After my somewhat controversial post on BLACK PANTHER last week I started, coincidentally or not, to watch ABC and Marvel’s CLOAK & DAGGER TV series. Now let me first say that some of Marvel’s TV series I’ve watched in recent years have been the best rendition of super-hero stories I’ve ever seen – reminding me of the joy I had as a teenager reading comic books and absolutely kicking the ass of most of the movies out there. So let me speak a little bit about that.

Over the last couple of decades, TV has come to the forefront of fiction writing everywhere. Many years ago there were TV stars and movie stars and TV stars were the actors who couldn’t cut it in the big leagues of the Hollywood film sets. Even stars like Paul Newman who showed up in the small screen a few times, would completely disappear into the mythical world of theaters as soon as they became big stars. If you wanted to see quality acting and quality writing and quality directing, you would be crazy to turn on the TV, unless to watch some twenty-year-old classic or sing along with Julie Andrews’ SOUND OF MUSIC at Christmas. This state of affairs however was completely turned upside down. Nowadays, good acting and good writing is on TV, period (well… with some exceptions).

The first super-hero show that blew my mind and actually made me feel a youngster again was Netflix’s DAREDEVIL, in particular the first season. I had watched J.J. Abrams’ HEROES and mostly liked it, but DAREDEVIL was in a whole different level. Full disclosure: Frank Miller’s DAREDEVIL was always one of my favorite comic heroes – I absolutely loved it. And they did change a couple of things in the series: Matt Murdock was more naïve and gentle on TV – I always liked the tougher darker Miller’s characters. Still, Vicent D’Onofrio’s portrayal of the Kingpin was brilliant, to say the least.

Then Netflix did it again with the wonderful JESSICA JONES and LUKE CAGE, and the powerful PUNISHER. Super-heroes quickly became adults and serious characters, less concerned with dressing up and more consumed by human dramas. I was very disappointed with IRON FIST, again one of my favorite characters that was portrayed as a spoiled brat, which was completely contradictory to a tough hard training life in a monastery. THE DEFENDERS was a little better but not much better. The powerful characters were there and I do like what Elodie Yung did to Elektra – but the human drama, the story and the writing wasn’t as good as the other series. Yet the trend had caught on and serious super-hero TV series became a thing. FX blew my mind again with LEGION – I didn’t know this comic series and I found it featured one of the most interesting and surprising villains around. If you haven’t watched, go watch it. There are other super-hero TV series, of course (please don’t speak to me about DC), and I’m sure I’m missing some, but these are the ones that for me, opened the comic book world again.

And now, CLOAK & DAGGER. Again, it’s been done right. It’s not about the battles, or the special effects, or the super-powers. It’s about the Human Drama. I go back to what I usually say about storytelling. Storytelling is one of the oldest ways of teaching and learning. The ancient races would gather around the fires and tell tales to their youngsters. Shamans and sorcerers would amaze the tribes with their stories. Greek and Roman theaters would fill with people eager to see the drama.  We even developed inner genetic techniques to absorb these stories. Every writer knows about ‘The Suspension of Disbelief’ – that exercise happening inside the minds of readers and audiences. We all know that Harry Potter never existed nor could he fly on a broom. We all know that Daenerys has never ridden a dragon. But we fool ourselves into believing in it. We suspend our disbelief so that we can join the characters going through the stories.  They tell me that the parts of our brain that ‘light up’ when we are ‘feeling’ a story are the same parts of the brain that turn on when we go through the same experiences in reality. That’s why we rejoice and laugh and cry with all that’s happening with the characters in the stories. This is a mechanism Humanity developed to learn. And to learn what, you ask me?

What are we learning with the stories we engage in? We learn things that would be very difficult to learn in other ways: we learn our values, about Good and Evil, about the obstacles life puts in our way, about how to make decisions. And the more difficult and thought-provoking these decisions will be, the more interesting and special the story is. In my view, fiction is the realm of complexity. It’s the realm of ambiguity. It’s the realm of discomfort. At the very core of the Human Drama, I believe, is the difficulty of making the right decisions in a world that is all but simple. I once heard it on the radio, going home, very eloquently, the host referring: «This thing of being a person is very complicated.» Also, that line from the Chico Buarque, the Brazilian singer: «Up close, no-one is normal». And that’s what stories are for: for us to learn what is complex and complicated. To learn the values and principles and solutions that will get us through our difficult journey in life.

Well, maybe that’s what makes a show like CLOAK & DAGGER, in my view, far superior than movies like BLACK PANTHER: the former is more complex and grounded than the latter.

CLOAK & DAGGER is the story of two six-year-olds, a white girl and a black boy, who meet in an event that takes both her father and his brother’s lives. Eight years later they are still looking for justice for those deaths and when they meet again they find that they activate each other’s super-powers. I’m sure that Olivia Holt and Aubrey Joseph, who portray Tandy and Tyrone, will be household names in a few years, but it’s not just their performances that hold this underrated TV show together: it’s the intelligence and the seriousness with which the Human Drama is treated in this story. You don’t follow it because it’s about two teenagers with super-powers, you follow it because it’s about two complex characters dealing with both the deaths of their loved ones and the injustice in the world. And, of course, the love that can emerge from their struggles.

I’ve only watched 9 episodes of the series. In the ninth, ‘Back Breaker’, there’s a ‘pseudo-fourth-wall-breaking’, where a character is teaching creative writing and explaining how at this point in the story the characters will lose their ground and fall. Here is shown the formulae that writers use in their structures. Some people dislike these formulae and find them too crude. But it’s not the formulae that are crude, it’s the writer. It’s not the tool that is broken; it’s how you use it that makes a difference. If you analyze the structure of both BLACK PANTHER and CLOAK & DAGGER you would find that there is not a lot of difference between the two. Still, the result is radically different.  Again, I liked BLACK PANTHER, it worked well enough. But it lacked sophistication, I believe.

One day we will discuss why then in BLACK PANTHER more successful and well reviewed than C&D – and why many of us prefer simpler stories. But this is not the day.

 

Just watched Marvel’s BLACK PANTHER movie. I am a Marvel fan and have been for a long time. I’m not one of those guys who know everything about super-heroes, but I remember the comics I read in my teens. I loved the Daredevil, enjoyed Spiderman and was fond of the Avengers. I absolutely loved the X-Men’s episode that led to Phoenix’s death. I remember reading those comics every week until I was 18 or 19 (time I went away to college). So it was with great expectation and gusto that I saw the grandiose wave of super-hero movies happen in the last few decades. I believe most of the movies on the Marvel Universe are really well made and really great movies. I thought BLACK PANTHER was also a really good movie. So why did it bore me so much?

