As much fun as pop culture nerds make of the Death’s Star’s fatal flaw, it is a case of the Big Red Button being employed correctly.įor one, the exhaust port isn’t an automatic “I win!” button. Shoot the thing and a chain reaction gets set off reducing the entire station into light, particles, and a CGI ring.
The secret plans to the station revealed a weakness (the Big Red Button): a little exhaust port. See, the GALACTIC EMPIRE (sue me, that’s how it’s written in the crawl), created a space station that was, in the sneering words of Admiral Chokeabitch, “the ultimate power in the universe.” It flew around at a stately pace and could blow up planets with a bizarre cannon that seemed to fire from several thousand miles next to it. Maybe the most famous Big Red Button in the history of storytelling belongs to the Death Star.
deploying his charisma to obfuscate massive logic gaps. The rules to using the Big Red Button correctly are ultimately subjective, but following them will insure that you don’t need Robert Downey Jr. If the bad guys are so bad ass and the hero is so fucked, then how does he win? Oftentimes, this comes down to the one thing the bad guys over looked, a Big Red Button that, when pushed, causes the entire evil scheme to come crashing down. This is where things get a little difficult. The only way shit could be worse is if he were married to Bonnie Bedelia or something. His only ally is the fat dad from Family Matters. His vulnerability is telegraphed in his lack of shoes. John McClane is trapped by thirteen guys with machine guns, and all he has is a pistol. Look at Die Hard, not only the greatest action movie ever made, but a step-by-step manual on how to navigate office buildings and murder foreign nationals. So the writer packs obstacle upon obstacle in front of the protagonist until it seems like there’s literally no way the poor bastard will ever survive, let alone triumph. The hero has to overcome some long odds or there’s no suspense. Well, unless you’re talking about The Avengers, which was two and a half hours of six jocks kicking the special kid’s ass and taking his lunch money, with the only real threat coming courtesy of the U.S. When the hero triumphs over the villain no one cares unless the hero was outgunned, outmatched, and outnumbered.
Any story of struggle has to be an underdog story.
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