FIlm Identity: What is it and Why is it Important?

FIlm Identity: What is it and Why is it Important?

Recently, I’ve been caught up following the details of a lawsuit brought on by CBS/Paramount and leveled towards Axanar, a fan film production that, so far has promised professional level production values.Perhaps you’ve heard of it? Rumor and speculation have been rampant since the suit was filed last December. At first, everyone thought that perhaps the lawsuit had to do with certain crew in the production getting paid, but once details of the lawsuit started trickling out, that specific complaint was nowhere to be found. The suit, up until very recently (yesterday) was simply a blanket Intellectual Property infringement suit. CBS/Paramount have countered with a voluminous list of copyrighted materials that have been used in producing Axanar. Some could be considered understandable and some are just outright ridiculous. That’s not really the point of this article though. At least not yet.

When news of the lawsuit broke, it was a major topic of discussion between my friends and I. SInce I’m an aspiring fan film maker, the question was, “Well how does this affect your project?” The only realistic answer that I can give to that question is, “We’ll just have to wait and see.” But as we were discussing, my assertion was that the timing of the lawsuit seemed suspicious. Indeed, it was filed a little over a week after the first trailer for ‘Star Trek Beyond’ was released with ‘Star Wars’. I deduced that Paramount was throwing a tantrum over the fact that the people that actually matter to Star Trek and its longevity, Trekkies, weren’t excited about the trailer in the least. Yet, here was this infamous fan production that’s been building momentum and garnering greater and greater support over the last three years or so. I can see Paramount execs throwing their hands in the air exasperatedly and asking, “What’s up with that?!”

The whole situation got me thinking about what was really at the root of the issue. It’s still my assertion that this fiasco has nothing to do with IP infringement. If it did, then there would have to be other fan productions involved as there are more than a few using very specific elements of the Star Trek mythology. The broad answer to the cause question is that Paramount and CBS see themselves being bested at their own game by a crowdfunded fan production and they feel threatened so they’re attempting to lash out and use their influence to stop time rounding a corner that can never be reversed. See, if a crowdfunded movie that can’t be sold does exceptionally well critically, then the door is officially open for crowdfunded films to become regular contenders in the film industry. There have been a number crowdfunded films that have been produced and done well already, but not to the same degree as Axanar. Should Axanar get made and do incredibly well, that lends credibility to these sorts of films and that will herald in a systematic dismantling of the current Hollywood method. Are you seeing it? If a crowdfunded film that can be sold is made on a budget of, say, $2M and then grosses, say, $80M, then Hollywood will have to realize that their hundreds of millions of dollars films are no longer a viable mode of operation.

It’s an interesting place to be at this juncture. I, for one, am extremely picky about the movies I’ll sit through, primarily because I love substance in my cinema experience and Hollywood has moved way away from films with substance. I know I’m going to sound weird, but heavy action films with ginormous explosions just don’t do anything for me. I prefer films that make me think a little. Lately, I’ve been getting my jollies from some art house indie films. These films have huge budget restraints and hence, need to compensate substance for style so what you end up with are films that are smartly written, well composed and edited, and that bank on basic film elements like pacing and tone to tell great stories. A prime example is a movie called ‘Primer’. See what I did there. It’s on Netflix and I highly recommend it as it’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about. That’s my long winded overview of the issue, but the roots go a lot deeper.

I’ve been of the opinion for some time that Hollywood films have been lacking a certain something over the last twenty or so years and while substance is definitely high on that list, I’ve recently begun to realize that there’s more to it than that. In my efforts to always come at movies from my logical and analytical approach, I’ve attempted in the best way I know how, to define these things that Hollywood movies, in general, are missing. These ingredients are what I collectively define as a movie’s identity. The identity of a film, in my limited perspective, boils down to four things: genre, audience, style, and tone. These are basic things that should go without saying when a film is in production, but somehow, they get skewed. When all four of these things are respected and are done well, you get at least a good movie, perhaps a great movie, out of the effort. But, when one or more of them are done poorly, the entire film suffers. WIth that in mind, let’s take a look at a couple of examples that demonstrate my opinion. There are a lot of films from which to choose, but being as it was Star Trek that started the whole thing, why not use examples from that franchise? ...You KNOW where this is headed… It almost seems unfair to pursue this line of reasoning in such a fashion, but fate opened the door and I’m more than willing to barge through it so let’s look at ‘Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan’ and ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’. I know it’s been done to death, but it just sets itself up so well!

