*WARNING : CONTAINS mild SPOILERS FOR STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS, MAN OF STEEL, WORLD WAR Z, MONSTERS UNIVERSITY but none of these spoilers will affect your enjoyment or unenjoyment of the films*
Of late, a boisterous, magnificent third act has become more than just a norm in a blockbuster film. It's as if a film's blockbuster status is negated if it doesn't have a huge third act with lots of explosions. Man Of Steel and Star Trek 2 both have had huge, destruction-y, action-packed third acts with whole cities being levelled and explosion going off without any necessity except to satiate the public's supposed hunger for disasterporn. This results in a third act that ends up being completely devoid of any emotion or humanity, and an emotionless scene is just not worth having. This, in turn, necessitates an emotional "beat" to be hackneyed into the act just so that the scene doesn't feel absolutely lifeless. And the result? A messy third act that satisfies only on a very superficial level.
Man Of Steel, though a better film than Star Trek 2, is the worst offender. It's noisy, both visually and aurally, made more messy by post-converted 3D and, worst of all, completely devoid of any emotion. I just dialled out of the film because the emotional connect was severed. It felt as if that was what the director intended, in fact : to sever all emotional connection and just show explosion after explosion and Zod and Superman screaming and engaging in a fight too visually noisy for anyone to care about. The focus was not on the character's faces, it wasn't on what they went through as a city imploded around them, but on the implosion itself. I find no cinematic or dramatic explanation for such a scene other than : welp, it looks cool. In Star Trek 2, Spock punches Benedict Cumberbatch's version of Khan on a moving vehicle while a gigantic starship crashes into London. ST2, however, fares much better than MoS, because the film decides to focus on the emotion a little more than the other film. It continually focusses on the faces of Zachary Quinto and Cumberbatch as they engage in their fistfight, it shows each characters' desperation and their determination. Man Of Steel attempts to do that by showing Lawrence Fishburne's Perry White trying to save "Jenny" Olsen who is trapped under rubble. But we don't care about either characters because they've been in the film for barely three minutes of screentime and we haven't cared about them for any of those minutes and the Zod/Superman fight is just a vfx orgy that drowns every pixel of emotion that could have been on the screen. The only reason Iron Man 3 isn't an equal offender is because of Robert Downey Jr. although I have to admit that the third act setpiece was quite dull compared to the rest of the film. Don't even get me started on the unnecessary faux epicness in The Dark Knight Rises because I could go on forever.
Compare these "epic" third acts with those that are smaller and focus more on emotions than explosions. Monsters University, which goes on predictably till the beginning of the third act where Mike Wazowski, in a bid to prove himself as an able "scarer" ventures into the human world through an experimental "door" to scare a human child. Now, what is important about this scene is that emotion driving it. The plot doesn't necessitate the character, the character necessitates plot. Mike Wazowski doesn't go through the door into the human world because the plot requires it to show something epic, but because he needs to go through it, to prove to himself that he can be a scarer. And that makes all the difference. Firstly, it doesn't feel artificial, it doesn't feel constructed and secondly, there is a great emotional heft to the events that follow it. The third act matters. It isn't there to look cool or anything. It is there because the plot needs it. It is there because it will evoke some emotion in the audience. It simply fucking matters.
Now, let's consider World War Z. It originally had five setpieces, all of them fast-paced, action-packed with clusters of Zombies attacking people : a sequence in Philadelphia, then one in Korea, Israel, one in the air and a final one that took place in Moscow. The Moscow one, as people who have seen the film would know, was scrapped in lieu of a climatic scene set in England. Before I get to the England scene, I'll talk about the Moscow scene a little. It had thousands of zombies rushing towards military outposts guarding the city and it was nothing more than an orgy of bullets, CGI and explosions. The problem with the scene was that despite looking cool, it was emotionally distant. It didn't work. They opted, instead, for a scene that had practically zero CGI and instead of being epic, concerned itself with the most primal emotion : fear. Brad Pitt's character Gerry Lane travels to a WHO outpost in England to gather something that may help the humans fight zombies. He finds out, however, that what he needs is in a different, zombie-infested wing of the outpost and he has to infiltrate that place with two of his acquaintances and not become zombie-meal. No guns. No bullets. No explosions. Only fear. A sequence that must have cost them no more than a million dollars trumped a scene that cost them nearly half the budget. The key is emotion. Emotion is what drives a film, what keeps getting us back to see it over and over again.
