Why Fantasy War Movies Suck

badlands, one of our forum users, often starts interesting topics. One of the latest topics is war movies. Thinking about some of the great war movies (and series) that I have watched through the years, I cannot help but think about two things.

First, I am reminded that Yoda said, “War does not make one great”.

Secondly, I find it disappointing that there are really no well-done fantasy war movies. Sure, we all have our favorite fantasy movies and many of them have wars (or may even be about wars). For example, “In the name of the King” — starring Jason Statham and a cast of other stars — comes close to being an interesting fantasy movie. It promises so much but seems to just fall short. Don’t get me wrong — I enjoyed it far more than many other fantasy movies I have had to suffer through. But it didn’t handle the genre properly in certain ways.

One of the criticisms directed at the movie by many viewers was Burt Reynolds’ portrayal of the king. Frankly, I think Reynolds did a fine job with a thin part. That’s the problem with fantasy movies: their worlds have no substance. “In the name of the King” is based on a fantasy game. Hollywood seems to feel that just drawing characters from games onto the big screen is sufficient. After all, “Resident Evil” is working out pretty well.

But the difference between a franchise like “Resident Evil” and a typical fantasy film is that “Resident Evil” has the luxury of stripping away all that we know about our world to create a minimalist landscape. The story is about a minimalist landscape (and the people who are struggling to survive in it).

The best fantasy worlds work because they have depth and a sense of pseudo-realism that works for the audience. There has to be more at stake than two kingdoms fighting each other, or some monster coming out of nowhere to terrorize a village. Fantasy movies struggle with the need to tell a story and depict a world. Usually, a typical fantasy movie revolves around a very small section of countryside, possibly one or two small towns. Many fantasy movies are set in desert landscapes.

There’s nothing wrong with having a movie set in a desert but if you have a civilization existing in a desert (ala “Beastmaster”) then you have some ‘splainin to do. “Conan the Barbarian” for all its many faults at least took the viewer through multiple kingdoms and cities, across a variety of landscapes. One had the sense that Conan was moving through a world that was populated by primitive civilizations. “Beastmaster” just left me wondering how all those people lived. Where did they get their food?

When a fantasy movie spends too much time wallowing in its gaming background (such as in “Dungeons and Dragons”) and emphasizing bad acting (such as “Dungeons and Dragons”) and depending on (incomplete or amateurish) special effects (such as in “Dungeons and Dragons”), the fantasy film genre takes a big hit for credibility and sensibility.

Of course, not every fault comes from the film-making industry. If the fantasy books and games many of these movies are based on don’t present sensible worlds either, then the movies can hardly be blamed for staying faithful to the denuded world concept. One fantasy world that lends itself well to the near-barren landscape motif is Middle-earth. In fact, readers of The Lord of the Rings sometimes ask where are all the people?” in Middle-earth.

Middle-earth’s history explains why there seem to be so few people in the western lands at the end of the Third Age. They’ve been under almost constant assault by outside forces for two thousand years. I don’t care what fantasy universe you’re from, that’s gotta hurt. So it was easy for Peter Jackson to depict a Middle-earth whose population centers were far from each other — the audience expected to see broad empty swathes of landscape. But Jackson correctly included references to older civilizations (the ruins at Weathertop and in Eregion, for example).

If the movie is relatively faithful to an original concept (and despite many departures from the book Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” was very faithful in a lot of ways) then the audience — if it has already accepted the original concept — should probably accept the movie. Unfortunately, that may not have happened with M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Last Airbender”, which is based on the Avatar animated series.

Now, not being a viewer for Avatar I don’t know what it’s fundamental concepts are, but a lot of people criticized Shyamalan’s depiction of the Avatar’s world. And I find that unfortunate because he actually portrayed a semi-realistic world. You can almost see the farms and fisheries that support the populations in the movie. The cities may not always make sense from an Earth-perspective, but within the context of the Avatar’s world they do at least some some affinities for their locations.

As a fantasy movie “The Last Airbender” shows us a variety of landscapes and populations, and in some cases you actually see these civilizations have multiple towns/cities. The unbelievably huge fleet of the Fire Nation isn’t quite justified by the revelations in the movie but the prospect of seeing further movies in the franchise at least teases the audience with some potential logic.

