Update

OK, one of my New Year's resolutions this year is to do more blogging. Unfortunately, this blog doesn't really lend to a regular schedule (I just hop on this soap box when I see some egregiously botched filmed entertainment). So where can you find daily (that's right--daily) opinions, reviews and helpful information from me? Why, right here, at TV on the Brain. (Mmm, brains...)

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Terminator Salvation

In the latest installment of the Terminator franchise, humanity battles machinery and loses. Unfortunately, that’s not a plot spoiler; it’s a diagnosis. Remedy, and actual spoilers, after the jump.

You can’t knock Terminator Salvation as boring. Director McG, aided no doubt by a phalanx of FX wizards and stuntpeople, delivers some pretty impressive action set pieces, especially the showdown at the 7-11 and ensuing chase, and Marcus Wright’s escape from Connor’s Resistance base. If the final set-piece in the metalworks plant finally tips from Cameron homage to Cameron rip-off, well, at least it’s still visceral and unpredictable.

The spectacle and the action are firmly in place. Why, then, does the movie feel so negligible, so underwhelming? If the film feels like it could float away, it’s because it has no weight. Lots of things happen, and some of them are even pretty exciting, but they happen to cardboard people, in a story that ultimately doesn’t mean anything. Here’s how to fix that:

1. Give Marcus Wright some history. He’s our main protagonist, but he’s basically a cipher. We know he was on death row, and he makes an oblique reference to the reason (something about his brother and some cops dying), but who is this guy? Did he just rob a liquor store, because I don’t think he needs to save the entire human race and literally give John Connor his heart to atone for that (he already got the needle!). Is he supposed to be some hardened murderer? Is he just the sort of sad-sack who always whines about what a loser he is? Who was he going to look for up north? He was all ready to abandon Kyle and Star to find this person, but then he just sort of forgets about him/her. He makes a lot of noise about second chances, and his entire existence raises questions about what makes us who we are as people; there’s a poignant story to be mined there, but we don’t get it. When Skynet welcomes Marcus back to the fold, it should discover that even though it chose the perfect person for this mission, a representative of everything wrong with humanity, whatever made that monster human is still more powerful than the circuits it used to convert him. As it was, I'm sure it was painful to rip that whatever-it-was out of the back of his head, but there was never really any question he would.
   
   
2. Have the characters react like human beings (or, in Marcus’s case, very human androids). Marcus wakes up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and he seems only very mildly surprised that (a) there’s been an apocalypse, and (b) he just woke up from the frakking dead. (He screams a little at first, but he then he just sort of gets over it.) Soon thereafter, Kyle gives Marcus a very redundant exposition dump re: Judgment Day and terminators, but never seems at all curious why the new guy never noticed the end of the world till now. After Marcus is captured, John Connor freaks out about the machines killing his daddy, Kyle Reese, and Marcus just pipes up that, hey, he knows where Kyle Reese is, without stopping to ponder the question of how in the world teen Kyle Reese is supposed to be adult John Connor’s daddy. These non-reactions shine a blinding spotlight on the characters’ fictional nature; they’re clearly not real people, and it’s hard to care about them as such.
   
   
3. Have the characters act like human beings. We meet the Resistance, and they all wear the exact same dour expression, like they’re all sharing a single depressive personality. I know it’s the end of the world, guys, and there’s probably some kind of personality shortage, but come on, where’s the dude who copes with stress by cracking wise? Where’s the scrappy little guy who’s always bouncing off the walls? Where’s the foxhole philosopher? Where’s the sweet-natured dim bulb? In short, where are the personalities that would make these people feel real and let us invest in their fates?
   
   
4. Kill a few characters. Aside from the set-piece that introduces us to John Connor and a few non-speaking extras at a 7-11, this is a remarkably bloodless movie. Here’s a group of people fighting machines whose only purpose is to kill, and yet the only above-the-line character who dies is Marcus Wright, who doesn’t seem particularly attached to his life anyway. Why should I worry about these people’s survival if none of them will die? I know it’s a PG-13 movie, but kill some folks off-screen! The high survival rate is killing the tension.
   
