Characters Who Were Much Better In The Sequel

2006 was a simpler time. Millennials were young and doe-eyed. We still trusted the Hollywood system to care for the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise like the beautiful creature it was and not milk it until its udders got chapped and scabby. The first of the Pirates sequels makes a lot of bold changes to the mythology. It introduces new characters like Davy Jones, the first tentacle-faced Scottsman to appear in a major motion picture since Sean Connery. It also reintroduces us to old favorites with new twists: Pintel and Ragetti are back and religiously motivated. Elizabeth is here and doing sword things now. Jack Sparrow isn't all that annoying yet.

But the real star was James Norrington. A secondary antagonist from the first movie, he'd been less "straight up villain" and more "guy your girlfriend's dad wishes she was dating instead of you." He had a great job and knew how to dress up pretty. His only character flaw was the stick up his keister, which Dead Man's Chest unceremoniously removes without so much as a "close your eyes and think of England." In the sequel, Norrington has been stripped of rank and dropped in a bottle, sent to Tortuga to slowly succumb to liver failure. He's more watchable and likeable for it, and he becomes the mascot for a phenomenon we'll see a lot here: the grimier the character gets, the more they improve.

There was a good long while there where comic book movies were considered kid-centric, hokey, expensive, and dumb. It took a while, but eventually studios started to figure out that colorful characters with decades of backstory to borrow from had, you know, potential. They could be exactly as complex and layered as you wanted them to be.

Case in point: Wolverine. On the surface, he's a cranky man with hands that cut things, making him the original Slap Chop. But delve into the source material, and you've got nigh on fifty years of stories about his origins, his life, and the ways that over a century of physical trauma and water bed accidents can wear on a guy.

And the movies got it right, like, half of the time. Roughly the first 20 minutes of The Wolverine, for example, are less an action figure commercial and more a heartbreaking independent film about psychological damage, loneliness, and regret. Do ninjas show up a few minutes later and break the dramatic tension? Yeah, but what are you going to do? The picture also ends with Wolverine fighting Super Shredder. Making movies is hard.

In the neverending panoply of superhero movies, 2008's Iron Man is rooted firmly in "great for its time" territory. Consider that up to that point, the most successful big screen superhero franchise had ended with Tobey Maguire slow dancing with Kirsten Dunst to apologize for punching her, and that for every X2 there were three or four Nic Cage Ghost Riders, Ben Affleck Daredevils, and Halle Berry Catwomans waiting to break your heart.

The problem with Tony was that he was too awesome to be interesting, with "awesome" being used here the way it generally is when a guy who still uses hair gel slams a Vodka Red Bull at a Buffalo Wild Wings. He was cocky, overconfident, and egotistical. His whole mission statement came down to "Darn it, I was too good at making stuff explode, so now I've got to explode the exploding stuff I made with even better stuff that explodes stuff."

So it was pretty refreshing when Iron Man 3 came out. Even with its divisive narrative and perceived lack of robot suit screen time, it really manages to shine when it comes to painting Tony as a human being. Here, he's a vulnerable person, terrified of what the events of The Avengers have done to change his worldview. It's a shockingly humanizing turn, even if you are still bitter about the Mandarin.

It's been nearly 15 years since Christopher Nolan inadvertently birthed the rise of the dark and gritty superhero movie with Batman Begins. Up to that point, Tim Burton's Batman Returns was the darkest on screen iteration of the character audiences had seen, and it played less like a true crime biopic and more like an ambitious Cirque du Soleil/Hot Topic cross promotion.

Begins was followed by The Dark Knight. Opening like gangbusters both critically and financially, the sequel has a lot of moments that've probably burned themselves into your memory. As you look back, though, practically none of them probably have much to do with Batman. It was weird that it happened and even weirder that it worked, but Batman was almost a background character in his own movie; more a part of the landscape and a vessel for theme than a human being affected by the story.

So it was a punch in the gut when The Dark Knight Rises rolled out that scene where Alfred admits that he burned the letter from Rachel. It's quiet and it's subtle, but that's the first time in seven years of movies that we see Bruce Wayne exhibit more than a half-hearted sociopathic glance at feeling emotions. Seeing a guy who's been wingsuiting into skyscrapers and Monster Jamming traffic jams for two movies staggered by something as personal as a lie his friend told him is still the closest we've gotten to a human Batman.

At a certain point, the particulars of a character aren't as important as their place in the world they inhabit. Disney put that together when they realized we didn't need a ninth reimagining of the Spider-Man origin story in order to make the audience understand Spider-Man. The killer from Se7en is defined by the way he changes the story, not background information about what drives him.

The same goes for Max in Mad Max: Fury Road. From the opening narration forward, we're not given a ton of material to draw from if we want to define his character. We know he's a survivor, and that he's less of a jerk than the bad guys. In point of fact, we're told so little about him that there are popular fan theories that he's not the Max Rockatansky from the first three movies at all, and while you can't prove that they're right, you sure can't prove that they're wrong.  

And you know what? That's alright. A character who's, in practice, divorced of any connection to previous events wound up being a lot more compelling. From the lack of flashbacks or explanation to his general lack of dialogue, less really was more.

The Prophecy is a 1995 horror thriller that has, in large part, been forgotten, as evidenced by the fact that it's one of maybe 12 '90s genre movies that nobody's trying to reboot. It's a not so great film with a few bright spots: Viggo Mortinson shows up as the Devil, Amanda Plummer is her usual level of inhumanly charming, and most importantly, Christopher Walken plays an evil take on the angel Gabriel. It never really gels, and it made next to no money, but damned if it didn't go on to spawn four sequels, which were... worse.

Really, there's next to nothing to love about the rest of the films in the series, with one exception: during production on 2000's The Prophecy 3: The Ascent, some sort of miracle must have happened. Maybe the director got bored or the writers got tired, but by all appearances, somebody made the decision to stop writing dialogue for Christopher Walken and just kind of let him talk. And talk he does. At one point, he sits at a diner from the first movie and orders breakfast for something like a full minute. Imagine a mid-level improv comic going to Denny's and ordering everything on the menu in a Christopher Walken voice, because that's exactly the energy that's brought to the scene.

The lesson here is, if you can't make something good, you can at least make it so weird that it's impossible to look away.