A fantasy movie that doesn’t have to be faithful to an original book, game, comic, or TV show is at least free from audience expectations. Take James Cameron’s “Avatar”. While technically a science fiction movie, it nonetheless shares the need to depict an entirely new world with a typical fantasy film. Pandora seems real again because we are introduced to a variety of landscapes and eventually got to see that, yes, Pandora has more than one clan (or tribe) of natives. Hey, it looks like a real world.

A fantasy war movie needs to accomplish several things if it wants to succeed on as many levels as a typical war movie.

First, the fantasy world has to make sense. It has to look real, like, yeah, it could exist somewhere according to some logical set of natural laws. It has to be full and robust. It should have a variety of landscapes and climates even if they are only scene briefly or from afar. Unlike a classic war movie that is set in a real historical place, a fantasy war movie doesn’t have the audience’s pre-established familiarity with the world in which the war takes place.

Second, the fantasy world has to be populated. If it’s nearly empty, the story has to make it clear early on why the world is nearly empty. You can have a fantasy story set in a very small area and then just imply that a full world exists outside that location, but if you set the story in a small location and make that the entire world — that needs some ‘splainin. So when you show a civilization in a fantasy world, that civilization has to have more than one city OR it has to explain why it’s down to the last city. And you need to show (at least in passing) how everyone lives — where do they get their food, their clothing, etc.?

Third, the characters in the story have to have a reason for existing other than to be the heroes (or the meat that gets chopped up). The classic “farm boy becomes the king” motif has been done to death. That the story is fantasy doesn’t mean it automatically makes sense. In fact, even if the idea can be forced to make sense, why does every farm boy have to become the king?

Something that fantasy movies lack is the common man’s perspective. You don’t get to follow the adventures of a squad of grunts in a fantasy war movie. It’s always the king or queen or prince or princess struggling to save the kingdom or the world. Why can’t someone just have a fantasy adventure in a fantasy world? There’s plenty of story to tell in that kind of movie. There’s plenty of character to develop in that kind of drama.

Fantasy movies should not be about the kings and queens — they should be about the real people in imaginary situations. Why? Because fantasy kings and queens are boring. They’ve been done to death. Everyone knows the king will save the kingdom, the prince will learn who he is and succeed his father, the girl will befriend the monster. What makes a rollicking good fantasy adventure is when the stakes are more personal. People used to love the old Sinbad the Sailor movies — he never had to save the world.

When a fantasy movie shows you only part of the story — and not necessarily the most important part of the story — the audience is left wanting more. When the fantasy movie says, “Look, there is this war going on, and here is this one guy’s part in that war”, it sets the audience up to expect to learn more about the world, the war, and maybe some of the guy’s buddies, cousins, or rivals.

We can produce an endless supply of movies about World War I, World War II, the Crimean War, the Civil War, the Vietnam War, etc. because those conflicts were not “one person’s fight” — they involved millions of people, including the both the soldiers and the civilians who supported them. Multitudes of small dramas unfolded everywhere in those conflicts. That’s why when we watch “Casablanca” we’re comfortable seeing just one small drama playing out against a well-established backdrop of many other dramas.

A really cool fantasy movie franchise would introduce and follow the exploits of many everyman characters, tell the greater story from several smaller points of view. The fantasy world should be shared by multiple stories, not created for the sake of one story.

In some ways, the “Star Wars” movies actually succeeded in doing this. George Lucas was able to give us (over the course of six movies) different sets of heroes and villains, different conflicts, and different motivations. And, sure, he has expanded the “Star Wars” universe to include comics, books, etc. but just those six films (not even counting the two Ewok adventures or the notorious Christmas Special) showed the audience that there is a LOT going on in the Star Wars universe. It’s not just about one character’s mission to save the galaxy.

Star Wars may actually be the best example to date of a “fantasy war movie” simply because it doesn’t focus on He-Who-Must-One-Day-Rule-The-Galaxy. It comes close to following the grunts as they carry out their duties while involving political leaders. The grunts may or may not have special abilities or destinies. They have flaws, personal ambitions, their own stories separate from the main story. Things matter to the charaters other than just getting to the end of the adventure.

I’d like to see more of that going forward. If there are more Airbender movies, I’d like to see more personal conflicts and interests. Sure, there is a greater theme involved (the world must be restored to balance) but what makes the world interesting isn’t the primary conflict — it’s the people and how they live in the world.