   
5. Send a message. Both of Cameron’s Terminators had a clear message: the escalating armament of the Cold War was going to get us all killed, and we would have no one to blame but ourselves. The second film in particular attacked the question of fate, whether our self-annihilation was inevitable or whether we could turn it around. (Ironically, in real life the looming threat was eventually diffused not by clear-eyed prophets but economics; humanity’s greed trumped its aggression.) Terminator Salvation was about...uh...Oh! What it means to be human! In the sense that...humans are better than machines! Because we have hearts! And hearts are important! So...there! Like I said above, Marcus’s character begs for an exploration of what makes a person who he is, and what it means to be human; John Connor touched on it as well in his “hey, you know what, let’s not kill our own POWs” speech. There’s a kernel of a theme there. Let’s nurture it into a full-grown, flowering theme.
   
   In a hypothetical world where machines are just as smart and smarter than humans, and have opposable thumbs and everything, what makes humans special? For one, lateral thinking; machines do just what they’re programmed to do, and only what they’re programmed to do, but humans can devise creative, adaptive solutions to problems. Like I said before, the action in this movie is great, and the humans were necessarily clever fighting the machines. I just think the cleverness could have been made more thematic, and therefore more resonant with the whole, with a little dialogue and a little attitude from the characters.
   
   More than any tactical advantage, though, what sets humans apart from any species on the planet thus far is culture. I don’t mean John Connor should have a couple of salvaged Picassos on his wall (though that might have been amusing); I mean the lowest of low culture—slang, music, religion, superstition, food, booze, sex, family. If we’re making the argument that humanity deserves to survive even after its own self-orchestrated undoing, we need to show a humanity worth preserving. What are we fighting for? What would the universe lose if mankind vanished? If we’re living another day just for more fighting, an unending cycle of violence, with nothing human to balance it out, maybe humanity should lose the war. Why not? But if that 7-11 were stocked with survivors who’d developed a more Bedouin sense of hospitality (with one token selfish guy for drama), we get a brief scene or two of post-apocalyptic society (intellectually interesting, emotionally arresting), plus a stronger foundation for the movie’s premise that, like Marcus, humanity may have screwed up absolutely everything, but it deserves a second chance. And as Marcus relaxes into the warmth of human community, we contrast John, a full-fledged human who holds himself apart from the barracks camaraderie raging on outside his lonely cell. He can’t indulge his humanity because he’s too busy saving it, but we make the same point: there’s something in humanity that must be saved. Now we’ve got some real stakes.
   
   The movie does make one argument for humanity’s superiority to machines: the human heart. Marcus is mostly machine, but he has some freakishly strong human heart; Marcus starts out a loner, but he ends up breaking into Skynet Central to save those lovable tykes Kyle and Star (also, er, because he has nowhere else to go); Marcus rejects Helena Bonham Carter’s offer of...something or other and saves the humans because he looooves them (and because HBC is horrible and mean; seriously, who would chose the machines that used you against your will? It’s not like we’ve had any indication Marcus is more a “go with the winners” kind of guy, hint, hint). John’s heart story is even less impressive: sure, he makes that one emotional appeal to the Resistance not to blow up thousands of human beings, but aside from tying to nothing previous thematically, the appeal was ultimately pretty self-interested—Kyle Reese dies, John Connor ceases to exist. Neither story really makes a case for the heart as an asset, much less the seat of humanity’s superiority.
   
   This is a harder fix. On the one hand the culture/community fix above helps because it shows humanity has a heart, and that helps. But if this is the crux of the human v. machine argument, and the film seems to want it to be, heart needs to be crucial to the climax. Suggestions: first, give Marcus a stronger incentive to abandon humanity. When Skynet welcomes him back to the fold, HBC should lay out some vision of the superior world they’ll build once the fatally flawed humans are dealt with. Don’t make him whole and human-looking again; make him think humanity won’t accept him back. Make siding with the machines the logical option. The one and only reason he sides with humanity should be his love for Kyle and Star.
   
   Second, make John the one to order the bomb strike on Skynet Central. Don’t tell him Kyle Reese is inside. Make him so determined to save humanity that he’s willing to sacrifice humans (who, let’s not forget, are already being fed into furnaces anyway). Let his wife (who needs more to do in the film anyway) appeal to his heart, the one only she knows he still has. Once his heart leads him away from the bombing—the logical option—let Marcus contact him from inside Skynet and offer him a much more dangerous plan: Marcus will sneak in John’s strike team so they can free the prisoners and upload a virus to the heart of Skynet, behind the firewalls (appropriately ironic, in light of T3). More soldiers will die, not too many more prisoners may be saved, but it’s just the sort of sentimental thing a human would do. Then, only after the smoke from the final set-piece has cleared, Marcus can introduce John to the kid he wanted to save: Kyle Reese. And there’s your capper: by following his heart, John saved himself (and his dad). Roll credits.
   

