Eyes heard, loud and ... cleard

It had been nearly 14 years since I'd last seen my #31 on Flickchart, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a movie I've seen more than a dozen times overall. And when I saw it on Thursday night, it was like no time I'd ever seen it before.

Hear My Eyes is a periodic Melbourne series where a local musician creates an all new score to accompany a classic film, and it gets showed a small number of times with live musical accompaniment. I've attended the series exactly once before, when it appeared during MIFF of 2017 and allowed me a new experience of a new favorite, 1972's Fantastic Planet, which I saw for the first time in 2008 but have now seen five times in total. That was a trippy experience, and so was this one. 

The musicians in this case were all electronic, led by lead composer and performer Peter van Hoesen, with a cohort called MESS Snythesiser Ensemble on stage with him, and a laser light show orchestrated by Robin Fox. More on the laser light show in a minute.

You pay $89 for the experience, but trust me, it was well worth it. 

Here are a couple ideas of what Hamer Hall in Melbourne looked like prior to Thursday's show, the middle of three. I had to take these photos a bit surreptitiously as there were already several people walking around holding up an iPad which showed a camera with a red Ghostsbusters-style cross through it. I know that was meant for once the performance started only, but I didn't want to unnecessarily anger anyone with what seemed like a blatant violation of the thing they were requesting of me. 

Under the screen you can see a DJ station that was eventually occupied by about eight people. I should say that I don't totally understand live DJing in most contexts. I get that many DJ sets are not totally pre-planned, or if they are pre-planned, then they do the transitions live anyway. I mean, I don't think they're just up there pantomiming. 

But for something like a score, where the music is timed out exactly to what is happening in the movie, there would be no reason I could see why they couldn't just press play on a pre-recorded sequence of music when the movie starts. I guess because then it wouldn't that cool. I do wonder if there is the freedom to interpret in the moment -- I mean, I can't imagine all the eight people up there were just pressing a button when it came time to press a button. But obviously there were certain moments within the movie that had to be respected, without any chance that a freestyle musical interpretation would step on them, such as when the music goes down in time for Arnie to say "Trust me" before he's about to not kill anyone with his gatling gun. 

I wondered, as I was watching, how they managed to squelch the original score, which I have subsequently learned is by a composer named Brad Fiedel. (I had always assumed the score was by one of the household name industry giants, like a Hans Zimmer.) And this gets us to the elephant in that very big room, which is that Terminator 2 is a particularly difficult film score to replace because of how iconic it is. The "dum dum dum da-dum" that we all think of when we think of T2 is so inseparable from the movie itself, would we miss it? But I'm getting sidetracked and I will come back to that in a moment. 

What I mean about this question of squelching the score is that I would have thought there'd be times that the score would be playing over key sound effects or dialogue in the movie. How would they erase the score without erasing the sound of smashing metal or human beings crying out in pain? 

I did wonder if it was similar to how you can reduce a song to individual tracks. There's a podcast I listen to once in a great while called One Song where they do just that, playing only individual parts of a song to analyze those parts unto themselves, in the course of considering that single song over a 45-minute period. Maybe Van Hoesen et al are doing that here. In any case, it was seamless.

The score itself? Pretty great. The word "cyberpunk" came to mind as I was listening to it, but "industrial" would have worked -- a lot of metallic scratching sounds, deep bellows, that sort of thing. The word "atmospheric" also came to mind, because there are moments in the film where I believe there probably was no score originally -- though I am eager now for a comparison viewing -- and they were accentuated here by a background humming, a howling of wind, or a sinister sonic wallpaper that added to the overall sense of dystopia. If I were a music critic rather than a film critic, I might be describing this better.

I did wonder, if just to throw us a bone, whether it might have been nice to acknowledge the "dum dum dum da-dum" of Fiedel's original, especially in the opening credits. I don't think anyone would have accused them of being too influenced by Fiedel if they'd just done the equivalent of a shout-out to that. But no, the music over the opening and closing credits was a bit more like what I would call "technical malfunction music," the sonic equivalent of a robot going on the fritz, with scraping and springing sounds reminding us of a future gone haywire.

Okay now it's time to talk about the lasers.

