That’s not to say that trilogies are inherently vapid, corporately-engineered “events”. In fact, they take the most basic root of storytelling structure – beginning/middle/end – and draw it out to three times its normal length. It provides the possibility for a very rich, in-depth mythology. The hard part is making sure that each of those three parts has that same internal structure and that every part is as satisfying as the whole. When it works, it has the dazzling symmetry of fractal art. The five examples I’ve picked here are prime examples of that.
1. Star Wars (1977-1983)
I remember, shortly before Return of the Jedi came out, spending time thinking about how lucky I was. I was almost the exactly perfect age that the Star Wars movies were geared toward -- 5 when the original came out, 11 when the trilogy finished. I was young enough for it to hardwire the love of movies into my soul, and I grew up enough over the course of those six years that I felt as if I had lived through the saga myself.
But you don’t have to be of an impressionable age to love Star Wars, and you can consider the reason inspired or crassly calculated and be able to base a legitimate argument on it. George Lucas was a self-proclaimed padawan of Joseph Campbell, the master of comparative mythology, and from him took lessons from every great story that had ever been told and retold throughout human history. The reason that the original trilogy resonates with so many different people, in so many different places and times, is because George took the time to learn what stories mankind has always told himself around the home fire to make his world seem more dazzling than it is, and distilled the best of that tradition, placing it in a timeless context that is simultaneously futuristic and “a long, long time ago”.
Do I sound like I’m overstating? Like I’m just a sci-fi nerd that lives and breathes anything having to do with intergalactic struggles of good and evil? Well, that might be true. But think about how the American culture changed in the summer of 1977. Star Wars not only lent legitimacy to an oft-maligned genre, it revitalized the film industry and connected the country – and the world – in a way that no one story had before, or has since.
Most of all, though, I think Star Wars opened up the process of moviemaking to the public, turning it into less of a mystical art that wizened old studio heads practiced in dark editing rooms, and made it a transparent, glowing thing, open and available to all. No one had ever seen making-of documentaries on that scale before, and I doubt that the general public had ever paid so much attention to obscure things like sound editing, bluescreen and puppetry. It became not only a cinematic thrill ride, but it indoctrinated us all into the living heart of moviemaking itself. It made us appreciate movies more by understanding everything that went into them. It drew us into its process, showed us around, and made everyone think, I bet I could do that. It turned us all into filmmakers, or at least into people who think like filmmakers.
I hardly remember seeing Star Wars for the first time. It must have been during its reissue in 1978, because I doubt my parents would have taken me until I was at least 6. There are only flashes of memory, and even then they’re only recollections of how I felt that first time… the only ones I can remember specifically are my revulsion of the bloody arm on the floor of the Mos Eisley cantina, and how I thought the movie must be over when everyone first escaped from the Death Star, only to be swept up into an even grander finale. Other than that, the characters and situations have been with me, for all practical purposes, my entire life.
I had never seen a film without a neatly wrapped-up ending until The Empire Strikes Back. I remember stumbling out of the theater, Ryan and I (and our friend Chris Weiland) almost unable to speak, not believing that so many things could be left unresolved, the answers still three years away (approximately a century, in kid-years).
The night our family friend Vicki took us to see Return of the Jedi, already a month into its run, the place was still packed. I remember it almost being like a religious revival, with people crowding the aisles, cheering and laughing together. I even liked the original Ewok song, which I’ve since grown to passionately hate. (Of all the changes in the Special Editions that came out in 1997, that was the only one that improved on the original.)
Then we all waited for sixteen long years. While I waited, I graduated high school, went to college, got married, started my career, and wrote a movie of my own (Syzygy, if you haven’t noticed it already). And I have to admit, when someone at my work got access to the video of the teaser trailer for Episode I and showed it several times one afternoon, it stoked my inner child again. I couldn’t wait to see the real thing. It seemed strange, a whole new set of characters and places that didn’t really seem too consistent with the original nuts-and-bolts kind of style, but I knew I’d be in a theater seat anyway.
The point of my dipping into the newer, less-liked trilogy, is that it took a special kind of epic to make people wait for over a decade and a half, and still come running like rabid dogs when it finally came back around. I have no doubt that those original three films are going to stand as one of the creative high points of the twentieth century.
2. The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)
As I’ve said before, I was extremely skeptical when I heard that Tolkien’s genre-defining book trilogy was going to be made into a trio of films. The only attempt that had been made to that point was Ralph Bakshi’s animated version from the late 70’s. That’s hadn’t worked, and the idea of a live version seemed equally ludicrous. After all, the first experience I had with the series was my grandfather’s coffee-table edition of The Hobbit, illustrated with stills from the animated TV movie. It just seemed like too much for anyone to handle. On the other hand, though, I was by that point a huge fan of Peter Jackson; I had already seen Heavenly Creatures, Dead Alive, Meet the Feebles, and The Frighteners, and thought they were incredibly ambitious and innovative. I held out hope, but I knew that the source material made for terribly difficult adaptation.