As I said, I’m a Marvel fan. I don’t like DC Comics. It’s not a religious thing or something. It’s just that DC’s heroes always seem too perfect in some way. They’re the rich guy’s heroes: they’re either Superman (with hardly any flaw), or super-rich, or gods, or royalty, or super-powerful. Marvel heroes always seem more human, the people’s heroes, with human flaws and human problems, and always in trouble. So I like Marvel much more. I still think some of the best super-hero movies are DC movies: the first two Dark Knight movies, the first two Batman movies (Tim Burton), the Wonder Woman movie, all of these are really really good. But Marvel has also created some gems: like Iron Man, or Spiderman movies, or LOGAN. And then there are those movies I think only fans can appreciate: I loved X-MEN:APOCALYPSE, for instance, because of Phoenix, most of all. And really liked THE AVENGERS.

I think super-hero movies have gone through a very interesting process: the thought and the effort that go into the execution of these movies, the investment in the story and the CGI effects and the actors and performances have become better and better.  They’ve embraced Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey and follow Blake Snyder’s SAVE THE CAT structure (my favorite). Disney is even considering investing in BLACK PANTHER for the Oscar race. And all I can say is: what’s wrong with these people?

You’ve seen the reactions to the Star Wars movies (I haven’t watched HAN SOLO yet) and they will happen as well with super-hero movies: they are becoming dull.

Formulas are formulas. They are mostly tools. For many people, the American movie industry is too dependent on formulas. One of them is Blake Snyder’s Beat-sheet. As you might know, I love Snyder’s Beat-sheet. It changed my writing for the better. Snyder basically divided Aristotle’s 3 Act-structure into 15 beats. They show us what must happen on the first act, the second and the third.  And it is a good formula. Many people blame formulas like these for movies having become too predictable and bland. However, you can pick up Snyder’s Beat-sheet and apply them on movies from CASABLANCA to BLADE RUNNER – they actually comply to the formula. And many other original interesting movies do too. It’s not the tool that’s to blame, it’s the user.

Creativity seems to live of unconformity. It seems that original ideas, the ‘out-of-the-box’ ideas, are the ones that went farther away from the norms, into a realm of unseen and unheard ideas, where no-one knew something was there. But that is not necessarily so. Most of the more interesting ideas come from what we call: Creative Problem Solving. They’re about the way someone picked up a problem and was able to solve it in a different way. They are not about the creation of something in a vacuum, but the conclusion of a long process of studying a problem and coming up with different progressive solutions. But one thing is getting a creative solution further and further along – closer and closer to its potential. Another much more interesting thing is to create a different paradigm, a different level – another kind of solution platform. And that, in my view, is what is lacking.

Well, the main strength behind Marvel and DC comics, is not the structure, is not the main formulas, is not the flawless and intelligent execution of the main ideas. It’s the strength of the original stories and the original characters. The great creators behind these Disney blockbusters, the Star Wars, Star Trek, DC and Marvel, are great minds like George Lucas, Gene Roddenberry, Bill Finger, Jerry Siegel, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee – all of them over 70-years-old and most of them already dead. Don’t get me wrong: I love all these guys and I think they’re geniuses. But let’s be serious: all these movies I’ve been talking about are not particularly creative. Lucas, Roddenberry, Kirby and Lee were creative. The rest of them are fan-boys getting the geniuses’ ideas closer and closer to their potential.

So what’s wrong with BLACK PANTHER? I would say: nothing. Good story, good acting, great battles, great special effects, powerful characters. On the other hand… Haven’t I seen this movie before? Okay, there’s a social side to it: the film mostly features strong African characters. As in WONDERWOMAN, there’s an important ground-breaking social impact that is not minor. There are too many movies with Caucasian men saving the day. But I think I am able to criticize this movie without putting that into question. In fact, if the CAPTAIN AMERICA movies were coming out now, I would probably be writing the same thing: it’s becoming old.

We need new creators. We need new stories. We need to stop believing that what has been done before is more reliable than what is new. Because you can rely on this: what gets old, eventually fails. I think we are seeing that happening already in the movie theatres. Wake up, Disney, we need your creativity back.

Yesterday I had the pleasure and the honor of hosting a workshop at the SCIFI-LX FESTIVAL in Lisbon with writer Pedro Cipriano about HOW TO KILL YOUR CHARACTERS. The theme of the festival is The Apocalypse and the workshop was very interesting to me and hopefully to the diverse audience present as well. Let me give you the main topics of my presentation.

Death is an obvious topic of fiction since the beginning. But an interesting point is who you kill. In the Greek tragedies of old, if I recall, much of the focus went into the sacrificial death of the hero at the end. Sacrifice was a virtue and the sacrifice of the hero for a higher purpose or fighting a much stronger force (the gods, for instance), was the main goal. In much of literature for a long time, I believe, Death was ‘given’ to important characters for important reasons. In ROMEO AND JULIET, for instance, Death is not only an escape but a sign of rebellion. This kind of Significant Death has been present a lot of fiction for a long time.

We have seen, however, in some fiction throughout the last few decades the proliferation of other kinds of deaths. Let me characterize one type as the ‘Red Shirt’ deaths. If you’re a trekkie, you know what I mean. In the original Star Trek series, the crew members with red shirts were taken to dangerous places to be the first ones (usually the only ones) to get killed. We didn’t know their names and didn’t want to know. The feeling to us was very similar to the death of a fly. No emotional involvement at all. This would also happen to dozens of Indians in Errol Flynn’s westerns or Vietnamese and Russian soldiers in the Rambo sequels, or ‘bad guys’ in many other works of fiction. The first movie that I felt, as I watched it in the theatres, broke the mold in the eighties was John McTiernan’s DIE HARD. Until then we weren’t used to give a face or give a damn about the ‘bad guys’. They didn’t have any characteristics, any differentiation. In DIE HARD, we finally have a common man, John McLane, fighting a hard fight against each of the terrorists he kills. We even have the brilliant comic relief of the oriental terrorist stealing a chocolate bar before a fight. What a lovely character-development comic detail. No ‘one-shot-one-kill’ phenomenon, no multiple deaths from a single burst, no dumb ‘red shirts’.

Another formula that was particularly irritating for a while was the ‘Sacrificial Lamb’ formula. I was shocked yesterday at the workshop when I put up a photo of Maverick and Goose and no-one seemed to know who they were. Am I really that old?? Well, then I asked: who will be killed in the movie? And the audience quickly came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t be the character portrayed by Tom Cruise, it must be ‘the other one’.   Goose is an example of a Sacrificial Lamb: a character you build up over the first two acts just to kill him/her for effect just before the end of the Second Act. Obi-wan Kenobi is another Sacrificial Lamb. And Boromir as well (even though he gets killed in the final act of the first LotR movie).

