Tim Burton's new movie, Reset
Oh man, so I was in the theater, very excited, and I was watching the new Tim Burton movie -- only this was something people actually cared about seeing, not just another masturbation into dim, oblique post-goth translations of other works.
This film, it was a little like he'd remade Die Hard and Dark City all at once, with a strange surreal-noir (you know, Burtonesque) story of a building taken hostage, only we didn't go outside the building (except, if I recall, the roof) until the very end, and so we never knew where or what kind of a crazy world the story was in. But there's more, and I wish I remembered more clearly now, but I know we were unclear if we were supposed to root for the hostages and their attempts to become free or the hostage-takers and their undeclared motives for taking hostages, or with the police/etc. trying to come in and save the day (which for most of the film are a force we do not know and have not met, but keep hearing about).
But what's really weird, and where I'm of course the fuzziest now, is that there was something about time travel or inter-dimensional travel or something, and the further into the film and the stranger things get the more we realize this isn't plain old Planet Earth. What I do remember is that the building the hostage situation was in turned out to be some big science building with a time machine or crazy dimension-warping... thing... inside it (kids this is the danger of falling asleep to Star Trek episodes), and that the people being held hostage turned out to be trustees and socialites and scientists.
Because of this, see, a couple of heroic hostages sneak away and use the machine. It's fuzzy if this means they go back in time to the beginning of the story or if they leap to a parallel dimension or if they sent a message back to their same selves and changed the outcome or what, but what happens is halfway through the story or so, they change the story drastically. So we start over, catching things about ten or fifteen minutes in, and now things go very differently. The building has been sealed with some kind of technology/magic (remember, it's all a little more Burton than real-life anyway) which essentially coats the building in glass and the hostage takers are now inside, just as before, but two of the hostages (I vaguely remember these as George Clooney and someone else, a woman... Julia Roberts?) know what's going on and avoid capture. The hostage-takers, led by I think Paul Giamatti?, do things differently now, and we start the story again, now with the upper-hand going to the hostages. We come to an impasse and someone else jumps back in the machine and we wipe the slate a third time, only now both sides have some degree of advantage.
There's something weird about the more times you use the machine the more warped and unlike the original dimension/timeline (Earth Prime?) things get, and this is where the Burtonisms start to show up as the world just feels more and more peculiar. Odd shapes, cultural bizarreness, unusual and unlikely inventions replacing ours. The implication is that each time they try, the world outside the science facility is changing drastically and the world inside, a relative bubble of normalcy, is only seeing a little of that bleed in, or something. I don't really remember. But it's a strange game of cat and mouse between hostages and hostage-takers as each fights their way back to the machine and uses it to back the story up with more advantage than the other side, all while cops try to find their way in and so on. It's obvious they're mutating things outside so much that the world won't be recognizable at all when they're done, but they're struggling for survival, or control of something (the machine?), or whatever: they're motivated and they won't give up.
So we're watching this in the theater and I'm thinking, "this is the first time I've been excited about a Burton movie since Big Fish," and I'm amazed at how complex and bizarre they're willing to take things, how we keep resetting and telling a different layer laterally to the same characters and events, rather than building a linear forward-moving story, and how weird it must have been to plot and structure it this way (even though upon waking, it doesn't feel that weird to me... still intriguing though). But, alas, the movie has a really bland, uninspired ending. I forget it now, but I know it was unanimously agreed upon as bad. Good movie, bad ending.
But here's the genius of it. Tim Burton very quietly released a "sequel." Actually he released new prints of the same film under the same title while it was still in theaters, only everything after the first fifteen minutes were completely different: when they start changing things, the changes just got better -- more inspired -- and I think the cops got inside and they started jumping back and changing things too -- and I remember being in the theater for the sequel, for some screening, and the audience had been chatting away for the first act which they'd seen before and suddenly after that first "jump," everything was different, with ratcheted up tension and a more realized universe, and we all shut the fuck up and stared in awe as the story just went somewhere more exciting. It was a coup, a sneaky move that nobody saw coming but everybody loved: the movie about resetting things and doing it again and where each reset fucked up the outside world into an even weirder configuration, used its own power on itself and reset. It was really exciting.
Eventually the new movie climaxed on the roof, and things are so bizarre that the buildings are all dangling by cables from some overhead rock structure, like daisy-chained christmas ornaments, and there was nothing below them but more cable and more buildings. It was supremely weird, and a lot of people didn't like it and got up to leave before the movie was even over (prompting, I remember, an out-loud laugh from me... which in turn prompted me to make a silent apology to the girls sitting in front of me when they stink-eyed me), but at least it was different and it wasn't afraid to be so.
The truth is, though, everybody left this movie still kind of disappointed, but just before the climax someone (I want to say it was Giamatti, the hostage-taker) had gone back down to the machine to "go back and sort this out once and for all," and we didn't see him come out the other side yet... so we knew a third version was coming, and somehow we all knew the third reset would be the one. And if not that, the fourth.
Somehow the prospect of going back and warping things further and giving yourself more knowledge about what to do next was a really exciting one to the audience, kept us coming back for more. In real life, I think it would be exhausting and disorienting and frustrating -- not to mention a cop-out and a headache.
