Epic Light Or Dark

This has been a downright epic week to be a geek. Seriously. For those of you living under a rock, yesterday the trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens dropped and pretty much broke the Internet. (Take that Kimye!) Just in case you missed it:

Pretty epic...and you know what else? Fun. Pulse pounding excitement and joy. That's something I think is missing in today's epics. 

We live in a time when grimdark is king. When people want to make darker and grittier versions of everything. The same week that this trailer dropped, the premier of season 5 of Game of Thrones aired on HBO. (F**k you, Bit Torrent assholes...but that's another blog entry.) And the show is as dark as ever, with the books going even darker. As has been my motif this year with my blogging, it got me thinking about epic. But then another trailer dropped (well, not officially, but you get my meaning) later in the day, the first teaser trailer for Batman vs. Superman. In case you missed that one: 

Darkness. Dread. Heavy handed God/Jesus metaphors. Heavy stuff. For a movie about a guy in blue tights and a guy that dresses up as a Bat. I'm being snarky on purpose a little bit. The first thing I wanted to know about BvsS was where was the fun? Adventure? Excitement? (I know, I know...a Jedi craves not these things.) Actually the stark differences between the two trailers (and one would think the two movies) made me think of this:

 (Will Arnett is officially my "second" Batman, but that's for another blog post.)

So, what's my point here.  I stated earlier that I think one of the things that's missing in today's epics is the fun. There's no awe. No sense of joy or excitement. Our need to make everything "dark" to suit our cynical, jaded (spoiled, entitled) world view is taking the joy out of these things. I think there's a prevalent thought that without that darkness, there is no sense of stakes. But that's just not the case. The original Star Wars trilogy did it and learned to balance the light and dark. I mean Empire is by far the best, but still loaded with tons of "thrilling heroics." Jedi takes a beating for the Ewoks, but as was recently discussed by a few people (Saladin Ahmed among them) on the Internet it has some of the most thrilling moments in the trilogy: the barge rescue, the space battle and the Luke/Vader duel are all great. Fun. Pulse pounding. We need more fun in epic stories. But to be fair, Jedi  was 33 years ago. It was a different time.

You want a modern example? I'll give you two: Guardians of the Galaxy and The Lego Movie. I often joke that GOTG is my "thesis" when it comes to my argument that epic stories can be fun. (Bonus points if you can name the movie that comes from.) Watch those movies and tell me that they aren't fun and epic.

Well, back to my epic.