The irony is that Fallen was a terrible bomb, and it has poisoned the waters for anyone trying to do something like that.
It's very difficult to have a disembodied or non-present antagonist in an action story; if there's nobody for the hero to challenge directly, it's very frustrating. (You can sometimes deal with that by giving the villain corporeal allies/henchmen/worshippers, like the aforementioned LOTR.) In a story that's really about something else, like a procedural where the hero must struggle with his or her superiors, or a romantic comedy, you can get by, because the nominal villain really becomes a stalking horse for the actual conflict.
Still, the less tangible presence the villain or threat has, the less dramatic force it carries. This is why Back to the Future 2 doesn't work as well dramatically as Back to the Future. In the first movie, if Marty doesn't reunite his parents, he will cease to exist, and we have the (contrived) device of the photo that keeps changing as a gauge to measure his progress against nonexistence. In the second film, the threat is not even Biff himself, but the unfavorable alterations of history, which is awfully murky from a dramatic standpoint.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-11-16 05:30 pm (UTC)It's very difficult to have a disembodied or non-present antagonist in an action story; if there's nobody for the hero to challenge directly, it's very frustrating. (You can sometimes deal with that by giving the villain corporeal allies/henchmen/worshippers, like the aforementioned LOTR.) In a story that's really about something else, like a procedural where the hero must struggle with his or her superiors, or a romantic comedy, you can get by, because the nominal villain really becomes a stalking horse for the actual conflict.
Still, the less tangible presence the villain or threat has, the less dramatic force it carries. This is why Back to the Future 2 doesn't work as well dramatically as Back to the Future. In the first movie, if Marty doesn't reunite his parents, he will cease to exist, and we have the (contrived) device of the photo that keeps changing as a gauge to measure his progress against nonexistence. In the second film, the threat is not even Biff himself, but the unfavorable alterations of history, which is awfully murky from a dramatic standpoint.