None of these changes should hurt the lovely action scenes already in the film, which is important, because this is an action film, you know. They might mean slightly more time between set-pieces, but I actually like that: I think the film could have used a little more breathing room, not just for character development but to give us a chance to anticipate the destruction—develop some dread. Never underestimate the power of dread.

There are a few more loose ends: Marcus doesn’t have much of a goal until he finds out he’s a machine, but I think that could be remedied by giving Kyle a stronger drive to find join the Resistance and Marcus suggesting if they’re going to join the fight they should go all the way to the top: John Connor. Say Marcus knew John Connor back in the day and we also have a reason why Skynet left Marcus’s pre-apocalypse memories intact: he needs those memories to identify and get close to his target. If we eliminate Kyle Reese as part of Skynet’s scheme, we eliminate some plot holes—if Skynet knows who Kyle is, why not just kill him immediately and wipe out John Connor’s whole existence? Once Marcus finds Kyle, why don’t they just scoop him up—they had a whole night to do it! Instead, Marcus the infiltrator has a single goal, to find and kill John Connor, and his hooking up with Kyle Reese is just a nice, ironic coincidence. Then, after his assassination attempt fails and Marcus realizes he’s a machine, he gets new twin goals, to rescue Kyle and to find out what he is. This way our protagonists have goals and the bad guys have a sensible scheme. I love it when a plan comes together.

I’d also change the MacGuffin signal from a magical off switch to a command frequency: it just makes more sense the machines would be broadcasting that. We also need a clearer idea why the magic signal makes an air strike viable now when it wouldn’t have been before, some bomb-proof defense the magic signal would disable.

That’s about it. What did I forget? Where did I go wrong? What’s the fatal flaw in my brilliant plan? Let me know in the comments. And remember: every story deserves to be fixed. Even the ones that haven’t yet discovered they’re really machines on the inside.
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Halloween in May

Listen, friends, let me take a moment to talk about something serious. If you start seeing people who are not there, please, I beg you, go to a doctor. If your dead fiancé returns? See a physician. Old army buddy who died on the field of battle? Make a date with a neurologist. A manifestation of your misspent youth, invisible to everyone else? That girl whose death you kind of caused? Anyone at all invisible to those around you? Seek medical care. Trust me; you’ll thank me later.

Spoilers for House, The Unusuals, Bones and Grey’s Anatomy after the jump.

My TV is being haunted. Last Monday the eponymous Dr. House continued his efforts to stop hallucinating Cutthroat Bitch, his best friend’s dead girlfriend. Two nights later, on The Unusuals, Detective Delahoy couldn’t get away from his high school girlfriend, who’s not technically dead but also not exactly real. Thursday on Bones Agent Booth kept conversing with Stewie, the evil British baby from Family Guy, a cartoon, and the latest in a season-long line of apparitions Booth’s chatted with. And only an hour later Denny Duquette, the most infamous apparition of the 2008-2009 TV season, made a victory lap on Grey’s Anatomy. What’s up with all these tête-à-hallucinatory-têtes? Well, in a word, sweeps.

May, along with February and November, is a sweeps month, the time of year when TV shows throw off all restraint. It’s a ratings Black Friday, when every show on the air competes for the best ratings in the most desirable demographics and, therefore, the highest ad rates. So they pull out all the stops: Deaths! Weddings! Babies! Hookups! Famous guest stars! The main character’s secret past revealed! And, of course, ghosts.

But even by sweeps standards, this last TV week saw an awful lot of ghosts. And not just on shows with ghosts or supernatural elements built into the premise—strictly realistic, scientific shows are sprouting spirits right and left. Either some sort of secret pact was made on the strike line last year, or there’s something in the Hollywood water. Regardless, while a showrunner can’t know he’s about to hit a sweeps ghost pileup, he can tell the best ghost story possible. How? Glad you asked.

1. Make sure the ghost has a reason to show up. Since all these shows take place, as mentioned above, in strictly realistic worlds (well, TV-realistic), almost none of them are willing to commit to actual spirits; instead, except for House, every character who chatted with an apparition turned out to have a brain tumor (House just has messed-up brain chemistry thanks to his longstanding Vicodin addiction; is Abbott Labs watching this show?). Brain tumors, of course, speak to another long-standing sweeps tradition, the fatal illness. But more importantly, why bring in a ghost if you’re not a ghost show?

