I was gonna write a big thing about my predictions but since I’m studying for my exams I’m just gonna write this really quick and follow up on this post after I watch the movie.

1: The Soul Stone is broken somehow

The last movie rewards Thanos with the Soul Stone for killing Gamora because he “loves” her despite him being evil and abusive to her. There is no way this was an oversight, and I think that because Thanos never truly loved Gamora, he will have never had access to the Soul Stone’s true power.

2: Ant-Man will make a joke about crawling up Thanos’ butt and expanding to blow him up

This is too much of a meme to not have made it into the movie, especially from a character like Ant-Man whose entire existence in the MCU up until this point has been comic relief.

3: Tony Stark will say some variation of “With great power comes great responsibility” then die in front of Spider-Man while defeating Thanos

This is my most specific prediction but it’s also one that I am extremely confident in. Throughout the past decade, we have seen Tony learn to take responsibility for himself and his own reckless actions. It is clear from all of the MCU movies that the overarching theme of the franchise is parenthood: Thanos to Gamora, Ego to Starlord, Howard Stark to Tony, the GoTG to Groot, Odin to Thor, Thor to Asgard, and of course, Tony to Spider-Man. Uncle Ben never made it into any of the MCU films so far, and that was because Tony was meant to represent Peter’s father figure. That line has intense cultural significance way beyond just comic book culture, and hearing it come from Tony means so much more to the audience after we’ve watched Tony learn what it means for 10 years. Tony is going to be the one to defeat Thanos, we all know that because of Dr. Strange’s plan. But his death is going to mean even more when he leaves this iconic line as his legacy. The first MCU Avenger and Stan Lee’s favorite character are going to have an unbreakable connection that will leave an indelible mark on the rest of the MCU.

How does a movie go from an idea to a full-fledged story? I have no idea, so I’m going to take some wild guesses at what some movie pitches might be and try to explore the thought process of the writers.

Seven

Pitch: A guy kills people using the seven deadly sins.

So anyone who goes around killing people is probably a criminal. So should this be from his point of view? How would you make a story about that? Maybe he starts off as a good guy who tries to fix problems with the world by getting rid of all the evil people in the world and goes overboard? Make it an anti-hero thing or a villain origin story? It could be from the point of view of a friend or someone close to him. Act 1, establish them both as people who care about justice. Act 2, they encounter some kind of fringe case that they have to deal with, maybe someone else murdering someone and they have to figure out who did it and why. You could have an act 3 twist where the guy is revealed to be the murderer all along. This would work well if there was one big murder, but not as well if there had to be seven total murders. Maybe this is how we got to the point of view of the detectives. There need to be a lot of murders, the killer probably is making a point since the killings are influenced by religion, and act 3 is showing that one of the main characters is outsmarted and the killer does have a point.

Ok, so it seems like one of the things that give direction is the message of the end of the story. The interactions between characters in the story ultimately are what give the message that the story is trying to tell, so if we start with a message, we can work backward and see what kind of character interactions could produce that result. The message of Seven is that everyone commits deadly sins all the time, but that does not necessarily make the world a bad place. The danger is seeing things in terms of black and white. Let’s add that as another category to our classification:

Message: Everyone commits deadly sins; treating people as evil just for committing these sins is wrong.

Now let’s take this approach with another story.

Ratatoullie

Pitch: A rat becomes the best chef in the world

Message: Not anyone can be a great chef, but a great chef can come from anywhere

Admittedly this is a softball movie to look at since the message is literally stated in the movie multiple times. But, it does show that the message of the movie can naturally arise from the pitch. There is naturally a contrast between the main character and the quality he represents, so the message becomes that that’s an okay thing to happen. This does highlight another question that we touched on earlier: what does the act structure of the film look like? We know that the first act can basically start as the pitch. To borrow Michael Tucker’s definition of an act, this is where we answer the question, who is our main character? At the end of the movie, we need to have the resolution of the third act be our message. In this case, it means that the rat needs to be successful in becoming a great chef. In order to show this, he needs to disprove that he is not a great chef (in another post I’ll go into why I’ve worded this sentence with a double negative). He needs to overcome someone or something else suggesting that he isn’t a great chef, which can easily be another character. So, let’s map this out:

Act 1: Our main character is introduced as a great chef.

Act 2: Someone believes that he is not a great chef.

Midpoint: Someone finds out that he is a rat.

Act 3: Our main character proves that he is a great chef, despite people thinking that he couldn’t be, given his circumstances.

We can see that we have the skeleton of the story written out pretty easily, but we are missing a lot of what ends up in the final film. At this point, we would need to fill out the story with characters who tell us more about who the main character is. Remy actually has a pretty flat character arc in this movie, and even though Alfredo Linguini is really the one with an arc, he’s not our main character, so let’s look at another movie to figure out how supporting characters work to inform us on and change the main character.

