The Avengers

The Avengers is why Disney bought Marvel and paid them so much money. It’s all about the character bank. In a worldwide market, companies put a premium on branding, which is selling an already recognizable product, and transmedia, which is telling the same story through many media forms. If you own a large bank of appealing, recognizable and repeatable characters, you rule the storytelling world.

But the characters in your bank can’t just be distinctive and memorable. Stanley Kowalski from A Streetcar Named Desire won’t help you here. They have to be characters who can go on many adventures, which is why they almost always come from the myth and action genres, and they are heroes, superheroes and gods.

Marvel has made a number of hugely popular films focusing on a single superhero, like Thor, Spider-Man and Iron Man. But The Avengers takes this genre to a whole new level, because it’s all about the lure of the All-stars, the Dream Team.

The all-star story is as old as myth itself. The Greek gods on Mt. Olympus and the Norse gods in Asgard are each communities of the best in their field. In more recent story forms like the caper film (Ocean’s Eleven) and the suicide mission story (The Dirty Dozen), the pleasure comes from watching a bunch of highly talented individuals come together as a team to accomplish an apparently impossible goal.

Few writers get an assignment like The Avengers, but you can create your own all-star story, and start a wildly successful character bank of your own. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as writer-director Joss Whedon makes it appear. Using The Avengers as our guide, let’s explore some of the challenges of the all-star story.

Just because these are superheroes or gods doesn’t mean you don’t have to establish a strong weakness-need for them at the beginning of the story. One of the strengths of the Marvel characters has always been that they run counter to the old conventional wisdom that superheroes are all good. In a great story, regardless of genre, the plot always plays out the character’s internal flaw.

Marvel characters have loads of flaws. For example, the Hulk has a real problem with rage, Thor is arrogant, and Iron Man’s Tony Stark is a raving narcissist.

All well and good. But with all-star stories you face an additional challenge in this area. You have to establish the weakness-need for a lot of major characters, and you have to do so in a relatively short period of time, without delaying the plot. This challenge is what hurt the Watchmen film. It took so long to establish the ghost and weakness-need of each of the major characters that the story died before it ever got going.

Whedon’s smart solution to this character challenge is to use two story techniques at once. The first technique, which Whedon brought over from his experience as a television writer, is to generate the primary conflict among the heroes. In the middle of the film, the heroes have gathered together but are not yet a team. Some of the Avengers imprison the main opponent, Loki, in their huge mothership. Loki doesn’t seem to put up much of a fuss about this, and that’s because he is planning to defeat the Avengers by getting them to fight amongst themselves.

Conflict among the heroes is more dramatic because we care more about our heroes than some super-villain. In TV you always want to generate most of your conflict among the leads, not between the leads and an outside opponent new to that episode.

This internal conflict also delays the unification of the heroes into a Dream Team. That’s another huge advantage because, when they do unite, during the final battle, it is under the greatest possible jeopardy.

And how do our heroes fight each other? They attack each other’s ghost and weakness, ultimately destroying their own ship in the process. So we get a plot beat – attack by the opponent – along with quick character sketch of each hero’s flaw. It’s all interesting to the audience because it’s expressed through conflict, not as boring exposition.

Notice the dissension also sets up the basic character change in the story, which is from troubled individuals to a perfect team. That moment of character change, when the heroes form a ring to fight as one against the alien forces, is the sweetest emotional moment of the film.

Here’s another tough story challenge. If you are going to have a team of all-star heroes, you have to come up with an equally strong opposition to match them. That’s hard, given that your heroes together must surely be the most powerful force in the universe. So your tendency is to create a team of all-star opponents, the Nightmare Team. But now you face story chaos, because you have to service so many heroes and opponents.

Again Whedon’s solution is instructive. The Dream Team element meant he wouldn’t try to come up with a single opponent, like The Joker, who would attack the heroes morally, questioning the very concept of the savior, or superhero. But he also didn’t go for the single opponent who would try to match the heroes’ physical abilities. Other than his apparent imperviousness to pain, Loki has no special superpower. Instead, he is the master schemer, a god whose distinguishing quality is his brain. He is potentially stronger than all the all-stars combined, because he can outsmart them. He can use his knowledge of the special weakness of each superhero to defeat the entire team.