It was irritating for many to feel the same death formulas being used over and over again for a long time. Me included. Until I read A GAME OF THRONES (Spoiler alert). Suddenly I felt George R.R. Martin had just taken the rug from under my feet. What do you mean, Ned Stark died?? It took me some time and another hundred pages or so to accept the inevitable. With that single act of defiance, Martin had just thrown the rule book into the fire. From then on The Song of Ice and Fire (SOIF) characters were really in danger. Their lives and their deaths had really become unpredictable.  And that was awesome!

The same happens in THE WALKING DEAD. Each character of the series or the graphic novels is naturally and fatally in danger. We never know exactly who will perish next. And that makes for a lot of its success. See, for instance, the end of Season 6 of TWD. We see 5 or 6 of our favorite characters being taken prisoners by the evil Negan. Negan, played brilliantly by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, has decided to kill one of our beloved characters, characters we’ve been following for years. He then proceeds to kill one of the characters in a cruel gruesome way. And then the season ends. We never see who got killed. The cliffhanger was maintained until the beginning of Season 7. For months we were wondering who had gotten killed and we suffered for it. Because these days we are not certain anymore of who is safe and who is not. The Build-up of characters is made over a long time and in subtle ways so the Pay-off is stronger and harder (on Build-up and Pay-off concepts read this post).

There is, however, in my view, a great difference between the deaths in SOIF and the deaths in TWD. In Martin’s epic, we always feel a progression towards a certain point in the future. We feel the story, the plot points, each death, will lead us towards an end. We don’t have that in TWD. There’s a cynical background in the post-apocalyptical tale that in my view makes it less satisfying. We don’t feel the deaths will lead us towards something. They are just another notch on the writer’s belt. There’s no end in sight. And that’s why I progressively grew disenchanted with that story.

I spoke of two other phenomena at the workshop. First, the Theory of Horror. I asked the audience what would they rather suffer: An arm cut off or the nails taken off with a plier? A bullet in the shoulder or a needle in the eye? Actually, for most people, the nails taken off or the needle in the eye are scarier than the other more dangerous injuries. Why? Because they are more relatable. It’s easier to imagine the pain of a needle in the eye than the strange pain of a bullet in the shoulder. Unless you’ve been through it, of course. So gore stuff like decapitations or deadly explosions is not the most impactful for an audience. Take that into consideration.

I also spoke of Deus Ex Machina endings. Even though you can argue that once or twice in classic movies and books they’ve been done right, the fact is Deus Ex Machina endings are lazy solutions by writers who don’t know how to end a story and would rather drop a nuclear bomb or a deadly meteorite and kill everybody. Acts of Nature are not bad. In James Clavell’s TAI PAN, for instance, the final encounter between the protagonist and antagonist happens in the middle of a powerful hurricane. And that’s interesting. But acts of Nature that purely resolve the conflict by themselves are the babies of lazy writers and should be discouraged.

I finished my presentation with Spiderman. «What does Spiderman say?» I asked the audience. And they replied: «With great power comes great responsibility.» They are right. We, the writers, have great power over the lives of our characters. That means we have also a great responsibility. The responsibility of killing them in a meaningful way. Forget about ‘Red Shirts’, forget about ‘Sacrificial Lambs’. Kill them right: give them a good life and a good death.

I’ve watched Scott Cooper’s HOSTILES a few days ago. One of the best movies I’ve seen lately. Tense, intense, cruel and moving, it features some superb actors and a very well written script. Cooper has written it and directed it. I’ve seen at least one of his other movies, BLACK MASS, and I wasn’t particularly impressed. But this one is really good. It’s about a veteran U.S. Army captain,  Joseph J. Blocker, played by the powerful Christian Bale, that escorts one of his worst enemies – Chief Yellow Hawk, played by Wes Studi – to his home territory to die.

The journey is filled with dangers and surprises, and the conflict that goes on inside the MC is also always skin deep: Blocker would rather kill Yellow Hawk, who brutally murdered his friends, than escort him home. More than a Western, HOSTILES is to me an essay on violence. Let me tell you what I mean and what I take from it.

At the onset of the movie, there’s this quote by D.H. Lawrence: «The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.»  Bale’s Blocker is an iceberg always about to crack. He is cold and steadfast when things are about to go wrong, but in certain moments we can see that the years of fighting and killing have taken their toll. The essential conflict of the movie is not with this or that enemy: hostiles keep coming and getting dealt with one after the other. The main conflict is what this fighting and this violence is doing to the man himself. In the end, the best thing that he can do is recognize how similar to his enemies he actually is. Violence becomes acceptable not for revenge, but to defend one’s principles, one’s values and the people who are important to us.

There is something great in American values. I have seen people in several countries disappointed and skeptical and critical of these values. Or of what they perceive of these values. There’s a perception that Americans only want to apply their values to American citizens, or are inflexible on how to look at others. To some: Americans are all too keen to impose their values on others. To others: Americans do not intervene when hostiles attack them in violations of American values. To many: Americans are too prone to violence themselves and they easily decide to shoot first and ask later. What we seem to forget, time and time again, is that for all their faults, Americans are the proponents and the guardians of values we ourselves value so much. Most of them, inscribed in the Constitution, one of the finest legal documents ever written.

All men are created equal. No man is above the Law. Citizens must elect their Government. Government of the people, by the people and for the people. Freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. Freedom of association. Right to privacy. Due process of Law. Right to vote. The abolishment of slavery. We forget that before this was written over decades in the American Constitution these values were neither obvious nor natural to anyone in the world. The great legacy of the Americans is, and should always be, the great Liberal agenda.

This is scary to many. Still in Vladimir Putin’s nightmares is that awful night in Berlin in 1989, when anonymous crowds walked towards the Berlin Wall and demanded to cross to the Western side. Putin was a KGB officer on the border and he had a really bad night, to say the least. He has feared Democracy ever since. The people are too powerful. Especially when they are free. And as all violence comes from fear, it’s no wonder that Putin has become hostile to the entire Western Liberal order.