‘Cause ghosts know stuff. Amber can tell House exactly what he’s thinking because she’s in his brain. Delahoy’s high school girlfriend not only knows what’s on his mind, she knows before he does. In an age when monologues and asides have passed out of fashion—no modern TV character is going to stop and ramble on to nobody about his fear of death, even if he has the “To be or not to be” speech in his back pocket—there’s no easier way to have a character talk to himself than to pair him up with a manifestation of his own subconscious. Voila—monologue in dialogue drag.

So what insight do our sample ghosts bring? Let’s do a run-down:

• House: House takes way too much Vicodin, to the point it’s threatening his sanity. Raison d’etre rating: 5 out of 5; as wakeup calls for eroding sanity go, there aren’t many clearer than conversations with imaginary people. Plus, Amber died because of the same arrogant substance abuse that’s causing this problem.

• The Unusuals: Delahoy maybe wishes his life had gone differently. RER: 1; as symbolism goes, the high school sweetheart was both shallow and on the nose, and why couldn’t Delahoy figure this out on his own?

• Bones: Booth is not his father, Booth shouldn’t blame himself for his army buddy’s death, and there’s no way Booth is going to knock up Brennan and not be involved in the kid’s life. Maybe they shouldn’t take that tumor out, it’s been pretty therapeutic for Booth. RER: 4 (the imaginary hockey hero is a nice contrast for the real deadbeat dad), 4 (the army buddy gets to save Booth), and 1 (ditto the Unusuals complaint—on-the-nose symbolism, any idiot or Booth should’ve known this from the beginning).

• Grey’s Anatomy: Denny may be dead but he still loves Izzie enough to stalk and harass her until she loves him back. Also, Izzie’s probably going to die. Unlike Booth, Izzie should rip that sucker out ASAP. RER: 0; technically only Denny stalking Izzie could show Izzie Denny would stalk her, but since I think the idea was to show how much he loved her, this gets negative points. As far as revealing a brain tumor, ditto House, minus several points for dragging it out so very long.

Basically, if you’re going to tell a ghost story, make sure it’s really a ghost story, and not just a story into which you can wedge a ghost. Then, pick the right ghost.

2. Make sure the ghost has something to do. A tumor-apparition can’t just lay out a character’s problem any more than a real ghost can come out and say, “my brother killed me so he could take over my kingdom and my wife.” (Well...you know what I mean.) Where’s the tension? Where’s the drama? Where’s the full hour of television?

So how do you introduce a ghost in the first act and delay setting it off until the last? Let’s consult our exemplars:

• House: House diagnosed Amber immediately as a side effect of sleep deprivation, so she spent her first episode as the invisible Hyde to House’s, well, slightly more controlled Hyde. Then she refused to go away, forcing House to lay aside his pride and get off the junk. Business rating: 5; Amber’s little clues to help House solve his case, House using a Bluetooth to get away with talking to no one—the show had a lot of fun with the setup, and so did I.

• The Unusuals: Delahoy’s sweetheart kept popping up in place of real, usually male people. Basically, wacky hijinks, with lots of Delahoy’s friends not noticing or caring that he was talking gibberish. BR: 0; not only was the girlfriend repetitive and boring, her appearance made everybody else seem stupid for not noticing his weird behavior.

• Bones: The hockey star showed up, said his bit and left. Ghost army buddy helped Booth escape a death trap, then exchanged hellos with Brennan (indicating he was more than just a hallucination—oooh). The cartoon baby showed up twice, setup and payoff, and the payoff was Brennan witnessing the exchange and immediately dragging Booth to the hospital. BR: 4; kudos to the Bones apparitions for efficiency and variety, and to Bones for taking proper action instead of just blowing off the danger signs.

• Grey’s Anatomy: Izzie spent many, many, many episodes trying to order her ghost fiancé away, then finally just gave in and slept with him. A lot. Within earshot of her living, breathing boyfriend. Eventually she remembered she was a doctor and sought medical care (from the worst doctors in the hospital, so that diagnosis took a few more episodes). Now she’s getting actual medical care, but Denny did drop back by to let her know there’s still some tumor left.* BR: 0; seriously, if it needs to be said, stalking is not loving, and despite Ghost, sex with ghosts is creepy. Also, how is this woman surrounded by doctors all day long and after months of erratic behavior and one outright confession no one knew anything was wrong? Worst doctors ever.