The Avengers is an action-myth story, so we need a big physical battle. To take on the opponent’s role of physical action and fighting, Whedon brings in alien forces that not only have super powers, they attack by the thousands. Loki and the aliens form a nice combination of brains and brawn that can seriously challenge the Dream Team.

The Avengers shows us once again that the all-star story is one of the most popular in storytelling history. But it’s harder than it looks. If you remember to start by identifying the form’s unique story challenges, you will be halfway home.

Watchmen

Mixing genres is the fundamental story technique of mainstream Hollywood moviemaking. If you want to play in that league, you need to master the technique. But be warned. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you end up with a big mess.

Watchmen left me with a strong sense of missed opportunity. This movie had the potential to be another deep exploration of the role of the savior in modern American life, with a shot at reaching the heights of the best of the form, The Dark Knight.

The challenge facing the writers was huge. They had to weave at least three stories, each from a different genre. First is the fantasy superhero story about who these characters are, why they formed their team, and why they disbanded it. Second is the detective story where Rorschach tries to uncover who is assassinating his old superhero pals. Third is the action story where someone is out to destroy the world.

In putting these three genres together, the writers have created a massive Rube Goldberg mechanism that lumbers along, puffing and wheezing, pushing forward, backing up, until it finally collapses at the finish line 2 hours and 43 minutes later.

Watchmen is a textbook example of how to write, and not write, a superhero origin story. The origin of a superhero is often the most fun aspect of the character and is a complete story unto itself. So the writer has to figure out how to combine a fairly long origin story with a full-blown crime or disaster tale, and make both lines seem like one.

Batman Begins gives us a model for how to execute this job properly. There the writers begin by crosscutting Bruce Wayne’s ghost as a youth (the bats and the death of his parents) with the training he receives from Henri Ducard of the League of Shadows. Then Bruce returns to Gotham to fight crime as Batman and eventually uncovers the plot to destroy the city, concocted by none other than his teacher, Henri Ducard.

But notice one huge advantage the Batman writers have in doing their adaptation: they have to detail the ghost of only one character. This difference is the source of all of Watchmen’s structural problems. The Watchmen’s writers tried to provide detailed ghosts for all nine of the Watchmen superheroes. They realized putting all of these origin stories together at the beginning would create its own movie and have little to do with the assassination/world destruction plot.

So they tried using an advanced story structure form (which I discuss in detail in the Advanced Screenwriting Class). In this form you set up a character with an intense desire line. Then at various intervals, you halt the narrative drive and you explore some dramatic issue or delve deep into character. This technique was used in both Forrest Gump and Lord of the Rings.

This advanced storytelling form has some great strengths but also grave dangers. If you don’t set up a strong enough desire line, the side trips eventually collapse the story. Similarly, if you go too often or spend too long in the side trips, your narrative drive stops. And if these side trips are about ghost – information about the past – then your narrative drive is really in trouble because you are literally going backwards.

All of these problems occur in Watchmen. The writers use a detective story for their desire line: Rorschach wants to find out who is killing the retired superheroes. This appears to be a good choice, since the detective form has one of the cleanest and most propulsive lines of any genre. It is also a form focused on finding out what happened in the past, usually having to do with who committed a murder. So the audience is more accepting in this form of looking backwards.

But the detective form has nowhere near the narrative drive needed to support this many backward looking journeys, for this many characters. And it cannot then flip to an action story line where a team defeats a supervillain who is trying to destroy the world.

The result is a film of three stories in which none is done well. Of the three, the most interesting by far is the story of the origin of this band of superheroes. Had the writers focused on this, they could have had a terrific film.

Of course all of this implies that the writers had a choice. All kinds of forces could have dictated that they somehow make the three-in-one story work. Faced with that task, you do the best job you can.

But whatever the reality of this film, Watchmen shows screenwriters that there are limits to how much you can hang on the narrative line. When mixing genres, the main rule is the pick one genre to be the primary one. Then be very careful how many other genre elements you hang on it. Or you’ll end up with some very nasty wreckage.