I don't think they ever got any better than the opening. As you recall, we start on a future battle between the human resistance and the machines, and there are literal blue lasers being shot in the movie. These same blue lasers strobed through the theater, prompting oohs and ahhs from all of us. The use of lasers continued to be interesting throughout, though none as effective as our first experience of them. There were lasers to accompany the lightning as the terminators arrived from the future, for example. There were lasers, thinner in their thickness and more diffuse in their spray patterns, during the film's big explosions. There were single lasers that held, for things like a sudden knife thrust through somebody's skull, though I didn't think these were the best use of the gimmick. When Sarah has her gun sight set on the back of Miles Dyson's head, a single laser pointer from the back of the theater mimicked this, which we all loved. There were also lasers creating patterns on the screen any time we saw something through the eyes of the terminator, which as you remember are through that computer readout.

The whole thing was just generally enthralling, as an alternative to our normal T2 viewings though certainly not a replacement for it. I reckon Peter van Hoesen conceived of this project not because he thought "I can do better than Brad Fiedel's score" but rather, because he loved it so much that he wanted to add his own interpretation to a movie he loved dearly. All the rest of the times I watch that movie, I will get Fiedel's score, so I'm glad I got van Hoesen's once.

And the cumulative impact of this experience was having a strange emotional impact on me. I don't usually get emotional during T2, and if I ever did, it would probably be what we think of as "spectacle tears," where the sheer size and scope of something moves us. In this case, I found myself getting a bit choked up at the film's actual emotion moments, something I don't think I'd ever experienced with this movie. 

Before I let you go for the day, I did want to include a smattering of first-time observations about the movie itself. Or if not first time, then things I was reminded of that I wanted to mention to you now.

1) There's something inconsistent about Sarah's behavior when she's in the mental institution. Clearly she's been working on a campaign to be released, or at least get a visitation from her son, which has involved six months of good behavior. Good behavior that her doctor acknowledges. Why, then, has she also recently stabbed the doctor in the knee with his pen? Surely she would realize this sort of thing would be disqualifying for her release?

2) I think we're supposed to believe that the T-1000 finally getting into a close quarters fight with Sarah at the end is significant, because he's finally sampled her physically and can finally mimic her. When in reality, he already touched her way back at the institution, when his metal sword arm slashed down through the elevator roof and cut a groove into her shoulder. I know they never subsequently shared any spatial dynamics where mimicking her would have been a benefit, but he could have mimicked her at any point from the mental institution onward.

3) There's one single moment I find kind of cringe that I started thinking of as "the most Michael Bay moment in Terminator 2." It's the moment where Sarah, John and the T-101 pause to watch two kids at a service station pointing toy guns at each other and screaming at each other, that leads them to conclude that human beings are doomed. It's not that James Cameron is above hitting you on the head with a message, but the subsequent slow-mo image of the two kids wrestling with their guns, silhouetted just a little by the sun, made me think of that as right out of the Michael Bay playbook. I mean, when you come down to it, Bay is basically just a very shitty version of Cameron, right? 

4) This is something I always say about T2, so it's not new, but I continued to be annoyed by the fact that John and the T-101 just watch for five minutes as small puddles of the T-1000 reassemble themselves after being heated up following the liquid nitrogen freeze. They could have been miles away by the time he fully reformed, yet instead they're barely 50 paces ahead of him. 

5) And speaking of John, I really appreciated how good Edward Furlong is in this movie. I think there might be some people out there who find his at-times squeaky performance to be cringe in the same way Jake Lloyd's performance as Anakin Skywalker is cringe, but I feel just the opposite about Furlong. I feel like this is one of the great child acting performances out there, to be honest. I was noticing little details of his performance, like the moment when he's looking at his mother as she tries to bury him under bulletproof jackets in the fleeing police truck. In this one prolonged expression you see three things: 1) sorrow that he never took his mother seriously all these years, 2) a sense of pride that his mother is so strong and capable, and 3) a desire to take in every part of her face, because it may be the last time he ever lays eyes on her. All in one expression. 

I feel like there is a cohort out there -- maybe even the majority of people -- who think of The Terminator as the masterpiece in this series, and T2 as just a capable follow-up. Maybe even a great movie, but nowhere near in the league of the original Terminator in terms of creativity, world building, that sort of thing.

