One of the Big Stories out there this week is how DC Comics is apparently planning a hard reboot of their entire universe, re-launching everything as #1 with 52 different series.

Whenever news like this comes out, I try to approach it with a healthy dose of skeptical optimism.  It could prove really interesting, or it could fail horribly, but I want to believe that it'll prove interesting. 

For me, the most interesting aspect is the fact that they are going all in.  When Marvel did Heroes Reborn or their Ultimate line, they didn't stop publishing their regular universe.  They were both toe-in-the-water experiments, with varying degrees of success.  DC, in some ways, had intended to do exactly this back in 1986 with Crisis of Infinite Earths, giving an in-story reason for a hard reboot.  The problem was there wasn't full commitment to the hard reboot, and there certainly wasn't a cohesive editorial vision behind it.  Here it seems that DC is doing a full jump-out-of-the-plane bold move that could soar or crash, but they aren't hedging their bets.

Now, for me this sort of idea can work a lot better for DC than it would for Marvel, because when you come down to it, DC's characters are more iconic.  The proof comes when you try to parallel the DC characters to Marvel counterparts: the main DC characters tend to embody a iconic Big Idea, and the equivalent on the Marvel side is somewhere in the C-list.  The Flash is super-speed, while Quicksilver is a superfast guy who is more known for being a creepy, possessive anti-hero.  Aquaman is the ocean-based hero, while Submariner is... more known for being a creepy, possessive anti-hero.  (I would argue the only major DC hero that has a solid Marvel counterpart is Green Arrow, who matches Hawkeye, both being definitive bow-wielding heroes in their universes.)

My point being, the DC universe is one where you can boil down the characters to their core, restart them and do something very interesting with them.  That was the core idea behind Marvel's Squadron Supreme and Supreme Power. (And it should be noted, DC has never really successfully done the same sort of treatment with Marvel's characters.)

So can this idea work, and be a huge success?  Absolutely.  Will it?  Hard to say.

I have to admit, I do have a twinge of jealousy towards the writers on these projects.  The opportunity to write these iconic characters, but starting from scratch?  That's potent.  If I had my druthers, do you know who I'd want to take on in that context?  Aquaman.  My big idea there would be to change Atlantis into a far more complicated political landscape-- many nations with loose alliances and straining relations.  Cast Aquaman as the Ned Stark in an underwater Game of Thrones, if you will.  Throw in some environmentalism and intrusions from the surface world, and set the whole thing on a low simmer.  Oh, yeah.  That would be fun to write.