I think my preteen boy gets what some movie makers don't yet get. I showed him two superhero movies this week, and he saw something I didn't notice until he pointed it out: X-Men, the first one, fell a little flat. Why? The characters were pretty well-developed. The storyline was coherent. The action scenes were good. Remember when I posted on humor and its importance to writing a compelling piece a few weeks back? There was maybe one humorous line in the entire show. Even a superhero show that is just a little too straight-faced fails to hold my boy's interest, and he's part of the target audience. For some people, action scenes are enough. For others, great characterization is plenty. For others, as long as the plot is good, they will follow you all the way. Humor adds the humanization and enjoyment that pull the rest of it together and keeps the audience coming back for more. I haven't seen it, but I understand "Deadpool" brought people out in droves. Why? Because it was snarky, sarcastic, humorous.
Most recent Marvel superhero movies seem to get that. DC seems to be lagging behind a little. Joss Whedon breathed humor into almost every scene, not enough to make it cheesy but enough to keep the characters lovable and interesting. In "Captain America:Civil War," the movie makers follow suit. It has everything that keeps an audience entertained. The characters have clear motivation, which leads to a compelling plot. Rather than melding together in a messy, action-packed phone directory like the critically and audience-panned X-Men 3, each character stands out as the hero in his/her own piece of the tale. The characters are more-or-less fully realized, all of them. We get a some origins/introduction of characters from Black Panther to Spider-Man, and several continuations of characters, with the title character, Captain America, and his adventures in the foreground. I believe each of those characters. Furthermore, I like most of them, whether I like them in comic book version or not. Having all of that work in a movie simultaneously is quite a feat.
But what my boy noticed that I really didn't was that the story didn't come alive until Spider-Man and the attending humor enter the picture. My boy has never been a huge Spider-Man fan, but he is now because his enjoyment in the movie only started when he could laugh. And characters only started wisecracking when Spider-Man showed up and got the humor ball rolling.
What can we learn about storytelling, then? Well, for one thing, when we write, we should make sure our target audience is entertained. And the best way to do that includes character development, including clear motivation, which leads to compelling action, all spiced with humor to help us care. And that, my friends, is my formula for good storytelling, whether it be in a movie or a novel.
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