I think Last Of Us proves that bit the best. It's a videogame from Naughty Dog and videogames are notorious for having giant, epic endings with huge boss-fights. Games are supposed to challenge and the challenge is supposed to get bigger and bigger and bigger. Yet, in Last Of Us, after gunning down countless humans, infected or otherwise, your final challenge is devoid of much "epic" or complicated boss-fight. And when you finish it, you're not met with an epic cutscene where the enemy blows into confetti or something. You're met with something that actually means something. Emotionally. And boy is it satisfying. It is probably the most emotionally satisfied I have been after finishing a game. Every game I've played, every one with complicated climatic boss-fights, no matter how hard or how epic, can't even hold up a candle to Last Of Us.Nothing trumps something as strong as emotion.
Even though Lord of The Rings' climax was an hour of the most epic battle sequence ever, it decided to focus more on the humanity and emotions of those in battle rather than the battle itself. The battle was just a backdrop for our characters to be in. The soldiers did not matter much to us, but Frodo did, Gandalf did, Aragorn did. By focussing on the characters instead of the action, Peter Jackson had us heading back to theaters for second and third helpings of the same film. I've watched Man Of Steel only once and I wish I didn't. Same goes for Star Trek 2.
But then you may argue that these big explosion-laden endings bring in the crowds.
Well, you're partially right. Because a lot of people do not look beyond the superficial. They know when they like something, but they don't know why they like it, really. The best example I can think of is the Dark Knight. There are no explosions in the Dark Knight, there are no moments of fake-epicness. There are some cool-looking moments like the scenes leading up to Joker's arrest, but these aren't the moments that stand out in the long run. People remember the scene where Batman ends up saving Harvey Dent instead of Rachel Dawes with more fondness and maybe startling accuracy because it has emotional payoff, because it made us gasp, not because of its aesthetics or anything, but because we felt something in our hearts. The real climax of the Dark Knight is Harvey Dent tossing a coin that will decide the fate of Jim Gordon's children, not Batman taking apart squadrons of policemen to get to Joker. A film's climax must mean something, emotionally. The rest is just background noise. Yet, people think that the explosions and the violence and Batman slamming Joker against the glass during the interrogation scene is why they liked the film. They're wrong. They're just looking back at their experience in a completely superficial manner.
And because of this superficiality, the studios think that's what the public want. That's why we're being bombarded by countless Transformers sequels and movies with too many explosions. We don't need them, really. But we want them because we don't know what we really need. Films are drugs that invoke emotion. We need them because they give us things we've never experienced, to go on journeys with strangers and to feel what they feel.
What we need is endings that are smaller, and less epic and preferably less noisy. We need endings that are big on emotions.
Compare these "epic" third acts with those that are smaller and focus more on emotions than explosions. Monsters University, which goes on predictably till the beginning of the third act where Mike Wazowski, in a bid to prove himself as an able "scarer" ventures into the human world through an experimental "door" to scare a human child. Now, what is important about this scene is that emotion driving it. The plot doesn't necessitate the character, the character necessitates plot. Mike Wazowski doesn't go through the door into the human world because the plot requires it to show something epic, but because he needs to go through it, to prove to himself that he can be a scarer. And that makes all the difference. Firstly, it doesn't feel artificial, it doesn't feel constructed and secondly, there is a great emotional heft to the events that follow it. The third act matters. It isn't there to look cool or anything. It is there because the plot needs it. It is there because it will evoke some emotion in the audience. It simply fucking matters.
