Finally got around to watching ‘District 13’ and was left with the same complaint that follows a large number of action and fantasy based film, shows and books: amazing is often multiplied and, therefore, diluted.
What do I mean by this? District 13 stars a petty-thief free-runner who can run up walls, jump across roof tops and acrobatically dispatch any bad guy in his way. Amazing. It also stars a policeman who is a free-runner and does much the same as the lead character. Less amazing. The good guys are relentlessly chased by a band of gangsters, many of which are free-runners and are able to keep up with and occasionally better their opponents. Un-amazing. If the petty-thief stood alone then he would stand out.
This is nothing new. Watch any action film – kung-fu movies are the most obvious examples. Bruce Lee will beat the hell out of a bunch other kung-fu dudes. Even the man on the street who gets in the hero’s way will adopt a kung-fu stance – that weird three-quarter scuttle, hands held in open fists. The same is true in shows like True-Blood: the new vampire in town is quickly followed by a pack of vampires, a vampire bar and then, it turns out, befriends a shape-shifter and a telepath. When these pockets of super-humans get together they are often surrounded by ‘norms’ who are able to compensate for their lack of abilities by being able to kill the undead with a baseball bat and go undercover as if they’d spent a lifetime doing espionage training. In shows such as ‘Heroes’ it turns out that everyone on screen has suffered some strange genetic mutation. Everyone is a hero. And, in the words of Syndrome: “When everyone is a hero, nobody is a hero.”
When writing a story or presenting a movie you are creating a new world. You are also framing that world within the story: when an amazing individual falls in love with someone who, without them knowing, is also amazing… and then finds out their cousin is amazing… and they are being pursued by an evil but amazing villain… who employs an elite group of amazing henchmen: the basic maths suggests that everyone in your world is probably, in some way, amazing. You have quickly gone from intelligent concept drama to ‘hey wouldn’t it be cool if…’ teen action.
Tags: framing, super-hero, World Building
Written by Adrian Robinson
28th January, 2010
