Let me tell you what I like — love? — about the almost over-achieving Sci Fi movie, “Wyvern” (2009): it’s a formulaic B-movie that hits its notes and maintains interest.
Ms. S. and I needed some mostly-brainless evening entertainment, something that would not require too much attention (so crafting could take place during the viewing), meaning no subtitles, and not too scary or disturbing (since work awaited … long hours alone at work). It was “Wyvern” or “Teeth”; the dice came up Nick Chinlund and Don S. Davis.
But: my point.
These movies follow a pretty basic five-act structure after a preface of sorts that introduces the danger and/or provides a hint at the trauma that haunts our hero.
- We gather and get to know our characters. There’s usually a heroic lead, but perhaps down on his luck, a bit of a fool, or haunted by some past failure. We may have a romantic interest, some comic relief, and a petty foil, someone to sew distrust who then gets his or her comeuppance later in the film. These characters tend to follow types.
- As our introductions conclude our ‘danger’ — a monster or natural disaster — begins to intrude, usually on the periphery. Perhaps the deaths of hikers or pets, then it’s observed by someone who might not be trusted/believed. There may be a false alarm.
- Our climactic middle act is more turning point than summit. Concluding the action of the second act our characters come face-to-face with the danger and recognize it for what it is. Chaos reigns, but characters may realize that if they make it through this immediate test, they may have a chance to fight back.
- Our characters may be on the run, but they’re trying strategies, they’re making plans. But at each turn, after every advance, their adversary sets them back further.
- And just as it’s becoming most desperate, and possibly just after a beloved extra or even the oft-booed foil bites it (often by self-sacrifice), our hero has a chance to redeem himself by both saving the day and confronting his previous trauma or failure.
We usually get a small denouement, perhaps clean-up or mop-up efforts, confirmation that our hero survived the defeat of the antagonist, a reunion with the romantic interest.
In “Wyvern”:
- The wyvern awakens.
- Breakfast is served. The love-triangle between the doc, Jake, and Claire is introduced, as is “crazy lady” Edna and town rube Farley. We meet the Colonel and our radio operator, Hampton. Everybody has a point of characterization or backstory.
- The doc bites it. Haas encounters the wyvern. There’s trouble at the mink farm and the Chief goes to investigate. Against better judgment the festival goes on. Nobody believes Haas’ tale of a flying monster not of this world.
- But the wyvern attacks, Deputy Susie dies, the Chief finds the bodies at the farm, the power lines and radio are cut. But our mains gather in the diner and Haas tells the myth of the wyvern.
- Weapons are gathered. Attempts at contacting the outside world ensue. Farley is injured, the doc is alive and sees the wyvern’s eggs, the doc is returned to town as bait, and Farley sacrifices himself for the doc. Our mains head out to the wyvern’s nest. Alas, they fail to kill it and Haas is killed.
- Fleeing with an egg, our team finds an abandoned truck; it was to be Jake’s replacement vehicle, and Jake gets an idea. He lures the wyvern after him and drives the truck, wyvern attached, off a cliff, saving the day.
It’s clean-up time. Jake wanders into town. The solstice is past. And Jake the haunted loner thinks he might just stick around.
It reminds me in a way of my go-to disaster movie, the movie that I’ll watch if it’s on TV: “Dante’s Peak” (1997).
- Way-back-when: Pierce Brosnan fails and his partner is killed. In the present day: a volcano is awakening in Washington.
- Brosnan and team arrive in Dante’s Peak, meet Mayor Linda Hamilton, her family, and a few other townsfolk.
- Hikers/Campers die in a hot spring that becomes super-heated. Wildlife begins to die. Brosnan raises the alarm; he’s shut down by his boss. It’s bad for business, etc. Crying wolf, and so on.
- It finally gets bad enough that people realize they need to evacuate. There are tremors and a first explosion. They need to gather the children and mother-in-law.
- Hamilton, her family, and Brosnan are all together and need to get back to town and evacuate. Obstacles are overcome, but one step forward, two steps back … and a lake of acid. Mother-in-law buys the farm. Brosnan’s boss realizes his mistake; he perishes, too. Much mayhem as people panic and flee … death … destruction … fire and ash!
- There’s no way Brosnan and Co. can evacuate in time, but Pierce remembers he has a locator beacon in a truck, so they flee into a mine to ride out the volcanic activity.
The worst is over; but did our leads survive? The locator works, they are rescued … a happy ending!
“Tremors” works in a similar fashion. “Independence Day”, too. This is of course unsurprising, since it’s just a well-worn five act structure set up in a such a way that the intellectual turning point is around act three but the emotional peak needs to hit first late in act four and then toward the end of act five. By that point all the actual plot-action is resolved; the denouement merely provides confirmation that our hero has survived … unless it’s a movie of the supposedly more tragic variety; the hero, though, doesn’t have to sacrifice himself, because a second-rate character already managed that task either in act four or as a surrogate in act five (yes, I’m looking at you, Randy Quaid in “Independence Day”). “Jurassic Park” is not dissimilar, either.