It is also not surprising that we see the American values of the West being corroded from within. I’ve just re-read Hannah Arendt’s EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM. One of the most impressive features of the described Nazi regime was how naturally and dutifully they would execute the most inhumane and despicable acts. It took years of eroding the moral fabric of Liberal Germany, from 1930 to 1940 until the Final Solution for the Jewish problem was decided. Plans to evict the Jews failed. Then plans to exile them all became too cumbersome (there was this crazy idea of shipping all European Jews to Madagascar). Then, of course, the most obvious way was to jail them, and finally to kill them. This became obvious over the years until it became inevitable. And for each step of the way there was a logical argument to go further.

It’s because of all this that I was so concerned with what has been happening these past few weeks in the United States of America. While in Thailand brave men and women risk their lives to save a few children, most Americans were shocked to see their Government corralling, separating and processing little children as the Germans have done in the Past. But these are only the first few steps. For how long will average Americans resist the continuous eroding of their moral values? I dread to imagine.

«The greatest calamity which could befall us would be submission to a government of unlimited powers» said Thomas Jefferson. It’s easy to become scared and violent in face of the ones who are different. Jews, negroes, immigrants, Islamites. What if they bring terrorists with them, or gangsters? What if they bring savage customs and behaviors? What is really scary is the values we are willing to sacrifice to our fears. ‘Let’s burn the village down to take the village’. We are the ones ready to destroy our own way of life so that we can ‘protect’ it. Those who come to us seeking help want only to cherish it, even if they do it in a childish, crude, clumsy way. As we relinquish power to an all powerful Government for the sake of our fears, we lose ourselves. And as we lose ourselves we are closest to damnation, and to the worst of mankind, as we’ve seen in the Past.

If Americans become once again hard, isolate and killers, we will lose modern society. Let’s hope that never happens. At the end of HOSTILES, Blocker decides to rejoin civilization. That’s a hopeful image that will stick with me.

So… Time traveling… What an irregular stuff. It brings us great stories and awful ones. I am fascinated by cultural shocks, like when two different cultures find each other and somebody tries to survive/strive in a completely different society with different rules. That’s part of what makes time travels interesting to me. How would people look at each other if they came from completely different eras? However, time traveling can take you to much more than these cultural shocks if you go a bit beneath the surface – some examples below. I believe I was 13 when I wrote my first and only time-traveling story. The closest I got to it afterwards was writing THE ALEX 9 SAGA about a commando from the 22th Century finding a planet in Space where society was still in the Middle Ages. Sounds cheesy, doesn’t it? But it’s not, it’s one of my best works, I promise.

So today I decided to talk about 5 movies/books that have time-traveling at their core. These are not necessarily the best ones, but they are a few that I really like and that make time-traveling interesting to me. They are not in a particular order – and feel free to comment on my choices and suggest other ones.

1.LOOPER

What an interesting take on time-traveling! In the future, when the mob wants to get rid of someone without a trace, they send people to the past where a hitman is waiting to dispose of them. How cool is that!? And what if you get sent to the past to be killed by… yourself in the past!! Wow! This concept really rocks. Add a brilliant Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing a young Bruce Willis and the amazing Emily Blunt and you have a real gem. Plus, of course, the twist at the end, which is very powerful. Actually the whole movie is filled with twists and turns that make your head spin. This is a film that I was very skeptical about until I watched it and loved it. I think the twists and turns account for most of the bad reviews it got, but that comes with the territory. I, for one, loved it. Of course, as with many time-traveling stories, it ignores the obvious paradox, but don’t let logic get in the way of a good story.

2. THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE

Both this movie and this book bring an original and ground-breaking take to time-traveling. THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE starts with a man meeting a stranger in a library and she recognizes him as the man who has been visiting her since she was a little girl and with which she is in love. Many times we believe that people from the future would know more than we would know ourselves, but in this story things are not that simple: the time-traveler has a gene that sends him almost randomly into the past, so sometimes he meets the woman he loves when she is an adolescent, and sometimes when she is a grown woman. They eventually marry and his condition makes for a very curious and interesting love affair. I love romantic movies and this one is a good example. Again, another movie that went by without much notice, but I definitely recommend it.

3. TERMINATOR

The TERMINATOR series is quintessential time-traveling fiction. There’s something about Arnold, of course, but this idea of a robot assassin coming to the past to kill the man who will save the world is absolutely brilliant. I, for one, though, think the second installment is the best of the lot. If Arnold is a good bad guy in the first movie, he becomes a really badass good guy in the second and his relationship with Edward Furlong’s John Connor is both moving and incredibly rich. I also love Sarah’s prison escape sequence: it’s the one I always crave to watch. Linda Hamilton plays Sarah to perfection and the way Sarah, John, Arnold and T-1000 meet is very powerful (including the comic relief of the gun getting stuck in the bars).

4. THE EDGE OF TOMORROW

I hesitated in considering GROUNDHOG DAY a time travel movie, but, in fact, Bill Murray’s character does travel to the past every day, always at the same moment. And GROUNDHOG DAY  is a great movie and an absolute classic. However, I feel THE EDGE OF TOMORROW fits better in this list. The concept is very similar, but more violent: a US Army officer fighting an alien race wakes up always on the same day every time he gets killed. THE EDGE OF TOMORROW is a movie that grows on me every time I watch it (yes, I can see the irony). I think Emily Blunt is sexy as hell in this and Tom Cruise is indeed a good actor (despite the annoying smile). The movie is thought provoking and stimulating even though that ‘centralized intelligence’/’kill the queen’ thing is a bit old already. The movie is based on the manga series ALL YOU NEED IS KILL by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. One of these days I will tell you why I believe the Japanese (manga included) have some of the best character development around – for now take my word for it and watch this movie.

5. BACK TO THE FUTURE

Even though I thought of other movies to put in here (like 12 MONKEYS), no time-traveling movie list would be complete without BACK TO THE FUTURE. I like the first one the most. Robert Zemeckis is a very strong director, even though I feel sometimes he shies away from some deeper moments. In BACK TO THE FUTURE he’s flawless. The construction of the narrative is very good, even though we stumble into the grandfather’s paradox once more. You know the one? If you went back in time and killed your grandfather before you were born how could you have gone back in time to kill your grandfather? But as I said before, don’t let logic get in the way of a good story. It’s always a treat to watch Michael J. Fox as Marty running around putting his parents ‘back’ together. It touches our fundamental fear of our parents separating or not succeeding and that’s a solid ground for a story. It’s also a cultural shock that is at least very funny. And of course Christopher Lloyd is amazing as Emmett Brown. This is one of those that we’ll see once and again on Christmas time for decades.

How did you like my list? Do you agree with me? Do you disagree? Tell me.

See you next week.

