Who Will Survive, and What Will Be Left of Them

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I don't know if you've noticed, but I can be sort of an obsessive geek over things. I know! Crazy. Anyway, for certain properties this makes it kind of hard for me to separate myself enough to give something a truly objective look. I've got other agendas, too many voices duking it out, inside of my head for what I want, what I need, from these things. The Scream films are one of these properties, obviously, and what I want from them has become pretty distilled down to an essence. Eau d'Ghostface if you will. Did Scream 4 deliver?

Well I can't talk about that without getting into

big spoilers, so let's take it after the jump.

I walked out of Scream 4 very very happy for pretty much one reason: my gang survived! All three of them! Sidney, Gale and Dewey all lived to die another day! Every single post that I've done on Scream 4 since it was announced has been some variation on my deeply embedded dread that one or two or all of them were inevitable victims. How could they possibly make it through a fourth film? That'd be nuts! It seemed impossible. So when the final curtain fell and they were still breathing, all their insides still on the inside, well any critical faculties I might have regarding the film just flew out the window. Hooray!

I realize that other people, less spazzier people, might not be so attached to these characters. They might have even been hoping and praying for a different, bloodier outcome altogether. I don't know what to say to that, and that's where my critical faculties fail me. They lived! The movie wins! The end!

Okay okay. I will attempt to divorce myself, ever so slightly, from that angle. If I were voting in my own poll from last week, I'd rate Scream 4 as better than Scream 3 - although, like Glenn, that's not because I hate Scream 3 as many people seem to (I find it a lot of fun) but because I felt as if, with this one the killer felt far less purposeless than the out-of-nowhere "Sid's got a brother!" development in that one. Here it's as if they had the idea of the killer first and the movie grew around that. It wasn't the most groundbreaking of twists - Happy Birthday to Me did it thirty years ago, and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane more recently, but I enjoyed the way Williamson managed to riff on the concept of remakes and reboots through his use of a curdled final girl. And I thought Emma Roberts was a hoot once she got going.

Part of me was mentally willing the film to end before the hospital scenes, with the triumphant survivor character having been so compromised... but that part of me was in a duel with the part of me that didn't want Sid to be left dead there on the floor, and that latter part, irrational and fannish, was destined to win. Thinking about it now, a fifth film could've sprung up as a dark mirror of Halloween II (Carpenter's, that is), starting with Jill in the hospital and finding out Sidney's still alive, and going from there. But it seems at this point that the talk of a second trilogy with the new young hip cast was a fun game of smoke and mirrors, throwing off our scent, and underlining the film's eventual point, right?

And anyway, I really enjoyed the scenes in the hospital. CLEAR!

The film worked to try and keep Sid at the center of the story this time around, doing a better job than Part 3 did, but it still could've, should've, worked a little bit harder. While it was handy for tossing red herrings at us on who might be the killer, in the end all of the scenes with Jill and her friends were distractions that we didn't need - the focus should've been more on Sidney and Jill's relationship... or lack thereof. There should've been a stronger sense of Sidney's arrival in town really truly interrupting Jill's life. Sidney should've been at the center of all of Jill's interactions with her friends a little more, just enough so we the audience could get a better feel for what Jill's had to deal with.

There are a lot of balls you've got to keep in the air with these films, and mostly I think Wes juggled them pretty well. You've got to make EVERYBODY A SUSPECT! So people have got to disappear and reappear at key moments. You've got to lay down motives for everybody without hammering anything down too heavily (until the end, with the sledgehammering speech of true motive, of course). I do think they picked up a few too many balls this time around - hiring an actress as awesome as Mary McDonnell is frankly a distraction if that's all you're gonna do with her. At least hers was the most creative death - knife through mail slot! - in a film that seemed to get a little bored in the middle of its set-pieces and just go for the same ol' stab-stab every time.

So you see, I did have some problems with it, but I still walked out happy. They left my gang intact. Or, you know, mostly. Scarred and beaten and battered and busted up, but breathing. In the vile burg of Woodsboro that's something I dared not dream, and appreciate beyond all reason. Now I'll move along to dreading a fifth film where they'll get killed. Perhaps that's a reason to celebrate the film's less-than-expected box office performance this weekend then?
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