Still, part of me wonders if I could tell some kind of a marketable story here. I almost think I could.
This film, it was a little like he'd remade Die Hard and Dark City all at once, with a strange surreal-noir (you know, Burtonesque) story of a building taken hostage, only we didn't go outside the building (except, if I recall, the roof) until the very end, and so we never knew where or what kind of a crazy world the story was in. But there's more, and I wish I remembered more clearly now, but I know we were unclear if we were supposed to root for the hostages and their attempts to become free or the hostage-takers and their undeclared motives for taking hostages, or with the police/etc. trying to come in and save the day (which for most of the film are a force we do not know and have not met, but keep hearing about).
But what's really weird, and where I'm of course the fuzziest now, is that there was something about time travel or inter-dimensional travel or something, and the further into the film and the stranger things get the more we realize this isn't plain old Planet Earth. What I do remember is that the building the hostage situation was in turned out to be some big science building with a time machine or crazy dimension-warping... thing... inside it (kids this is the danger of falling asleep to Star Trek episodes), and that the people being held hostage turned out to be trustees and socialites and scientists.
Because of this, see, a couple of heroic hostages sneak away and use the machine. It's fuzzy if this means they go back in time to the beginning of the story or if they leap to a parallel dimension or if they sent a message back to their same selves and changed the outcome or what, but what happens is halfway through the story or so, they change the story drastically. So we start over, catching things about ten or fifteen minutes in, and now things go very differently. The building has been sealed with some kind of technology/magic (remember, it's all a little more Burton than real-life anyway) which essentially coats the building in glass and the hostage takers are now inside, just as before, but two of the hostages (I vaguely remember these as George Clooney and someone else, a woman... Julia Roberts?) know what's going on and avoid capture. The hostage-takers, led by I think Paul Giamatti?, do things differently now, and we start the story again, now with the upper-hand going to the hostages. We come to an impasse and someone else jumps back in the machine and we wipe the slate a third time, only now both sides have some degree of advantage.
There's something weird about the more times you use the machine the more warped and unlike the original dimension/timeline (Earth Prime?) things get, and this is where the Burtonisms start to show up as the world just feels more and more peculiar. Odd shapes, cultural bizarreness, unusual and unlikely inventions replacing ours. The implication is that each time they try, the world outside the science facility is changing drastically and the world inside, a relative bubble of normalcy, is only seeing a little of that bleed in, or something. I don't really remember. But it's a strange game of cat and mouse between hostages and hostage-takers as each fights their way back to the machine and uses it to back the story up with more advantage than the other side, all while cops try to find their way in and so on. It's obvious they're mutating things outside so much that the world won't be recognizable at all when they're done, but they're struggling for survival, or control of something (the machine?), or whatever: they're motivated and they won't give up.
So we're watching this in the theater and I'm thinking, "this is the first time I've been excited about a Burton movie since Big Fish," and I'm amazed at how complex and bizarre they're willing to take things, how we keep resetting and telling a different layer laterally to the same characters and events, rather than building a linear forward-moving story, and how weird it must have been to plot and structure it this way (even though upon waking, it doesn't feel that weird to me... still intriguing though). But, alas, the movie has a really bland, uninspired ending. I forget it now, but I know it was unanimously agreed upon as bad. Good movie, bad ending.
But here's the genius of it. Tim Burton very quietly released a "sequel." Actually he released new prints of the same film under the same title while it was still in theaters, only everything after the first fifteen minutes were completely different: when they start changing things, the changes just got better -- more inspired -- and I think the cops got inside and they started jumping back and changing things too -- and I remember being in the theater for the sequel, for some screening, and the audience had been chatting away for the first act which they'd seen before and suddenly after that first "jump," everything was different, with ratcheted up tension and a more realized universe, and we all shut the fuck up and stared in awe as the story just went somewhere more exciting. It was a coup, a sneaky move that nobody saw coming but everybody loved: the movie about resetting things and doing it again and where each reset fucked up the outside world into an even weirder configuration, used its own power on itself and reset. It was really exciting.
Eventually the new movie climaxed on the roof, and things are so bizarre that the buildings are all dangling by cables from some overhead rock structure, like daisy-chained christmas ornaments, and there was nothing below them but more cable and more buildings. It was supremely weird, and a lot of people didn't like it and got up to leave before the movie was even over (prompting, I remember, an out-loud laugh from me... which in turn prompted me to make a silent apology to the girls sitting in front of me when they stink-eyed me), but at least it was different and it wasn't afraid to be so.
The truth is, though, everybody left this movie still kind of disappointed, but just before the climax someone (I want to say it was Giamatti, the hostage-taker) had gone back down to the machine to "go back and sort this out once and for all," and we didn't see him come out the other side yet... so we knew a third version was coming, and somehow we all knew the third reset would be the one. And if not that, the fourth.
Somehow the prospect of going back and warping things further and giving yourself more knowledge about what to do next was a really exciting one to the audience, kept us coming back for more. In real life, I think it would be exhausting and disorienting and frustrating -- not to mention a cop-out and a headache.
Still, part of me wonders if I could tell some kind of a marketable story here. I almost think I could.