Fanboys

Fanboys

This is a movie that several of my nerdy friends have been wanting me to see for a few years now, so I finally sat down with one of those nerdy friends and watched it. Spoilers ahead.

This is a really great premise for a movie. In 1998, a group of Star Wars nerds decide to take a road trip to Skywalker Ranch to watch The Phantom Menace before its release because their friend is dying of cancer. It's a simple story that immediately creates excitement because there's so much to explore, such as dissecting nerd culture, exploring the late-90s as a very specific time in pop culture, and the effects of cancer on friendship. Instead it mainly goes for low-hanging-fruit-jokes, lazy stock characters, and just having nerds act nerdy for the nerd of it.

I don't want to rip on this movie too hard because I feel like it would be punching down (it's just a low-budget comedy that didn't do well in the box office (it didn't even break one million), and I have friends that have a great time watching it), so instead I just want to talk about how it could've been improved as both a comedy and a film in general.

When it comes to the characters, we have two fairly distinct nerds (Dan Fogler as a John Belushi-esque 70's-era party-nerd and Jay Baruchel as an awkward, hopeless romantic nerd), two bland nerds (Sam Huntington and Chris Marquette as average white guy and average white guy with cancer, respectively), and cool girl nerd who's whole thing is that she's a cool girl nerd (Kristen Bell, who manages to bring something to this lazily-written character by being the treasure that she is). We meet them all at a generic costume party where they ham fisted-ly explain who they are and what the movie is going to be about. Instead of doing this, we should either be introduced to the characters individually by seeing what a typical day in their life is like, or have them together doing something else, like watching Star Wars together. This is less on-the-nose and also has a lot more potential for both comedy and development. Moving on to specific characters, Eric, the main guy, works at his dad's company and he's going to get promoted so he's going to leave his nerdy friends behind. While this is a very cliche scenario, I like that it adds conflict and makes him the audience surrogate character by having him be the only one in the circle of friends who knows that they're embarrassing nerds. Eric is a boring character, but seeing as he's the protagonist, the voice of reason, and the only one of them with a future, it's at least forgivable. However, his dying best friend Linus is the exact same amount of boring and bland, only he gladly accepts his nerdiness. There's no reason for Linus to not be as distinct and recognizable as Fogler and Baruchel's characters, seeing as how it would be very easy to do. For example, they really try to brush over Linus' cancer, but if they were going to address that more then maybe he'd be depressed or in denial, or if they're going for stock nerd characters maybe he's the logical one, like Spock or Abed from Community, and having cancer doesn't make any sense to him so he's going haywire. These are just depressing spitballs but they at least give him some form of a personality. I'm not at all familiar with Huntington or Marquette so I don't know how they normally are as actors, but Baruchel, Bell, and Fogler are all seasoned comedic performers, so they're at least able to bring something special to their lazily-written stock roles.

Bell's character bothers me in particular because she's such a stereotypical male-written female role. "The cool nerdy girl who's just one of the guys and says stuff that normally only dudes say" is a bizarre and common trope that, in this movie in particular, accidentally serves as that previously-mentioned dissection of nerd culture, because it shows that the screenwriters fall right into the one of its most problematic pits (other than the Sarlacc): sexism. It's awesome to have a nerdy girl character, but she needs to have an actual personality that's more than just "one of the guys." She needs to have her own conflicts beyond having a crush on Baruchel, which is barely even addressed until the end of the second act. For instance, it's very weird that she hangs out with these dudes (especially Fogler, who straight up tries to get her to take her shirt off through Jedi mind tricks), so maybe she finally takes a moment to examine her life choices and ends up going through some kind of mental breakdown. Or maybe she still has a crush on Baruchel but it's more of a creepy obsession and she's a very over the top Helga from Hey Arnold! stalker-type. Or maybe she's the logical Abed nerd character. Or if she's still both nerdy and cool, maybe she dreams of being a stunt person for a Star Wars film and she love dangerous situations. Again, not great examples, but it's about giving her a personality beyond "one of the guys."

