I have the flu.
How did I get it? Possibly because it is the season for such things. Possibly because it was sent as punishment for my vast and varied sins. Or maybe it had something to do with that curiously-perfumed envelope Scott Lynch sent me.
Either way, I’m sick. As such, productivity is limited, my eyes sear and my urine boils and sets my toilet ablaze (hence the inspiration for Black Halo’s cover art). As a result, I have been watching a lot of shitty movies. Because what else is Netflix for if not to see movies you’re embarrassed to be seen watching? Tonight, I watched The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior, which as one of my Twitter buds puts is “the best prequel of a spinoff of a sequel of a remake ever.” And that’s exactly what it is.
Also, it’s bad, don’t watch it.
It wasn’t until I watched Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time that I truly began to feel pain, though.
For those of you who have not played the game: you are worse than Stalin. There is no debate on this. It is among the most fantastic games you will ever play, including some of the characterization and story that rivals a lot of novels I’ve read, let alone video games. It is such a good game that, if you have not played it, you are objectively worse than a dictator who killed millions of his people and fed them to the rest of his people. It is that good a game and you are that bad a person for not having played it.
Consequently, you’d think that it would make a pretty good movie. I mean, if you cut out most of the puzzles, you’d pretty much have an awesome script. It’d be great.
It was not. The final sword fight takes place in a corner. No. That is not an exaggeration or a turn of phrase. It is a corner. About two feet by two feet. And there is a fight going on in it.
But that’s besides the point. This was a movie that was going to be hard to screw up. You had an exotic setting, a plot pre-made and one of the most intriguing characters in video games history: a dashing young rogue who actually acts like a dashing young rogue–he abhors bloodshed, he has a hard time coming to grips with caring for people and he matures over the story. But it wasn’t until I saw Jake Gyllenhaal’s take on the Prince–a violent, angry asshole who is hailed as a hero and a great savior despite slaughtering thousands and who is oh so easily flummoxed by the spunky heroine–that I realized something.
I miss Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Yes. He was an actor born with a vast, barren wasteland where his charisma should be. He was basically meat and anger. That didn’t matter. He did well with them and frequently used them to his advantage. And to be honest, that’s why I miss him. I miss having heroes who were lacking something. I miss having an amoral sociopath in Conan. I miss having an emotionless killbot in the Terminator. I miss heroes who had to make up for something.
Because our current modern action heroes don’t really seem to have that problem. They are witty, they are charismatic, they are ladies’ men, they are expert fighters, they are masters of disguise, they are brilliant tacticians. They do not have traits, they have ingredients. They are canned heroes.
And I do not like them.
Frequently it’s mentioned that a hero must have flaws. A hero who is perfect is not relatable, after all. And that’s true, but it’s not quite the whole story. Adding a flaw for the sake of adding a flaw is just adding another ingredient to the can. It’s not the flaw itself that makes the hero interesting, it’s how he deals with the flaw, how he overcomes (or fails to overcome) the flaw that gives him depth and thus makes us appreciate him more.
We didn’t like Jack Sparrow because he’s got loose morals. We like him because that loose morality has resulted in complete obliviousness to anyone besides himself and his actions reflect that.
We didn’t like Jackie Chan’s heroes because they were weak and cowardly. We liked them because he acted as they would have: trying to escape fighting and seeing what happened when that didn’t work.
We didn’t like Conan because he was aggressive and violent…well, we might have, but we liked him more because that aggression resulted in his distinctive personality that led him to punch a camel in the face for spitting at him.
Yes, a hero needs flaws. But the work doesn’t end there. Remember this when designing your characters: flaws shape their personality, which shapes their past, which shapes their personality. The flaws have to be a part of them. The flaws have to affect them. The flaws have to shape them and, by shaping them, shape the story.
Otherwise, you get a big ol’ bowl of Jake Gyllenhaal.
And he’ll give you diarrhea.
I agree with this completely. And support it with a very manly, and very bass filled, hearty, Here Here! As I pound my fist into the table over and over again instead of clapping. For that is far more manly.
I think Jake Gyllenhaall does have a Schwarzenegger-style hole in his active ouvre – it’s just instead of charisma, he’s lacking a personality. Or expressiveness, really. I think he only gets work because he looks a little bit like a puppy, which is fine for Romcoms, but probably poor casting when it comes to Prince of Persia.
Shia Laboeuf would have been better (I’m joking! Don’t hit me!)
There is no point at which Shia LeBoeuf can be considered the sane option. He’s like the atomic bomb. We must never use him after we’ve seen what he can do.
I don’t know about Gyllenhaal. I suspect he’s certainly got something that made him good in Brokeback Mountain. I think it’s more that directors have a hard time playing to his strengths, though.
Gyllenhaal sounds like it’d give you diarrhea. D:
Or perhaps he gives you his own brand of poots, similar to Montezuma’s Revenge. Soon, you find yourself excusing yourself from the table, citing a wicked case of the Gyllenhaals.
Watch Walhalla rising to forget Prince of Persia. No canned hero there.