How I would do a The Miracle on the Hudson movie

So, we didn't see a movie today.  Did get in two more episodes of Luke Cage.  In episode three I had a moment of "Show, I think I know exactly what you're going to do.  For the love of all that is fucking holy prove me wrong," and it didn't, and I am irked, but this is about not seeing a movie.

There wasn't a lot playing at the place where we would have seen the movie.

One thing that had some promise was Sully, but that promise was somewhat marred by the fact that it was called "Sully" when all five crew members were heroes.  Moreover, whenever there's a movie that should be great it runs the risk of, "That would have been an enjoyable movie, if not for the fact that any movie about that/like that should X times better and so I'm just left disappointed."

Watch bad movies on the See Fee Channel and you'll very rarely get let down.  (Though some times they pull off that execrable feat.)  Watch movies that should be fantastic and you invite a certain melancholy into your life as you constantly note how much better things could have been.

So, anyway: what it should be.

The thing is, "The Miracle on the Hudson" was the most successful ditching in aviation history because, basically, everyone did their jobs and nothing beyond the obvious (bird strike, boom boom, now this is a very poorly designed glider) went wrong.

So the movie shouldn't be Sully it should be Flight school and crew training and how they decided to write what they did in the manuals and air craft construction standards and . . . stuff.

And to really capture that what you'd want to do is have the flight (which lasted about six minutes) and evacuation with extensive flashbacks cut into both.

Something happens, flashback to what went into making the procedures and such used to deal with that, return to show the crew doing those things.

It's not enough that people opened the doors in such a way as to deploy those inflatable slide things that doubled as life rafts and when one failed the manual handle was used.

You need to show the decision to make them life rafts, the work that went into the design, whoever said, "Of course it's supposed to happen automatically, but we need a backup in case it doesn't," to get the manual handle on there and so forth.

AND you need to show what led to flight attendants getting training on that because when the fucking Titanic was launched the crew didn't know how to properly load a life boat and that makes a difference.  (Sure, they didn't have enough boats for everyone, but it's not as if they saved everyone that they did have boats for.)  Then, of course, the flight attendants getting that training, then return to the incident where they used the damned training.

It's not just Sully, in this case more than many people that get movies made about them.  Sully didn't do anything special, instead he did normal things well.  Very well.  Almost unbelievably well.  Then again so did the four other people on the flight crew.

And if you really want to tell the story you don't just need to have them doing these normal things well, you need to tell the story of why these things are normal.  And also how if you're in a panic on a sinking plane you shouldn't open a door that the crew hasn't authorized you to open because that makes it sink faster.

But mostly what went into the technology, the information, and the training that led to things going right.

Ditching is not something one ever wants to do because planes that are not made for water landings have a tendency to sink and people have a tendency to die.

The plane was packed.  The standard layout for an Airbus 320 accommodates 150 passengers and that is exactly how many passengers there were.  Add in the crew and you get 155 people.  The reason it's called a miracle is that 155 people survived.  That . . . usually isn't going to happen.

And yet how it happened was people doing what they were trained to do.  Nothing more.  Nothing more was required.  All that they had to do to become heroes was do their jobs, and you'd want to depict that.

Also, that type of plane was specifically designed so that it would hold up well in a forced water landing (ditching.)  You'd want to depict that.

The things that went into the events of January 15, 2009 were things that were set into motion years in advance.  Incorporating that into a movie wouldn't necessarily be easy.  It requires being unstuck in time.  Story progresses this much, flashback to the series of events by which this thing or tidbit or bit of training came to be in play, show how it played out, story progresses a bit, another flashback to a Connections-esque journey through time to see how the next important bit got there, and so forth.

I don't think I've ever seen a movie done that way, I have no idea if it would work.  But it's how you'd really have to do it.

How did it become required that flight attendants be trained in water-landing evacuation?  Because that saved lives every bit as much as the flight attendants who used that training.

So on, so forth, rinse, repeat.

* * *

Short version:

The reactions of all members of the crew, the split second decision making and the handling of this emergency and evacuation was 'text book' and an example to us all.     -Air Commodore Rick Peacock- Edwards, Master of the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators

An example to us all, yes, but the thing about the heroics of textbook operation, is that credit is due to the textbook as well.  How did the textbook get written in such a way that following it could make you a hero?

That's as much the story of US Airways Flight 1549's incredibly successful ditching on the Hudson river as what happened on the plane itself.

The entire crew, and at least one of the passengers, were definitely heroes.  But they were only able to pull off "Everybody lives, Rose.  Just this once, everybody lives," because of everything that had come before.

* * *

This is, perhaps, not as good as it could be.  Lonespark thought it important that I just get it done, and she's probably right.  When I wait to write something it often doesn't get written.

* * *

I looked up the plot of Sully.

I'm glad we didn't watch it.

Untangling Captain America: The Winter Soldier

I have so much to say about Captain America: Civil War, but I mentioned at Amarie's that while Civil War had attempted to do two movies at once the previous movie had attempted to do "like nine".

Not really nine, more like seven.  I've talked about it in passing multiple times, the ones I can link to offhand are a comment here and a comment at Amarie's.

Anyway, I've been thinking about doing post untangling the movie for a while, in the manner of of Disentangling Jurassic World where I separated out the various plots of Jurassic World and ended up with a seven movie sequence.

As with the Jurassic World post, this isn't me saying what the film makers should have done.  My opinion on that is simple: pick one movie that you want to make --one story you want to tell-- and put your effort into doing it right.

This is instead about the theoretical exercise of separating out the tangled ball of too-much-plot they tried to cram into a single movie and seeing what it would look like if each movie worth of plot were given an actual movie.

This is a table of contents, not what I'd actually call things:

• 1 Working for Shield
• 2 Working against Shield
• 3 The Fall and Rise of Nick Fury
• - A TV show about hackers called together by Maria Hill
• 4 The Winter Soldier actually plays an important role in a movie
• 5 The computer-ghost of Zola
• 6 The "Shield Civil War"
• 7 Looting the cool tech
• 8 (Re)Assembling the Avengers
• 9 Your bank records, medical histories, voting patterns, e-mails, phone calls, your damn SAT scores.

* * *

1 Captain America: Agent of Shield [top]

When the movie starts we see Cap and Natasha go on a mission together where they already work as a great team in spite of being given different objectives and not being able to completely trust one another.

While the MCU might have problems with too much plot, or the wrong plot, or, "Oh my God, what the fuck is this?" it's actually very good at narrative parsimony.  Part of this is the quality of actors.  The the number emotions that Hiddleston is able to pack, with sincerity, into a couple of wordless seconds as Thor talks to him in Avengers was the subject to a youtube video that shows it in slow motion basically made the argument that every frame was packed with meaning.

While as far as I know no such videos have been made of Winter Soldier (though, in spite of knowing of no such thing, it would kind of surprise me if there aren't any) we get the same thing going on.

We also get it in choreography. Not on youtube but on tumblr, someone went frame by frame for a scene from the initial mission in Winter Soldier in which Steve, super soldier who can pick people up and run to safety with them no problem, bodily moves Natasha out of harm's way and, while they're in motion, Natasha shoots one of the bad guys.  First off, that's the sort of thing that only superheroes can pull off.  Second, that's the kind of thing that only superheroes who work really well together can pull off.

But the mission had cause for dissension and conflict and such, and we never really got to see Steve/Cap, the one who is new to being an agent of Shield, and Natasha/Black Widow, the one who's been doing this for a while, have a straight forward "fighting the good fight and stopping the bad guys" mission.

This movie would be just that.

Steve is settling into his role as someone working for Shield against threats the world doesn't know exist instead of working for the military against hyper-Nazis.

He's getting to know Sam Wilson (not Falcon, not in this movie) and Sharon Carter (but doesn't know she's an agent yet) while he and Natasha save the world from whatever.

That's enough for a movie.

* * *

2 Captain America: Project Insight [top]

This is basically what Captain America: The Winter Soldier was but they, for some reason, felt the need to shove in an attempted coup against Nick Fury, the computer-ghost of Zola, Hydra infiltration, Shield turning against itself, the Winter Soldier, every privacy concern about the internet given form and malevolence, the kitchen sink, and a few other things.

Take that extraneous shit out and just make the movie that it would have been without distractions.

Shield's Project Insight is designed to simultaneously destroy privacy and kill anyone who's a threat without any legal proceedings or hint of justice.

The other things can be dealt with elsewhere.  Shield (for whatever convoluted infiltrated by people that put their faith in a computer program designed by someone who was dead at the time reasons) has gone so far across the line that they can't even see the line anymore because it's over the horizon, and possibly possibly also across several major geological features like mountain ranges, oceans, and so forth.

Shield needs to be stopped before Insight goes live.  Steve, Natasha, and Sam (who is Falcon in this movie) face off against Shield.  This is basically the movie that we have once you cut out the distractions and focus on telling the one story and telling it right.