There’s no reason why a movie should follow this patter; it’s an empirical, historical “is”, not an “ought”. It’s familiar. It’s safe and easily comprehended, but familiarity also breeds contempt. And even if a movie or narrative follows the five-part plot arc as described, there’s no need for it to be split into more-or-less equivalent “acts”, a relic from theatre.
We recently began working our way through the movies Roger Ebert picked as his favorites each year of his career, beginning in the late 60s with “Bonnie and Clyde”, followed by “The Battle of Algiers” and “Z”. In a certain sense the first two, at least, follow main aspects of a five-act structure (though not that described above for an action-disaster-monster movie), but not as “acts”. And the political-thriller nature of “Z” confounds the simple placement of plot moments into well-labeled boxes. But what they all do nicely is drop the viewer into the “action” without hand-holding. “Bonnie and Clyde” begins with Bonnie, introduces Clyde, gives us a little banter, and throws them on the road after their first crime together. And no moment of quiet respite is left untainted; thus, it’s always moving forward. “Battle of Algiers” begins toward the end, then flashes back several years to tell its story episodically, only to arrive back at the beginning, provide a resolution to that plot, and then dissolve it with an epilogue that eliminates the names and characters we had followed for nearly two hours with masses and riots, and with historical details delivered clinically. These are not difficult pictures; it is just that neither presupposes an obvious narrative rubric.
I remember watching “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy” (1982) a few weeks ago and noting throughout how it more or less fit the given five-act structure, and in a rather explicit fashion, though given its cinematic and literary predecessors this is not surprising.
The problem with formula in the fashion described is that often form becomes content; there is nothing novel in “Wyvern”, and the parts could be exchanged for another monster movie, another lonely or plucky hero, and so on. We could even have a twist in which the protagonist is female, in which the monster is not really evil, and so on. But we could easily predict the story, and in a sense there is something unsatisfying there. Of course — and here I think of the Woody Allen again — the formula can be utilized as a scaffolding for a better work, serving almost as traffic lights or signs along the way, indicating in both tragedy and comedy where certain actions are fated or determined to happen, and if we have any attachment to these characters, the gap between what we want to happen and what we know will happen can be part of the experience; the form is not the content, but is a part of it.
But back to “Wyvern”.
Along the way Ms. S. and I spotted plot holes, implausibilities, and actions certain to lead to a character’s demise a cut or two later. It could have been a drinking game. Yet none of this was particularly maddening or disappointing.
And then there was “Naked Fear” (2007), which failed entirely and whose failure could be attributed partially to having no coherent plot arc. There was an introductory phase; it just happened to take up the first forty minutes in a hundred minute movie. Admittedly there were aspects of a second-act rising action taking place during the same time, but it occurred during the introduction of characters and relationships; it was more character than plot development. Then we have our nearly-mid-movie break, which is just a reveal to the main character of a situation the audience has been merely anticipating since the opening scene. The prolonged hunt-and-chase sequence would qualify as falling action, but it was constantly undercut by transitioning back to the city and to Dwight and Tom. We then got multiple resolutions: the killing of Colin, Diana making it to town, Dwight revealing Colin’s villainy to Tom, each less important than the one before … and then our denouement: Diana escaping and reappearing ten months later as a vigilante.
The unfairness of my treatment here is that “Naked Fear” has no obligation to follow a five-act structure or even five-part structure. It more closely follows a binary narrative divided roughly down the middle. But only roughly; and in such cases there is often significant parallelism to provide comparison and contrast between the two narrative segments, but here that was muddied in the second have by the constant meddling on the part of Dwight’s story. But, one might retort, “Naked Fear” does not have to follow a binary structure, either. If I propose another traditional structure that it fails to meet, then again one can ask, why must it follow that one? Or the next? And so on. Why must it follow any structure?
And it needn’t follow any particular structure, but by virtue of being a narrative occurring in time and place, it will have some structure. Without an explicit structure to guide us, we are left, instead, with scenes arranged chronologically but seemingly without regard for relevance, function, or impact. Structure, as in “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy”, can be overt enough to serve as shorthand, allowing elision.
And back, again, to “Wyvern”.
It follows an obvious structure relatively well. You forget how much you appreciate a common form until you see something that fails utterly mainly through ignoring it. The acting was more fluid than in many similar productions, and this allowed character names to become at least types if not actual characters. It promised and delivered.
Notes
- Contrast this with the three-act structure of modern screenplay writing … the three-act structure is rougher than the five-act I prefer and describe here. It also does not fit well with “Naked Fear”, as Act I is far too long … or, rather, “Naked Fear” does not fit the mold very well.
- … the question arises, even though we can find a beginning, middle, and end for many of these, almost ‘by definition’, and even follow the ‘arc’ in a global sense, do we really in any meaningful way have an ‘act structure’ in many such movies? Change of setting or location? Time? Mood or tone? Pacing? “Naked Fear” fails, I think; many other common genre pics manage, if not always well …
- … and what I may argue is that those that follow three-act but also fit the five-act succeed more …
- … but I digress, as this was about watching “Wyvern” and a discussion of three-, five-, or seven-act narrative structures is a topic for another time.
