Ryan Coogler, Sascha Penn, Cheo Hodari Coker, Juel Taylor, Sylvester Stallone, and Steven Caple Jr., 2018

no votes for Best Picture but rated #17, 2018 Skandies

spoils this movie and
    Fantastic Four v7 #4

Until quite recently, I would have found it highly unlikely that in 2023 the ac­claimed new writer of the Fantastic Four comic would be the Dinosaur Comics guy, but here we are.  And his run’s been pretty good so far!  In fact, the most recent issue featured one of the most ingenious ideas I’ve come across in a while.  I said “ideas” and not “scenes” or “moments” because I think that un­fortunately the creative team bobbled the execution.  Here’s the deal.  From what I’ve read, the Dinosaur Comics guy wants to go “back to basics” with the FF: Reed, Sue, Ben, and Johnny flyin’ around in space having adventures.  But under previous writer Dan Slott, the FF was more of a Fantastic Ten.  Reed and Sue already had two kids: their son Franklin, now aged up into his teens after decades as a preschooler, and their daughter from an alternate dimension, Valeria, about whom the less said the bet­ter.  Ben married Alicia, his love interest from the Lee and Kirby days, and they adopted a couple of alien children, Jo and Nicky.  And Johnny’s betrothed, an alien named Sky, was also hanging around.  Slott found an exit for Sky before he left the book, but that meant that Dinosaur Guy still inherited four kids who didn’t fit into his plans.  And in issue #4 of his run, we learn how he elected to write them out.  A few months ago, we are shown, there was an invasion from the Negative Zone, and the only way to save the planet was for Reed to shunt the alien monsters six months back in time⁠—when the Earth would be on the other side of the sun.  But “to balance the temporal equations”, he had to send everyone else in an area the size of a city block forward one year.  “Everyone else” includes Franklin, Valeria, Jo, and Nicky.  They’re perfectly safe, and won’t know that anything had even happened until they suddenly discover that a full year has elapsed without their knowledge.  But their loved ones have to live a full year without them.  Ben and particularly Alicia are furious that Reed has done this and doesn’t even seem to care.  They leave town for months.

This being the Marvel Universe, though, they eventually find themselves captured by space parasites from a planet called New Xeron.  The parasites keep them in stasis by locking their minds into a memory⁠—the memory of the invasion and its aftermath.  Reed, Sue, and Johnny find them and attempt to free them, but the parasites try to keep Ben and Alicia on the hook by amplify­ing the memory’s emotional intensity.  But, at the climactic mo­ment, this backfires on the parasites⁠—because they have to amplify the emotional intensity of the whole memory, including Reed’s reaction.  And while he was typically stoic in the moment, turning his emotions up a hundredfold allows his own sorrow about the separation to come to the surface, and when Ben sees this, and Alicia (who’s blind) hears the devastation in his voice, they finally forgive him.  This frees them from the memory and the space parasites are defeated.  That’s brilliant, I thought⁠—once I figured out what the hell had even happened.  Because the way the idea was conveyed to the reader left something to be desired.  We got three pages of technobabble laying out the premise in a deliberately obscure manner, then a page of repeated panels in which Alicia accuses Reed of sending the kids away for increas­ing lengths of time (“a year” becomes “two years” becomes “ten years”, etc.) while Ben’s expression changes, then a cut to Reed crying, then three pages of speech bubbles explaining what had just happened.  A few tweaks could have given this sequence much more impact in the moment rather than just in retrospect.  First, the creative team should have found a way to show the an­tagonists developing the plan to amplify the emotional intensity of the memories.  You say the parasites aren’t sentient enough to consciously do that?  It’s a story.  What you say goes.  Make them sentient enough.  Set up their goals and expectations for us so that we know ahead of time what the “Alicia yelling” scene means and so that we dread seeing it turn out the way the antag­onists hope.  Then, we’re supposed to be paying attention to Ben’s dawning realization of something we can’t yet see?  Good idea⁠—so direct our attention.  Over the course of those repeated panels, have the “camera” slowly zoom in on Ben so his expres­sion takes precedence over Alicia’s speech bubbles.  (This will be helped by the fact that we now have a clearer idea going in of what those speech bubbles mean⁠—we won’t be distracted by puzzling over them.)  We want to turn the page wondering, what has Ben seen?  What has gone wrong with the antagonists’ plan?  And since we now have expectations about how that plan might play out, seeing those expectations upended becomes a “whoa” moment rather than a “huh?” one.  It might even be a good idea to have Ben start to explain the antagonists’ miscalculation to make sure that everything clicks into place for us exactly as we reach the key panel.  Writers tend to underestimate how clear they need to be for the crucial elements of their stories to land.  “Seems perfectly clear to me!”  Well, yeah, because you’ve been living with the story for however long and already know it by heart.  The readers don’t.  And that’s good!  Only on a first read do half the tricks in a writer’s arsenal work.  But making them work requires some careful engineering.