* * *

3 Shield: A question of Leadership [top]

The attempted coup against Nick Fury was an unnecessary distraction in the actual second Captain America movie, but it's a good plot to have in general.  It' action.  It's spy thriller.  It's fun and explosions with ... probably not Chiwetel Ejiofor, but nothing is perfect.

A rouge element within Shield is trying to take out Fury and this movie is about that.

At this point Steve and Natasha are probably jaded on Shield and Sam was never a part of it to begin with, but it shouldn't be that hard to recruit them.

Fury or Hill says this, pronouns as appropriate: They're not trying to kill me/him because I/he tried to launch Project Insight; they're trying to kill me/him because I/he failed.

We got a fair dose of this in the Winter Soldier, but it was mashed in with so much else that ... yeah.

A big question is whether Fury should fake his death here (and try to rule from the shadows) or whether it should be saved for later.

* * *

- Marvel: Hackers [top]

On watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier . . . well, this was a while ago.  I think that Lonespark was the one who said that she wanted to see Robert Redford from Sneakers stop Robert Redford from The Winter Soldier and I was the one who agreed.

So much of what was put into the movie was the sort of thing that cried out for the team from Sneakers, for computer wizes, for hackers, for people who live online, dream in code, and know all the flaws in Hollywood portrayals of hacking, and have a first edition copy of Neuromancer they got by illicitly rerouting a shipment of old paperbacks via hacking into UPS's servers.

So I'm just throwing this in there: Maria Hill forms a team of computer people and such with the task of finding out what was really behind the attempt to unseat Fury and violently change the leadership of Shield because their regular investigations are all hitting dead ends well before the trail should end.

They've stopped the people who actually did things, but not the ones who gave the orders.

The only thing that they've found out is that the whole thing seems to be somehow tied up in a thing that doesn't officially exist called the "Zola Algorithm".

The TV series runs alongside the the remaining movies and involves simultaneously investigating and opposing this unknown threat that seems to be everywhere and know everything.

At times it feels like their opponent has access to every piece of information that was ever electronically recorded by anyone or anything.  While they find plots to stop they're generally not able to piece things together into any kind of coherent larger picture.

Other than being targets of the shadowy bad guys, what do a a TV anchor in Cairo, the Under Secretary of Defense, a high school valedictorian in Iowa City, a scientist named Bruce Banner, and a (former?) surgeon named Stephen Strange have in common?

Also, they totally get hired by Hank Pym to clandestinely remove some vital components from the files of his old Ultron Project because letting anyone revive it, as one Mister Stark has been considering, would be a really bad idea.

Yeah, blatant foreshadowing that has nothing to do with what's actually suggested by Winter Soldier but, but a) movie seven is entirely based on needing to shoehorn some awesome in to make Avengers: Age of Ultron make sense, and b) it doesn't make sense to have Ant Man without his connection to Ultron.

Artistic liberties.

* * *

4 Captain America: The Winter Soldier [top]

Bucky finally gets a movie where his name actually belongs in the title.  While Hill's team is investigating via electronic means, Steve and Natasha are experiencing a real problem trying to do an investigation of their own: every time they seem to have a lead, the lead ends up dead.

It doesn't take long to realize that someone is killing the people who might be able to give them the information they want.  It takes a bit longer to realize that that person is the Winter Soldier, and longer still to realize that the Winter Soldier is Bucky.

The whole movie is about trying to stop/recover Bucky so that they can a) not have a mind controlled assassin out there and b) get some damned answers.

* * *

5 Hydra: Electronic Echos [top]

The team from the TV show has worked out that the Zola Algorithim, whatever it was/is, was developed by/at ----- which heroes are sent to investigate.

What they uncover is a standard evil science thing:

"Sir, we could get results just as good, without compromizing our morals and violating every human rights thing ever, if we used this method that would only take six weeks longer."

   

"THAT'S SIX WHOLE WEEKS!  Science will not be delayed.  Now prove your loyalty by doing an experiment that involves doing unethical things to unwilling human subjects."

Part of the difficulty, though, is that while they can find labs and shut them down (with the requisite fight scenes and explosions) they're unable to find the person in charge.

Eventually they realize that this is because the person in charge is Zola, who had his consciousness transferred to computer when his body was dying.  There is no physical person in charge to find.

Movie about bringing down Zola's network.  It's not quite Hydra because he was always more in it for the science that ignored ethics than any direct loyalty to Hydra.

The movie does let them realize that Hydra still exists, and they finally learn that Zola's algorithm is a computer program he made for Hydra.

* * *

6 Shield: Internecine [top]

With the revelation that they've been infiltrated by Hydra, Shield should, honestly, have more internal conflict than one scene in a control room while everything else is shunted into the spinoff series in such a way as to have Agent Coulson sell someone to someone else, so the someone else can torture the sold person for shits and giggles, in order to gain a modicum of improvement in political standing.

Seriously, why in FUCK would anyone consider doing such a thing?

Shield needs to be at war with itself and it shouldn't be quite as simple as Good Guys vs. Hydra because, remember, Shield itself (Hydra and non-Hydra alike), in the form of their upper echelons and everyone working directly on the project, was in support of Project Insight.  Some non-Hydra people would be thinking more or less what Fury had been thinking: things are spinning out of control and we need to get our hands dirtier if we want to protect people.  They'd align with the Hydra side of things and might not seriously believe all of the Hydra talk.

A paramilitary pseudo-intelligence semi-clandestine agency goes to war with itself when they have technology on a level that includes aircraft carriers that can fly.

That's enough to do an entire series of movies, TV shows, books, comics, video games, tie in merchandise, radio shows, plays, and so forth.  I'm suggesting that we cut it down to one movie containing the main action-movie-type points.

Though there's a political element too.  Covering that as well would probably be too much for one movie, though.

The movie ends with Shield, the whole thing, being shut down and the major players in the evil side (the ones who didn't go to ground) being arrested.  The good people find jobs elsewhere, Natasha testifies before congress.

This movie would heavily use Cap, Natasha, Sharon Carter, Sam, probably Clint (Hawkeye), definitely Maria Hill, Nick Fury who is operating from the shadows and pretending to be dead for all or most of this, and, um, people.  Evil Robert Redford would likely be involved.

This is the movie that ends with Steve and Sam going off to find Bucky.  They think the immediate problem has been dealt with, and they're ready to go off on that personal mission.

* * *

7 Maria Hill: Getting My Boat Back [top]

With Shield shut down at the end of the last movie the helicarrier is in limbo.

Meanwhile the people in the Marvel: Hackers TV show have found out that --since they proved what a threat they were by sending heroes after Zola which simultaneously let them learn what the fuck the Algorithm actually was and revealed that Hydra was still a thing thus instigating the collapse of Shield which had been the thing most able to conceal Hydra activities-- they can't operate anywhere for long without the algorithm locating their base and sending people after them.

Thus Hill decides that what they really need is a mobile base of operations that's invisible.

And so we have a heist movie about stealing the Shield helicarrier.

That's it.  Movies have been made about stealing things far less cool.

Yeah, this isn't really suggested by Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but it's kind of needed for the helicarrier showing up in Avengers: Age of Ultron to not be an asspull and it makes sense to fit in here since this is when it would be up for grabs and because it could serve as a base for Marvel: Hackers which was suggested, but lamentably not followed up on, by the movie.

Hill, the people from the TV show Marvel: Hackers and anyone else on a team Hill would hand pick, steal the coolest boat around which happens to be the only flying aircraft carrier on earth since the Project Insight ones were blown up in movie two.

* * *

8 Hydra: Open War [top]

Hydra returning could be a movie in itself separate and apart from Shield going to war with itself or any of the others and, in light of Age of Ultron, it kind of needs to be.

You see Age of Ultron begins with the Avengers already assembled and functioning as a well oiled machine.  This is a problem given the question posed at the end of the first Avengers movie:

Sir, how does it work now? They've gone their separate ways, some pretty extremely far. We get into a situation like this again, what happens then?

We need that answered.  They start Age of Ultron all back together and taking down the very last Hydra base.

So, given Age of Ultron it's vital that the "Hydra has returned, what do we do?" movie that was crammed into the actual Captain America: The Winter Soldier be done, and be done in a way that gives the answer: we assemble the Avengers.

It probably begins with Steve and Sam being called back by someone (Hill or Natasha) which annoys them because they were pretty sure they were getting pretty close to catching up with Bucky.  Then, as things go on, they end up calling on more and more of the Avengers.

Since they've likely noticed that Loki's scepter is one of the things that went missing from Sheild they'd call on Jane Foster and Erik Selvig for help which is how Thor would end up coming to earth for this mission.  That might also be what brings back Bruce and Tony since they set up a thing to find the scepter before.

Since Natasha and Clint would be involved almost by default, that could explain how everyone got together right there.

