But this blog entry is not about defending nerdism. What it is about is how the most recent reaction to continuity within fiction seems to be largely negative and against it. I recently read an article that tries to make a case for keeping loose continuity within the various film franchises.
Please read this article before continuing.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/10/26/hero-worship-the-007-approach-to-continuity
Joey Esposito's comment "that continuity is rarely anything more than a distraction from good storytelling" is quite a load of bollocks, as far as I'm concerned. But first things first.
Contrary to what many might perceive at first glance, the Bond films have a fairly strong continuity within themselves. References to his dead wife, an on-and-off girlfriend, villains, etc. The changing of an actor or maintaing the age of a character who has been around since 1953 is hardly a strong case for discarded continuity. It's no different than hiring a different artist to draw a character or modifying subtitles to a foreign film to allow for relevance to the foreign viewer's culture. It keeps the ball rolling.
That aside, I'll begin making my case for the importance of continuity.
Reason No. 1... It keeps you caring about the characters
If you are reading or watching a succession of material around a character, it won't mean much if the character dies in one story and then comes back without explanation or reference. With no point of reference to build from, you can't grow to appreciate the character and the character can't really grow, either.
Reason No. 2... It allows for thematic cohesion
This might not necessarily mean much to everyone, but it appeals to my sensibilities.
I will give you the Terminator franchise as an example. The first film in the series presents time travel as a means to change the future. That is, the future is not set in stone and can be changed. At the end of the film there is a little twist that presents the possibility that maybe the future can't be changed.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day continues on the "No Fate" theme by having the heroes destroy the means to create the villains and prevent a nuclear war from ever happening, yet still maintains an ending of ambiguous nature.
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines more or less throws the "No Fate" theme out the window. While the date of the nuclear war has changed, the heroes are unable to stop the machines from taking over. Story-wise, the future has changed. Where theme is concerned, the change is drastic and clashes with the ideas presented in its predecessors.
The Alien series is the same way. The first two films have a theme of survival; that when you're in a hopeless situation you can find the strength within yourself and persevere over the dominant life-form, i.e. the alien. Alien 3 arrives and the producers say, "Screw this! Let's kill off all the interesting characters, replace them with bland characters, and try to justify it creatively all in the name of art!" It's made even worse by the fact that Alien Resurrection brings Ellen Ripley back as a clone. So even Alien 3 gets the shaft! Oh well. It's the worst the series, anyway.
Reason No. 3... Internal logic
I'm going to reference Alien 3 one more time. In the film's opening we see an alien egg in the cryo-chamber of the starship. The problem is that the alien queen from the previous film neither 1. stowed away with her egg sac and 2. never had time to go to where the cryo tubes are. It's like the producers didn't even care.
Another great example and an extremely blatant one is in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Early on in the film we see Superman rescue a group of cosmonauts from death. Fast forward to the final conflict between Superman and Nuclear Man. The villain takes a woman that he's sweet on up into space with him. Oh, and she's not wearing a spacesuit.
Now there could have been some special power that Nuclear Man has that enables him to take her into a vacuum. Even a throwaway line that references such a power would've worked, but we're left scratching our heads at what we just saw.
Reason No. 4... Aesthetic consistency
The Batman film series from 1989-1997 suffered from this considerably and it was one of many reasons that the franchise went into hibernation for eight years.
Tim Burton, along with production designer Anton Furst, established a very distinctive aesthetic in Batman '89. Gotham City is a combination of art deco and expressionism, with a little touch of Syd Mead's "retrofitting" design on Blade Runner.
This style more-or-less continued on in Batman Returns. Bo Welch took over as production designer and made his own stylistic changes. The expressionist ideas from its predecessor took full precedence. Nevertheless, it never draws attention to itself unless you're going out of your way to look for it.
Then things took a turn for the worst. Joel Schumacher took over as director of the last two films and sealed the fate of a franchise that showed a promising future. From the colorful lights and neon face-painted street thugs to the over-the-top costumes, gadgets, and vehicles that screamed, "I'm a toy, buy me NOW!", it quickly became apparent that the mighty had fallen.
Fortunately, Warner wised up and kept a focused vision for the series when Christopher Nolan relaunched the franchise in 2005 with Batman Begins.
Postface
The proof is in the pudding, folks. I think it goes without saying that the film medium absolutely needs to keep strong continuity if they expect anyone to enjoy and, subsequently, pay for more to see.
That Esposito guy is an idiot.
-L. Travis Hoffman