*I should add, based on a previous sweeps plotline Denny may in fact be a ghost. That of course begs the question, if he’s really an envoy from the spirit world, why did he spend so many episodes stalking his fiancée and sexing her up without ever bothering to mention she had a deadly, time-sensitive illness? Worst dead boyfriend ever.

Lessons learned: 1) Give the ghost something to do—pitch in on the case, make the kind of snide comments that can’t be said aloud, scare people, even; just give them a better job than standing around being imaginary. If the job is being creepy, make sure it’s intentional creepy, not accidental creepy while aiming for touching. 2) Don’t have friends and co-workers blow off a character’s erratic behavior; it makes them look stupid and/or self-involved. 3) Since the ghost has a specific job, give them just enough story time to do it, then let them go. Just because they’re ghosts doesn’t mean they can’t bore. Which brings me to...

3. Make sure the ghost is actually interesting. I reiterate, just because a character is imaginary doesn’t automatically make her interesting. Ghosts need just as much personality and history as the living. Amber, for example, has heaps of both, thanks to her time as a recurring character the previous season (as well as Anne Dudek’s fantastic portrayal). This woman was House’s student, his personal rival, a femme flip side to his own callous coin and the indirect victim of his self-absorption. There are multiple dark undercurrents to their friendly banter, and ultimately a certain justice to her refusal to be banished. Plus, she’s funny. Funny forgives a lot.

Delahoy’s old girlfriend, on the other hand, has never appeared before and will likely never appear again. Delahoy asks her what she wants and she just mocks him. She’s not actually funny, and the writers fall into the old trap of confusing beautiful and oblique for alluring and mysterious. She’s completely two-dimensional, and, frankly, a bore—a problem very much exacerbated by her lack of business (see 2).

It’s very easy to treat ghosts as plot rather than character; don’t do it. Hold your ghosts to the same standard as any other character: if they’re extraneous, cut them, if they’re useless, give them something to do, and if they’re boring, switch them out for someone more interesting. Above all, make sure your story really calls for a ghost, and not just, say, more nuanced writing and acting.

And as always, I crab because I love. I think The Unusuals flubbed the ghost storyline, but I heart the acerbic dispatcher and that modern Frank Burns, Eddie Alvarez. Likewise, my hat's off to Grey's Anatomy for take ghost-sex lemons and making friends-rallying-and-Karev-stepping-up lemonade. The turnaround has been amazing; I didn't even shake my fist at the TV when Denny popped up one last time. Kudos.


(A tip of my hat as well to Daniel Fienberg, who published this story while I was trying to write this one and definitely helped me shape my thoughts.)

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X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Old Farmer: Everybody makes choices.
Wolverine: Mine got taken away from me.

Welcome to the inaugural post of How to Fix Your Story, a blog about stories that could have been fixed but tragically were not. We’re starting today with summer 2009’s opening salvo: X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Due to the nature of the blog, absolutely every post will include SPOILERS.

I’ve been a big Wolverine fan since the Saturday morning X-Men: The Animated Series of the 90s. So gruff! So tuff! Such a softy deep, deep down! Hugh Jackman and Bryan Singer did a great job with him in the first two big-screen X-Men outings as well, so I was pretty pumped for this movie. Alas.

First, because I always like to say something nice, let us count the film’s successes. It had lots of eye candy, both human and spectacle. Its roster of talented actors threw themselves into their roles—Liev Schreiber in particular wrung a lot of character out of a one-note psycho. And it absolutely had all the explosions and mutant-on-mutant violence I expect from my big-screen comic book adaptations.

Now the problem: there was no story. There was a series of events, and some of the early ones had to have happened for later ones to occur. There was even kind of a plot toward the end, but it was a bit vague, and in the end I’m not sure that anybody I’d consider a protagonist accomplished anything. In fact, if you think about it, the bad guys won. Stryker wanted to create a super-soldier; he succeeded (thanks, post-credits bonus scene!). Sabretooth wanted to reconcile with his brother, and, tough talk aside, he basically accomplished that. Wolverine? Had a bunch of stuff happen to him, and killed some dudes, and then forgot all of it. He accomplished nothing, negative or positive. He was not a substantially different man at the end of the film than the beginning. Why again was the movie named after him? (Oh, right—franchise.)

This is a real problem. How did Sabretooth end up with an emotional arc and Wolverine none? It starts with a foundational problem: Wolverine never had a overarching goal.