The movie can't end with them taking down the last Hydra base that contains the Scepter because that was in the beginning of Age of Ultron, but it could end with them completely breaking Hydra and someone commenting, "It's not quite over, we still don't have the scepter."

Maybe a line about how they're still having no luck on the electronic front because damn is the "Algorithm" powerful and capable of stopping their attempts to break Hydra's electronic network.  (This could even involve asides between Tony and Bruce about how if Zola could do it they ought to be able to do it thus continuing to foreshadow Ultron.)

* * *

9 Hackers: The Algorithm [top]

The team from the TV series have been making progress in the TV series and have been able to trace and isolate the key components of the Zola Algorithm which, honestly, isn't the best named thing.  Sure, algorithms exist to solve problems, but the problem of "Identifying, tracking, and eliminating threats to Hydra's interests" is such a complex and ill defined problem that what we're talking about is a really advanced AI and you don't use the term "algorithim" to describe that, but one could argue that it's a name and a person named "Melissa" probably isn't a honey bee and ... how did this sentence even begin?

Right.  Ok:

The team from the TV series have been making progress in the TV series and have been able to trace and isolate key components of the Zola Algorithm so that it can now be effectively stopped if we just have a big impressive movie.

Note that in the actual Captain America: The Winter Soldier the algorithm was never dealt with and thus it's presumably being used to hire hit people to kill of present and future heroes because doing things one at a time might be slower than Project Insight but it's better (for a Hydra version of "better") than nothing.

What's it been doing?

Jasper Sitwell:  Zola'a algorithm is a program for choosing Insight's targets.

   

Steve Rogers:   What targets?

   

Jasper Sitwell:  You! A TV anchor in Cairo, the Under Secretary of Defense, a high school valedictorian in Iowa City, Bruce Banner, Stephen Strange, anyone who's a threat to HYDRA. Now, or in the future.

   

Steve Rogers:   In the future? How could it know?

   

Jasper Sitwell:  How could it not? The 21st century is a digital book. Zola told HYDRA how to read it. Your bank records, medical histories, voting patterns, emails, phone calls, your damn SAT scores! Zola's algorithm evaluates people's past to predict their future.

   

Steve Rogers:   And what then?

   

Jasper Sitwell:  Oh, my God. Pierce is gonna kill me.

   

Steve Rogers:   What then?

   

Jasper Sitwell:  Then the Insight helicarriers scratch people off the list. A few million at a time.

Anyway, it was set up in the actual movie, it's basically Sneakers with a more sinister bad guy than Ben Kingsley, and we should have gotten that movie.

The Algorithm is basically Ultron with clear goals, a lack of neuroses, no fixation on having a physical body, and no idiot ball.  A formidable foe indeed, especially since it would be able to come up with a plan better than, "I'll create a massive robot army all linked to my hive mind," since that's just begging to to lose.  The Algorithm, recall, was never detected, it was fallible humans who let the secret slip.  Unleashing robot hordes upon Sokovia is unsubtle, easy to detect, and the sort of thing that gets you destroyed in a way that involves explosions and Avengers.

This movie is about beating it.

This movie also sets up the battle shown in Avengers: Age of Ultron because without the Algorithm providing cover they can finally locate the last remaining Hydra stronghold.

* * *

With that we're finally done with the many and various movies that Captain America: The Winter Soldier tried to be.

The problem with the actual movie should be kind of clear: you can't do all of that in a single move and have it come out well.

The Shield Civil War was reduced to, basically, one scene.  Pre-Civil-War coup against Fury got, I think, three.  Zola's electronic ghost?  One scene.  The Algorithm?  It was mentioned in a small part of one scene and received all of three lines, you can see them above, I even included an extra fourth line because the conversation isn't done without it looping back around to Project Insight.  Working for Sheild?  One quick mission at the start as set up and it sours Steve on Shield in general.  The Winter Soldier of the title?  He didn't even need to be in the movie.  Take him out and replace him with generic assassin and the movie is almost entirely unchanged.  Dealing with the still extant Hydra?  Doesn't really come up except for a scene at the end where they're arrested without incident because it would totally be that easy (sarcasm, if you didn't catch it).  The fact that the movie cried out for a Sneakers-esque computer team?  Not even touched.

Looting the cool tech? Nowhere in there even though there ought to have been people diving into the Potomac to steal bits of the Insight helicarriers to begin their careers as heroes, villains, or just people who make impossible technology in their garage.

Star Wars Redux: No Jedi Truths

Luke left Yoda's hut, and walked back to the X-wing.

"I can't do it, R2," Luke said to the droid that had always been there for him.  "I can't go on alone."

"Yoda will always be with you," came Obi-Wan's voice.  Luke looked around and saw Obi-Wan in blue spirit form.

"Ben!  Why didn't you tell me?" Luke said. "You told me Vader betrayed and murdered my father."

"I didn't know, I thought what I said was true," Obi-Wan said.

"How can you not know the difference between 'Betrayed and murdered' and 'Is the same person as'?"

"When your father was seduced by the dark side, it was as if he became a different person--"

Luke turned away in disgust, "That's your excuse!?  That he's a different person now?"

"No, Luke.  Please allow me to explain."

Luke turned back, "Fine."

Obi-Wan sat on a log and gestured for Luke to sit beside him.  Luke didn't.

"Anakin was a good friend," Obi-Wan said.  "When I first knew him, your father was already a great pilot.  But I was amazed hos strongly the Force was with him.  I took it upon myself to train him as a Jedi.

"He was my first, but soon I had three students: your father, your mother, and Darth Vader.  I thought I could instruct them as well as Yoda.  I was wrong."

"But Darth Vader is my father," Luke said.

"No, Darth Vader is dead," Obi-Wan said.  "He did betray your father, as I told you before, and he did attempt to murder him.  After the battle the only survivor was mangled and burned beyond recognition.  When the Empire's servants came, he introduced himself as Vader and has used the name ever since."

Luke finally sat down beside Obi-Wan.

"I assumed that Vader had succeeded in killing your father.  I was wrong.  I encountered him several times after that, as the Clone Wars drew to a close, and not once did I sense he was really Anakin.  The dark side had twisted him until he was unrecognizable."

"There's still good in him," Luke said.

"Has he ever shown it, Luke?" Obi-Wan asked.  "I wouldn't have sent you to live with your Aunt and Uncle if I'd know the man calling himself Darth Vader was actually Anakin Skywalker because it placed you at risk.

"To keep our families safe, we never spoke of where we came from.  Only Anakin and I knew about Beru and Owen so I assumed you'd be safe there.  Skywalker is a common enough name near Tatooine.

"But I was wrong, and you were at great risk.  What if Anakin had stopped in to see his family and discovered you?  Imagine being raised by Darth Vader if he took possession of you, or he might have simply killed you to avoid a potential future threat.

"But it never happened.  He never looked up his family, he has never shown love, he has murdered people without hesitation or guilt.  What good could be left in him?"

*silence during which Luke is uneasy*

"And my mother?" Luke asked.

"The Emperor knew as I did that if Anakin were to have any offspring they would be a threat to him, even more so since your mother was a Jedi too.  So when she became pregnant I arranged for her to go into hiding.  By the time you were born the war was over, and we had lost.

"She wanted to raise you, but the Jedi purges continued after the war, and there was a chance she might be found, so to keep you safe she had me take you to Anakin's family.  That's what she told me, at least.

"She died --of natural causes-- a few years later.  I'm sorry I don't have better news for you.

"You should know that Yoda did plan to tell you about your father, when he felt you were ready for such devastating news.  You left before then."

"I know how shocked and hurt I was when Yoda told me the truth.  The pain was worse than when I died.

"But right now, what matters is that Anakin and the Emperor are still out there.  Your friends experience with Anakin should prove to you that they cannot defeat him on their own."

"I can't do it, Ben," Luke said.

"You cannot escape your destiny," Obi Wan said.  "The future is always in motion, but certain future events are fixed in place. You must face Darth Vader again."

"I can't kill my own father!" Luke shouted.

"When was he there for you?" Obi-Wan asked.  "He killed Beru and Owen.  The Anakin I knew would never do that.  He loved them both too much.  But he did.  He killed the people who raised you.  He's changed Luke.  He's nothing like the man who loved your mother.  He's nothing like the man who constructed a new lightsaber in the middle of a war just so he could bequeath his original one to you.  He's nothing like the man who would have loved you."

"It doesn't matter," Luke said quietly.  "I can't kill my own father."

Obi-Wan hung his head.  "Then the Emperor has already won.  You were our only hope.

Luke remembered something, "Yoda spoke of another."

"Yes, another of the surprises Yoda had for me," Obi Wan said.  "But it is a secret best kept."

"He said there was another Skywalker," Luke said.  "I think I deserve to know about my own family."

Obi-Wan sighed, "I was told that the reason your mother delivered you into my arms to bring to live with Beru and Owen was that she was afraid of being found in the ongoing hunt for Jedi, and that concern was true, but there was another reason.