So last week, after my post on Writer’s Blocks (see here) a discussion came up in one of the Facebook groups I belong to, a group dedicated to Role Playing Games. This discussion started by a post extrapolating Writer’s Block to an RPG group session and how group members compensated for the blocks in one another’s creativity. Not everyone agreed. As I wrote in my article, I believe blocks in creativity are many times the projection of our fears and inner demons. How does that play in a group situation? Many writers and schools of thought have approached this subject. Let me talk a bit about it.

First, let me tell you that I haven’t been involved in Role Playing Games for a long time. I’m not speaking of the kind you play on the computer – even though there are icons like WORLD OF WARCRAFT or ARMA 3 that are very stimulating. I’m speaking of the Role Playing Games played by a group of people around a table with strange dice, incarnating strange characters that go through what one might call a narrative. The decisions of the characters are made by the players according to some rules and the whole situation is controlled and guided by what we call a Game Master. In DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS the Master has a special name: Dungeon Master. Even though I played a few games, I haven’t played a lot in recent times, because I live about 45 minutes from Lisbon and I have been swamped with work. But I’m still in contact with the community, a bunch of weird but very intelligent people who I love.

Anyhow, I’ve been stating for some time that Game Masters should be aware of some leadership theory and group psychology. So here’s my take.

We humans are social people, but that doesn’t mean that being with others is easy and without complexity. Most of the time we are wrestling with two forces in our inner minds that are pulling us to one side or the other. They are called the Isomorphic and the Homomorphic Poles. The Isomorphic part of our mind suggests that we will feel good joining others and being part of a group. When the Isomorphic pole is surfacing we feel good if a group accepts us and we are sensitive to rejection. However, there is also the Homomorphic Pole – this one tells us that if we let ourselves be absorbed by the group we will lose our own identity and be void – so it makes us want to reject the group and/or change the group in our image, or make the group accept what makes us different.

In a group, each of our Isomorphic and Homomorphic poles is in interaction with everyone else’s. This, in my view, is what produces the energy fluidity we call Group Dynamics. We also have that in a Creative Writing context: we are always wrestling between our own aesthetics, fantasies and ideas that make us unique, and the formulas, building blocks, tropes and other reader’s needs that make our texts readable and enjoyable. In a writing group, multiply that by the number of members in the group and you’ll see how complex the dynamic is.

However, Group Dynamics have patterns and recognizable phenomena. One interesting thing is the path a group goes through from inception to adjourning. It’s a fascinating subject which I will not go through in this text. For more, look up the stages of group development by Bruce Tuckman, for starters – you’ll see a group is not just one group, but an ever changing entity that will have different characteristics at different stages: there’s a whole economy of group individual and social energy being traded within a group, always enforcing new stages on the group itself. You can also wait until I talk about it in the near future – for I certainly will. Today, I prefer to write about the phenomena discovered by Wilfred Bion.

Bion was a psychiatrist that followed the doctrines of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein in the aftermath of World War II. In the military, he was given the task to deal with the mentally traumatized war veterans in Government facilities. Doing this, he was one of the pioneers of psychoanalysis in a group setting and studied the behavior of groups. Not really knowing what to do and not having good precedent to follow, Bion decided to stay as quiet as he could in his groups and learn what he could from what happened. In so doing he ended up experimenting with Leaderless Groups.

Leadership, in my view, is a group phenomenon. It naturally happens in a group. In one way or another, the group ends up following a leader that will take it where it wants to go. In a therapy session the formal leader is naturally the psychotherapist. But if the formal leader is unsatisfying, an informal leader eventually rises up. That also happens in an RPG setting: if a Game Master’s performance is unsatisfying, soon the whole group will be boycotting his plan. But by deconstructing this search for a leader and the fulfillment of the group’s goal, Bion found out that there are certain kinds of behaviors of a group that follow ‘Basic Assumptions’ – these are in fact Group Blocks, organizations of the group’s anxieties that block the group’s work and creativity. Here are Bion’s Basic Assumptions:

Fight or Flight – A group responding to a threat often goes into Fight or Flight mode: in a game situation we often see the group distracting itself with jokes or unrelated stories, avoiding decisions or uncomfortable situations at any cost. Or even fight over a detail or something without any importance in order to avoid real decision making. Leaders that don’t understand or are insensitive to how uncomfortable a decision is being to a group often get frustrated and when they try to force the group to focus they many times will face stiff opposition and find the group will actually be fighting them.

Pairing – At some times, a group will be fascinated or paralyzed by the interactions of two individuals. By focusing on these two individuals, the group can also avoid uncomfortable decision making. This can go on for a long time and if group members start taking sides, the avoidance can go on forever! A Game Master that is unable to refocus the group on the task or on the individual decisions of each member could see the game stalling around the annoying interactions between the ruling pair.

Dependency – At some moments, the group might be inclined to seek the protection of one single individual that, at the extreme, might seem omniscient and omnipotent. The group will submit to the immature idea that every single problem and discomfort will be resolved by this single individual and so it abdicates almost completely of any power to decide while it remains under the illusion this individual is the Messiah the group always wanted. Invariably, reality will creep in and the group will be disappointed, but it can take a long time (as we have been witnessing for the last few years in US politics with Obama and Trump, each in his own way).

It is my opinion that if a GM does not understand the difficulty or the discomfort that a certain decision imposes on a group he will try to force his way out of a Basic Assumption behavior. A Basic Assumption is, all in all, a Group ‘Writer’s Block’ and will be impeding the narrative of the game. But trying just to force the group to move on can have the effect of increasing the anxiety and be counter-productive. If a GM is patient and quietly works on the group’s anxiety, the group will eventually reach a different position, what Bion calls: the Work Group.

When in the Work Group position, the group will be making decisions in an efficient and effective way, working together and analyzing objectively the situation and the facts. That is the moment the GM has been waiting for and the more he can guide the group to this position the most enjoyable the game will be.

There is a lot more to say about this subject but for today it’s enough. I hope it’s useful for all you GM heroes out there! See you next week!

This weekend I drew a blank. I had my customary post to write, and I am committed to writing one a week, so I had to find a theme and an angle. Couldn’t make it. I just couldn’t think of anything to talk about. I’ve been working hard in my DDJ (aka Dreary Day Job) and have several articles, short stories and other texts I need to deliver, so I haven’t had much time to watch movies or TV and have been reading a couple of books I’m still not comfortable talking about. So this weekend I didn’t have anything to say. So I decided to post about Writer’s Block, that feared monster most writers have to face at one time or another.

In my experience, Writer’s Block is not a unified monster. There isn’t really just one kind of WB. I categorize them in two types: The Blank and The Fear.

