Amph Sequels: 22 Do's and Don'ts: Don't: Just repeat yourself

Bam! Right out of the park. You're right, it is. Much, much, much, actually.

 

Do: Basically everything Toy Story 2 and 3 do

"The latter portions of Pixar's iconic series just do everything right. They honor their predecessor without using it as a crutch. They bravely send their characters off on new adventures in very different landscapes (the city of 2, the frightening play-prison of 3). They add in exciting new costars (Joan Cusack's Jessie, Michael Keaton's Ken) and vivid villains (Kelsey Grammer's Stinky Pete, Ned Beatty's Lots-O'-Huggin'-Bear.) They keep the plot relatively simple ? 2 is a rescue mission, 3 is an escape thriller ? saving the one huge flourish for the very end of 3. Toy Story 3 even eliminates the trilogy's lone lame character: See ya, Bo Peep! Notably, 3 had a new director (Lee Unkrich, who codirected 2 with original director John Lasseter.) Best of all, the later films find the characters in an ever-more-precarious situation, slowly tracing their history from beloved toys to forgotten artifacts of youth.

See Also: No other series comes close. Well, maybe the Apu Trilogy."

 

I love Toy Story, but the idea that it's better than the Godfather trilogy or the Star Wars trilogy or the Indiana Jones trilogy beggars belief.

 

I'm not sure I agree with the article. I'm not sure why he said that the plot needed to be "relatively simple". Should all sequels be simple? In that case, I'm so sorry Godfather 2, you're too complicated to be good. Even moving the characters to new! exciting! locations isn't a given plus. I'm pretty sure all three Batman movies are going to take place in Gotham, but that doesn't mean it's going to be boring or same-y. I'm not even sure if you need to have the characters in more precarious situations each movie. I mean I though the ending to Raiders with the Ark face-melt is totally more dangerous then the stone in Temple of Doom (to be fair TOD is a prequel but the point stands). Sequels should build on each other thematically I guess, such as Empire Strikes Back subverting the "good vs. evil" concept in Star Wars or Toy Story 3 building on the passion/emotionless life/death scenario presented in Toy Story 2.

If there is one thing that you should take from Toy Story (as well as Godfather and Star Wars sequels) is that your sequel should have a point to it and have something to say other than just being identical to the original. While each of the Toy Story movie's touch on a life after "death" scenario (or at least the last two, I haven't seen the first in forever), all of them deal with it in a different way. The other Pixar sequel, Cars 2, wasn't amazing but at least it didn't do the same thing as the original. If you try to make a sequel just for making a sequel, you might get something compared to the original Toy Story 3 idea, which sounded terrible!

 

Once again, the list offers advice that somehow manages to be uselessly general and unthinkingly specific at the same time, and doesn't actually get at what made the films it cites as examples successful. I'm afraid this is not a very helpful collection of pointers.

 

SW, Indiana Jones, and The Godfather trilogies all have weak or weaker entries, and Toy Story doesnt. Couldnt tell you what that means lol. My opinion is that The Empire Strikes Back is better then any of the Toy Story movies, but Return of The Jedi isn't. Whatever. All of the above are great stories. Entertaining with flaws and all. And as i'm writing this I think you cant definitely make a case for Toy Story being the superior trilogy. I dont personally believe that but its not a controversial opinion.

 

The Toy Story trilogy is more consistent, sure. But its best doesn't even begin to even reach the same parish as the peak of Star Wars or The Godfather. They're great, thoughtful childrens' films with sharp wit and heartfelt emotions, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking that John Lasseter built some kind of complex, deeply resonant saga here.

 

Yeah, the Toy Story movies are a very good, consistent trilogy of wonderful kids' films. But consistency alone is not the whole enchilada. ROTJ and TOD are not nearly weak enough to bring down the overall quality of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies, which are absolutely spectacular, and Godfather Part III doesn't even matter, because on a scale of one to ten, the first two parts are both twenties. Consistency can't even remotely approach the pure quality embodied in The Godfather.

When it comes down to it, I can guarantee you that people are going to be watching and talking about The Godfather, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones for another hundred years. I can't guarantee you that people will still be watching and talking about Toy Story. And that's the difference.

 

The strength of the Toy Story films generally isn't that they do everything right - it's that they do nothing wrong. And that goes for Pixar films as a whole for the most part. A Pixar film may have some excellent high points (the opening sequence of Up comes to mind as an example), but for the most part a Pixar films works by avoiding missteps. It's not that their best moments are better than other people's best moments, it's that their worst moments are better than other people's average moments.

 

The Toy Story Trilogy is an example of how you do a good film series. You make each story different, while still retaining the overall arc and characters. They link together but the are different enough to watch on their own with their own stories.