"You are one of twins."

Luke was too shocked to say anything.

"Yoda felt that it would be safest if you were separated.  You were sent to live with your father's family, your twin sister remained with your mother.  Because of your mother's death, even your sister doesn't know her heritage, and it is best that way.  Her anonymity has protected her since her birth."

Luke thinks about this and then his eyes light up, "Leia!  Leia's my sister."

"Your insight serves you well," Obi Wan said.  "Bury your feelings deep down, Luke.  They do you credit, but they could be made to serve the Emperor."

-

Or something like that.

-

[Added]

When looking up the canon conversation I found this:

[Added]

Oh, hey, a less cynical one (only Obi-Wan's Star Wars description, not RotJ certain point of view):

Disentangling Jurassic World

My actual advice to film makers would be to figure out what story you really want to tell and tell that story.  I know what it's like when you've got seven thousand ideas but the fact is that in this world, and even with the best film budget, you just can't tell them all.

But what if you could?  What if the makers of Jurassic World really could tell the various stories they wanted to tell?  What if there were world enough and time?

What would that look like?

Table of contents for the post:

Movie 1: Running and Funding a Theme Park

Movie 2: Training Raptors

Movie 3: Uncovering the Conspiracy

Movie 4: The Character Story

Movie 5: The Disaster Movie

Movie 6: Monster in the woods

Movie 7: Hunting with Raptors

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The first two movies would take place concurrently.  They're very different movies.

Movie 1: Running and the Park and Keeping it Funded. [top]

One is a big budget effects extravaganza that pulls you into Jurassic World (the theme park) the same way Avatar pulled you into Pandora and Lord of the Rings pulled you into Middle Earth.

It's about the park itself, running it, not having it go broke, the various problems with working with live animals some of which can kill you, so forth.

The story would be principally told from three viewpoints.  Not three characters, three viewpoints.  One is the control room we see a fair amount in the actual movie.  They're overseeing the entire park park and they have their own politics and idiosyncrasies.  You get the barest hints of it in the actual movie.  Mostly what you see is the interplay between the guy who has his desk covered in toy dinosaurs and the boss lady, who is completely business, unemotional, and so forth.

The perfect moment of what could have been is when Claire, boss lady, sees, several seconds before it happens, that Lowery, underling guy, going to knock his drink off his desk while he's distracted (and ignoring her) and silently uses her foot to slide a trashcan where it will need to be to catch the drink and stop it from spilling all over the floor.

Claire and Lowery have disagreements about various things, he thinks the way she looks at the animals they manage is heartless, she thinks he's unprofessional (toys all over his work station) and has poor taste (he bought a Jurassic Park, the place where people died, shirt and wore it to work), but they've gotten to know each other work well as the control team, and in that moment you see that the working well is in part because because she's able to manage his shortcomings.

Something that isn't gotten into in the movie is that while Claire likes things to be organized and wants things to run with mechanical smoothness, and prefers to think of things in terms of quantifiable figures instead of, say, populations of people and animals with their various dispositions, Claire allows her employees significant leeway in how they act.  She lets her underlings, such as Lowery, express their disagreements with her.  Until he showed up at work wearing disaster paraphernalia which apparently crossed a line for her, she was fine with his toy covered work area.  She may come off as emotionless, but she's clearly respecting her employees' need to be in a working environment that is comfortable to them.

Vivian is another employee in the control room who is given basically no characterization beyond agreeing with Lowery's sentiments if not his style (her work station is clean.)  She basically serves as a stand in for the entire rest of the control room staff so that we know that that they're all reacting more or less the same way to this or that development and it's not just Lowery who feels whatever way Lowery is feeling.

The one bit of characterization she does get is that she leaves her outside of work life outside of work which leads to Lowrey thinking she's single and assuming he's going to get to dramatically kiss her in a moment that's supposed to be comedic but ends up being, "I liked Lowrey until he was really fucking creepy."

If we assume that the reason Lowery and Vivian are allowed names is because they're the top two employees under Claire, then the three of them would collectively be the main people in the park's nice neat "You can oversee everything from here," control room.

That's one viewpoint.

The second one is the people working behind the scenes in the park.  The ones who have to keep the animals fed, figure out ways to make sure that they're in places the visitors can see them, do check ups when the triceratops has a tummy ache, so forth.  The mechanics too.  There's a lot of technology that goes into Jurassic World that is entirely unrelated to the dinosaurs.

The third would be, basically, executives.

Simon Masrani, who owns the park after being given it by John Hammond, is trying to follow through on Hammond's dying wish (which doesn't involve profit), "Jurassic World exists to remind us how very small we are. How new."  His viewpoint, taken from the late John Hammond, is "Spare no expense."

He's going to be looking around the park, usually as an anonymous guest, to make sure that the two things he considers important (Are the guests having fun? Are the animals enjoying life?) are happening.

Other executives, apparently from Verizon per the actual movie, are going to be there to decide if they want to invest in a new exhibit.  They're going to be there as not remotely anonymous VIP guests.

And that's going to be the conflict of the movie.  Masrani isn't taking the expense involved in a venture like this seriously enough, but Claire knows the park needs this new investment because they can't afford to do a new exhibit on their own and without the spike in attendance that always comes with a new exhibit in (insert unit of time here) they won't be able to keep above water, whereas if they can pull of a really good exhibit (which means a bigger investment) they've worked out enough of the problems and expenses that they should be able to avoid a recurrence of this financial crisis for the foreseeable future.

The movie follows Claire as she tries to wow the Verizon executives into investing much needed money while dealing with all of the problems that go with running a theme park built around animals.  (This is where researching Disney's Animal Kingdom will come in handy, they had to overcome a lot of hurdles to make a theme park around animals.  Taking their problems and multiplying by dinosaur should be good for a fair amount of plot.)

One can imagine all manner of things that end up distracting her from the task (sorry boss, rules say only you can authorize ... whatever) or making it harder (the hydraulics used used to move the entire seating area to the mosasaurus show, which is a wow-worthy feat she wanted to use, are being repaired.  Such and such dinosaur that she hoped to show off is in mating season and they're beating each other up.)

Each thing that distracts from or detracts from wowing the executives is showing us the park behind the scenes, each thing that goes as planned is showing us the park from the view of park goers, and through this frame, you get the movie about running the park both in terms of operating it and keeping it funded.

In the end, the executives agree to fund a new exhibit, the first of its kind.  Not a resurrected dinosaur, but a wholly new one that combines traits from various things and blah, blah, blah Indominus Rex.  ("We needed something scary and easy to pronounce. You should hear a four-year-old try to say 'Archaeornithomimus.'")

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Movie 2: I'm not training raptors so that you can use them as weapons [top]

The second movie is about the training of the raptors.  It's much lower budget as the work is secluded in its own section of the island off limits to tourists and, notably, other dinosaurs.  Thus the only effects it needs are the raptors themselves which ... CGI is getting better all the time, but Jurassic World could really have benefited from using less of it and more practical effects.  We still haven't reached the point where animatronics can be replaced by CGI.

This movie is going to be dealing with the raising and training the raptors.  The main characters will be Owen (raptor trainer from the movie), Barry (Owen's black friend, who I'm going to assume is raptor trainer, from the movie), and [Insert human female characters here].  Or genderqueer.  That's totally ok too.  I'm just saying that I'm not going to leave this plot as a movie where the only female characters are dinosaurs who don't talk and have been the villains of the last three films.

At the start of this movie it seems like the only thing is trying to train the raptors, but there will be increasing hints that the people overseeing this want to use the raptors for something else.

Worth noting that the funding for this project is not from Masrani but from InGen and there's a conflict in the movie between those two groups.  Masrani owns the park and his people operate it.  He seems to be a friend of the late John Hammond.  InGen ousted Hammond, replaced him with people who were less soul-having in previous movies, and now, while they don't own the park or the dinosaurs, they do own the technology and processes used to produce the dinosaurs.

Thus Masrani's people have to work with InGen in spite of the fact that they're not always at ease with each other and, it turns out, have very different goals.

The raptors are cloned using Masrani's facilities (I get the impression no one lets InGen have a cloning lab of their own anymore, they tend to create the conditions for lots of death) and the project is being run on Masrani's island, but it is an InGen project.

It was sold (to Masrani's people and the actual workers) as testing the intelligence of the raptors, with the training being how they go about doing that.

Also worth noting is that there was about one sentence of acknowledgement that actual dinosaurs don't look like Jurassic Park dinosaurs in the movie, but it seems to me like the intelligence testing premise would have allowed for a great way to show that fact.

They could have raptors just like ones from the previous movies in one group, and feathered raptors that are created using more recently discovered more complete raptor DNA in another and the testing could be, in part, to see if actual raptors were as smart as the ones we've seen in previous films or if the intelligence was an unexpected product of the imperfect reconstruction.