The Blank happens when you just can’t think of anything to write about. That’s basically what happened to me this weekend. You want to write, you need to write, you’re ready to write, but you don’t know what to write. I don’t get this one very often anymore, because I’m convinced this happens because of a lack of preparation and lack of commitment. When you draw a blank you have already messed up. I’m always looking for concepts and stories to write. I have an Excel file with dozens of concepts I’ve been collecting for years. That’s my first weapon against The Blank. Also, I am always working on more than one story at a time. Usually, they’re in different stages. One might be still an infant, forming in my head. Another could be an adolescent, with a few pages written, but still being structured. Another could be in the writing stage. Another could be in the editing and beta reading stage. My pipeline is always full. So if I’m stuck in a story, I jump to another and I never draw a blank. So, preparation and a long-tail pipeline take care of the Blank most of the time. This weekend’s happened because I don’t have the same pipeline for blog posts. I used to. In the beginning, I was always writing at least with a two-week cushion. But that’s gone now and that’s my fault. I am not prepared enough for the blog posts and so this happened. Must work on it, and sorry about that to you, faithful readers.

The second kind of WB is what I call: The Fear. The Fear happens when you know exactly what you want to write, you have the story in your head, but you just can’t get to it. Something is stopping you. You find every excuse not to write. Many writers get puzzled by The Fear. They truly want to write. But they can’t. The Fear, however, does not need to be a mystery. The Fear, in my view, happens in one of two ways.

The Inside-Out Fear happens when your inner emotional and psychological barriers react to something you want the characters to go through. Maybe your mother died and you want to write about that, but you are not ready to do it, your mind finds it too painful to go through again. Or your character gets tortured and you find the pain too much to bear, because there’s no mistake – you feel it as well. Or your character falls deeply in love and you just had a break-up and can’t manage the happiness in your character. Whatever… In my view, Inside-Out Fear can be overcome if you ask yourself what’s troubling you and you face that fear. It’s difficult and you need to be brave, but it can help you in many ways.

Then there’s the Outside-In Fear, which happens when something deep inside you is telling you that there’s a problem with the story and you are not ready to listen to that voice. Maybe the solution you devised for your character’s problems is not a good one. Or maybe your finale is not satisfying enough in your head. Or maybe your structure is wrong. I’m struggling right now with my WIP novel and I know why it is: my idea of the ending is not powerful enough yet, and both my second act battle and my B story are still not very clear in my mind.  And so I’m writing slowly and painfully. Important elements are missing. To overcome the Outside-In Fear you have to do three things: you have to admit something is wrong; you have to find out what that is, and you have to work until you solved the problem.  Sometimes you need to research some more, sometimes you need to work on your structure, sometimes you need to find the right idea… It doesn’t matter. It’s work.

I believe the WB Monster can be defeated if you understand it. You cannot underestimate it, nor be paralyzed by it, or it will defeat you. Just try to understand it and calmly overcome it. It may take time and patience, but that’s the craft you’re in.

Most of all, the worst thing I think some writers do is give in to panic. They assume Procrastination, that constant distraction and looking for excuses that is many times typical of WB, is a sign of laziness or a weak strength of will. Sometimes they think they are just not made for writing and get depressed by doubts. But that’s mostly wrong. Procrastination always has a reason. There’s always a motive for it. It comes from fear of your inner demons or lack of preparation. Facing your inner demons can both be therapeutically and lead you to impressive writing. And lack of preparation is something you can fix: you only need to go back and go through the motions. Better still, Writer’s Block can be a very useful tool: it can work as an alarm that you have problems in your writing. That there’s something in your story that you need to fix. So you need to go back and look for what’s missing, for what you feel is wrong.

So don’t panic. Just remain calm, convince yourself that it will end eventually and then work it off. Be creative. That’s what I try to do. Hopefully, this is useful.

Today at the Lisbon Book Fair, under the annoying drip-drip of June’s would-be rain, Penguin House’s publisher Companhia das Letras launched an anthology of 21 short-stories celebrating the 21 years of one of Portugal’s most important literary contests, the Young Writer’s National Contest. The anthology features 21 winners of the contest, including some of the most prominent writers of the New Portuguese Literature, as José Luis Peixoto, João Tordo or José Mário Silva.  It also includes one of my short-stories, from back in the day, and made me reminisce about my younger years. A lot has happened since then and maybe that’s why I am less tolerant nowadays with some questions young or amateurish writers pose in some Facebook groups I belong to. I shouldn’t. I should be more patient. But I’m not. I just remember not having anyone to ask stupid questions when I started and maybe I’m resentful (poor me).

So I decided today to be more generous and kind than I usually am to my fellow beginners and to my young inner self and answer some common questions I see often asked in those groups. Just give you a peaceful piece of my mind. What do you think? Are you with me?

So, here we go:

1: How do you get started? How do you start writing? How do you become a writer?

I’ve seen this one a couple of times and it puzzled me. I started writing when I was 12 years old and I just started. I picked up pen and paper, and later a typewriter and I started. I never stopped to think how to start. My advice to you, who have this question in your souls, is: don’t take it too seriously. Don’t go to classes, don’t read creative writing books, don’t ask experience writers. You can do all that later. How do you start? You just sit down and write, and write, and write. Just pour it into the paper or the screen. Will it be very good? Probably not. But that’s how you start. You can’t start learning tennis thinking you’ll beat Roger Federer in a month. Just have fun. Be creative. Experiment. Tell stories. Show them to your friends and family. That’s how you start.

And write because you enjoy it. If you’re merely in love with the idea of being a writer, of having published books, signing autographs and earning more money that Stephen King, forget about it. Go do something else. You’re just not taking it seriously. The probability you’ll be able to get there is less than 0.001%. Or even less. I’m serious. More than 99.9% of writers never get rich and are not famous. Write because you enjoy it. Have fun. Otherwise you will not make it. The effort will simply be too much for you. Trust me on this.

2: Should I use a First Person narrator or a Third Person narrator?

The first time I tried to answer this question I figured it was a matter of taste. I use both all the time. But actually, no. I don’t think it is. I use them for different reasons.

Here’re some reasons to use First Person, in my view: 1) Readers identify better with the character, they assume his/her POV so they actually assume his/her ‘skin’ in some sense. 2) You want to hide some events that are happening outside of the scope of the character’s POV, maybe because you want to make it a twist, or something. 3) You want to expose the intimacy of the thinking and feeling of the character and this is the best way to do it.

