THE EDUCATION OF JARVIS SLACKS

The only problem with this is that I can't have its children.

The issue is whether or not we even need a damn Bioshock 2.  And, no, no we don’t.  Ok, so I realize that there are some of you that don’t play video games, and the only post that came up this week was about the sequel to a brilliant video game.  So, you are probably saying, Jarvis, stop lying to yourself.  You are going to get Bioshock 2.  I mean, you loved the first one, Jarvis.  So you’ll obviously buy the second one.  Well, no.  No, I won’t.  I have absolutely, positively no interest in Bioshock 2.  The reason we don’t need another Bioshock is the same reason why we didn’t need another Matrix movie, why we really didn’t need another Pirates of the Caribbean. Sequels are not always needed. When they are, they work.  But they only work by design, not by desire.  You don’t get me?  Let me explain.

Let’s take two movies that were the first movies a trilogy.  We’ve got the aforementioned the Matrix and we’ve got Star Wars: A New Hope (We are pretending that the horror which were the prequels never happened. Ok?)  Now, I don’t care who you are.  The first Star Wars wasn’t that great and if you say it was, I’ll punch you in the nose. The greatness which was the first Star Wars is only evident with its sequel, The Empire Strikes Back.  Without Strikes Back, New Hope would have been an all right film.  The excellence of the second movie validated the need for the first.  Sort of like Einstein being born and then we say, hey, Einstein’s mom.  Thanks for pushing Einstein out your vagina.  If we look at the first Matrix, we got a reversal.  Since Matrix Reloaded sucked, then we can understand the greatness of the first one.  We can say, the Matrix was so good it didn’t need validation.  Its validation was its original greatness.  Any attempts to try and add to the greatness, or to make other great things off the greatness of the original is futile and pointless.  Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl was a great, fun flick.  The series got lucky because Johnny Depp is an acting God.  The other two films were completely unneeded, but the second two films were still great films because of Depp, and without the first movie, the other two would never have happened.  Does that make sense?  Yes?  No? Let’s continue.

Sequel Perfection.

There are more examples that prove my point in the weirdest of ways.  Spider-man 2 was a terrific movie, and made the first Spider-man seem terrible.  However, Spider-man 3 was horrible, a complete waste of everyone’s time.  What happened?  The same scenario that usually happens after the fist movie happened after the second.  You can blame poor designing skills.  Seriously, good sequels and trilogies are planned out.  There are little things in the movies or video games that make you think, ok, a sequel could work here.  The Spider-man movies didn’t have a plan, not really.  They tried to set one up at the end of the second one, but it was loose and the third one didn’t follow the plan (The Green Goblin redemption story).  Instead, we got Venom and Sandman and Peter Parker dancing on tables.  The Matrix might have been planned out, but the first one gave little hint of that.  Instead, we got two movies that made absolutely no sense.  Well, the third one made sense.  Sort of.  At the end of the first Pirates of the Caribbean, Jack Sparrow was alive, escaping on the Black Pearl.  A sequel was warranted.  Looking at Video Games, Mass Effect had tons of hints for a sequel in the first game.  A second game was needed so much that there is no reason for some one to play the second game if they hadn’t played the first one.  And all roads lead us to Bioshock 2, a game that no Bioshock fan ever, ever wanted.  Seriously.  The narrative in Bioshock is almost perfect.  The hero dies at the end (depending on the ending you get), there is a resolution, there are decisions.  The game makes sense.  And, honestly, Bioshock’s world was so depressing, so utterly disturbing, I have a hard time revisiting it.  I liked popping my head in a few times to check it out, but I doubt I want to go back there.  Bioshock 2 fails because the original Bioshock was so successful.  We got our fix the first time around.  If we try and go for another, a bit different trip, we all know we’ll be disappointed.

Sequels seem like the logical step when it comes to entertainment media.  Battlestar Galactica is doing it with the prequel Caprica (a glorified sequel).  Die Hard did it.  Avatar probably will do it.  Movies and video games are a major, billion-dollar business.  But the art of the movie, the art of the video game, these things always, always suffer when the ambition of creators goes against the purity of the original, superior product.