The two groups would both be subject to the same training and their progress would be compared.

But that is neither here nor there, at issue is the stories that they tried to cram into one movie and this one is basically this:

The team raises and trains the raptors believing they're working to test the extent of raptor intelligence, they learn that in fact their work is going to be used for military purposes.

The movie would end with Owen, Barry, and [insert human female characters here] managing to secure control over the raptor project thus, for the moment, preventing it from being militarized.

This could probably involve Masrani as it is his island and in the actual movie he's shown to have prior knowledge of Owen.

In the grand cinematic tradition of aligning climaxes, securing the raptor project for non-military purposes only would happen at roughly the same time as some major breakthrough in the raptor training.

-

Again we have two movies.  In fact, I think that until we get to the end, they all come in pairs.

The movies take place later on, where the first movie was about getting the funding for Indominus Rex, now they're working on getting ready to unveil it.  As expected, most of the kinks are worked out of the park and it's all going smoothly.

Movie 3: The Conspiracy [top]

When Masrani first lays eyes on the new dinosaur, and when he learns the difficulty they're having in containing it he orders Owen to be brought in to provide a fresh perspective on their containment measures and see if he can spot any holes in the security.

This is just as it was in the movie, but unlike the original movie this shouldn't coincide with the escape because that makes it very difficult to tell the investigation story.  That's why the story failed to go anywhere in the movie.  Good people do not try to find out who is to blame while there are people in need of helping.

There needs to be a gap between finding out things are not right and "Oh my god, it's going to eat us," if there's to be a decent story of the investigation into what's really going on here.

So we have that gap.  Masrani and Owen both investigate, maybe Claire does as well.  Definitely room for [insert human female characters here].

Over the course of the movie layers of lies, inconsistencies, and whatnot will be uncovered.

The movie has a secret lab.  A secret lab that's off to the side of the non-secret lab.  Even if no one noticed that there's this random empty space behind that wall when looking at the floorplan, probably its power usage has raised some eyebrows somewhere.

As it's learned that there are things to Indominus that shouldn't be there, and various parties look into finding out how this happened, things will be revealed and the movie will ultimately culiminate in the discovery of the secret lab and the arrest of various people responsible.  Not of everyone responsible though, because the head guy at InGen and his concentrated stupid-evil is in fact useful for after the dinosaur escapes.

Conspiracy uncovered, arrests made, guilty flown away to be punished, everyone can have a nice time thinking they've succeeded and it's all going to be alright.

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Movie 4: The Character Story [top]

This is the first story that the actual movie started to tell.  Gray is 12ish and not-neurotypical.  He's presented as a watered down version of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.  He's on the autism spectrum but still capable of normal interaction, he's not a savant, he does memorize at least two groups of things he's fixated on down to minutia (dinosaurs and ... jeeps maybe?  I'm not sure the scope of the second fixation.)

The biggest hurdle he has with ordinary social interaction is that he either can't read people to tell when they're not interested, or he doesn't care enough about them not being interested to stop from bombarding them with a never-ending stream of words (in this case related to his dinosaur fixation.)

Zach is his older brother.  Zach's age is difficult to place.  Based on his actor we'd guess 19 or 20 and probably on the higher end of the range but the movie treats him as a not-yet legal adult who will be in the care of his parents for at least a while longer.

Based on his portrayal in the movie I think Zach probably has dysthymia.  He's locked into a pretty solid state of indifference and it takes a fracking mosasaurus to put the first crack in it.  He appears to just want to be left alone and for things to be quiet (which leads to friction with his brother.)

Again based on his portrayal in the movie, I'm thinking that maybe Zach is an asexual aromantic person who either doesn't know it or hasn't accepted himself.  He likes looking at smiling girls about his age, but his interest isn't really portrayed as different than someone looking at a sunset or a nice painting.  Which is to say, his aesthetic appreciation of the female form appears to be entirely without a sexual component and as for what little we see of him with his girlfriend, at best he seems baffled by the entire concept of their relationship.

Zach's general disinterest has caused him to miss any signs that his parents might be splitting.  Gray, on the other hand, has taken note of the fact that each parent is exchanging mail with a different lawyer and used Google to discover that the lawyers are divorce lawyers.

These two coming together such that they'll be able to support each other through whatever life in general and their parents' upcoming divorce throws their way is one of the stories the movie tried to tell.

That story can be told anywhere, but it's against the backdrop of Jurassic World and it's shared wonder at the dinosaurs that starts them coming together.

Again we have a story where the canon people involved are entirely male (Claire is their aunt but her work keeps her from being with them.)

It's easy enough to fix.  Add in some other characters.  Maybe Zach ends up spending some time with a lesbian character that lets him know that:
a) Being asexual is totally a thing, and
b) There's nothing wrong with that.

We could have the romance subplot that film makers always insist on throwing in between the lesbian and a love interest.

As for why Claire can't be there with them for the whole time, this is happening at the same time as uncover the conspiracy movie.  Maybe she's following the money and asking questions about H. R. Haldeman.

The movie ends with Zach and Grey having bonded the [insert human female characters here] having resolved their plot.  And Zach, Grey, and Claire might have some kind of improvement in their relationship because it's a character movie so, why not?

The sheer coolness of the dinosaurs being what Zach and Grey bond over is important to the plot, but mostly Jurassic World features in the movie the way space ships, space ports, bases, floating cities, and assorted stuff like that feature in Star Wars: It surrounds the characters and penetrates the plot; it binds the movie together.

Or, for an alternate description, it's like water in a fish's life if water were composed of pure concentrated awesome.

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The next pair of movies show things going wrong.

Bad people have been arrested (see conspiracy movie) the secret lab has been uncovered, law enforcement of some kind is probably confiscating hard drives to be decrypted and see how deep the rot goes, but there's still this genetically modified thing in an exhibit that is supposed to open soon.

Our good friend "Easy to Pronounce and Scary" escapes.

Movie 5: Disaster movie [top]

Initial attempts to contain the situation fail and things spiral out of control until all Hell is (that is: various types of dinosaurs are) being unleashed upon the park's patrons.

There have been movies about floods, fires, volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, meteors, asteroids, sharknadoes, avalanches, and so forth.  A disaster movie where the disaster is hungry angry dinosaurs is honestly the next logical step.  The truth is, I'm not sure why we got to the sharknadoes first.  (Also, most of Sharknado was about a sharkicane, which makes a hell of a lot more sense than a Sharknado.)

The point is, what goes into making a disaster movie is well understood and does not need to be described in depth here, except for the part where I point out that Sharknado is NOT the example to follow.

The key thing is that Invictus Rex (I know that's not its real name) smashes through the things used to keep the other dinosaurs restrained having the unintended (though I doubt she minds) consequence of unleashing them.

Thus the dinosaurs are coming.

There is a theme park/resort full of people that need to be evacuated or, somehow, safely sheltered in place.

This movie is about doing that.

You know that there'll be the doctor that the movie follows, and the rescue person that the movie follows, and the [whatever] person that the movie follows, and of course the people directing operations, and that some climactic thing will weave all of these people's stories together because that's how these movies work.

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Movie 6: Monster in the woods [top]

When things move to emergency management situation Claire is no longer the one who ought to be in charge.  Her skill set is not emergency management.  They hired her to do the best job running the park under normal operating conditions.

Presumably they have someone who knows how to deal with emergencies and she or he takes over.

This frees up Claire to do exactly what she she did in canon: go out after her nephews, grabbing Owen on the way out the door.

For a more plausible explanation for why they're the only one's that deep into not-safe land than "They're the only ones who don't come back when called," either:
a) They're not the only ones.
or
b) The security system was just updated (after the arrests that capped off the mystery/conspiracy movie) and not all the bugs are worked out.  Their super-special no-waiting-in-line pass Claire gave them is reading as, basically, administrator access, and so when manual controls are overridden to return all of those vehicles home, it doesn't happen to theirs.

Regardless Claire, Owen, and maybe one of the [insert human female characters] from the raptor trainers go out looking for the brothers from the character movie who, since the character movie is over, have gotten their shit together in terms of their relationship but will quickly find themselves out of their depth in terms of not getting eaten.

They're desperately trying to stay one step ahead of Scary and Easy to Pronounce, meanwhile team of adults (Claire, Owen, and [insert human female character] raptor trainer) are looking for them.

The part where the boys find the ruins of the original Jurassic Park was honestly perfect.

In fact, in many ways this story in general was the most well done, fully realized part of Jurassic World as a whole.  The boys trying to get to safety, Claire and Owen trying to get to the boys.

The problem is that you can't fully realize this story when you're also trying to tell nine or ten other stories.  Even in this post, where I'm trying to separate out the stories into fully functioning stand alone bits, I'm only going to manage seven of them (of which this one is number six.)

