tenpastmidnight blog
Making hay while the sun shines
» Monday, January 12, 2004 «
Films that didn't need a sequel
I taped Highlander: Endgame the other night and finished watching it this morning. The Highlander films are a great demonstration of something Hollywood forgot years ago: some films don't need a sequel. Highlander is the best example of this. It had internal consistency, a beginning, middle, definitive end and there was absolutely no scope for a sequel. Now we've had three of them, because the original film was successful, and in each of the sequels they get further and further away from the events of the original, and none of them are as good.
Other films that didn't need a sequel? For me, The Matrix was a film that stood better on it's own than it does now as the start of a trilogy. Police Academy, but only because the quality of the writing dropped even further than the original as the series went on. The Fast and the Furious - the second film could have been written slightly differently and launched under another name, they were just cashing in on the TFaTF doing well... Oh, there must be dozens. Then again, Hollywood is producing lots of tripe at the moment without them all being sequels, bad writing doesn't have to be restricted to having a number at the end of the film title.
Other films that didn't need a sequel? For me, The Matrix was a film that stood better on it's own than it does now as the start of a trilogy. Police Academy, but only because the quality of the writing dropped even further than the original as the series went on. The Fast and the Furious - the second film could have been written slightly differently and launched under another name, they were just cashing in on the TFaTF doing well... Oh, there must be dozens. Then again, Hollywood is producing lots of tripe at the moment without them all being sequels, bad writing doesn't have to be restricted to having a number at the end of the film title.
