prequels are not impossible but they are difficult

I saw Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga over a week ago and have already forgotten most of what happens in it, which is not a good sign. The only elements to stick in my brain are the delightfully weird side characters who—more so than the car chases and the sheer Australia of it all—are the real defining features of the Mad Max universe. As a Mad Max movie, Furiosa is fine, a perfectly cromulent new addition to the franchise. As a prequel, however, I think it’s quite bad. The movie is sort of aware of that fact: the closing credits are full of clips from Fury Road, as if trying to make the case for itself. “Maybe this was kind of dumb but hey! it’s setup for a better movie!”

The problem is that Fury Road didn’t need any setup. In fact most action movies—and most action-adventure stories in any medium—live very happily without prequels to explain their backstories. A fun fact I learned from Margaret Ann Doody’s The True History of the Novel¹ is that the earliest novels (which were Greek and Latin prose narratives written mainly in North Africa and the Middle East) nearly always started in media res. From the very beginning, stories have rarely started at the beginning: they start in the middle, at a point of action and high tension, and then backfill the rest of the narrative as needed.² Most really good, enduring stories leave a lot out: much of the art of fiction can be found in knowing what to show in narrative and what to only briefly reference. Not every story element needs an entire origin film.

I’m really not opposed to big science fiction and fantasy universes, or to expanding them through prequels and sequels. I am, however, extremely fucking tired of them lately, because most of them are made so lazily and greedily, and without any respect for the inherent challenges involved. Writing a great story is hard: expanding the backstory in a meaningful way is infinitely harder. I’ll explain why it’s so hard in the form of three quick rules that I think would-be prequel writers should follow, or at least consider.

Rule #1: The answer must be bigger than the question

This rule will make more sense, I think, if I start off by talking about sequels. All sequels are answers to a question, pretty much the same question each time: “what happened next?” Whatever the next chapter in a series happens to be, it always needs to exceed what came before: the stakes need to be higher, or more complicated, or tonally shifted in an interesting way. If a sequel operates in the exact same register as the original, then it’s always going to suffer by comparison: it’s always going to be a duller and more predictable version of the thing we’ve already seen. Prequels are, in this sense, no different than sequels: wherever they take place in a fictional timeline, they arrive second in ours, and therefore they likewise need to be some version of more, larger, unexpected, slanted, different.

A prequel also has the additional challenge of asking trickier questions than a sequel: not “what happened next?” but “how did this come to be?” Sometimes prequels fail because (sorry to stereotype) they’re made by nerd boys who are mainly invested in the origins of inert objects, such as weapons and machines and costumes. “Where did Furiosa’s big rig come from” is a question you could ask, if the story of the big rig’s creation happened to be really interesting, and more expansive than the question would seem to suggest. Unfortunately, the answer in Furiosa is “Immortan Joe decided he wanted a big rig,” which okay, don’t we all.

But even if the question “how did something come to be” is directed at people instead of objects—say, “how did Darth Vader come to be,” it’s still difficult to make the answer more interesting than the question. Vader is a cyborg sorcerer in black armor voiced by James Earl Jones; it’s hard to outdo or exceed that in an origin story, especially if it’s brought to us by weak actors with bad voices and stupid lines. Plus, we already learn Vader’s origin story in the O.G. Star Wars trilogy through a series of deliberately misleading stories told about him by other people. So really, we have two problems: 1) we already know the answer to the question of how Vader came to be 2) it was already told to us in an interesting way. A prequel dramatizing Vader’s origin needed to up the ante, to surprise us in some fashion (and not just with, uh, pod racing and racist accents). It needed to give us more—and a more that would expand the original trilogy, not just in terms of narrative real estate but in depth and meaning.³

Rule #2: Linearity is for chumps

Action-adventure stories tend to start in media res because it’s exciting, and also because most good stories are nonlinear. Modernist and postmodernist literature and media have confused the issue here a bit, but a story doesn’t need to jump around between past and future timelines to be “nonlinear” in a way that matters. Fury Road, for example, is effectively nonlinear: we open after a (brief, ineffective) moment of backstory with Mad Max being brought to a place he doesn’t understand, where a set of events he had no part in have already been set in motion. And in the process of getting involved in these events, Mad Max learns about other important events that happened in the past to the other players in the story, and precipitated the crisis in which he has found himself and now has to respond. Most of these events are related to Furiosa, who is also introduced to us in media res: she’s Immortan Joe’s best general, except she immediately betrays him to rescue his wives, a plan which has clearly been in place for some time offscreen. During the course of the escape, we find out that she was kidnapped from a paradise as a child; she’s trying to return to that paradise which no longer exists, though she doesn’t know that yet. We get so much story from her, and all effectively nonlinear: we get new pieces of backstory and new motivation from her as the main adventure rockets along. Just because the main adventure is technically linear doesn’t mean that the narrative itself is only driving forward. In fact the entire story-movement in Fury Road is circular: it journeys, and it returns.