Here’re some reasons to use Third Person, in my view: 1) You want to follow several equally important characters, and it doesn’t make sense, or it becomes too confusing, to be jumping between several First Person narrators. 2) The story has such a scope that you need to follow the whole more often and give weight to the general ‘up-in-the-air’ POV, instead of being stuck to a particular ‘down-on-the ground’ POV. 3) You want to show important things that the character does not know about and maybe never will. In one of Alexander Kent’s novels (probably STAND INTO DANGER), the MC is in love with a woman who is tortured and killed. We know what happened to her and some of the characters around him also know what happened to her, but they let the MC think she just abandoned him and went on her way, safely. This kind of twist wouldn’t be possible, or it would be more difficult, if the novel had been written in the First Person.

3: How do I open a novel? How do I open a story? How to write the first sentence?

I never gave too much thought to the first sentence. Just start writing. If you think the first sentence is that important, leave it to fine tune in the end. Just start. Focus on the story. Say what you want to say. Just go and go and don’t stop. Honestly, a writer is too often looking for an excuse to stop and not write. It sounds silly but it happens. I believe it’s because of the weight of the responsibility, or of the identification with the characters, or whatever. But it’s important to be determined to go through it. To get to the end. I can’t say I write every day (I wish!). Sometimes I have to stop and think, or am busy with something else. But I have to be absolutely determined to reach the end, or I will not be satisfied with myself.

That said, I have been paying more and more attention to the beginning of a story. It’s the one part I usually re-write, many times because my beta-readers annoyingly ask for it. But what I think it’s important is having the same care as you would in a movie: you want to start in a way that the reader feels chained to the book, compelled to read just one more page. And that means starting with a bang! Starting in an unexpected, strong, sometimes shocking way. Or be very very good, careful, invested, in the writing itself.

When you study screenwriting they tell you that the Initial Image should come back a full circle into the Final Image. I like that, even though I don’t think I always achieve it. But try it. It’s not bad advice.

4: Can I write more than one story at a time?

Well… I do! I’m always entertaining several stories at the same time. Usually, they will be at different stages. I will be researching one and editing and re-writing another. I will be writing the first chapter of one and the last chapter of another. I pretty much let my brain choose the one I absolutely must be writing at a particular moment. Sometimes my unconscious mind really has to come out in one way or the other. Having several stories on the table helps me prevent writer’s block: if I am not able to work on a story I’ll turn to another and come back later.

But some writers can’t do this. They need to stick to one story each time. It just depends.

5: Do characters do things you did not expect? Do characters have minds of their own?

The thread this question generated was filled with polemic and surprising comments. Some people, maybe because they’re addicted to outlines or maybe because they don’t like to feel they lose control, would say it is impossible that something coming out of their wits would do something unexpected. To me, it happens frequently. Characters just ignore what I want and do what they want. What does that mean? It probably means the character is so consistently built it is not coherent anymore to act as I have planned before. Or it means I take the risk of actually empathizing with the character and understanding what he/she would feel in a certain situation, losing a bit of control myself. Or it means that a writer is indeed a bit schizophrenic as David Mamet suggests. But I do believe characters have minds of their own and that’s one of the most difficult things to manage when you write.

And that’s it. For now these are the questions I will give my input to. Don’t take it too seriously. I’m not a guru of anything. I just thought it could be useful to some people, that’s all. See you next week.

Foreign language movies don’t have a particular good time at the Academy Awards. Even though a handful of them are well considered and given this or that award, very few ever contended for the major Best Picture Oscar. Still, in 2001, Ang Lee’s CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON came close. In a batch that included Soderbergh’s TRAFFIC, CHOCOLATE and ERIN BROCKOVICH, the Oscar went to Ridley Scott’s powerhouse GLADIATOR. Even though I liked GLADIATOR I have also been very critical of it. I will speak of that movie in another occasion, but one thing I absolutely must tell you: CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON is by far the better movie. With Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh in the roles of their lives, and Zhang Zyiy in a refreshingly stunning performance, this Chinese-spoken movie is brilliantly revisiting the Chinese Martial Arts genre, which people who know my books know I enjoy.

 

It’s been a few decades since Bruce Lee’s Kung-fu movies conquered the West. Since then, we’ve seen the rise of many talented artists as Jackie Chan or Jet Li. I particularly liked the low-budget Hong Kong phase of Jackie Chan, who was both funny and skillful. Kung-fu movies are a lot like musicals as if you are watching the performance of dancers in carefully choreographed moves, but there’s a kind of life and death tension that gets your attention. And Jackie Chan has a lot of Charlie Chaplin in him as well. But the best movie I’d seen on Kung-fu was ENTER THE DRAGON with Bruce Lee at his best. Until, of course, CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON. In this movie, Ang Lee picked up most of the Kung-fu movie tropes and made a serious dramatic movie with them. After this one there were several others, like HERO or THE HOUSE OF THE FLYING DAGGERS, but CROUCHING TIGER was the first, I believe.

One other interesting aspect of the movie, for those of you who know about writing, is its structure. Most movies nowadays, and most writing in the West, have an Aristotelian 3-Act structure. But in the East they use a different structure called Kishotenketsu – a 4-Act structure. This includes a third act that brings something new to the story and propels it into another dimension. Let me illustrate it with this movie.

In the first act we discover the characters: Li Mu Bai is a retiring legendary warrior who wants to give up his sword Green Destiny and rest, maybe even live his love with his friend Yu Shu Lien. But the sword is stolen by a young woman, Jiao Long, who has secretly learned Kung-fu from the criminal Jade Fox who is posing as her long-time nanny. The Jade Fox loaves Li Mu Bai and all he represents and the young woman wants to use the stolen sword to flee from an arranged marriage and become an outlaw herself – free and independent. So this is a classic first act, presenting the main characters and conflict and the catalyst to the adventure.

In the second act we see how Li Mu Bai and Yu Shu Lien find the stolen sword and expose the Jade Fox. But in recovering the sword, Li Mu Bai finds that the young thief could be a worthy student of his art, someone to teach before he retires altogether. She resists. But without the sword, she is compelled to accept the marriage and do her duty. In this second act, the obstacles seem more visible and the goals of the protagonists more difficult to achieve.

But then we have a third act that throws the story into another path. Luo Xiao Hu, a thief from the desert, tries to stop Jiao Long’s marriage and take her with him. We also learn that they were both lovers in the past, at a time the young woman was kidnapped in the desert. This new storyline turns the story upside down and we start understanding why Jiao Long is so keen in getting her freedom.

In the fourth act, Jiao Long steals the sword again and flees alone into the wilderness, trying to find her place in the world. The beautiful end of the movie moves me every time I watch it and I will avoid spoiling it for everyone who still hasn’t seen this incredible film. But the key to understanding the core of the story is the love tale, of course.