I just don't see it. I've seen the original Terminator only one time all the way through. Maybe twice, but no more than that. There's just nothing in that movie that makes me want to come back to it the way this one does. This is the masterpiece. 

I said earlier that I might want to do a comparison viewing, especially while my Hear My Eyes experience is fresh. Well, I might get that chance. When the movie came up over dinner this week, in the context of discussing where Daddy would be on Thursday night, we thought it might be okay now to show these movies to our kids, even the 12-year-old, despite the violence. I think they could have more trouble with the nuclear annihilation scene -- that's the one that gave me trouble when I was 17 -- but I think the 12-year-old could probably handle all of it, and the 15-year-old certainly could. So that may be in the offing sometime soon.

If you happen to be in Melbourne and you happen to be reading this shortly after it's posted, there's one more performance tonight. 

X-Men: Apocalypse or Termutantator 2: Judgment Day or Children of Mutants

If Logan seems really good, it could be because it reminds us of some really good movies.

One of which is not last year's X-Men: Apocalypse. Which wasn't terrible, but which I watched on the plane only like three months ago and have already forgotten.

I think they might have used that title a year too early.

And before I go any further, let me issue a giant flaming SPOILER ALERT for anyone who thinks I'm not going to spoil every last second of Logan in the following post. (Also spoiling T2 and Children of Men, but it's a bit more likely you've seen those.)

Let's do this systematically.

X-Men: Apocalypse

If you're going to use a cataclysmic word like "apocalypse" in an X-Men movie title, don't waste it on the name of a character. A character who was the most forgettable part of a forgettable movie.

No, use it on a movie like this.

The world does not end in Logan, nor is it in danger of ending. But a cinematic world does seem to meet its maker, and what could be more apocalyptic than that?

Logan doubles down on the epic revelations of the way characters die that makes movies like Star Trek Generations and Star Wars: The Force Awakens feel apocalyptic in their own ways. It kills off not only one, but arguably both of the most famous X-Men there ever were.

And what could be more apocalyptic than that?

But the deaths of Charles Xavier and Wolverine -- in 2029, so they can still fiddle with the timeline to get them in plenty more movies -- are not just apocalyptic because of the fact of their occurrence. I mean, everyone dies, and in this movie we learn that Xavier is supposed to be in his 90s -- a good long life. I'd have to consult the comics to know for sure, but Wolverine a.k.a. Logan nee James Howlett could be three times older than that. They've lived good long lives.

Well, not good long lives. And that's the apocalyptic part. Because we somewhat rarely see our favorite recurring characters in the movies meet their ultimate demise, we always retain this distant hope -- nay, belief -- that there is a happily ever after waiting for them, somewhere, at the end of all these troubles. They may be going through the shit now -- for the seventh, eighth, ninth, or in the case of James Bond, twentysomethingth time -- but someday, somewhere, they will have a quiet retirement full of all the carefree joys that life has denied them so far.

Not so with Logan and Professor X.

Logan has become a heavily bearded alcoholic who drives a limousine, and is starting to get eaten from inside by his adamantium. More metaphorically, he is being eaten from within by the deaths of centuries' worth of people who loved him. Simply put, happiness was never going to be possible for him.

But there's a difference between knowing that this is true and actually seeing it play out. We see the last week of Logan's life, and it's not a pretty one. And yeah, he does die a hero. There's some satisfaction in that. But I wouldn't exactly call it retiring by a fireplace and sipping Earl Grey tea.

And Xavier? He's spent some number of years at the end of his life living in a large metal canister in the Mexican desert, losing his faculties and prone to violent seizures (with catastrophic external consequences for those around him), attended to by an albino who once helped track down his friends in order to exterminate them, and an alcoholic limousine driver who shoots adamantium claws from his knuckles. He also bore the responsibility for an event that gets no elaboration that saw seven other X-Men die. (Which ones? Some other movie will probably tell us, eventually.)

That's not exactly the fireplace with Earl Grey either, now is it.