Now, let's consider World War Z. It originally had five setpieces, all of them fast-paced, action-packed with clusters of Zombies attacking people : a sequence in Philadelphia, then one in Korea, Israel, one in the air and a final one that took place in Moscow. The Moscow one, as people who have seen the film would know, was scrapped in lieu of a climatic scene set in England. Before I get to the England scene, I'll talk about the Moscow scene a little. It had thousands of zombies rushing towards military outposts guarding the city and it was nothing more than an orgy of bullets, CGI and explosions. The problem with the scene was that despite looking cool, it was emotionally distant. It didn't work. They opted, instead, for a scene that had practically zero CGI and instead of being epic, concerned itself with the most primal emotion : fear. Brad Pitt's character Gerry Lane travels to a WHO outpost in England to gather something that may help the humans fight zombies. He finds out, however, that what he needs is in a different, zombie-infested wing of the outpost and he has to infiltrate that place with two of his acquaintances and not become zombie-meal. No guns. No bullets. No explosions. Only fear. A sequence that must have cost them no more than a million dollars trumped a scene that cost them nearly half the budget. The key is emotion. Emotion is what drives a film, what keeps getting us back to see it over and over again.
I think Last Of Us proves that bit the best. It's a videogame from Naughty Dog and videogames are notorious for having giant, epic endings with huge boss-fights. Games are supposed to challenge and the challenge is supposed to get bigger and bigger and bigger. Yet, in Last Of Us, after gunning down countless humans, infected or otherwise, your final challenge is devoid of much "epic" or complicated boss-fight. And when you finish it, you're not met with an epic cutscene where the enemy blows into confetti or something. You're met with something that actually means something. Emotionally. And boy is it satisfying. It is probably the most emotionally satisfied I have been after finishing a game. Every game I've played, every one with complicated climatic boss-fights, no matter how hard or how epic, can't even hold up a candle to Last Of Us.Nothing trumps something as strong as emotion.
Even though Lord of The Rings' climax was an hour of the most epic battle sequence ever, it decided to focus more on the humanity and emotions of those in battle rather than the battle itself. The battle was just a backdrop for our characters to be in. The soldiers did not matter much to us, but Frodo did, Gandalf did, Aragorn did. By focussing on the characters instead of the action, Peter Jackson had us heading back to theaters for second and third helpings of the same film. I've watched Man Of Steel only once and I wish I didn't. Same goes for Star Trek 2.
But then you may argue that these big explosion-laden endings bring in the crowds.
Well, you're partially right. Because a lot of people do not look beyond the superficial. They know when they like something, but they don't know why they like it, really. The best example I can think of is the Dark Knight. There are no explosions in the Dark Knight, there are no moments of fake-epicness. There are some cool-looking moments like the scenes leading up to Joker's arrest, but these aren't the moments that stand out in the long run. People remember the scene where Batman ends up saving Harvey Dent instead of Rachel Dawes with more fondness and maybe startling accuracy because it has emotional payoff, because it made us gasp, not because of its aesthetics or anything, but because we felt something in our hearts. The real climax of the Dark Knight is Harvey Dent tossing a coin that will decide the fate of Jim Gordon's children, not Batman taking apart squadrons of policemen to get to Joker. A film's climax must mean something, emotionally. The rest is just background noise. Yet, people think that the explosions and the violence and Batman slamming Joker against the glass during the interrogation scene is why they liked the film. They're wrong. They're just looking back at their experience in a completely superficial manner.
And because of this superficiality, the studios think that's what the public want. That's why we're being bombarded by countless Transformers sequels and movies with too many explosions. We don't need them, really. But we want them because we don't know what we really need. Films are drugs that invoke emotion. We need them because they give us things we've never experienced, to go on journeys with strangers and to feel what they feel.
What we need is endings that are smaller, and less epic and preferably less noisy. We need endings that are big on emotions.
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