Good evening, dear readers! I’m back from an extended summer break – which I took to focus on some fiction development and round off the school term at work – somewhat rejuvinated and with a few new things on my mind to discuss.
Set-up and pay-off are two things that are key to telling any good story – whether aiming for a satisfying ending to an epic or trying to land a great joke in a comedy, a punchline or story beat that comes from nowhere is bound to leave your audience unimpressed and unfulfilled.
One huge recent example is the Marvel Cinematic Universe or MCU. While each of the films manages, for the most part, to have some satisfying pay-off in terms of each plot or character, many of these were left with a “to be continued” or “this character may return” question mark for later in the MCU. The biggest set-ups were, of course, the build up to the initial The Avengers (2012) and then the slower build-up to Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019) to cap off the MCU’s Infinity Saga. As I said, plenty of this was done during individual films, through the protagonists and also by introducing secondary characters whose roles would be expanded further in the series. I’d be remiss to not mention the now-famous post-credit sequences that became an MCU staple, where a short stinger is used as an epilogue/ “what’s coming next” for the series.
While the MCU hasn’t always been back-to-back bangers, there was a generally good sense of slow build-up to the chief conflict over the Infinity Stones in Infinity War and Endgame, with characters being slowly moved into position and the Infinity Stones themselves being introduced as generic MacGuffins in individual movie plots. As the decade of MCU movies closed in on Endgame, there was a real sense of Thanos and his quest for the Infinity Stones being a looming threat that would have to be addressed. Where the MCU has really fallen down post-Endgame is replacing the slow, methodical set-up to the next big pay-off with a directionless “throw a pile of shit at the wall and see what sticks” attitude, saturating the audience with TV shows and movies galore without sign-posting a clear end goal in sight. With the recent pivot to stunt-casting and returning characters, the jury’s out on whether or not Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret War will be worth watching despite the heavy musk of desperation in the air.
Another recent example of juggling set-up and pay-off is the Dune duology. Being a two-part split of Frank Herbet’s chunky sci-fi classic, the movies feel very much two halves of one larger story which creates a bit of unevenness between Part One and Part Two. Villeneuve’s films come much closer to directly translating the source material, squeezing in more details than David Lynch’s adaption, but the trade off is the first film being a bit heavy on the set-up and the second film feeling like rather a lot of pay-off. They’re still well worth a watch, but cutting something as dense as Dune in half was always bound to leave a few ragged edges and unfortunately the Dune movies are not exempt from such consequences when it comes to satifyingly balancing a narrative across multiple entries.
As mentioned before, good set-up is key when it comes to comedy: Whether you’re going to play the joke off as expected, or subvert expectations, you can’t do either without building things up first. The absolute S-tier example of perfect set-up is Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz (2007). I don’t think there’s a single moment of that film wasted when it comes to laughs, and every single joke that’s set up is paid off by the end of the film. Some of these happen within a few minutes or scenes, but overall, the film takes huge pains to set up everything for a third act of both explosive action and nuclear levels of pay-off.
I’ve been discussing Hot Fuzz a lot with a friend recently – who also gave me the idea for this piece – and we came to the conclusion that the film stops setting up and starts paying off at the “NWA scene” where Nicholas Angel goes to confront the sinister local organisation. Whilst this scene is both the pay-off of the mystery that the film has built up to and the start of the third act proper, the dialogue immediately calls back to other dialogue, alibis and excuses from earlier in the film. Even when it comes to action choreography, our dynamic duo re-enact every single ridiculous action trope that Danny asks Nicholas about earlier in the film. There might not be another film that does it so tightly and expertly as Hot Fuzz, and it merits umpteen rewatches to catch every little detail as it resurfaces.
That’s all for today, dear readers. As ever, please feel free to chuck me some spare change on Ko-Fi if you like what I’ve got to say, and you may occasionally see me pop up on Letterboxd and maybe even Twitter too. Until next time, take care!
