Sequel Syndrome

I'm admittedly late to the game with this, but there's something baffling to me about movie sequels. I just watched Ip Man 2 and, while I don't want to run that movie down too much, it got me thinking about this again.

I call it a syndrome, first, because "sequelitis" is taken. TV Tropes offers a wide but not comprehensive list of symptoms and occurrences. Second, I call it a syndrome because I, at least, can't pin down a single cause. (Perhaps, like many modern diseases, the underlying pathogen is confirmation bias.) Sometimes a sequel's just worse. Sometimes there's someone or something you can blame, but not always.

So, I liked Ip Man a lot. The story has some parts that you can only accept because it's a kung-fu movie, and other parts that are just absurd. It is, at heart, the story of a man who overcomes adversity by boldly being able to. Still, there were some genuinely subversive moments that made it good to watch even when nobody was punching anyone.

I only heard about Ip Man, though, because of a glowing review I read of Ip Man 2 in Seattle Weekly. The sequel's score stands well above the original's on Rotten Tomatoes, so I was quite excited about 2 after seeing 1.

Girlfriend caught it before I did, but Ip Man 2 is basically Rocky IV. (Actually I think if Sylvester Stallone had thought to go to Sammo Hung for his fight choreography from Rocky II on, the world would be a substantially better place.) It also occurred to me belatedly that the original audience wouldn't have identified at all with the white antagonist, making the movie possibly less morally complex than it had even seemed at first. I am actually aware of nothing that Ip Man 2 does better than its antecessor, which is why it's so weird to me that the critics should prefer it. Is there something wrong with movie critics? (I notice that RT's audience ratings line up better with my own opinion, which lends itself to that theory.)

Anyway, Ip Man 2 has the same writer and the same director as Ip Man, as well as rather too much of the original cast. As a writer (finger quotes optional), I'm inclined to say it lands at the feet of the writer, but I can't say what constraints he, or anyone else, was working under.

It might be useful to look at some other sequels that suffer from similar symptoms. Sherlock Holmes, Iron Man, and Casino Royale all recently yielded inferior sequels. The first two changed writers, and the last one changed directors. Yet they all seemed to fall flat on so many levels, including what just looked like lazier editing from the returning directors and lazier scripts from the returning writers. Were they bored?

(I'm also of the opinion that the whole problem starts with The Godfather Part II, but if you think that that one was better than the original I won't fight you over it.)

Thankfully there have also been some recent exceptions. Carriers, if you will. Spider-Man and Batman Begins both had sequels that were actually better. Spider-Man changed writers completely, but Batman kept the same writers and added Jonathan Nolan to the mix (and I'd be surprised if he didn't have any influence on the first one). However it was done, neither one of them slackened off.

(On a side note, The Dark Knight Rises apparently has the same writing team as The Dark Knight, which, according to the evidence examined so far, suggests that... nothing.)

There's one common thread among all of these. It's subjective, but we're talking about art, so, yeah. A sequel basically has to have a new character, since a good original takes its cast to the natural result of their interactions.

The new character has to be strong enough to change the dynamic of the movie. Otherwise you just end up with your sequel's protagonists retreading the same arcs they went through last time. See Quantum of Solace, in which James Bond relives the last five minutes of Casino Royale, chasing down a bad guy who's so inert that the big reveal about his evil scheme doesn't make 007 bat an eyelash. See The Godfather Part II, whose most interesting character is dead before the movie starts, and whose present-day storyline unfolds pretty much exactly the way the end of the first movie implied it would.

On the other hand, need I go into a long explanation of the significance of the Joker in The Dark Knight? Or, take the progenitor of superior sequels, Terminator 2. The important new character in that movie actually isn't the T-1000 or John Connor; it's the original Terminator, back but with a completely new set of motivations.

On the other other hand, there's the sequels whose new characters are just weird and annoying. Not to name names.

And while the quality  of the new characters is more of an indicator of overall quality, it's not perfect, and it still looks like another symptom, rather than a definitive cause.

Nor can we just say that a franchise/character/premise has run out of good ideas. Iron Man 2, Ip Man 2*, and Spider-Man 3 (sigh) both suffer from an overabundance of plots. What they needed was to be pared down so that subplots would have room to grow naturally, instead of being crowded out by competing real plots.

I could go on like this but I think my thesis is still that the cause is still unknown. Study must continue, though, for only then do we stand a chance of finding a cure.

* I feel the need to point out that Ip Man, unlike the other entries in this list, is a person's actual name. While I admit to comic book heroes being overrepresented in this post, he is just a real person with a name that's a bit unfortunate to Anglophones.