Final Fantasy XIII, the Mortal Engines movie, and Pirates of the Caribbean At World's End. These three have the same Energy and I want to try to explain why.
FFXIII, when not mentioned as the worst Final Fantasy, is often considered the unspeakable one, the unspoken one, the one set apart and must not be named. And yet it has a following. Most people really hate it, but a small subset of people really love it, and in any case it's enough subset that the game spawned two sequels.
The Mortal Engines movie tanked, hard. This is partly thanks to the movie being released on a week wedged between Wreck-It-Ralph 2 and Spider-Verse/Aquaman. But also, you know, because it's not very good. The critic consensus was that it was visually pretty, but otherwise bland. And yet, Philip Reeve, the author of the book it's based on, said it's an amazing movie.
"The first Pirates of the Caribbean movie is really good," said people. "But the other ones are bad." Ok, I didn't have much anecdotal evidence for this, but that's the general feeling I'm getting. At World's End, the third movie, is a mess, but it's also my favourite, so there's got to be something in that, eh?
These three works, I think, are flawed because they're made by passionate people who have spent too long looking at the big picture. They love their creation dearly, they spent countless hours poring over the details of the lore, the world, the overarching narrative. When they started writing and setting up the first scenes, they already know how the entire thing will play out.
But once you're neck deep in something, it's hard to imagine what it will look like to someone completely new to it. It might be clever, you think, to scatter foreshadowing and worldbuilding details about, but to someone new they're invisible. It might be clever to not explain the story outright and just allude to events, but to someone new they're just confusing.
I love the Mortal Engines movie because I've already read the book, I already know the story, I already understand what the movie creators are trying to do. I caught the little details, I enjoyed the little allusions.
I love At World's End because I didn't watch it from start to finish. I stumbled on bits and pieces as I passed by the TV while it was playing. When I finally sit down to watch the entire thing from the beginning, I'm already in love with it.
It took me a very long time to love Final Fantasy XIII. It started with the promotional images, which evoked an idea of the game. Then, since I didn't have the console to play it with, I watched a playthrough, which gave me an incomplete image of what this game is. Some years later I finally played the game myself, and I found it terrible because I didn't understand, at first, what the game mechanic is trying to do. Now I'm playing it again, from the beginning, but already with an understanding of what it wants to be, what it tries to be, what it is. And already knowing those, I've learned to love it.
These three works, and others like them, are exactly what they want to be. It's just that, "being acessible to someone completely new" slipped off that list and nobody on the development team noticed. Most people don't have the time, the opportunity, the contrivances of coincidences, to learn to appreciate them. But there are those who do, and that's how they gott their fans.
