This past weekend we watched G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra on Netflix, a movie that started to make me feel weird, then anxious, then totally detached. Why? Because, it was popcorn action movie that I shouldn’t take at all seriously? No. Because it, like several films previously, tripped my Star Wars alarm.

What is a Star Wars alarm, you ask? It’s a flag that gets triggered when an action adventure movie borrows enough plot points or general constructs from the original Star Wars trilogy that it feels like the movie maker is trying to leverage my affection and feelings for those other films.

Now, I’ll acknowledge that Star Wars wasn’t the first to use many of these elements. But for me, they are iconically connected with those films. Integrate one of these, I might smile. Two, maybe it’s an homage. Three or more, and I’m taken out of the movie and start pacing the room. If you’re keeping score, G.I. Joe — amazingly — includes every one:

1. Your villain is a disfigured member of your hero’s extended family. In-laws count. If you can really mess up your villain’s face through burns or acid and make him wear a mask so that his own family doesn’t recognize him, that’s best. But I would probably consider any major physical disability suffered by a scuffle or skirmish part of this criterion.
2. Give your villain an army of faceless automatons that all dress alike. The less they speak or emote, the better.
3. Make sure your villain has a disproportionally large headquarters and that he’s getting ready to use a new weapon for the first time that could destroy a planet. Oh yeah, and make sure the hero has to try to rescue a girl from this place.
4. Let your two sides engage in a dog fight of piloted vehicles outside the villain’s headquarters as the movie climaxes, while the command team listens in to radio play-by-play. Make sure the protagonist or his buddy barely escape as the villain’s base implodes.
5. Toward the end of the movie, add a sword fight between two long-time rivals trained by the same master. Kill one off.
6. Make sure your hero turns someone from the “dark side”.

There are other aspects than these that get regularly borrowed. Any movie in which the protagonist is introduced to a force or secret society he or she was previously aware of could be included (see The Matrix). But I can forgive that one as a staple for sci-fi and fantasy.

Problem is, these things all work. So they provide a pretty tempting net to fall back on when you’re building up a third act. But when I start seeing a bunch of these aspects fall into place, I start to feel like I’ve been here before, long long ago…

Leave me a comment if there are any movie patterns that set off your alarm.

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Posted in Artsy by Scott No Comments Yet