I shouldn’t have worried. The Lord of the Rings was a giant step forward for movie special effects, using computer imagery to create a whole other world that actually lived and breathed with a clarity never realized before. While its most impressive innovation was the MASSIV graphics engine, which could create photorealistic battles that raged over scales of entire square miles, Peter and his team paid incredible attention to the little details as well, from every little prop (created on three different scales so the differently-sized men, dwarves, and hobbits could interact with them all) to set design elements showing a world where each different race and culture had their own well-defined civilizations. The way they all these varied characters came together to wage war against a titanic unseen enemy was shown with an incredible optimism, not to mention incredible respect for the original story. I had never seen live-action and CGI married so flawlessly, and the world they constructed was continuously awesome in the most literal sense of the word.
I know there are purists out there who will argue that-didn’t-happen-until-later and that-got-skipped-over and where-the-hell-is-Tom-Bombadil?, but I can’t say I agree. Adaptation is exactly that: knowing where the strength of a certain medium lies, and tailoring the story to those strengths in order to make it all work. Sure, a fantasy novel is a great place where ancillary characters can come and go, and every place, person and weapon has three different names depending on the heritage of the character who’s talking about them, but a movie has a different set of priorities altogether. Even if it turns out to be eleven hours long (which the Extended Editions of these movies happen to be, put end to end), there’s only so much information you can stuff into the frame. And it is the Extended Editions you should see. If not, you’re going to wonder what ever happened to the evil wizard Saruman, and you’ll never get to experience The Mouth of Sauron, one of the coolest evil henchmen the screen has ever seen.
Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens managed to do the impossible and make a beautiful and emotional film out of an often-frustrating 1200-page fantasy novel. It’s going to be the benchmark for all other ambitious film projects of the twenty-first century, and right now I can’t see how it’s going to be topped.
3. Indiana Jones (1982-1989)
I’m writing this a year before the release date of the fourth Indiana Jones movie, so far in advance that it doesn’t have a name yet. So I still count this as a troligy, at least for the time being. My only hope that the other great movie franchise of the 80’s doesn’t get trashed is my faith in the creative team… I mean, come on, would Steven Spielberg really direct a sequel that he didn’t think was worthy? Then again, he’s responsible for The Lost World…
I admit, I was far too young to see Raiders in of 1981. A 9-year old isn’t quite prepared for burly Germans being chopped up by airplane propellers and faces getting melted by the Wrath of God. Still, it was a great ride, despite the fact that my father managed to nod off both times he took my brother and I to see it that summer.
What this trilogy taught me, however, was how each film in a series can have an entirely different tone from the previous one, and it probably should if the series isn’t going to get stale. Raiders is a romp through the Egyptian desert, and while the stakes of the adventure are high, a wide streak of humor runs through the whole thing. Temple of Doom, meanwhile, is like a fever dream that you just can’t wake up from, I mean that in the best possible sense. It’s loaded with caves, lava, human sacrifice, and mine carts that cruise along like the world’s best roller coaster. The difference here, however, is that the journey is almost entirely humorless. Admittedly, Spielberg tries to cut the tension with broad yuks, but it always comes off as queasy (the PG-13-inspiring Maharishi dinner scene) or crass (the sexual cat-and-mouse Indy plays with Spielberg’s future wife, Kate Capshaw). Last Crusade, the third installment, enjoys throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, globe-trotting from Venice to Germany to the deserts of North Africa. It introduces fresh characters (Sean Connery’s perfection as Indy’s dad, for one) and gives us some of the first truly inspired computer-generated effects.
So what does the fourth installment hold? I can only hope for the best at this point. Indiana Jones is a prime example of the uncertain future of visual storytelling itself. As time goes by, a great uneasy convergence of all storytelling techniques is taking place. TV is becoming more like the movies, with multi-season story arcs, movies are becoming more like TV, with new installments of even the oldest franchises chasing the dedicated audience, and the web promising to bring them all together into one untidy but exhilarating box.
4. The Terminator (1984-2003)
I never saw a horror film until I was 16. Frankly, up until then, I had no interest in them. I would sometimes overhear kids at school talking about something disgusting they had seen the previous night (“And then his tongue came out of the freaking phone!”), and I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly made them want to watch it. It wasn’t until I saw The Terminator one Saturday afternoon that I finally got it.
It’s hard to describe what I felt afterward… As the closing credits roll, Sarah Conner is driving off into the desert, pregnant, knowing full well that a nuclear war will, within months, destroy the world, leaving mankind helpless until her unborn son may or may not turn the tide… it was a sickly feeling. No movie had ever left such a weight hanging over my head before, and from that day on, I couldn’t get enough sci-fi and horror. I drank them in like water, my head filling with alternate universes spinning on countless axes, places where incredible, horrible things could happen. I took them all on… the only requirement I asked for was that I hadn’t seen anything like them before. That’s the rush of wonder that everyone experiences, I suppose, when their safe, childhood boundaries of imagination are suddenly blown down, revealing a wider, weirder, adult realm beyond.