Which brings us to Creed II, the eighth movie in the Rocky series that dates back nearly half a century now.  As I discussed in my writeup of the previous seven installments, the Rocky series tracked the evolution of American culture: the 1976 film was immersed in gritty 1970s urban squalor, but the 1985 film was a series of music videos for the MTV era, full of talking robots, Lamborghinis, and gallons of body oil.  The subsequent films backed away in embarrassment from the excesses of Rocky IV and attempted to recapture the feel of the original, which is a polite way of saying that they blatantly recycled its formula.  But Rocky is now ostensibly a supporting character in the story of Adonis (“Donnie”) Creed, son of Apollo Creed, killed by Soviet Super-Soldier Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, so the series couldn’t really pretend that that movie had never happened.  So here it is 2018, and a big studio has released a $50 million movie with Ivan Drago in it.  Maybe instead of mocking up a Rocky VIII header image I should have billed this movie as Rocky IV II.

It’s not good.  Donnie Creed remains a cipher.  Long stretches of the movie are given over to Donnie becoming a father, but nothing really interesting emerges from this⁠—the filmmakers’ thinking seems to have been “there are a lot of fathers and father figures in this movie, so this seems like a thematically appropri­ate way to, like, take some time”.  The main plot is a rehash of the formula from Rocky III: champ gets the stuffing beaten out of him by a freight train of a fighter, trains for the rematch, and scores a big redemptive win the second time around.  But the training sequences in III had a clear point: not only does Rocky bond with his former arch-nemesis, Apollo Creed, but Apollo teaches Rocky, previously just a slugger with a strong jaw, how to box properly, with the speed and skill needed to outfight Lang.  The training sequences in IV had a point as well, demonstrating the contrast between Ivan Drago’s training regimen in the Sovi­ets’ high-tech facilities, full of supercomputers and steroids, and Rocky’s rustic training regimen out in the middle of nowhere, chopping wood and lifting rocks.  The training sequences in Creed II serve to notify the audience that Donny is training.

