metapunk

Just saw Iron Man 2. It was everything I expected it to be. Which is to say, merely entertaining. The acting is okay, it’s funny and action-packed, but… You know that smoking hot person you dated for a like a week back in college? They were charming, and bubbly, and the sex was unbelievable… but soon enough you realized you just couldn’t have a meaningful conversation with them, so it was all about the booty until you got so bored and sick of feeling like you were using them that you couldn’t bring yourself to look them in the eye anymore? Yeah, Iron Man 2 is like that.

It started off okay, although there are some great moments in the film where Robert Downy Jr.’s dad is explaining that technology will solve all our problems. I was the lone madman in a theatre full of normal people, so I did my best not to cackle maniacally when he says that. Then, like magic, RDJ builds a particle accelerator (sort of) thingy in his garage, and uses it to pull a completely new and conspicuously unnamed chemical element out of his arse, that, among other things, holds the entire second half of the movie together. It used to be, writers would think up actual words for this stuff. It would add, you know, verisimilitude… or something.

I mean, really, it offends me as a potential writer and all-around geek that there was no name for the inevitable Wikipedia article on this fantastical element. Which is odd, being offended, because I did enjoy the movie. Great special FX, plus, y’know, Scarlett Johansson in a catsuit, kicking ass and not even bothering to take names… and that’s my point: chucking some names in there is just common courtesy. If you make up some sort of bullshit technology that your whole plot-arc is based around, at least spot-weld some techno-babble to it so people can pretend like they know what you’re talking about.

They did it (or rather didn’t do it) in Avatar, too. The eee-vile corporate cliche (don’t get me wrong—actual corporations are cliches too, but I digress) was on Pandora to mine a super-valuable element that, yadda yadda, makes some kind of supertech possible (I dunno, fusion, FTL, anti-grav, gimmick-free cinema, or whatever; doesn’t matter)… and oh yeah, the native Na’vi’s humungoid treehouse sits right on top of the largest deposit of the stuff, making the attempted genocide / big explodey fight scene / special effects extravaganza of the decade at the climax of the movie gratuitously necessary, and the best name Cameron could come up with for this giant steaming pile of McGuffin was: “unobtainium”… cause it’s so, like, hard to _get_… get it? Me am clever, yes?

Okay, anyone out there writing a sci-fi-action screenplay… pencils down, listen up: We all know your amazing and heretofore unknown super-substance is some sort of hand-wavium, but you DON’T ACTUALLY CALL IT “HANDWAVIUM,” or better yet, just hand-wave the problem of a name entirely. Not if you want to avoid insulting your audience.

Damn. There was a time when writers actually gave a shit what things were called. You’d never catch Tolkien phoning it in on the main event. There’s a man who understood the value of naming things. I mean, in the Lord of the Rings, shit had like six names in four different languages. And all those words had their own bloody histories. “Hobbit”… now there’s a word you can hang your plot on. AND HE DID! So what if it took him like 12+ years to write that story? The guy understood craftsmanship! And in his defense, there was that whole apocalyptic war-to-end-all-wars thing happening while he was trying to write it. YOU try pounding out over half a million words of brilliantly poetic, flowing prose, on deadline, while fricken’ Nazis are bombing the shit out of your country!

I tells ya, these folks in Hollywood have it too easy. People will sit through anything nowadays, long as it’s shiny & splodey enough. And dammitall, I ain’t gonna stand fer it no more… Just you wait, I’ma gonna…. jus’ a sec…

HEY YOU KIDS! GET OFF MY GULDERN LAWN, AFORE-AH-HAV-TUH-WHUP-YUZ!!!

Where was I? Anyway… enjoyable flick. Not real deep. But still, ScarJo in tight clothes, so…

I mean, if a movie can’t stimulate my imagination, it better freaking have some hot babe in black latex tearing up a room full of mooks, ya dig?