The second movie caught me completely off guard years later. In my adolescence and young adulthood, I never missed a preview. It’s hard to believe, but in those long-gone days, the first time you’d hear about an upcoming blockbuster was, more often than not, in a preview. They were like multimedia potato chips to me, and I loved the anticipation of seeing what new wonders would be coming soon to a theater near me. So you can imagine my amazement when, on watching Total Recall on video in early 1991, I was floored by a preview for Terminator 2.
I’m amazed that I walked into the theater to see it months later with virtually no knowledge of what I was about to see. All I knew was what had been revealed in the trailers and commercials, that Arnold was the good guy this time around, and the bad guy was made of some sort of liquid metal. Like a conductor leading me through a brilliant series of time changes, James Cameron managed to fashion an entirely new story out of the ashes of his original. And that was a tall order… the nuclear war couldn’t be between us and Russia, because Communism had shaken itself apart since the first film was made. In his usual style, he switched things around so that a self-aware computer had determined that humankind was its only threat and fired the missiles itself.
The film itself is brilliantly paced, because as we rolled into the last 15 minutes, I still didn’t have the faintest idea how the liquid-metal man was going to be stopped. And since the point of a Terminator is its sheer relentless force, it had me right up to the very end.
I even liked the third installment, which is a much more by-the-numbers sequel without Cameron’s involvement, mostly for its lovely twist ending. It reminds me of something I saw James Cameron say once in an interview. He was talking about a scrapped alternate ending for T2 that had shown the future, and what wonderful lives the characters were having because there never was a nuclear war and the machines hadn’t taken over. Cameron felt that the ending was too pat, too literal. He couldn’t in all good conscience say that because these people did these acts, everything was going to be okay. The point of the movie, he insisted, is that we hold our fate in our own hands; that nothing is set, and we have to fight for our future every single day.
5. The Qatsi Trilogy (1983-2002)
I feel badly for the laserdisc collectors of the world. For a long time, they were the aesthetes above the rabble who watched VHS tapes. They were the connoisseurs of film, while the rest of us snacked on cinematic potato chips. And today, the technology they based their existence on has been shrunk down and made available to everyone in the form of DVDs. It must be tough.
The first film I saw on laserdisc was, appropriately, Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I’m not a Floyd fan, but one of my high school friends was, and he invited a bunch of us over to see it one weekend night. I didn’t really care for it, but was impressed by the clarity and fidelity of it all. You could freeze a frame and not have staticky lines running through it! Wow. A few months later, I plunked down the ridiculously huge deposit at my local non-Blockbuster video store and rented two films on 12” silver platters: the director’s cut of James Cameron’s Aliens (which was unavailable in any other form at that time) and Koyaanisqatsi, by former monk Godfrey Reggio. The second film I chose because I remembered its strange name, and from what I had heard about it, its scenic photography and time-lapse effects seemed like just the thing to try out this new, sparkly medium.
Of course, Aliens was brilliant, but it was Koyaanisqatsi (a Hopi word for “life out of balance”) that blew me away. There’s no dialogue, no commentary, just a series of images of the beauty of nature and the way mankind has moved in to pervert it. That shot near the ending of a rocket exploding and the burning nose cone endlessly tumbling, tumbling mesmerized me. I didn’t know whether to be ashamed of my participation in human civilization, or to marvel at the gleaming destructive beauty of it.
(I had the good fortune to see Koyaanisqatsi live in 2004, with Philip Glass’ inimitable music played live by him and an ensemble of keyboardists and vocalists. Hearing the opening chant of the title sent shivers through me, and I only wish that everyone could experience that film the same way.)
I saw Powaqqatsi next, and this time Reggio’s meditation on destruction is about globalization and the systematic dismantling of “third-world” cultures. His title is another Hopi word, meaning “life in transformation”, and it’s meant in the ironic sense of the world. Civilization is trampling civilization, with the only governing force being the power of money. Seeing robed children in the desert obscured by the dust of a passing American truck is a more stinging accusation about our priorities than any UN report ever could.
The third film, Naqoyqatsi, means “life as war”, and is perhaps the most damning of the three. We treat everything in our lives as a battle, it argues, an attitude that only leads to self-destruction. Collages of political talking heads, intimations of the ruined Tower of Babel, and one amazing extended magnification of a piece of fractal art give a fitting, digital end to a series that implored us to seek the balance, the humanity, to our lives. Reggio doesn’t damn us for our actions, but does show us how ignorant we’ve been in our stewardship of the Earth and everything that lives there.