In the defending corner, the apparent champion of this fight, ‘Wrath of Khan’. ‘Khan’ was released in 1982 and that’s one of the major reasons why I feel like this fight is a little lopsided. Back in that time period, studios made their movies for a much narrower audience and for much less budget so it’s a no brainer that the numbers are going to a more successful film. ‘Khan’ is still considered by most to be the ‘best’ Star Trek film in the franchise, with little dispute. But why is this? Well, let’s break it down based on my film identity formula. First, ‘Kahn’ was very much a reboot in its own right. This will be important later, but it introduced the idea that Starfleet was more of a military organization with new uniforms and training that reflects a more military persuasion. However, at its core, it still uses a tried and true formula for great Star Trek, that being the allegorical use of classic literary works as the basis of the film’s story. In this case, ‘Moby Dick’ plays a huge role in the plot and Nicholas Meyer was not too subtle about letting us know. In the Ceti Alpha V scene, Chekov actually sees a copy of the book on a shelf.The movie also does what Star Trek has done so well since it first began and that’s tackle social and moral ideas. In this case, there were a lot of themes being used, but the major ones were the dichotomy between creation and destruction, life and death, and getting old versus FEELING old. There was also some great commentary about man’s predilection toward substituting himself in for God. Furthermore, like most films that I tend to find engaging, this film had at least a couple of limitation forced upon it. First was budget. After ‘Motion Picture’ ended up costing Paramount an unheard of $40M, they scaled the budget for the sequel back quite drastically to $12M. Even adjusted for inflation, that would only amount to about $39M by today’s monetary standards. This led to so interesting creative choices. The most apparent was the decision to reuse special effects footage from the previous film. Since there were so many beautiful sequences from which to pull, why not reuse them to save on budget? The other limitation came in the form of Shatner’s and Montalban”s schedules. Shatner was busy gearing up for ‘TJ Hooker’ and Montalban was actually filming for ‘Fantasy Island’ at the time. Getting the two together for scenes turned out to be impossible so Meyer did the next best thing. Through some script trickery and some special effects voodoo, he gave the impression that the two were interacting in various scenes without actually having the two meet in person. It actually worked out really well for the film as I think having an aging Kirk ham fist a super buff Khan would just have seemed silly. As far as the tone of the film goes, it was definitely a serious film. There’s very little levity in the movie. It manages to expertly walk the line between serious and outright dark as the story progresses. Finally, Khan is just relentless and sadistic! The audience gets to see him descend into full blown madness, but somehow, we’re made to at least understand his motivations, which makes him somewhat relatable. There’s also a wee bit of nuclear arms race commentary thrown in there for good measure since it was the height of the cold war. Whew! Now let’s really break it down. The genre that was pursued is cerebral science fiction. The target audience were fans of Star Trek, and fans of cerebral sci-fi. The tone was serious and foreboding, kind of like if ‘Alien’ and ‘Star Trek’ had a love child. Finally, the style was very much Nicholas Meyer’s signature style. He has a flare for drama, allegory and tension in his films. In the end, adjusted for inflation, the film cost $32,880,000 to make and it grossed worldwide $216,221,579. For those who are math illiterate like myself, that’s a total earnings of $183,341,579. That’s pretty respectable.

