A friend of mine in showbiz once told me that everything was being pitched as “Die Hard in/on a blank”. Die Hard on a submarine. Die Hard in a mall. Die Hard at a Circle K. So, it makes sense that with any new and improved Amblin-esque attempts at family adventure films a fitting comparison would be the almost 30 year old, Richard Donner classic, ‘The Goonies.’
However, Has our tech and cultural landscape changed so much that most of the stories from the 80’s simply couldn’t happen today without artificially engineering circumstances where they could? The Goonies are going to be evicted? Why don’t they just start a Kickstarter or GoFundIt campaign to get donations and save the neighborhood? or an online petition, or email representatives, or any of a million things they could try in this the electronic connected age of empowerment.
I think the difficulty with technology is how do you get away from the already established fantasy that our current tech basically makes us minor gods and steer it to the more decidedly lo-fi fantasy of escapist high adventure. The line between “fantasy” and “idiotic and unrealistic behavior” can be razor thin, and no one likes the latter. This is especially true for a Goonies when contrasted to a Harry Potter, since with the former we’re theoretically playing with the real world. How do you create what is recognizably the real world and then add true peril on top of it without either blowing the audience’s suspension of disbelief, or going someplace dark enough to permanently ruin the sense of lighthearted fun.
So you say, How would you make a modern kids adventure work?
Something like ‘Lost in Space’, but not quite as strange. A family is a situation where they are not inundated with with cyber-this, internet-that, and being compulsively connected to everything. It’s important to avoid, the usual ploys, the idiot father, the weak-willed and/or uncooperative mother, otherwise squabbling and/or ineffectual adults. Kids who are passive aggressively bratty and needlessly counter-productive. Maybe the the kids don’t want to be there, but they get over it fast because “you are here so deal with it”.
Also, It’s not that life is so monitored. but what if the kids decided to duck the radar as they knew it, to find that blind spot, to get into adventures their parent might have gotten into so much more easily.
One more thing, let’s avoid kids having a weird destiny and/or strange powers as the reason d’etre for the adventure. No more Narnia. How are three city kids (even if it is about WW2) supposed to bandy together strange mythological beings to fight huge powers and vast armies? If it was three kids exploring a strange world, on the other side of a portal, only to have to participate in a campaign to safe that world, without becoming the saviors of that world, but maybe finding and/or rescuing said savior.
Basically, it comes back to a very distinct lack of imagination. Given some thought you can make anything work.
-You build the story around an alternate/augmented-reality game, like Ingress. Only instead of the in-game story just being a framing narrative to explain gameplay, it’s actually real. It could be like an update of older adventure/horror movies like ‘Cloak & Dagger’, ‘The Gate’ or ‘Trick Or Treat’. But instead of heavy metal music, or video games, or off-brand Dungeons & Dragons actually being the key to supernatural powers/aliens/government conspiracies, it’s a smartphone app. Or an update of ‘The Last Starfighter’, with the smartphone game selecting players for “the real war” through a digital version of the Sorting Hat.
-An inner city story where the strangeness and otherworld-ness, unique characters and happenings are not dark and evil, but a new set of experiences, that fear prevented ever even imagining was there.
-Visit a new country? Prove the axiom: “All the travel book s in the world are not worth one real trip.”
-Dare to drop off the grid for a few days… Or the days immediately following disaster.
-Meet an extraordinary person/being, who makes regular life not regular for a while.
That’s five. Now, run with them.
Don’t worry – someday movie pitches will be done by saying “This is like the first Twilight movie crossed with a strong Big Hero Six vibe. Remember that dragon Smaug in that Hobbit movie twenty years ago? Our villain is just like that!”
-Dagobot
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