He had a few short-term goals; at one point he decided not to be a horrible, soulless killer, and got himself his very own Little House on the Rockies (very Laura Ingalls Wilder—the girlfriend was even a school teacher!). But he was pretty much the only one surprised when that went bad. And then for a while he was making noise about revenge. But then the girlfriend turned out to not be dead, so...Wolverine just walked away. And then he wanted to save the girlfriend from Sabretooth, but then she became pretty secondary to the final set piece, which had him facing Deadpool for...um...well, ‘cause Stryker wanted them to fight. And then Stryker made him forget and he...wandered off. But Stryker got arrested! Except we know from the other movies he’s back in charge eventually, so...OK, what are we doing here again?

Plenty of stories fall short of greatness because even though the hero has external goals, he has no internal ones. James “Wolverine” Logan had neither. Let’s see how we could fix that.

Since it’s a prequel there were certain restrictions to begin with. Basically, he had to get a metal skeleton from Stryker in that under-dam lab at Alkali Lake, and then he had to forget his whole life. The metal skeleton is just a plot point, but the amnesia is a real problem: what can he accomplish that amnesia won’t automatically negate? Either he accomplishes something positive and the amnesia turns the story into a tragedy, or he accomplishes something negative, the story was a tragedy to begin with and the amnesia comes as a relief. There are real possibilities with either option.

With that in mind, I think the easiest way to fix the script as it existed would be the latter option, which plays into the tragic, tortured loner character Wolverine has always been. So what can Wolverine try for and fail? Logan fights for a few things during the film—the USA (for some reason), his brother, his lumberjack-and-girlfriend lifestyle, revenge, survival. There’s never really any question he’ll survive and fighting for America isn’t really the point (we just have more wars, I guess), but I think we can take the middle three and make a story.

Here’s the new story: Logan vs. himself, ego vs. id. On the one hand Logan is a violent, temper-driven man, who kills easily and well. He’s inculcated to violence early on, learns to perpetrate it himself, becomes skilled, gains respect. Don’t piss off the hairy guy. On the other hand, he has in his mind’s eye a picture of another life. Something meaningful. A little romantic, even. A place to call home, a woman to love, friends who aren’t bad, bad people (he saw it once in a Rockwell painting, it was nice). Young Logan, angry Logan, wouldn’t know how to get that life if he wanted to; century-old Logan, just plain tired, is desperate enough to try.

So Logan not only fights in a hundred years of wars, he takes a moment when freeing a French village to smile at a kid and accept a meal from a nice family. Maybe during a break in the War of Northern Aggression (now with soldiers from even further north!) a freed slave talks about what he’ll do when he’s done with fighting, and Logan realizes even a runaway slave is freer to choose his own destiny than Logan. All the while, Sabretooth is pulling him along, to more fighting, more glory (and make no mistake, Logan glories too).

Then, Vietnam. It’s horrible. Logan seriously considers trying a civilian life, but he’s not quite there yet. Stryker makes him an offer and he and Victor go off to keep on doing what they’re good at. Semper fi, or whatever.

Let me be clear, here: Logan needs to go to a dark place. He needs to participate in some atrocities, he needs to need some redemption. He can’t just stand there and watch Victor be bad and pout. Since we’re going to Africa, maybe he ends up mowing through some child soldiers (of course, maybe then we don’t get our PG-13 rating). Maybe they’re rescuing American hostages held in a family-style military base and the whole thing goes My Lai. Regardless, he needs to do something so horrible even he’s shocked (and this is a guy famous for berserker rages). Then, once he reaches what he always thought was the line and zooms right past it, then Logan gets out. He loves his brother—his brother is the only person he’s ever loved, or who’s ever loved him—but he’s got to get out.

Cue the girlfriend. And by “cue the girlfriend” I most certainly do not mean “cut to the part where he’s already got the girlfriend and the peaceful, boring life he always wanted.” I mean “cut to Logan learning how not to be a killing machine.” Let’s see Logan actually struggle to get that normal life. Let’s see him puzzle over how to be happy, and how happy actually feels. Let’s see him fall in love, and confess to this woman what he is and what he’s done. Don’t drag all this on forever, because hey, this is a summer popcorn flick and we need to keep moving. But the viewers need to go through some of the process with the character in order to gain an emotional stake in the inevitable catastrophe. When Logan loses the love of his (new) life, I want to feel gutted, not like I’m checking off a plot point.