Termutantator 2: Judgment Day

In structure and form, though, this is almost a complete rehash of Terminator 2. Which is one of my favorite movies of the 1990s, so if there's any movie to borrow from, it might as well be this one.

Shall we review?

- Both movies spend significant portions of the narrative in a Mexican desert setting

- Both movies are violent, R-rated action movies that were successfully sold to the masses despite their R rating

- Both movies feature a fight between two nearly indestructible creatures, the original model and the new and improved model -- here, let's call it Logan vs. the Logan-1000

- Both the T-1000 in T2 and either one of the Logans in Logan have the ability to reshape their hands, making use of a sharp appendage that either comes out of their hands or actually is their hands

- And speaking of hands, both movies feature a character who reveals that he has a robotic hand -- the T-800 revealing his cyborg endoskeleton in T2, and Boyd Holbrook's character showing off his "enhancement" in Logan

- Both movies feature a precocious child in tow, though the roles are reversed in terms of who teaches whom not to use lethal force on an innocent victim

- Both movies feature a mid-movie domestic interlude at the home of a nice black family, though that interlude works out a lot worse for the black family in Logan

- Both movies effectively feature the protector sacrificing himself at the end so the precocious child may live

That enough for you? Or should I go on?

(Trick question. I'd have included more if I could think of them.)

Children of Mutants

This movie's Children of Men similarities are not quite as unmistakable, but I started to think of them when Xavier talks about how there have been "no mutants born in 25 years." (Or someone else says that to him, I can't remember.)

So when we are first presented with Laura, it does seem as though she's kind of the "miracle mutant," the one who has broken the string of no mutant births, just as the baby in Kee's stomach in Children of Men heralds the end of 18 years of worldwide infertility. Of course, we later learn that Laura is not quite so unique and that there are at least a dozen others like her, with similar abilities. (And forgive me for being a bit cynical and thinking that someone is just trying to create the conditions for a whole new series of X-Men movies starring these kids, but grown up by a decade so they can be played by bankable actors.)

Logan is also a similar reluctant hero to Clive Owen's Theo in Children of Men, guiding his young female charge on a dangerous journey plagued by numerous threats to get her to a safe haven -- a Canadian location called Eden here, an altruistic team of scientists called The Tomorrow Project in Children. And of course, both have to die in the execution of their sacred task.

Both movies also feature an adult woman who was meant to be part of the journey but dies unexpectedly near the beginning.

And of course Children of Men is set in 2027, only two years before Logan.

I guess there are only supposed to be like six different stories that people tell over and over again, right?

                                       ********************

One final thought about the movie, which I did like very much despite pointing out these similarities and giving you the impression I view it skeptically. When Xavier asks Logan if Laura reminds him of anybody, I thought for sure they were not going with the obvious (uh, sure, she has adamantium claws, of course she reminds him of him) but the less obvious, a character who has been in the background of each of Wolverine's three spinoff films while almost never being referenced openly. It can't have been a coincidence that the terrific young actress playing Laura, Dafne Keen, could very credibly be cast as either a younger version of Famke Janssen, or her daughter. Famke Janssen having of course played Jean Grey, the love of Logan's life, who dies in X2. Yet the movie doesn't ever evoke her name, and the similarity of appearance must be only coincidental because Laura is the biological daughter of Logan and some Mexican teenager who was used as a surrogate to carry the baby to term. A bit of a missed opportunity, I'd say.

Maybe they just cast Keen as a bit of a visual link to Logan's past, a past he has finally now put to rest.

Forty-eight reasons to see The Hobbit

It seems that nearly everyone has some angle of wariness related to The Hobbit.

A friend of mine phrased one of these angles of wariness very succinctly earlier this week on Facebook:

"Just bought our tickets for The Hobbit. I'm excited to see it (and the other movies), but I'm pretty unconvinced that you need 2 hours and 45 minutes to tell 1/3 of a 300-page novel."

I've also heard that the credits alone run for 16 minutes. So even though I usually like sitting through as many of the credits as time will allow, at least I know I can get out of there in 2:29 for this one, if need be.

However, my own greatest source of wariness about the movie has now become the biggest reason I'm interested in seeing it.

Yep, the infamous 48 frames per second projection rate.