Compare that to the original Star Wars Trilogy. Empire is great because it went down a different darker path and expanded in a different direction from the first movie while still linking to the events that occured in it. Jedi is a good movie, but it did essentially re-harsh the plot from the first movie (Empire builds Death Star, Rebels launch big fleet and destroy it) albeit with some alterations. Basically the article is saying If you want to do a great film series, do it the way Toy Story does it. Godfather is let down by part 3 even if it isn't bad, Indy & Back to the Future are let down by their middle parts.

Toy Story in technical terms is like the LOTR Trilogy, perfect because each of the movies is equally good (rare to have a 5 star trilogy).

 

Don't: Just grab an original story and plug it into a franchise

"Ocean's Twelve infamously started life as a screenplay called Honor Among Thieves, in which an American thief and a European thief square off. As star Matt Damon explained to EW, the process of turning that screenplay into Ocean's Twelve was simple: ''They kept the European thief very similar and divided the American up 11 ways.'' Because really, who doesn't want to see one single character arc split across 11 vastly different people?

See Also: Die Hards 3 and 4, which awkwardly plugged Everyman John McClane into a revenge script called Simon Says and a techno-thriller called WW3.com."

 

Yes and no. Die Hard 3 kicks ass and takes names. Then it kicks more ass. Die Hard 4, on the other hand partially sidelines John McClane by focusing a little too much on Justin Long's computer hacker/tech wiz character.

 

Die Hard With a Vengeance is horrid as a Die Hard film. It might have been more tolerable as something else, but there are still wild storytelling issues.

We'll see what happens with The Dark Knight Rises, since it's apparently very much A Tale of Two Cities.

Isn't The Godfather Part III sorta-kinda King Lear? But I guess people do irrationally hate that film, too.

 

Thank you. Finally, someone else who'll say it. WaV is awful. Die Hard 2 was pretty great, but 3 was awful.

 

A poor Die Hard movie maybe, a poor movie in general it is not.

 

Thank you. If Die Hard is Bruce Willis's Indiana Jones, the Die Hard 3 is Bruce Willis's Last Crusade.

 

It has my least favorite Jeremy Irons performance, my least favorite Samuel L. Jackson performance and manages to only be about one rung up the ladder from North on my "most humiliating uses of Bruce Willis" list. They didn't put Willis in a pink bunny suit, that is true. They allowed him that dignity.

And I don't really know why people act like it's because it isn't really a "Die Hard movie" that people dislike it. I think it's far more a rip off of the first Die Hard movie than Die Hard 2 is. It has Jeremy Irons doing his best Alan Rickman impression as the brother of Alan Rickman's character. I just found that profoundly annoying. Die Hard 2 was different, but Die Hard 3 essentially borrowed its villain from Die Hard, just like cut him out and pasted him in, right down to his motivations. It's as annoying a "copy-paste" as I've seen in a sequel, I think. The water flooding that tunnel was the best thing about Die Hard 3 and the only part that really felt anywhere near as awesome as anything in the first two.

 

That's possible. Of the four Die Hard films, the only one I've never seen is Die Hard 2, but of three that I've watched, Die Hard 3 definetly comes up to the level of Die Hard, particularly when compared to Die Hard 4.

 

Die Hard 2's storyline is about a thousand times worse than 3's is, and the main villain...well, what main villain? You can see they're trying to be original, but the plot is just ludicrously cliche and unbelievable. I'll grant that 3's storyline was basically a bigger replay of the original, but 2's jumps the shark as soon as you see a miniature version of Dolph Lundgren flexing naked in his hotel room, and it just gets more and more silly from there.

 

I don't understand where the hate for 3 is coming from. I prefer 3 vastly to 2, although 4 is just ridiculous. And now they're doing a fifth where NYC cop John McClane SAVES THE WORLD! IN RUSSIA! AND ALL OF A SUDDEN HE HAS A SON!

 

Comparing Die Hard 3 with Last Crusade I think is frankly offense, not least because I consider Last Crusade the best of the Indiana Jones movies and DH3 is not the best Die Hard movie. Die Hard 3 takes place over a large city area (more like Die Hard 4), so it isn't very similar to Die Hard 1 or 2 in that respect as those take place in a single location. Last Crusade has nazis and a Christian Biblical artifact as the main object of desire just as Raiders did, it is also set in similar areas like desert and the Middle East region.

Die Hard 3 has a villain related to the one in Die Hard 1, besides that it isn't very similar.

 

Do: Consider adding a co-star with equal (if not greater) star power

"Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade repeats some of the best elements of Raiders of the Lost Ark: Christian artifact, Middle Eastern setting, the presence of John Rhys-Davies. But it also adds in Sean Connery as Jones' dad, a perfect cross-generational pairing of superstar action heroes that gives Crusade a flavor all its own.

See Also: Dwayne Johnson as Bizarro-Vin Diesel in Fast Five, Halle Berry as a ''Female Bond'' who actually does give 007 a run for his money Die Another Day."

 

No one should ever, ever cite Die Another Day as something to emulate.