Now in the challenger’s corner, Star Trek Into Darkness.I had hoped that this movie might help me to really drive my point home and in many ways, it still does. This film uses many of the same characters that ‘Khan’ employs. There’s Khan and Carol Marcus, but it uses them in drastically different ways, which makes it only vaguely reminiscent of its predecessor. There’s a prominent theme of preemptive global policing that runs throughout. The theme of vengeance is there as well. The use of the military industrial complex as a villain is really cliche. However, the moral dilemma of following orders versus doing what is morally correct is always pertinent. Theme of family is also kind of tired. And there are a ton of other things that have already been nitpicked to death so I’m not going to go there. The major problem with this film’s identity is that it attempts to borrow heavily from great Trek gone by and in so doing, it shoehorns elements of the mythology into its narrative out of context. Khan was a great villain in his original film because he and Kirk had already had an altercation that resulted, ultimately,in Khan’s wife dying. Then Khan had 15 years to stew over that fact and blame Kirk for the outcome. In this film, Khan is instead found and thawed by Admiral Marcus and while this may be okay from the start, the fact that this tremendous and bloody squabble is carried out over a year’s worth of interaction and the mere threat of Khan losing his people makes the whole premise of Khan’s protagonistic actions seem extremely disproportionate. Speaking of disproportionate, the Vengeance as a starship is way over the top. Now, the film does get quite a few things right. There’s great tension, a little mystery and the spectacle, for what it’s worth, is at least somewhat entertaining. There are however, a number of points that play all too well into my original premise. This was meant to be a Star Trek movie. As such, the expectation had already been established from 40+ years of previously established mythology that the film would be somewhat cerebral in its execution. Abrams will use moral themes in his films when it suits him, but he likes to gloss over things, in this case, with glossy scenery, costumes and lighting. If we breakdown the film based on our previously established identity equation, it nearly gets everything right. The genre is science fiction action. This is a deviation from previous Star Trek, which always attempted to be more intellectual in nature. But, Star Trek has proven that it can do action well in the past. The key is that there still needs to be allegory and morality in the mix. The tone is mostly serious. There are moments of levity peppered in there and they didn’t overwhelm things as much as I had previously remembered, but Spock with the ‘Khan’ line did break some surprisingly effective dramatic tension in a less than enjoyable way. The style is typical JJ Abrams. He likes to put spectacle before substance, and use big action and throwbacks to draw his audience in. The target audience seemed to be as many people as could be attracted to the movie and, hopefully, fans of Star Trek. So where do we sit? The movie’s budget was $150M and its total gross was $467,381,584. This is a total earning of $282,381,584. This is significantly more than its predecessor, but there’s more to a successful film than the final gross and this film has been pretty universally panned. In terms of establishing an identity, it did a number things that were self-defeating. Firstly, it attempted to call itself Star Trek despite that fact that it flies in the face of the well established identity of Star Trek as a franchise. While it was a fiction and some science was employed to tell the story, none of the science holds up under scrutiny. Gone are the days when Star Trek had a group of scientists acting as consultants to ensure that their narratives weren’t COMPLETELY outside the realm of possibility. Secondly, in disregarding scientific logic, it spat in the face of Trekkies, who are typically meant to be your target audience when making a Star Trek film. These dots practically connect themselves, by the way. I can see some prudence in trying to attract a new generation of Trekkies as it were. Paramount would be in a hard way if all the Trekkies eventually dies out and there was no one left to support the franchise. However, being a Trekkie has never been terribly mainstream and this film especially seems geared more toward the hipster crowd who like things because they seem ‘cool’, but who don’t want to take the time to fully understand what makes the thing cool in the first place. Trekkies are the types of people who get inspired to science and exploration because of the voyages of the Enterprise that they watched when they were young and this film in particular does not seem scientifically inspirational at all. Paramount tried to appeal to everyone with the film. The problem is, when you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing nobody.

Where does this leave us with Axanar? Well, there’s still a lot that remains to be seen. Primarily, we need to see if production will be allowed to continue. However, there are a lot of fundamental changes that should start happening in Hollywood. One of the easiest courses of action, in theory, if not necessarily in practice, is American studios need to look into foreign studio acquisition. The fact of life is that as humans, we’re not all the same and the places where we grow up and the cultures to which we’re exposed shape what type of media we enjoy. By planting flags world wide, studios could continue making money in foreign markets, but focus their efforts toward a smaller population. This would markedly increase the quality of films being produced, primarily in the US and it would alleviate the need for Titanic sized budgets for advertising. Studios also need to depart from the yes man mentality. Film makers require limitations in order to make great films in the same way that a kite requires someone to root it firmly to ground if it is to fly. When artists are given everything they could possibly want, they have no reason to be innovative or creative. Finally, at least in terms of fan productions, studios need to embrace this medium. It would be way too easy to build a framework for fans to work within. Allow these productions to be made, give them a means of licensing through the studio and work out a way for them to be distributed by said studio so that all involved can make a little money off of these projects. It’s a no risk moderate reward business model that just makes sense no matter which way you look at it. As fans, we can only hope that the powers that be will open their eyes to this last point as fan films are a time honored and respected way for fans to show reverence toward the things they enjoy. It would truly be sad to see studio execs stifle the passions and the creativity of the fans that make their franchises so successful in the first place. I may not reach many, but it is my hope in the pursuing months that level heads will prevail and that we will finally be able to embrace a new era where the efforts of these fans will start to receive the accolades that they truly deserve.