I won't rehash the flogged-nearly-to-death discussion of the strengths (few?) and weaknesses (many?) of this gambit by Peter Jackson, but in case you don't know what I'm talking about at all: Almost every movie you've ever seen was shot at 24 frames per second. With twice as many frames per second, the image is far more crisp and there's less blurring. Most people don't notice the blurring of 24 fps, in part because it's been the standard practice throughout history. But 24 fps is part of the reason why some people don't like 3D -- they find the image darker, and it leaves them feeling queasy. The faster projection rate is supposed to fix those problems, but it has a side effect that some people hate and some people embrace: The images look hyper-real, to the extent that it sometimes makes them look cheap, like they were shot on video, or (as I have often referred to it) belong on some bad BBC show from the 1970s.

I'm wary about having my own experience of The Hobbit ruined if I find this technique distracting, as I always have in the past when my TV has been on a setting that mimics 48 fps (or actually uses 48 fps -- I don't pretend to understand all the technical details). But I've decided that I owe it to myself to see it this way, in 3D, for one simple reason:

How often do you go to the movies and see something new? I'm not talking about new in terms of plot, subject matter or narrative structure -- but something new in terms of technique?

Even if my viewing of The Hobbit is destined to be a failure, I want to expose myself to this new paradigm, which some people have said will be the future of how movies are made, and others say will go the way of the dodo bird once these three movies have come and gone. 

After all, wouldn't you have wanted to go see The Jazz Singer in the theater, if you had been there in 1927 when it came out? Wouldn't you have been so exhilarated by hearing Al Jolson's voice that you would have nearly wept? Or what about nine years before that (I'm just now learning this bit of trivia, mid-way through this paragraph, whose order I am nonetheless not going to restructure to be chronological), when a silent film called Cupid Angling was the first color feature? You could say the same thing about the first animated movie, the first 3D movie, even the first movie where you saw nudity, depending on how far you want to stretch the notion of what constitutes something truly "new." There was even a thing called Smell-O-Vision once. If I'd been around then, I would have been the first one in line. (It would have been the 1960 movie Scent of Mystery, the only film ever to use this obviously unsuccessful and impractical gimmick.)

I'm not saying The Hobbit is going to represent this kind of sea change, but I'm also not saying it isn't. And since all of the techniques listed above predate 1960, that just tells you how rare it is to get something truly "new" -- and therefore, how important it is, as serious film fans, to embrace our opportunities to experience these new things when we do get the chance.

In fact, in trying to find examples from my own life as a film fan, I'm forced to choose viewing experiences that contained far less revolutionary changes in what we experience with films. Unsurprisingly, most relate directly to visual effects. I'm thinking of the T-1000 in Terminator 2, with its unprecedented (to me) use of digital technology. I'm thinking of the first time I saw a Pixar movie, Toy Story; I was so impressed that I saw it again the next day. I'm thinking of the first movie I saw on an IMAX screen. I'm thinking of Avatar, which was clearly an evolutionary step forward in how realistic and immersive 3D can be.

What these viewings all have in common, though, is that the change I was witnessing was undoubtedly a positive thing. Even though Avatar left me a little disappointed overall, that's primarily because I couldn't separate my experience of its visuals from my experience of its story. A movie like The Hobbit threatens to make that separation all the harder to achieve, except this time it would probably the story that's good and the visuals that aren't so. 

Still, I'm not so in love with Middle Earth that I can't take this risk. Because another concern I have about The Hobbit is not just its bloated length, but the fact that it's a prequel to events that I think most people would argue are far more dramatic and have far greater stakes -- if only because there are certain characters you just know will survive. If you think Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf or Gollum might die in these movies, you obviously haven't seen the LOTR trilogy. And there are a half-dozen other characters who appear in these new films who also appear in the trilogy that comes later in Tokien's chronology. (Let's just hope they do a convincing job making the actors look younger, which is already an early problem I've noted with Ian McKellan.) When I watched the Rankin/Bass Hobbit from the 1970s, I always remember thinking it seemed pretty light and goofy -- and that wasn't just because of the animation style. Even back when I was a kid, I sensed the story's lack of dramatic weight. There's a reason Jackson started with Lord of the Rings and not this.