And then, crisis. What ruins the sweet thing Logan’s got going? His violent side reappears—and that means Victor. Frankly, I’m not interested in Victor running around killing old team members; I don’t care about those guys anyway. I’d like to see Victor insert himself into his brother’s new life, showing the girlfriend, Kayla, just how crude, rude and violent her lover used to be. I’d like to see Kayla and Victor clash, and Logan defend Victor, the man he very nearly was. I’d like to see Victor’s temper get the better of him, like Logan’s always afraid his own will, and Victor kill somebody. I’d like to see Logan actually have to choose between the two people he loves and the two lives he could live. He chooses Kayla, and peace. So yay for Logan! Personal breakthrough! Now cue the tragedy (and the explosions).

Now is the time in our story when our hero’s misdeeds come back to haunt him. Just as he’s banishing his brother as a murderer, the brother or father or lover of somebody he killed in that last, terrible rage, the one that inspired him to turn his life around, finally finds him, looking for revenge. Naturally, this bad guy (we’ll call him Angry Avenger) has mutant powers, and he and his gang of scary friends descend on the Little House in the Rockies. Everybody who’s not invincible (Kayla) dies. (By the way, we’re giving Logan a big ol’ tractor so he can blow that up. Lots of dangerous farm implements—whatever desperate, violent men can use against each other. Go nuts, guys.) Now Logan needs revenge. And who do you turn to in a terrible time like this but family/your own dark id? Sure, Logan just kicked Victor out of his life, but they’re brothers, man! You can always count on your brother (to help you massacre a bunch of guys).*

*I have a picture in my mind of Victor finding Logan cradling Kayla’s dead body and Logan commenting he though Victor was dead—and Victor saying he can’t be killed. The symbolism, man, the symbolism.

But how? Angry Avenger (obviously this would be that one fearsome villain from Marvel’s roster—you know the one) kicked Logan’s and Victor’s butts at Little House, so they’ll need an edge. And hey, as it happens, Victor’s still got Stryker’s number—and Stryker’s been doing some crazy experiments lately. Stuff with adamantium, in fact. So Logan makes his Faustian bargain, a contract to rejoin Stryker’s merry band of murderers for at least x years more, in exchange for invincibility. And it works: Wolverine, Sabretooth and Stryker’s whole horde descend on Angry Avenger and his minions and lay them to waste, man, woman and child. Logan the killing machine is back.

And then he finds out Stryker gave Angry Avenger his location—and that Victor was planted to lead Logan back into the Stryker family. And here’s our showdown: Logan vs. his entire team. Not some arbitrary super-bad guy who appears like the Big Boss at the end of a Mario Bros. game, but the very men he’s fought and killed beside. It’s a battle royale, and at the end he’s the only killer left standing.

As to the amnesia, we could go the same route as the comics, which explain it as a function of his healing power, his brain protecting him from his terrible memories. I don’t like that here because a) it takes us back to passive Wolverine, acted upon rather than acting; b) it would feel arbitrary that this is only kicking in now (and just imagine the awful expository dialogue you’d need to explain it—shudder); c) it doesn’t really resonate with the story. Instead, what if before the battle royale Stryker had introduced a new target, a powerful mutant who needed to be contained and would take all of their strengths to subdue? Wolverine goes on this one last mission as a way of falling on his sword, sure he’ll die in the attempt. Instead, his target, Professor Xavier, reads his whole terrible history, has compassion on him and wipes his mind, thus giving him one more chance at redemption. That way the amnesia is meaningful for the story, and we still get our Patrick Stewart cameo. Win-win.

So what does all that give us? It gives us a hero with a larger goal: shake his violent tendencies and become a real human being. It gives us a hero making decisions instead of just half-heartedly reacting to other characters’ decisions. It gives us a character arc—a more tragic arc than Hollywood generally likes to serve in the warmer months, but I think that since this leads directly into a much happier story we’ve already seen we just might get away with that. It also pares away some of the crowded cast of glorified cameos in the current film, without skimping on the mutant-on-mutant violence people paid $10 to see. Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with it.

And that wraps up our very first How to Fix Your Story post; I hope you enjoyed it. This has been extremely long for a blog post, but we were fixing a deeply flawed movie; I don’t expect to take this long every time. In any case, thanks for coming along, and feel free to comment about why my solution won’t work, what necessary element I forgot to include, or why I just don’t understand the instant classic that is X-Men Origins: Wolverine. And see you again soon!
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