Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Tuesday, August 06, 2002

Sequels tend to always be worse than the original. There are obvious exceptions such as the Back to the Future series and of course Star Wars.

Gerard actually advances a fairly complex question here. Back to The Future 2's superiority to Back to the Future is at best debatable. Although louder and wider in scope, and inarguably more ingenious in its capacity as a metamovie - a sequel that reprises not only the characters and action but the temporal space occupied by its predecessor - the lack of the same emotional bonds between the characters and the reliance on effects over sharp scripting leaves the question open.

None of this changes the fact that Back to the Future 3 was an experience of an unpleasantness comparable to having your penis flensed and the resulting pulpy sack of fleshsquash then vigorously rubbed between two sharks (whose roughened, skin-splitting epidermis is, we have established, either very scary or, being reminiscent of the protective spines of a hedgehog, actively deleterious to scaring activity). Although it is also, technically, a sequel, being sequential, to Back to the Future.

Star Wars is another and yet more complex question. For, although there is a strong and well-supported case that The Empire Strikes Back is a better film than A New Hope, with improved scripting, better characterisation and more and better effects, which make up for or even complement the darker tones and the absence of the sense of wonder that permeated its parent,
Return of the Jedi essentially sucks bantha cock. Until the bantha begged for mercy. Including 10,000 years for it to develop language and the concept of mercy. And yet, this is both a sequel to the far superior Empire Strikes Back, and the perceptibly superior A New Hope, sequel being, as you smart kittens all know, being from the Latin sequor, I follow.

Then we get to The Fandom Menace and Where are the Clones? There should be Clones...., and it gets yet more difficult. These are more painful to watch than one's entire family being gang-banged by ewoks, including and indeed placing much to the fore your dead granny. Artistically and in real chronological terms, they are manifestly sequels, but they preced in terms of the timeline of the fiction they inhabit not only their direct predecessor but also the two predecessors of that direct predecessor.

In many ways, Gerard has, in his cute, vole-like way, unearthed a puzzle for generations to come.

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