 

Narrative structure, as Language (see my take on ARRIVAL), also determines our behavior, the way we see things and the way we act. This 4-Act structure seems less worried with showing the outer conflict of the characters and more focused on the motivations and developments of the inner conflict. This is interesting. It’s also a different perspective on narrative. And as I mentioned before, I think, the richness of perspectives improves us all. Looking for alternatives and other ways of thinking is also an attitude. Something we could and should commit to. Solving our inner tensions and fears allows us to discover new things, new ways, new ideas. I have been thinking for a while on writing a 4-Act story. I’m still not there, but I’m getting closer. What do you think?

 

James Cameron’s ALIENS has more than 40 aka’s around the world, I’ve just found out. In Argentina it’s ALIENS – EL REGRESO (or ALIENS – THE RETURN), in Italy it’s ALIENS – SCONTRO FINALE (or ALIENS – THE FINAL ENCOUNTER). In Portugal it’s ALIENS – O RECONTRO FINAL (also ALIENS THE FINAL ENCOUNTER).

Of course at that point (1986) there was no way of knowing there would be at least 7 or 8 more movies on the infamous alien (if I’m counting the Prometheus and the AxP storylines correctly), so it wasn’t the final encounter by any measure. I actually watched the Cameron movie in the theatre, before I watched the Ridley Scott groundbreaking first installment, and even though I’ve watched both several times since then, I still like the Cameron movie better. But that’s just me: I love military action and I think ALIENS is one of the best Scifi military action movies ever made. And as I watched it last night one more time I concluded three things: 1)Cameron is a really talented director; 2) Cameron, Giler and Hill’s screenplay is really-really good, and; 3) the Midpoint in this movie is very powerful.

Let me go through these conclusions one by one, with special emphasis on the last one.

James Cameron is a household name. Just in Scifi, you can’t avoid icons like THE ABYSS, TERMINATOR or AVATAR, whatever you think of the movies themselves (thumbs up for those who think AVATAR is a downgraded, hyper-marketed, silly version of DANCES WITH WOLVES). But you can also speak of the very solid TITANIC phenomenon and, of course, it is doubtful the ALIEN would have become a franchise if the second movie of the series, Cameron’s ALIENS, wasn’t such a great film. But as I watched it again last night I couldn’t help but notice the little things that make it so. Cameron’s use of sound is brilliant. There’s not a lot of music and a lot of the movie is very silent and quiet… until it isn’t. The feeling throughout a large part of the movie is of eeriness and discomfort. And then there are some scenes I absolutely love. Several of them. As the moment Newt is fearful with water to her waist, grabbing her doll’s head in her hands, while waiting for Ripley and Hicks to cut the metal grid above her to bring her to safety… but too late. It’s a stunningly tense and beautiful scene and Cameron’s choice of camera work and actor’s directing is very strong. Or the moment of the first confrontation with the aliens, where confusion is so intense that only yesterday did I understand that about half the casualties of the Marines were self-inflicted or acid induced (pun intended).

The script is also very well written. You can see it in the richness of the supporting characters, like Bill Paxton’s Hudson. But mostly, the first half hour or so is brilliantly paced. It’s a constant build-up with little action, but you feel the tension rising relentlessly. The way the script keeps hiding the final act is perfect. Only in the final act do we see the Alien Queen and real danger Ripley is facing. We know ‘it must be something we haven’t seen yet’(as Bishop puts it) but we don’t really know what it is. And the way Ripley goes from ‘fifth wheel’ to a leader is also very interesting.

But this script also features an impressive Midpoint. I always have trouble explaining the Midpoint beat of a movie. Why is it there? What does it do? What do we do with it? Blake Snyder used to say: “If you can crack the Midpoint, you can crack the story.” And in most stories I write, I find he was right. The Midpoint changes the movie. It divides it in two. Before the Midpoint we were watching a movie, or reading a story, after the Midpoint we’re looking at something else entirely. Like in MATRIX. At the Midpoint Neo meets the Oracle. Until that moment we thought ‘he must be the One’, or ‘it’s Neo against the Machine’. After that point he’s just there to save Morpheus – and he becomes the One in the process. After the Midpoint we’re just watching Oracle’s prophecy unfolding. Or in GRAVITY: until the Midpoint we had Bullock’s Ryan and Clooney’s Kowalski trying to get to the Space Station, but after the Midpoint we see Kowalski dying and Ryan is alone trying to save herself. The best Midpoint I’ve seen in recent years, though, was in MANCHESTER BY THE SEA. The event at the Midpoint completely changes our perspective and we don’t watch a completely different movie after that but we notice we’ve actually been watching a different movie than we thought we were all along.

The Midpoint is very important but it’s difficult to explain both what it is and why it’s so important. It’s like we had a period of maturation of our relationship with the characters until then and at this point we’re ready for the final challenge, to face the real danger, to go for the moon.

ALIENS Midpoint makes it great. Until the Midpoint we were watching a gung-ho military action thriller. After the Midpoint we are faced with a strong, unpretentious, feminist plot. What happens at the ALIENS Midpoint? This happens: after the first disastrous battle against the aliens, a group of survivors manage to escape to an Operations room where they settle and plan their way to safety. After they have prepared, Ripley goes kiss little girl Newt good night. Newt says she doesn’t want to go to sleep because she dreams with monsters. Ripley tries to calm her down saying she will be in the next room and that she will never abandon her. Newt asks her: «Promise?» and Ripley replies: «Promise.» And that’s it. Until then, the movie was about Ripley confronting her fears and facing the monster in her past. It was her against the Alien. From the Midpoint on the movie is something else: it’s a fight between two strong females protecting their young. The Alien Queen and the Human Leader will face each other to the death. That’s the Final Encounter. Not a ‘Return’ as they would say in Argentina. Ripley is not there to face the Alien anymore. It’s an Encounter, as the Italian title affirms. It’s the face-off between two bad-ass females.  After the Midpoint, Ripley is there to do only one thing: to protect Newt and bring her to safety. Period. Whatever it takes. Even when she has escaped already, she will go back to the lion’s den to retrieve the lost little girl.

This Midpoint actually makes this movie, in my view, both more powerful and relatable but also in a class of its own. It’s a feminist movie. It’s bold and discrete at the same time. ALIENS is one of those action thrillers that might be commonly undervalued and rejected as a shallow narrative. As Cameron himself, I’d bet. But that ignores the power that it conveys. It’s for sure one of my favorite Scifi movies. Maybe not in the Top 5, but somewhere close. How about you? What do you think of it?