The Matrix

Pitch: Our world is a simulation, and one man has the power to lift the curtain and free humanity

Message: Question what you’re told, live by your instincts, and define your own reality

Act 1: Our main character finds out the world is not what he thinks it is

Act 2: Our main character finds out he is the most powerful being in the world with the ability to save humanity

Midpoint: Our main character finds out that he isn’t the chosen one, but that humanity is now in imminent danger

Act 3: Our main character saves his mentor and by extension, all of humanity, by defining his own reality

Ok, so we have our outline of the entire story. Let’s think about our two supporting characters. The first act is dominated by Trinity, who helps push the story forward by leading Neo toward the act 1 revelation that the world he knows is a simulation. She does this by helping open the movie with the hook, then works to guide Neo and the audience toward this revelation. She breaks Neo’s assumption that his world is what he expects by showing him things that don’t make sense given his understanding of the world until he is forced to accept reality. Act 2 is then dominated by Morpheus, who helps guide Neo through the new world. He teaches Neo (and the audience) the history of the world, the nature of the Matrix, how Agents work, pretty much everything he needs to know. He helps Neo grow to become the most powerful being in the world and guides him toward the midpoint, where the Oracle takes over. She tells him the exact opposite of what Morpheus has been saying the entire movie, changing how he has been understanding the world up until this point. We barely have time to think about what she says before act 3 comes, and the Agents take over the story. Finally, Neo is equipped to make the only active choice he’s made throughout the movie, and fights the Agents, completing his arc. We can see that supporting characters can be used to help lead characters through the story by leading characters to our outright causing plot points to happen. Not all stories need to have single characters helping the main character through their arc, but it seems like it can be useful to use the supporting characters to help the main character learn certain things about themselves.

With a few case studies, we’ve gotten a better idea on how to go from an idea for a story to a full-fledged narrative. There’s still a lot of work to do, like figuring out character dynamics, specific beats of the story and their pacing, the rules of the world, the tone, and all the other things that turn a story from passable to great. But now with some framework to help guide a basic premise, it should at least be easier to get started.

Pacific Rim (Del Toro 2013) has a premise that seems like it was imagined by a 12-year-old who watches too much anime. There’s no shortage of movies about robots and aliens fighting one another, especially since this movie was released at the peak of the Transformers epidemic. So how do you make a movie with a cheesy premise in a saturated genre actually interesting and (dare I say) good? By making the fight scenes cool as hell.

In movies about robots and aliens, people come to the theater because they want to see buildings getting destroyed and crazy visual effects because this is obviously super fun to watch. But, when your movie is supposed to show huge robot battles, the plot needs to somehow navigate to as many of these battles as possible. In Transformers (Bay 2007), this is done by taking an everyman character and throwing him in the middle of these giant fights with nothing to do; not very satisfying. We really don’t care what happens to Shia LaBeouf or Megan Fox or his parents because the story surrounding these characters is, aside from being extremely generic and bland in its own right, is completely detached from the fights that got us into the theater. Yes, we have a nice audience surrogate character to run away from explosions and carry the MacGuffin and save the world, but by the final set piece in the movie, we really just want to punch him in his stupid face whenever he’s taking screen time away from Optimus Prime. BUT, even though we want the Autobots to succeed (since, ya know, they’re trying to stop the Earth from being destroyed), we don’t really care about them because they barely have motivation to be saving the world in the first place, let alone character arcs.

Pacific Rim solves this problem by making the central world-saving mechanic the bond between two characters. The Jaeger program conceit is actually genius for this, since it inherently ties the consequences of the plot to the character interactions of the story. Before the titles, we see simultaneously that the Becket brothers have an extremely close relationship and that this strong relationship directly translates into Kaiju-ass-kicking. We learn right away that in order for the characters to make progress toward beating the invasion, they will have to learn about one another and actually have real, human interaction.

The place that we see this happen most effectively is during the midpoint crisis of the movie. By now, we have established that Raleigh and Mako would make a highly effective team, but there are a few huge obstacles in the way. Raleigh is learning to overcome the loss of his brother from the beginning of the movie and learn to work with someone else again. Mako is learning to overcome her past so that she does not get lost in the drift. Stacker is refusing to accept that Mako has grown into not only a capable and skillful pilot, but an adult who can make her own choices.

But then, for the first time, two Kaiju breach at the same time. A double event.

Because of the double event and the subsequent EMP, the story now must be resolved by the action of the plot. Even though it seems like everything has been going wrong with Gypsy Danger up until this point, everyone needs to put aside those problems in order to save Hong Kong. The reason that this fight is the most exciting out of all of the fights in the movie is that you get the satisfaction of all these story elements resolving with the added bonus of watching Gypsy Danger kick some Kaiju ass.

This one is for all the people who I’ve ranted to about movies and music in the past: I’m finally making the transition from annoying pop culture friend to annoying pop culture friend with a blog.