So I'm the perfect candidate to seek out my local 48 fps showing of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. I'm not some Tolkien nerd who has only one chance for this film to make its first impression on me, and can't afford to blow it at the risk of my geek soul. And besides, the most interesting outcome for me might be to hate the 48 fps but still like the movie. As much as anything, I'm curious to see if there is a definite correlation between the way the movie looks and the impression it has on me as a piece of narrative art. It would be a similar experiment to making yourself watch Avatar for the first time on an iphone. Okay, better example of a spectacle whose story is actually a success: It would be like making yourself watch Titanic for the first time on an iphone. 

In a way, the verdict is already in on The Hobbit, anyway. Regardless of its fps, it isn't wowing critics in terms of its quality as a film, as it's been conspicuously absent from the year-end awards that Peter Jackson made his bitch the first time around. Most conspicuously, yesterday's Golden Globe nominations didn't feature a single mention of The Hobbit, at least in the major categories I perused. That's ouch-worthy.

But however you choose to consume it, here's hoping that you get something out of The Hobbit that reminds you even in some small way of the original trilogy, which I consider to be one of the great achievements in film history, even though I'm not a Tolkien nerd. We should be glad there's an artist out there with the vision and ambition to give these films such a lavish big-screen realization -- whether he launches a new cinematic paradigm or not.

The inevitability of excess

I was all set to write a piece this Friday about how Iron Man 2 appeared to be following the dispiriting "bigger, more, but not better" trend of Hollywood sequels.

But sometimes in the blogging world, with all the reading we do, we come across the work of another blogger who has already taken that same perspective, and taken it more eloquently and succinctly than we would have ourselves. So I'd like to refer you to the work of my esteemed colleague Daddy Geek Boy on the topic. It's a good write-up, and you can find it here.

I'll still write about Iron Man 2, but I thought I'd take a slightly different approach, ask a slightly different question. Namely, is it possible for a sequel not to succumb to the sin of excess? Is it possible for a sequel not to have double the good guys, double the bad guys, double the explosions, and in some cases, double the babes?

It's easy to think of examples where they indulged themselves, and it's very easy to think of dozens, if not hundreds, of bad sequels. But this morning I want to consider the good sequels, and see if they were able to avoid this pitfall. Even The Dark Knight, which I won't write about again because I just wrote about yesterday (albeit in purely semantic terms), couldn't resist the urge to add a second villain, even with the first villain as dynamic and dominant as Heath Ledger's Joker.

So I'm examining five of my favorite sequels of all time, ones that I liked better than the original in some cases. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm leaving out series where the first film was always planned as part of a larger story, where future installments of the story were already written (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter) or envisioned by the creator (Star Wars).

Granted, most creative talents will tell you that they always envisioned their movies as multi-part stories, which is probably true to the extent that it makes sense to mentally blueprint a franchise if you think your movie is marketable. (Plus, most creative types are dreamers, and are overly optimistic/delusional about the quality of their own ideas.) But most sequels came into being because the first movie was good. If it hadn't been good, we simply wouldn't have cared about "the rest of the story" that existed purely in the writer's head.

So without any further ado, here are five excellent sequels, listed in no particular order. Let's hold them up to the light and see how they did.

1) Superman II (1980, Richard Lester). This is by far my favorite Superman movie, which has everything to do with relegating Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) to the role of comic relief, and replacing him with not one, not two, but three new villains. The plot itself is bigger as well. Although it could be argued that reversing the rotation of the earth to turn back time is a pretty big deal, I'd say that having the world taken over by the three Krypton refugees and willingly giving up his super powers qualify as more earth-shattering, as it were, for Superman.

Why it works: Three supervillains might ordinarily spin your head like a bad Joel Schumacher Batman movie, but since they essentially operate as one character in terms of their function in the narrative, the movie feels clean and focused. Plus, Terrence Stamp gives what I would argue is one of the great villain performances of all time as General Zod.

2) Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, James Cameron). I don't mean to blaspheme, but this is another case of me liking the sequel better than the original. The T-1000 was like nothing I had ever seen before -- in fact, the rush of excitement I got from Cameron's digital innovations with this character was much greater than what I got watching Avatar. Still, when you break it down to its elements, the movie does have two terminators, and it adds a squeaky-voiced Edward Furlong as the young John Connor.