But that’s not what I want to talk about.  I want to talk about the interesting part.  So, one of the key elements of Rocky IV is that, during their fateful exhibition bout, Ivan Drago basically pounds Apollo Creed into hamburger during the first round.  Rocky insists that he’s got to stop the fight, but Apollo demands that he let it continue, “no matter what. No matter what!”  So when Drago continues to bludgeon Apollo, and Apollo’s coach Duke begs Rocky to “throw the damn towel” (signaling to the referee that Apollo’s corner is giving up on his behalf), Rocky hesitates long enough for Drago to deliver the fatal blow.  Rocky’s guilt over this is a big part of what motivates him to finally agree to fight Drago himself, and of course he wins the bout, stirs Gorbachev to stunned applause, and ends the Cold War.  In Creed II, an Ameri­can promoter discovers that Ivan Drago, now sixty and looking alarmingly like Gordon Ramsay, has a son, Viktor, who’s been taking opponents apart out on the Klitschko circuit.  He hatches the idea of a new generation of Creed vs. Drago, pitting the new champ⁠—Donnie, who wins the belt against some rando in the first few minutes⁠—against the son of the man who killed his father.  When Donnie accepts the fight, Rocky wants no part of it, saying that it isn’t smart for a guy like Donnie with “everything to lose”⁠—a world champion about to start a family⁠—to be baited into fighting a dangerous opponent with nothing to lose.  Apollo Creed did the same thing, and that’s why Donnie spent his early childhood as an orphan.  “I could’ve thrown in the towel, but I didn’t. And I gotta live with that,” Rocky says.  Donnie insists that he’s taking the fight anyway, snarling at Rocky that if he’s “walkin’ out on me,” then at least he “ain’t gotta worry about throwing in the towel this time”.  Clearly, the towel is important!

Here’s the problem.  Structurally, the setup is clear: Rocky failed to throw in the towel last time, with tragic results.  It would have been the intelligent thing to do, the compassionate thing, the thing that would have dramatically improved so many lives.  Rocky would have still had a friend in hard times.  Donnie would have had a dad.  Mrs. Huxtable would have had a husband who didn’t try to dose her with Spanish fly.  And now Rocky has a second chance!  The shape of the narrative could not be clearer!  “I didn’t save your father for you and your mom, Donnie, but I’m going to save you for your new wife and your baby daughter!”  Except… these movies do not actually believe that throwing in the towel was the right move.  After all, that wouldn’t be showing the eye of the tiger!  As Survivor declares in the Rocky IV training montage, “In the warrior’s code, there’s no surrender!”  So Rocky can’t redeem himself by throwing in the towel!  Neither can any­one else in Donnie’s corner!  Donnie takes the Viktor Drago fight and gets pulped in short order, but when his new coach (“Little Duke”, son of Apollo’s old coach) says he’s got to put an end to this⁠—while Rocky, watching on TV back in Philadelphia, cries, “Stop the fight!”⁠—Donnie, like his father, orders Little Duke to let the fight continue, and Little Duke keeps the towel in hand just as Rocky had back in 1985.  The movie tries to have it both ways, giving our heroes credit for knowing the smart and compassion­ate move, while also giving them credit for being warriors and not actually making that move.  Even the outcome tries to have it both ways.  Yes, Donnie’s refusal to let Little Duke throw in the towel means that he ends up hospitalized and gets to piss blood for a few weeks, but it also lets him keep his belt, after Viktor Drago is disqualified for a late hit.  So, what about the inevitable rematch?  You can’t really pay off the towel saga there, right?  Is a Rocky movie really going to go, “Protagonist gets pulverized by a more powerful opponent, ends up in the hospital, recovers, trains for a rematch, and… gets pulverized again”?  So that the big climax is Rocky heroically putting the macho bullshit aside and saving Donnie from the morgue?  Maybe we cut to the year 2048, and Donnie’s daughter, now thirty, rides her hoverbike down to the cemetery to tearfully thank Rocky’s headstone for the fact that she got to grow up with a dad?  I don’t see it.  And yet the filmmakers found a way to give the towel saga an ending that would have earned the movie a thumbs-up all by itself: the tables turn, Donnie is pounding on Viktor, and Ivan Drago is the one who throws in the towel!  I say “would have” because, as with that Fantastic Four issue, the muffed execution blunts the impact of an idea that had worlds of potential.