As far as humor goes, Fanboys has a reliance on a few different joke-types: references, cameos, making fun of nerds, and using uncreative stereotypes. Let's get that last one out of the way first, because while I have no idea if anyone involved with the film was a bad person (except for producers Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, which was an unexpected double-whammy in the credits), there's definitely some dated stuff in this movie. Bell's character has already been addressed, but then there's things like the surprise gay bar, doing drugs with a "chief" while not even hiring a Native American actor to play him, and cheap use of slurs that had been widely considered to be unacceptable well before its release date. This movie was made in 2009, so there's really no excuse for any of this other than it's a desperate attempt at getting laughs. The cameos are all fun, and that's kinda it. It's cool to see Billy Dee Williams in something recent, or being able to see Carrie Fisher again, or William Shatner as a shady, Deep Throat-esque person, but they don't do much beyond that. The way the movie makes fun of nerds is strange because I was never entirely sure if they were condemning or celebrating them. Seth Rogen as the Trekkie came off as a bit mean-spirited due to his false teeth, but then Linus has a whole speech about how much Star Wars means to him and how he's proud to be nerdy. The answer might that they're both good and bad or that they're neither, but instead of having an answer or just constantly making jokes on both sides of the argument, they should have been trying to get to the bottom of the phenomenon of grown adults being so excited about movies that George Lucas has frequently explained are for children. This doesn't need to be the thesis of the film, it should ultimately just be about the characters and the story, but it could have been a really fascinating and unique element that set it apart from other mainstream comedies.

Moving on to references, the issue here is that Fanboys' references are often placed where an actual joke should be. References can often lead to great jokes, but a reference is not a joke on its own. They can be used as a way to bring in an unexpected comparison (for example, in Superbad, when Seth claims to have hit his sexual peak too early, Evan says "You're like Orson Welles.", a reference to not only Citizen Kane, but Welle's entire career after that, which no one would expect those characters to reference in that scene), as a character trait (Abed's constant referencing of TV and movies, Jack Black's passion for classic rock bands in School of Rock, Sterling Archer's desire to be like Burt Reynolds and therefore knowing all of his movies, etc.), and as a parody/homage (Both Shaun of the Dead and Young Frankenstein are perfect for this (as are basically any Edgar Wright or Mel Brooks film) because even if no one could understand a single homage, parody, or any other kind of reference in the entire film, they still stand completely on their own through their strong jokes, conflict, and characters, as opposed to any of the Scary Movie-type parodies, which are just heightened references). The best part about a lot of these examples is that understanding the reference is not a requirement, it's just a bonus. Meanwhile, there are two separate scenes in Fanboys where the nerds are being interrogated and have to answer Star Wars questions, which is not enjoyable for anyone except people who already know the answers. In the second interrogation scene they at least juxtapose the Star Wars questions with sex questions that none of the nerds except Kristen Bell understand, but that still doesn't elevate it to hilarity. Sometimes the references feel totally out of place, such as being able to make their car go to lightspeed even though that doesn't fit in the world they've set up, and then having their car crash into a billboard which makes a Darth Vader-shaped hole and then his breathing noise happens. This is all for no reason other than to make references. It doesn't further the story or develop the characters at all.

All this being said, this is still nowhere near as bad as something like Big Bang Theory, which is a soulless, passionless, mean-spirited cash-grab con-job, because it's clear that the people making the movie actually do love Star Wars. One of the writers of the film was Ernest Cline, who wrote the novel Ready Player One and its subsequent screenplay. That guy is clearly a genuine sci-fi nerd. Adam Goldberg was the other writer, and he created the dysfunctional family show The Goldbergs so clearly he identifies with social outcasts. I don't know about the rest of the cast, but Kristen Bell and Jay Baruchel are definitely both passionate, nerdy people when you see them in interviews. There are passionate and excited people behind this movie, there just wasn't a lot of effort actually put into it. This could have been something great, and it had all the resources and the drive to do it, they just didn't do it. I don't really know why.

Ultimately as a movie and as a comedy I wouldn't recommend this movie. I think there's better, funnier movies out there and this one doesn't cover any new territory. However, if you're a passionate Star Wars fan and you love to hear Star Wars references and make Star Wars jokes, this'll probably still be a good time for you and your friends.