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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 6/28/2025

Sequels: A Choice

When something original and new gets sudden success in Hollywood, there's the immediate need to capitalize on it. Sequels have always been a thing in Hollywood, extending back to the silent era with serials (William Wyler cut his teeth making serial westerns for Universal), but it was the 80s where Hollywood decided to make them a cornerstone of their financial well-being rather than an ashamed underbelly of cashflow that it had always been.

For decades, the question of how to approach sequels was easy: more of the same. Another adventure for the Lone Ranger or Flash Gordon. Even outside of franchises, you could just have Randolph Scott amble into another isolated western town and deal with some injustice and then amble out again, and the B-movie fans will show up in enough numbers to financially justify the next. So, that means formula. You just do the same thing again.

And when sequels turned into huge business, that approach becomes a bigger question. If you're Fast and Furious, you can keep tweaking the formula slightly with every entry until you reach ridiculous, borderline parody of the original film, and the audience will go along with it. If you're Star Wars, you go in a different direction and deepen emotion and increase danger...for one film and then revert to the formula of the first.

In my cinematic journeys, I've grown less patient with formula. I don't reject it or hate a film because it follows formula, but I've always looked forward to sequels that broke with formula more than those that stuck to it. So, now we must talk about Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted Theodore Logan.

Bill & Ted's Curious Cinematic Cruise

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is a weird creation from the get-go. Born from a stage act from the writers, Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson, where they would play the characters, two doofuses with Southern California surfer accents, reacting to news events, it's about the titular heroes traveling through time to...pass a history report in order to...save the future because...their music brings about world peace. It's inherently silly, makes no sense when you think about the film's embrace of time travel mechanics (if the future is in danger of not existing because the band will be split up with Ted going to military school because he fails his history report...how does the future exist where they never split up?), and very loosely structured.

But it was a financial success, and the studio, Orion Pictures, quickly greenlit a sequel.

What do you do with that? Well, I was curious, so when I picked up the 4K boxset of the trilogy, the first thing I did was watch an interview on the disc for Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey with Ed Solomon. His first inclination towards writing a sequel was formula. Bill and Ted need to write another report, this time for their English class. But they quickly abandoned it.

Instead, they went...weird. Bill and Ted die. They die because some ugly dude from the future hates the utopia he lives in, so he sends back robot versions of Bill and Ted to kill them, replace them, and then use the originals' platform to establish a new future in the ugly dude's vision. Hardly any time travel. No reports to do. In fact, the film consciously uses formula against our heroes. When the evil robot usses meet the real Bill and Ted, they rely on their memories of going back in time to fix their problems to get them to come along and kill them in the desert. From that point on, though, it sidesteps the formula from the first one completely and sets its own path.

And I prefer it, and not by a small amount. The first is loose and just kind of flops from one section to the next with no real narrative drive. It's funny while it does it, its saving grace, but I just prefer how the second film has this centralizing focus and a more linear approach to the heroes dealing with their problems. The afterlife on Earth, including possession to try and get people to protect their babes, to Hell, where they have to face their eternal damnation in entertainingly personalized form (including Alex Winter, who plays Bill, playing his own grandmother), to facing off with Death in a series of games to get back to Earth, to Heaven to collect Station, the universe's smartest scientists, back to Earth. In the first, they get their phone booth, travel kind of randomly, get some footage of Napoleon at a waterpark and the rest of the historical figures at the mall, and then do the report.

And that difference is actually one of the reasons why I feel like the second is actually the better film. It takes an established formula, consciously undermines it, and understands what needs to be preserved isn't the formula but the characters. What makes a Bill & Ted movie a Bill & Ted movie isn't them assembling historical (or literary, in the case of the second film's first draft) figures to present in front of an auditorium of high school students. It's Bill & Ted facing extreme and fantastical circumstances with their signature dopey flare. Moving away from the formula of the first and putting them into something completely new is a good thing.

Facing the Music


Rumors and efforts to get a sequel to Bogus Journey lingered for years until finally, in the late 2010s, the original writers Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson cracked a script that made both Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter happy. Bill and Ted never wrote the great song to unite the world, reality begins to crack, they're tasked with writing it in 77 minutes, they travel to their own future (past the point where the world ends...?) to steal the song from themselves while their daughters travel through time to get together a great band to help their dads with their song. Also, they die and meet Death again in order to complete the band.

So, the third entry is something of mishmash of ideas, seemingly a collection of different ideas the writers had had over the years, cobbled together into something like a whole. In terms of approaching sequels, it has its cake and eats it too by being both different and the same at the same time. In terms of the sameness is the daughters collecting historical personages and the trip to Hell (though Hell is presented in far less interesting terms). Regarding the new and different it's seeing Bill and Ted watch their futures evolve over the years in different ways.

