Young Sherlock Holmes supports the general rule that if you want to see a really good Barry Levinson movie you should watch one set and shot in Baltimore. It's also an illustration of what might be called The Prequel Problem.
What was Sherlock Holmes like before he applied his brain to ratiocination? What was his life like before he met Dr. John Watson and Inspector Lestrade, before he acquired Professor Moriarty as an enemy? Devotees of Doyle's books have speculated for years, and there may or may not be a movie in it. So of course in Sherlock Holmes he meets Watson, Lestrade, and Moriarty in boarding school, where he's already a fully formed amateur detective.
This is the Prequel Problem in a nutshell. You may make the pitch that there are great stories to be told before the story everyone knows. But you're not really interested in those Before stories, and/or you don't think your audience is. So you just wind up retelling the well known stories, but set earlier.
Smallville, a show that I never really got into, meant to be the story of young secret alien Clark Kent before he chose to become Superman. But as things dragged on the entire DC Universe formed while Clark was still dicking around in his everlasting gap year. I liked Gotham better but the same thing happened there. After the first season the idea of this being a prelude to Batman's career, rather than just a bunch of Batman stories where he's an adolescent twit without a costume, disappears.
It might just be that burrowing into the "deep" past of pop culture figures isn't very conducive to creativity.
2 comments:
Prequels are one of those inventions of the modern age that none of us asked for or needed. If you can't think of what comes next why not see if you can milk the story as is for what likely happened before. Although it's true they've been increasing the lifespan of films, television programs, and video games it's a rare occurrence when one adds a unique perspective.
I'm not certain who in movies made the first prequel but it's George Lucas who first comes to mind when he fulfilled his original promise to make nine Star Wars films in all - the prequel and the sequel. I remember we saw Young Sherlock Holmes which starts out as a promising Holmes-ish adventure - murders, suspects, imaginative clues but then.. halfway through the movie, it veers into an action film.. which is very unlike anything Arthur Conan Doyle ever imagined his enigmatic detective doing.
I remember Jer talking about his experience playing the original Tomb Raider games - how much fun it was playing Lara Croft, a British archeologist, travelling around the world in pursuit of lost artefacts and solving puzzles while navigating hostile environments. Then came the young Lara Croft versions of the game when she was a whiny little twerp who somehow managed to create mayhem amongst a horde of thugs - no more clever puzzles.
The only memory I have of an interesting prequel was in the Superman comic that showed how his parents tucked the infant super hero inside a little rocket and sent him to Earth just as his home planet Krypton was about to be destroyed. Then the Kents found and raised him. I guess it wasn't really a prequel but an origin story and it was about Superman after all.
Gotham was fun for a while but I can't say I'm eager for the next series.
You've hit on the reason why things like prequels are made, which is essentially as a cash cow, a way to keep the party going where once it would have ended after a few years. But that's also the seed of their downfall. The cynicism weighs them down after a while. The audience might not think of it in those terms but I think many of them see that there's not really any passion involved.
George Lucas made the prequels but wound up selling the property to Disney before he could get to work on the sequels. One big problem with the prequels was that he started in the late 90s, when he hadn't directed anything in over 20 years. There was still a theoretically interesting setting but he had gone rusty in terms of creating a story and characters there. Young Sherlock Holmes was one of many Holmes projects where they didn't understand what the character was about or what Doyle had been up to. It's a testament to Holmes's appeal that these never seem to hurt his popularity.
Lara Croft is a classic character where you don't really have to know much about her personal life or backstory to enjoy the games. The Angelina Jolie movie tried to make it her personal saga but it didn't really come off. Too bad that the game studio has made a similar mistake.
Yeah, I don't know if that origin story was the first Superman story ever published but it was a pretty early one. And canny. This is, after all, a very new concept in 1938. A man who's really an alien , but whom we're supposed to trust to defend us? That needed a little context. Just a little.
"Fun for a while" is a good descriptor, I think. That's how it often is.
Post a Comment