A major change to things would be to have leaving the original park not lead directly to reaching the non-safety of the current resort.  It simply doesn't make sense for a variety of reasons. A major one being that once all parties are there, they should be able to regroup, send the kids to shelter in place with the rest of the huddled masses, and generally not have the plot progress as it does in the movie.,

They could reach an outpost or something and, given how the timing of things is going down, have that destroyed by the flying dinosaurs, and then meet up with the adults while taking shelter there.

Then, the two groups together make the dash to safety.  But in this case safety would be where Owen and [insert human female character here] work with the raptors.  Given the reputation of raptors in the Jurassic Park universe, there's probably a fucking bunker there in case the things got loose.

Plus, if they're smart and they know they're being followed by death incarnate, they probably don't want to lead it to where the huddled masses are all huddling.

The movie would end not with them beating Scary and Easy to Pronounce but instead with them reaching shelter where there's solid walls, food, water, and generator driven power.

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Movie 7: The Vorpal Blade [top]

Movie 1 covered getting funding for the Indominus Rex, Movie 2 covered training the raptors.  Movie 3 covered uncovering (eek! terrible unintended pun) the corruption behind Indominus Rex, Movie 4 set up the characters being rescued in 6 as well as the park that is turning from order to chaos in 5.

5 covered protecting the people in the park as a whole.  6 was about rescuing the individual people who were in the most danger both because of where they were and because Indominus picked them to hunt.

The one thing we have yet to cover is attempting to directly deal with Indominus. (Also the payoff for having trained raptors.)

That's what Seven is about.  We'll see the events that set off 5 and 6 from a different perspective as initial attempts to contain it result in both killing the initial response team and driving Indominus, Scary and Easy to Pronounce, Rex into barriers in failed attempts to corner it (or just by accident) which leads to it smashing those barriers and thus setting free the other dinosaurs that threaten the park population in general necessitating the evacuation seen in movie 5.

Again, this covers a time period we've already seen, just from a different perspective.

And part of what we'd see in this different perspective is that while the regular park employees were working to protect the guests under the guidance of the emergency management staff in movie 5, and while the raptor trainers, head of normal park operations, and nephews were running for their lives in 6, a change was made in the hunting of the Scary but Easy to Pronounce.

InGen used the confusion to have their security take over the hunt, and that is partially responsible for things going so horribly wrong (who cares if they break a wall and let predatory dinosaurs out?  That's Masrani's problem), even though things were going pretty badly before that, but is also allowing them to pressure people into giving access to things they shouldn't have (the secret labs that are sealed until law enforcement can thoroughly inspect them "If we want to save lives, we need to know exactly what we're up against.  Open the door," the raptor program that they were explicitly pushed away from at the end of movie 2 "We need all options on the table, People Are Dying," and such.)

The situation is being used by InGen to recover data from their illegal project(s), remove evidence incriminating them and ... do a test run of their weapons programs.

The Indominus is exceeding all expectations.  It was supposed to be a proof of concept on various things (adaptive camouflage in visible and infrared spectrum, whatever the hell else they stuck into the damned thing) that funneled money away from legal work by taking place under the guise of a park attraction and so had to be as big as the expected park attraction (they're actually more interested in smaller animals, for example ones that can enter buildings without bashing holes in them) but so far it's proving to be able to plow through infantry like a tank.

Our heroes will appear when InGen shows up to take possession of the raptors (ostensibly to be used as weapons against the Indominus) and finds heroes already camped out at the raptor paddock.  (InGen assumed they were conveniently dead and is not altogether happy to find them alive)

Raptor trainers will insist that if the raptors are to be taken out on a hunt (which they oppose but can't stop) they lead them.

While they're doing that, Claire tries to take the boys to the resort because that's where the ongoing evacuation operation is going on and, say, InGen brought a nice armored truck with them.

Scary but Easy to Pronounce could turn out to have been waiting outside the compound (Recall that she was chasing the boys) and, when various people go various ways, slaughter the people who stay behind at the base camp.

If there is some crisis of loyalty amoung the raptors it would make more sense if InGen caused it (maybe intentionally to get rid of the people who might have incriminating testimony against them, maybe accidentally by using a means of control, say electric shocks, that screwed over the raptor's trust in the trainers.)

Regardless, after taking out the InGen control camp, Scary but Easy to Pronounce follows Claire and the boys back to the resort.  Raptor trainers realize Scary is following the others and try to intercept and warn them.  You get the showdown in the resort just like the actual movie.

You can even have the T-Rex to the rescue they used because that was one of the things that actually made sense.  She gave no signs of hunger, so she didn't try to eat the humans, instead she at first followed the pretty, pretty light (the flare) with curiosity and then, upon finding another sort-of adult sort of T-Rex in contested territory, she started a threat display and that jerk started fighting her so of course she fought back.

All things considered, the T-Rex and surviving raptor working together to take down Scary but Easy to Pronounce was one of the cooler things in the movie.  And it made sense as well.  By the time the two noticed each other they were both out to kill their common enemy, so why mess things up by fighting each other?

The raptor isn't a threat to the T-Rex's status because it's not a competing T-Rex, the T-Rex isn't a threat to the raptor because the T-Rex isn't being aggressive towards it.  And they complement each other really nicely.

Things that I would change are that all but one of the raptors being wiped out is kind of ... uh.  Crappy.  Also, when the raptors were taken out it was generally, "I pick you up in my mouth and throw you against something," not once --NOT ONCE-- did someone run to one of the fallen raptors to see if was in need of medical attention in spite of the fact that at this point the raptors were knowingly fighting to defend them.

Humans: heartless bastards.

I have no problem with the ending of the unmodified dinosaurs not actually winning, but instead driving Scary but Easy to Pronounce back to where BOOM! mosasaurus eats it.

There's always a bigger fish (no there isn't, but go with me here), said the Jedi master in the movie we pretend doesn't exist.  Scary but Easy to Pronounce wasn't even aquatic.  Never saw it coming.

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And, there, I've pulled apart the strange tangled ball of too many plots for one movie and attempted to make it into movies, seven of them, each with a movie's worth of plot.

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A formatting note: Blogger makes it literally impossible to test that same page links are working in the editor and I need to go to sleep now and thus won't be testing after posting, so if any of the links are borked, please do tell.

How I would do it: Splatoon

Splatoon is revolutionary and freaking adorable, but it could be better.

Before we get to what I'd do differently, we have to talk about the game itself.

When I realized that doing so was really post length itself I cut it out and put it in it's own post.

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The first thing that needs to be understood is that Splatoon, as it currently exists, needs multiplayer bots.  I'm just going to foonote that [1] because it's more a patch on existing things than the fun how I would do it stuff.

Table of contents:

• Integrating Singleplayer
• About non-interactive content
• Non-combat multiplayer
• The Plaza
• Tentacle Styles
• Home
• Inkopolis and shopping
• Multiplayer modes
• Rankings
• Stages
• Random notes

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Ok, so, single player is awesome.  More of it, thank you very much.

Also more integration of it.  This could be purely aesthetic.  When you start the game you're told on the local newscast that the power source for the city is gone, and since the power source is a giant electric catfish (creativity points for inventing the "zapfish" electric catfish instead of making it an eel, by the way) that's kept in public, you can see it's no longer there.  But, other than it not being there as part of the scenery, there's nothing mentioned about it ever again until you complete the single player campaign and return it.

Local newscast says its back, now you can see that it's home.

The local news cast is used to announce stage rotation which happens multiple times a day and also announce any new features added to the game (new weapons, new stages.)  Mixed in with these could be things about the power shortage.  Lights could flicker.  Things could look like a city that has power problems.

As you returned the little zapfish stopgap measures could be implemented to deal with the problems and thus you could see what you were accomplishing.

Like I said, purely aesthetic.

That said, it would also be nice if you could have things that do affect gameplay.  Like bringing some of the gear you buy in the plaza on single player missions.

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Non-interactive content should be skippable.  Non-interactive content should be skippable.  Non-interactive content should ALWAYS be skippable.

Even if the game thinks it's the first time someone has seen this, it should be skippable.  Cutscene?  Be able to skip it.  Newscast?  Be able to skip it.

Results of the match you just played?  Be able to skip it.

It should be always, always, always be possible to skip non-interactive content.

The sole exception is when the content serves the same purpose as, "On your mark.  Get set.  Go!" and that is something that should never take a long time.

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Non-combat inter-player interaction.

When you're walking around the plaza you can encounter other players in a miiverse way.  That means you can see them, as they have chosen to appear (skin color, eye color, clothing) and read any message they've shouted to the world, but you're not really encountering them because they're basically playing the role of NPCs.

I'd be in favor of making this an interactive non-combat multiplayer.  Have it be a chance to talk to your fellow players between matches and such.  Talk could in fact be text so voice chat wouldn't have to be implemented; that said, people want voice chat and for good reason.