I don't think I'm alone in seeing the third film as a miss (it has the lowest IMDB rating by not a small amount), and I think a large part of that has to do with the confused conglomeration of ideas and storylines, coupled with an end of the world storyline and visuals that fit more in with an MCU movie than a Bill and Ted adventure. It is a combination of regurgitating the old and finding some corner of new stuff, but combining them...inelegantly. Do I expect elegance from a Bill and Ted film? Neither of the first two are, but they have a clearer vision about what they are, more modest ambitions, and an interest in generally being different.

It feels like a compromise film between a bunch of different needs from stars, writers, and studio, and those compromises prevented the film from having something like a life of its own.

It also doesn't help that Keanu and Winter cannot recreate the energy from their youth, denying the third entry one of the key appealing aspects of the first two: Bill and Ted, to some degree.

Different


Bill and Ted aren't the only two cinematic figures who have seen strange changes in directions in subsequent movies. Think of Rambo, his first film, First Blood, being a fairly spare thriller in the Pacific Northwest where only one person dies to Rambo: First Blood Part II set in Vietnam where he blows up a bunch of stuff real good. Or Gremlins where the first film is essentially a cross between Frank Capra and Steven Spielberg with a dash of Joe Dante while the second is Joe Dante's love of Tex Avery Looney Tunes made real life. Or the Evil Dead franchise that started in dark horror and quickly morphed into horror-comedy with Evil Dead II (which itself is essentially a remake of the first one) and outright comedy with Army of Darkness.

This can work well (think Army of Darkness) or really badly (think Highlander II: The Quickening). I think it generally doesn't work well because of the realities of movie making (starting with writers not understanding the assignment, studio executives not understanding the value of the risk of the change, and actors valuing their images), the path of least resistance simply being "the same but different," which usually translates as "bigger, louder, and longer."

Which makes me look forward to the sequels that do veer off in weird, unexpected directions. I mean, there are a good number of examples of sequels that do this and just fall flat or just don't measure up (I like Halloween III: Season of the Witch, but it's not anywhere close to the original), but it's just...more interesting.

But people love formula. They loved The Fast and the Furious and want more of it, and any changes to tone and scale have to happen slowly over time. They want just another adventure with Kirk and Spock. They just want James Bond to face down another big threat while bedding women and using gadgets. And I'm not opposed to that. I've had a lot of fun with continuing adventures type films.

But sometimes, you need Bill and Ted to die and fight evil robot usses from the future instead of collecting more historical figures for another report.

In other news, M3GAN 2.0 came out yesterday and Jurassic World: Rebirth comes out next week.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

F1: The Movie

M3GAN 2.0

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

What Did the Lady Forget? (Rating 3/4) Full Review "I think that points to how Ozu can create these multi-layered stories so easily. It's not his best example, but it's a solid one." [The Criterion Channel]

There was a Father (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Still, this is very good work from Ozu, proving very quickly that he's a master of the sound era without any flash or showmanship. He's assured and confident in his stylistic approaches, and he makes it work with the stories he's choosing to tell." [The Criterion Channel]

A Hen in the Wind (Rating 4/4) Full Review "Really, this is a marvelous gem of a film. It's one I'd never heard of, and one I think deserves more attention. It's great." [The Criterion Channel]

Tokyo Story (Rating 4/4) Full Review "So, yes, Tokyo Story is a masterpiece. It very likely could be Ozu's greatest achievement. It's touching in a deep, subtle way. It's miraculously made. Ozu's intelligent approach to his stories makes them far more compelling than I imagine almost anyone else could make them. He was a gem of cinema, and this may be his crowning achievement." [The Criterion Channel]

The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Still, this is Ozu demonstrating his mastery of his art once again. Probably not the very top of his output, but this is still a touching look at a relationship told with quiet reserve: exactly what I want from an Ozu film." [The Criterion Channel]

Early Spring (Rating 4/4) Full Review "The quiet, subtle way this film touched me really surprised me. It's great." [The Criterion Channel]

Equinox Flower (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Still, it's very good. Almost like Ozu on autopilot. But his autopilot is better than most people's best efforts." [The Criterion Channel]

Good Morning (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's full of fart jokes, little business, and hardly any story at all, and yet, in the end, there's this swell of emotion as life just...plays out." [The Criterion Channel]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 7/19, and it will be about the directing career of Yasujiro Ozu.