I don’t know why I keep going into these later Rocky movies expecting the redemption of the ludicrous.  Somewhere I’d heard that Rocky Balboa (i.e., Rocky VI) had used a series of silly boxing movies as source material for a sophisticated character study, and it turned out to be a silly boxing movie.  Similarly, when Ivan Drago showed up in Creed II, I thought, “Ooh, I won­der what they’re going to do with him?”, and the answer turned out to be, pretty much the same thing they did with him in Rocky IV.  This movie doesn’t plumb the depths of Ivan Drago’s soul.  We do learn that after his loss, Drago found himself des­pised in Russia; his wife left him, he fell into poverty, and even­tually he decamped for exile in Ukraine.  But he remains a flat villain for whom time is a flat circle; the only evolution he has undergone in thirty-three years is from “I must break you” to “my son will break your boy”.  Still, there’s the seed of something here.  Ideally, throwing in the towel would serve as a moment that resolves an internal conflict for Drago running the length of the film.  We’re shown how Drago longs to return to the good graces of those who rejected him.  We see how hard he drives Viktor: if an opponent lasts longer than a round, Ivan fumes, “Why is he still standing? He’s embarrassing you!” and even goes so far as to growl that Viktor’s weakness is the reason the public looks down on the name Drago and why Viktor’s mother ran off.  What if someone were to challenge Ivan on this?  To ask him, to his face, whether to him Viktor is merely a vehicle for Ivan to recapture his lost glory, or whether he truly loves Viktor as a son?  It would take some time for the film to tease out the an­swer, for Ivan Drago would not be introspective enough to have a ready response.  What we would gradually be shown is that Ivan does love his son, but it’s not something he’s ever focused on⁠—love is not a big part of his emotional lexicon.  Hunger for lost respect is far closer to the fore, and it should slowly dawn on him that he has been thinking of Viktor almost solely in terms of his instrumental value, and that maybe that ain’t great.  Another challenge: if Ivan does love Viktor, why be so relentlessly harsh with him?  The standard answer of the poisonously demanding parent is that pushing children rather than nurturing them is the way to show real love, because only kids who are pushed become successful and only success brings happiness.  Ivan Drago would be able to add another answer: this is how he was pushed by the Soviet sports establishment, so it is all he knows.  Again, he should be increasingly troubled by the realization that that ain’t great either.  By the time of the final fight, he should be strug­gling with his feelings about his relationship with his son, from his birth right up to this moment.  And then the way you shoot the decision to throw in the towel⁠—it’s got to be a perfectly acted and edited sequence.  We need to feel Viktor’s determination to remain on his feet, though he is helpless to fend off Adonis Creed’s onslaught⁠—each blow needs to feel like it could be fatal.  We need to see the switch flip for Ivan, as one moment he’s watching his ticket back to public and institutional acclaim slip away, and then next he’s watching his beloved son, whom he now knows he’s mistreated, wilting under a murderous attack⁠—and realizing that, if only he can summon the courage to change, the towel in his hands can save his little boy.

According to Wikipedia, this is what Creed II depicts.  But as the kids say, “Yeah, no”.  That towel sequence has some of the neces­sary ingredients, but there’s too much faffing around for it to really work.  Donnie cornering and pummeling Viktor is shot from a distance and from weird angles.  At the key moment of the movie, to even figure out what’s going on you have to peer around what the camera has decided to linger on, which is Ivan Drago’s ass.  As for all the psychological underpinnings of that moment, the internal conflict leading up to it… well, let me put it this way.  Screenwriting formulas dictate that you don’t say in a speech what you can say in a line, you don’t say in a line what you can say in a look, and you don’t say in a look what you can just leave out.  Those who endorse those formulas might well argue that Creed II handled Drago’s internal conflict perfectly, by giving us a couple of glimpses of him looking distressed and leaving the precise reasons for his distress as subtext.  And my past self⁠—writing when I was working in the movie biz⁠—came up with a list of evaluative patterns that might have agreed: Pattern 18 does say, “Don’t speak the subtext!”  But I think I’m going to take that one back.  There are times when you want subtext to remain unspoken, and there are times when you want to turn it into text.  As Tricia McMillan learned in Chapter 2 of Mostly Harmless, the trick is to distinguish between the two types of occasions.

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