Multiplayer is a team of four vs. another team of four.  Working together with your team in a way such that you complement each other is essential.  And yet you can't talk to them.  You can't say, "I can hold this position so no one else needs to wait here," or, "Cover me," or, "I've got you covered," or, "Don't go that way there's a sniper," or, "Everyone attack on 3," or, "If you just tell me what you're trying to accomplish, maybe I can help you."  Or anything like that.

But we'll get to multiplayer.

For now the plaza.

The thing is, you could still do the mii-verse thing that's being done here so that the area looks like it's populated people people doing people things while doing what I'm advocating.  The difference would be that the NPC population would be made of people who aren't in a position to interact here (say people who are logged off, instead of people who are logged on.  Or people currently in matches, or something.)

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The Plaza

In the plaza is a cafe you can't go into (because it's not like your character needs to eat or drink) the shops, an arcade game (not an arcade that you can play arcade games in, a single arcade game machine in the open) the place you go for multiplayer, the place you go for same-system multiplayer, and the Amiibo station.

First the shops.  I was disappointed when I learned that headgear, which includes hats, helmets, glasses, goggles, headphones and probably other stuff (oh: gas mask, head band) is one item only given that I want my character to be able to wear glasses and a hat.

Simple solution: split off eye-wear into a different shop.  The game involves paintball (well ... inkball) it would make sense for everyone to wear goggles by default and the eye-wear shop could be divided between things like cooler goggles, normal glasses, sunglasses, Geordi's visor (but not called that so you don't get sued) and such.

Headphones would also be good to separate out since they're there already but are somehow prevent you from wearing glasses or a headband.

Now, since gear comes with abilities there could be balance issues, but I'm sure they could be worked out.  Before I do quick math on that, consider this:

You can pick your headgear, you can pick your shirt, you can pick your shoes, you can't buy pants.  (We are the squids who wear no pants.)  Instead everyone wears the same featureless, black, form-fitting athletic shorts.

They need a pants, shorts, and skirts shop.

Thus expanded, the shops would be:
Eyewear, hats, headphones, shirts, pants/shorts/skirts, shoes.

Headphones kind of stands out as "Wha?" but they're already in game as headgear.  It's canonical that inklings are known for their liking of music, so each of them having some kind of music thing (doesn't have to be headphones, could be an nondescript MP3 player clipped to a belt) isn't really a stretch.

That's six shops.  If the new things all have the same one primary ability and up-to-four secondary abilities thing going on then you could have every ability as a secondary as opposed to the half you could have before (if the random rolls went just right in either case) in addition to the six primaries (compared to 3) in a single outfit.

I think it's not really desirable for there to be the potential to have everything, but it's not like there was some law of nature that necessitated there be precisely 24 abilities to begin with.

If we double the shops we could double the abilities.  Some of them are already pretty esoteric.  "Haunting" is the one that comes to my mind.  It marks the person whop killed you so that everyone on your side can see where they are (yourself included when you respawn.)  I'm not precisely sure what controls how long this lasts, but it's probably the same as the point sensor and echolocator which do similar things.  If that can be an ability you can imagine how many possibilites there are.

Run speed and swim speed being increased are both special abilities, but nothing about jumps.  Jump length and jump height are both things that could be increased.

I'd like there to be an anti-gravity-in-ink-ability so that when you're in ink on a wall and not moving you stay where you are rather than slide down.

Being able to submerge in enemy ink could be useful, even though enemy ink is harmful to you and has a severe movement penalty.

The point is, the abilities out there to abilities you can have ratio could be kept the same because I'm sure more ones could be thought up.  (Or, alternatively, just don't have as many slots.)

For that matter, you could have a feature where the maximum number of abilities is capped but the amount of gear is variable.  As it stands everyone always has three bits of gear.  You can't go barefoot or shirtless, and if you want there to be nothing on your head the best you can do is buy contact lenses for your head gear.

I'd still want the inklings to be wearing clothes, but things could be made optional.  The shorts currently contribute nothing, have them be the default and still contribute nothing.  Have a similarly bland shirt be the default and contribute nothing.  Have all other gear be optional.

Then put caps on the abilities.  If you think the game is perfect as it is, you can only have three primary abilities (if you have four or more things on some of the primaries, you should be able to choose which, get demoted to secondary) you can have at most 12 secondary abilities, if you've got six things on all of them maxed out, only the first 12 secondaries count (this is easy to figure out because they have a set order) so from the things with non-demoted primaries you get two secondaries each and discard two secondaries each.  From each thing with a demoted primary you have the primary as secondary, the first secondary, and discard the three other secondaries.

My point here is that there are plenty of ways to have more gear without unbalancing the game, so I have no fears about adding gear types and would do just that.

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I wondered, to some degree, if people would find these ideas absurd, the game isn't dress up, after all.  It turns out that there's an online movement to add a pants shop.  People also want a hair salon.

Inklings don't have hair.  The top of their head has something that looks hair-ish from a distance but it's actually a remnant of your squid-form color, the most hair-like part are the still-long tentacles.  You can't get a trim.  It would have to be surgery and I'm definitely opposed to that being in the game.

However the tentacles can be styled in a way.  They can be tied.  The boys all bind theirs toward the top back of their heads, the girls all wear them loose.  A couple of NPCs who are older than the players and have extra long tentacles have theirs bound in ways that are more complex and clearly feminine.

I'd definitely support a tentacle styling shop.  Especially because if we assume that loose tentacles are how you say to the world, "I'm a girl," and bound at the back ones are how you say, "I'm a boy," (which seems to be the case) then someone with long but bound at the back tentacles would openly be a trans boy, someone with short but unbound ones would be a trans girl, and we'd be able to have instant representation just by letting people decide how to do their "hair".

(We probably wouldn't get it, though I'm all for NPCs that look like other players to populate the larger world I'm going to be describing, thus we could ensure that we got it.)

Other styles would be a way of saying that either you're neither gender or you care more about looking how you want to look than people getting your gender right at first glance.

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People also want pets which I don't really see the point of, but ok.  Some specifically want ink-pets that they can use in multiplayer which, I guess, would take the form of a special and ... there's nothing wrong with that, some of the specials are weird.  Or maybe it would be a secondary weapon (throw out your pet) which, again, some of the secondaries were kind of weird so ... sure, why not?

People also want apartments/houses.  This actually makes sense because the loading screen when you start the game is of an inkling's room and if you look at the gamepad you see a map of said room.

In fact, having a home could be really useful for being able to sort your gear.  Right now all your weapons are on one unsorted screen and if they take up more than one screen you have to flip right or left to see more.  There's not rhyme or reason the order they're in (perhaps the order you acquired them?) and it's a bit of a mess to find what you're looking for.

If you actually had a 3D space in which to put your stuff you could sort it in a way that makes sense to you.

Additionally it opens the door to having swag you could collect.

X-Wing Alliance gave you a room (complete with a growing souvenir collection) in spite of the game being a flight simulator.

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People want to see more of Inkopolis than just one plaza and the multiplayer stages.  I'm with them on that.  It would be cool to be able to walk around and look at the place you save in single player and live in regardless.  The multiplayer stages are explicitly normal places that they've cordoned off to make into a match spaces temporarily.  It would be neat to be able to walk around the non-cordoned off version when it's not in use as a match.

(It might also be neat to go to one of the places currently in use for matches and spectate.  Obviously it could only show one match at a time even though many are going on, but: who cares?  Be a spectator.)

For that matter, since I'm basically talking about turning a simple match based multiplayer game into an MMO, it would be cool to arrange unofficial matches where you told people, "Show up at X and bring your ink," and the fight didn't really have rules or time limit and didn't affect your standing or ranking at all.

And being able to wander the city comes back to something about the merchants.  It would make more sense to me if the shops were fully loaded with stuff all the time and it were just the case that certain sections weren't open to you when you hadn't reached a sufficient level.  Furthermore, that would could lead to decisions about various things because if multiple companies are offering more or less the same product, you've got to decide which to get.

And what about if you're choosing how to dress entirely based on fashion and care not about abilities?  We know there's a mall in Inkopolis, maybe the stuff there is cheaper but doesn't have abilities or doesn't have as many.  (Could be everything there is primary only without a single secondary slot.)  The mall could also have stuff you could use to decorate your room.

I'm going to get into travel around this expanded city, but first one more thing on clothes.

What if you really like something in terms of stats, but not so much in terms of how it looks.  There ought to be an alteration shop that will help you change how things look or, failing that, the ability to let some piece of clothing soak in dye of another color until it's something you like.  (Boring white tee?  That's what tie-dye is for.)

Ok, so, bigger city.  The super-jump from multiplayer, or the squid launchers from single player, would justify fast travel from one location to another so that you wouldn't be stuck slowly making your way from point A to point B.  That said, there are other means of travel and the plaza really feels too much like a human design and not enough like an inkling design.