Most prequels, however, are painfully linear, and the Furiosa prequel is no exception. It opens with young Furiosa, who we follow in linear time as she ages from a brave and stoic child into an even braver and stoic-er young woman. The child actor and Anya Taylor-Joy try very hard, but they have few lines and even less development. The strictly linear movement forbids any moments of revelation, and as such we don’t really get to know Furiosa in her own movie: we are simply handed, in plodding linear time, the events as they happen to her. We also know exactly where she’s going, because we’ve already seen Fury Road, so there are no real questions about her character arc there either. The action scenes also lack tension, because Furiosa has plot armor and will survive any physical assault, except to the arm that we know she has to lose because she has a prosthetic in Fury Road. The answer to the question “how did Furiosa lose her arm” could have and should have been a big emotional moment, but I’ve just seen too many of these dull prequels, and even dismemberment felt like checking off a box.⁴ Now, if the movie had opened with Furiosa losing her arm (something which we already knew was going to happen) and then moved backward, and forward again…that might have been interesting, like a real movie.

Rule #3: Knowledge is the opposite of power

I talked about this a lot in my Grand Unified Theory of Plot(TM) post, but in brief, I think successful plotting has a lot to do with concealing and revealing information. Something important is held back between characters and audience, or character and character: the thoughtful resolution of this imbalance can feel like the solving of an equation or the completion of a chord progression (or, if done badly, like someone bungling an easy math problem or slamming the wrong keys.) The problem with a prequel is that definitionally, we know what will happen: in fact we usually know really important information, like who will live and who will die. So the tension can’t come from resolving questions such as “is this character going to make it” but has to be found elsewhere.

Sorry to toot the Star Wars horn so much today, but Andor, I think, has managed to figure this out: it’s one of the only good Star Wars expansions for a reason. The tension in Andor isn’t whether the rebellion will succeed (we know it will), or even whether these specific early revolutionaries will survive (Andor himself, as we already know from Rogue One, definitely won’t.) Instead, the story finds all its tension within the characters, and the fact that they don’t know that the rebellion will win. Stellan Skarsgard’s character is constantly questioning whether the difficult and fucked-up choices he’s making on behalf of the revolution can be justified; he has no way of knowing, he can only keep working. A lot of the rebels’ early missions go tits-up; mistakes happen, and they lose people, and they’re scared all the time. In the meantime, the imperial bureaucrats are just trying to secure their own careers. There’s a lot of pathos and even hilarity in Andor: everybody’s actions are so small in the face of the epic, mythic battle to come, but nobody’s aware of that: they’re all just making their wee little plans.⁵ This is a case where the physical stakes of a prequel are technically lower and smaller, yet they’re compelling because they’re so different from the original. The answers too are bigger than the questions—the questions in this case being “how did the rebellion get started?” and “how did the Empire fumble this bag?” The answers, so far, have been complicated and fascinating. I really hope Andor season two (RuPaul voice) doesn’t fuck it up. It’s basically the only good prequel we have.⁶

1. The True Story of the Novel is an absolute banger and required reading imo.

2. Superhero origin stories are a bit of an exception here, in that they do sort of start “at the beginning.” But you could also argue that they work to establish the character in reality, then show how power changes them: that is, they begin right before the transition point between the mundane and the magical.

3. It’s totally possible that kids these days grow up watching Star Wars in fictional timeline order. I pity the children.

4. As you know, I am very skeptical of sex-scenes-in-movies discourse, but Furiosa suffers from lack of a sex scene. If she’d fucked her boyfriend instead of just cuddling him platonically a bit, the emotional stakes of the dismemberment sequence would have been a lot clearer and more compelling. (No dismemberment without dick? is strangely what I am saying.)

5. Basically, Andor works in the absence of Jedi because of the presence of Jedi elsewhere in the larger story. They provide enough mythic weight that they aren’t needed everywhere.

6. No I’m not watching The Acolyte, I have this thing called self-respect.