Why it works: Although there are two terminators, they are not both the hero or both the villain, so the mano-a-mano dynamics of the original are still in place, shifted from Arnold Schwarzenegger's terminator against Linda Hamilton to Robert Patrick's T-1000 against Schwarzenegger. And John Connor essentially replaces Kyle Reese from the original. The net gain is really only one character.

3) Toy Story 2 (1999, John Lasseter). Officially, I like Toy Story better than Toy Story 2, but it's so close that Toy Story 2 has to be considered, hands down, one of the best sequels of all time. True enough, though, there are both more heroes and more villains. Added to the characters we love are a second Buzz Lightyear and Jessie the Cowgirl (voiced by Joan Cusack), and there are three characters who share the villain role: the evil toy collector (voiced by Wayne Knight), the evil collectible prospector toy Stinky Pete (voiced by Kelsey Grammer), and, well, The Evil Emperor Zurg, come to life in toy form (voiced by future Pixar director Andrew Stanton, to the extent that the character has any real dialogue). The adventure is slightly bigger as well, as it involves more trips out of the house.

Why it works: Pixar has an instinct for narrative structure that is unmatched in the industry. The writers are smart enough to dole out enough lines to the minor characters so that they all feel involved, so that the extra new characters don't push them into irrelevance. I expect Toy Story 3 to be similarly successful with this narrative balancing act.

4) X2: X-Men United (2003, Bryan Singer). This one's going to be a bit more difficult for me, because although I know I like the X-Men sequel better than the original, I have a hard time quantifying why. I can tell you that there are more heroes and villains than the first. The heroic additions include Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) and Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), who walks the line between hero and villain, and the villains pile on with Lady Deathstrike (Kelly Hu) and William Stryker (Brian Cox), in addition to the usual stable featuring Magneto, Mystique, etc. This film also does what a lot of second movies gain the confidence to do: kill off one of the beloved stars of the first movie, if only temporarily, in Jean Gray (Famke Janssen).

Why it works: X2 is more like the typical superhero sequel than any other movie on this list, which makes sense since only one of the other movies is actually a superhero movie. But it works because the multiplicity of characters actually helped shove at least one character that I did not particularly like, James Marsden's Cyclops, into a corner. Thankfully, Cyclops has little more than a cameo in this movie.

5) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982, Nicholas Meyer). And here's a sequel that is really, truly different. Star Trek II is a brilliant movie, but it doesn't feel like a sequel at all. Even though it deals with the Genesis device, which can create a whole planet from scratch, and the (temporary) death of Spock, who comes back to life in the next movie during a rapid re-growth on the new planet, Star Trek II feels intimate more than grandiose. There are a lot of quiet moments in which the characters discuss their mortality, and the hero and the villain never once see each other in the flesh.

Why it works: The impression created by Star Trek II has everything to do with the impression created -- or not created -- by Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The first Star Trek was a total dud -- I remember feeling a profound sense of disappointment and wondering if there was any hope for the series. If it weren't for Star Trek II, there surely wouldn't have been. We have Star Trek II to thank for all the other Star Trek movies, even the reboot we got last year -- which, if it weren't for Star Trek II, might have been attempted in the 1990s and starred someone like David Caruso. So Star Trek II is a lot more like a first movie than a second movie in that sense, though when you think about it, the whole Star Trek series has kind of assumed a serial quality, as traditionally defined -- each chapter doesn't really need to be bigger and better, it just needs to follow the characters to the next chapter in their lives. I think I'm starting to ramble here.

So is there anything we can take from all this to apply to Iron Man 2? I guess what I personally take from it is that I shouldn't perceive its "bigger, more" approach as creatively bankrupt -- not automatically, anyway. Even the best sequels have to provide more things to look at, more places to turn your attention, and in all likelihood, more minutes of celluloid. That in itself is not a guaranteed recipe for failure, and in fact, it maybe inevitable.

Obnoxious lines like Tony Stark yelling "You complete me!" to Pepper Potts after he jumps out of the plane to retrieve his helmet ... well, that may be cause for worry.