Inklings move faster in squid-form so you'd expect the design of their cities and buildings to reflect this.  The plaza is a no-splat area so you can't lay down a trail of ink to swim through, but there could be channels of some sort of opalesque universal ink that everyone could swim through to move faster than on foot.  Also, in single player a mode of fast travel to difficult places was shown, ink-rails, which are sort of like ... um ... beams of ink projected in straight lines until they reach a joint that redirects them in another direction or their end point.

Both of these things could be ways to travel around larger areas without getting bogged down in travel time.

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Multiplayer game modes.

Right now the multiplayer is a sort of balance between laying down ink and fighting your opponents to hinder them from laying down ink while preventing them from hindering you.  That's fine, I'd add two things though.  One would be a mode in which it's just laying down ink.  You cannot die, you cannot kill.

There are still downsides to someone shooting at you --there's a severe movement penalty on the other team's ink, you need your own ink to refill your ink tank-- but in general the game is primary objective only: ink more territory than the other side.

The other would be the opposite.  It doesn't matter how much ink you lay down, the object is to splat the enemy more than they splat you.  The way squid-swimming through ink changes movement and what it does with respect to stealth means that this would be very different from what goes on in a traditional shooter, but the objective would be the same.

Right now all matches are four on four.  I'd open it up to more possibilities.  I don't think one more person would kill the system and cause horrible things, so three teams of three seems an option.  Four teams of two definitely.  Free for all: eight colors of ink being shot around.

Also, instead of 4 on 4, 3 on 3, 2 on 2, 1 on 1.

And this is part of where the footnote, apparently the only footnote (at least the only one so far), comes in.  Bots really are needed to deal with cases where someone's connection dies, and they could be very helpful when the matchmaking software can only find seven people to put in a match and thus no one gets to play, but if there were significantly more multiplayer options (I just described 42 options of which only one is in the game) then it is absolutely essential that the system has a way to deal with things when there aren't enough human players.

The more options I have, the fewer people playing in each option, which means the more important it becomes that a match can be had when there aren't enough people who want that type of match at that time, which means the greater the need for really, really good multiplayer bots.

Not really, really good in terms of ability to win, really, really good in terms of acting in a humanish way.  Beginners don't need their butts constantly kicked, if they're going to have artificial opponents those opponents need to be on their level.

Further complicating existing multiplayer is that since it's four on four all the time, you're always on a team with three other people and you didn't get to pick their weapons.

Maybe you're great with a blaster provided there are other people on your team with rollers to lay down ink for you.  If you equip a blaster and get stuck on a team where everyone else has blasters ... sucks to be you.

There are four primary weapon types.  I think that leads to 35 possible combinations on a 4 person team.  Basically any level of control over what kind of team you're on will require the matchmaking software to consider all 35.  (I suppose the exception is if you could name only one that you wanted to be a on a team with, then things could be paired off and pairs stuck together, that's two sets of ten combinations so I'm not sure that's any simpler.)

And, again, you start to see how it would be vital to have a supply of players in cans (really good bots) to choose from to fill out any matches.

But it would at least mean that you don't start a match with a feeling of, "Fuck, I suck with a team armed this way."

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Rankings

Levels are just earning your way into being able to buy better stuff.  Rankings are really important.  There are official rankings which happen as a result of "Ranked Battles" (good name there, I wonder how they came up with it) and I'd like to think that there's some kind of unofficial behind the scenes ranking system that tries to keep a bunch of newbies from squaring off against the most experienced veterans of all time in the non-ranked matches.

Too often, in both types of matches, one side never stands a chance.  This is a serious problem.  It doesn't help, it isn't fun, it's just no good.  There needs to be a better system for making sure that the teams which face each other both at least have a chance of winning.

Moreover, ranking needs to take into account something that the official visible ranking does not: there are four kinds of weapon.

If you're the best there is with a roller you'll probably be able to get a high rank, but if you then decide to start practicing your charger skills there's no way in hell it makes sense to throw you into a match against top ranked players.

It needs to be divided by weapon so that you're playing at the right level for you no matter which weapon you have equipped.

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Stages

The places you play are called stages.  I'm not totally sure why.  Maybe it's nomenclature I'm just not familiar with, maybe it's because the game already uses the terms "level" and "map" to mean different things.

Regardless, there need to be more of them (there's at least one more on the way.)

In addition to needing more, though, there's also a need for different ones.

The single player campaign made heavy use of an interactive environment.  The ink rails I mentioned were part of that.  You can see how it would work, and offer a risk/reward combination in multiplayer.  Shoot the start thingy to turn the rail on in your color, then use it, but watch out because the enemy can shoot the start thingy too.  I'm not sure if doing so should turn it off (with a second shot turning it on in their color), or immediately switch it to their color.  Either way you'd be dropped right out of it.  (If it did immediately switch to their color you'd be inked up close to being splatted when you fell.  Or possibly splatted outright, either way.)

There was invisible stuff that you had to ink up to see.  On the one hand, this could be brought in the same way, or it could be made so that not only does there have to be ink on it for you to see it, but it has to be your ink.  Enemy ink doesn't show it to you.

The sponges were a truly interesting thing.  Shoot them with your ink and they grew huge and you could interact with them as you could with any inked surface.  But if the enemy shoots them they shrink back down.  Two possibilities.  One is that all sponges are neutral.  In their uninked state they're just waiting for someone to ink them so they can grow up huge and take the ink's color.  When shot with the other color they shrink back down to the uninked state and then, from there, can grow up huge in the new color.  The other is that some sponges are one color, the others are the other color.  Shooting with the color of the sponge can only make it grow, shooting with the other color can only make it shrink.  You can make an enemy sponge small and useless, but you can't convert it to one of your own.

There were things powered by propellers that you'd shoot ink into to make them go.  generally elevators or things that moved side to side.

Single player also had stages with dynamic parts from simple spinning things to blocks that rearranged themselves.

My point in bringing all of this up is that it's in the game.  The code is already there and it's just waiting for someone to take it and make multiplayer stages using these features.

I'm not advocating turning multiplayer into a platformer like single player, but I do think that the unique features from single player could be introduced to multiplayer.  Should be introduced, in fact.

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Random other thing: I don't know how hard it is to make a very basic skateboarding simulator, but one of the multiplayer stages is a skate park.  It would be kind of cool to be able to try to skateboard there when it's not being used as a multiplayer stage.  It is, after all, a skate park.

I really feel like I should be able to pull at least one other random bit of random out.

Oh, post single player victory it would be pretty cool, in my opinion, to be able to have non-violent interactions with the octalings.  The war is over, you won, they're probably bitter and pissed off, but maybe you could do something to help their situation which seems to, kind of, suck.

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[1] Historically this has proven to be an incredibly difficult thing to do because while making an opponent that will be difficult for a player to beat is fairly straightforward, making an opponent that acts like a human being is less so.  Great strides have been made in this arena, but since Splatoon is not a traditional game, it is likely that a lot of what is needed to make a faux player needs to be built from scratch.

In addition to all of the stuff that goes into trying to make a shooter bot, which has traditionally been the problem approached, a faux player would need to be able to decide when to shoot vs when to lay down ink, where to lay down ink, when to switch between the two tactics, when it's best to lay down ink in an area that doesn't matter in order to charge their special, how to use the special, the best way to use things like beacons, when it pays to drop all reason and go for a Hail Mary because you're about to lose, what the Hail Mary would look like, how to best support and complement allies, and so forth.

The reason that Splatoon needs multiplayer bots is that, since the object is not to rack up the most kills, losing a player is devastating.  In a traditional shooter if you lose a player because their connection was lost, they were called away from the game, or whatever it's bad, but not catastrophic.  The reason is that while you have one fewer person on your side trying to shoot the enemy, you also have on fewer target for the enemy to shoot at.  It doesn't make up for a lost player, but it does mitigate the effect.

In Splatoon the object is to lay down ink.  Four on Four and you lose a player means that there are four of them inking the stage and only three of you which means that all things being equal the end result should be that they cover 57% of the stage.  What would be a tie is a loss.  What would be a win is a loss, only what would be an impressive win still constitutes a win.

I wonder if vast strides could be made in multiplayer bot making simply by collecting an analyzing the data that's being produced every time people play.  All games are run through nintendo online so in theory, if they wanted to, the could record every single game, use that to gather data for how human players actually play, run the data through pattern matching software to simplify it into a finite set of machine-understandable tactics and strategies, and then attempt to simulate those tactics/strategies.  (Still using the real life data to create very complex, but basically if-then based, ways to make the decision of which tack to take and when to change tack.)

We're talking about massive amounts of data to sift and analyze, which means ideally you'd be doing this shit on supercomputers (which, more often than not, are being put to better uses), but it does make for an interesting thought.  Every multiplayer match is a trove of data on how actual human beings approach actual gaming.  As far as I know that data is never saved, but it could be and analysis of it could do some very interesting things.