A Prayer For ‘Zoolander 2’: The Good, Bad, And Surprisingly Great Sequels It Could Learn From

There is a unique emotion reserved for only two very specific situations: when a sequel is announced to a film that you hold close to your heart and when you, a lactose intolerant person, are offered cheese. Initially all the good memories rush to the forefront, creating a state of superjoy. Then the cracks start to appear. You remember all the times this situation has gone wrong, along with the subsequent fallout. The outcome is almost always guaranteed to be the same: crappy.

In this way, Zoolander 2 is risky business (except that Risky Business thankfully doesn’t have a sequel). As someone who fell in love with the original film — despite watching it for the first time on a teeny tiny aeroplane screen while a young man sporadically vomited into a bag across the aisle — the excitement/horror cycle launched into full swing when the sequel was announced last year. I was optimistic about the film’s promotions which have continually drawn self-reflexive attention to the fact it’s a sequel, playfully acknowledging that they’re aware of the risks being taken. However pessimism makes a strong showing too, this time in the form of Benedict Cumberbatch in a potentially problematic cameo.

Like any other attempt of this nature, there are only three possible outcomes: they get it wrong and ruin an otherwise good thing, they get it right, or they miraculously eclipse the original. In the original film, we saw Zoolander overcome his shortcomings and finally become an ambi-turner. Here’s hoping that he uses his abilities to turn the right way.

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Getting It Wrong

Making a bad film is one thing, but sabotaging the overall quality of an otherwise good franchise with a mediocre script or a painfully obvious cash grab should be the fourth unforgivable curse in the Potterverse. Do you remember Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World? I do, but only because it ruined my ninth birthday party, and in some ways, my entire childhood.

Disney has a long history of taking difficult stories and sanitising them so they are suitable for children. When it comes to fables like The Little Mermaid, it’s fine to switch out the original ending (Ariel stabs herself and turns into bubbles when her prince marries another woman) for happily ever after. Pocahontas however, was a real person, and so writers are much more limited. The original Pocahontas film does take some liberties — she’s made older, John Smith is made younger, their relationship is greatly exaggerated — but overall it works and, more importantly, it cuts off before everything went to hell in real life. Journey to a New World however doesn’t have this luxury.

Here, we see Pocahontas shipped off to England with a new man and a newfound detachment from her relationship with nature. This is basically the cinematic equivalent of hurling the original film into a lake and then tossing a whole lot of radioactive waste in there with it. It occupies a strange middle ground between documentary and fairy tale. The ugly historical truths surrounding the story are aggressively pared back, leaving the film as a sad, tedious husk with an ambiguous ending — I guess because “she died while trying to make it back to America” doesn’t really scream “Disney ending”.

“What was that?” my friends asked each other over the sound of the tape rewinding. “I don’t know,” I squeaked, desperately dragging out musical chairs in the hopes everyone would forget the disaster of a film I’d chosen. Then we all listened to the Spice Girls because it was the ‘90s and that was all anyone ever did.

See also: Evan Almighty, Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea, Quantum of Solace, Bring It On Again Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

Honourable mention: Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (for about 20 minutes too long), because as much as we might have loved lamp, distilling a movie down to its jokes and then building around it with extra slapstick basically leaves us all in a glass case of emotion. Except without the emotion.

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Getting It Right

Calling your sequel The Temple of Doom is one way of tackling any potential negativity head on. The other is to actually hire proper writers who understand what audiences want and how films work (take heed, Quantum of Solace). The key to a good sequel is to harness the spirit of the original without trying to repeat it note for note.

Indiana Jones is a trilogy* that remained consistent across the three** films, with each one bringing something new to the table. The alternative to this is something like The Hangover 2. It was fine, but it was a bad sequel. In fact, it wasn’t a sequel at all; it was the same film in a slightly different setting.

That being said, if you walk away from a sequel and feel that watching it was slightly better than setting $19 on fire and extinguishing the flames with your tears, then it is already better than 99 percent of what’s out there.

*Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is an abomination that will be treated as an entirely separate film and I will fight anyone who tries to group it in with the original three.

**No really. It is a separate film. Please.

See also: The entire Harry Potter series, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Mummy Returns, X2, The Dark Knight, Magic Mike 2 and Serenity.

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Doing Better Than The Original

The main thing I remember from watching The Hunger Games is that I got a parking ticket while in the cinema, which is not exactly a glowing review of the film. One year later I was pretty much forced into watching Catching Fire, and pleasantly found they had rejigged the writing team and expanded the budget, making the film an example of something more rare than tasteful fashion in the Capitol — a sequel that is better than the original. I ended up watching it six times, dragging various people with me, and making far too many puns. It seemed that contrary to what I thought from the first film, my enthusiasm for the series will never Peeta out.

This isn’t just something that happens to average films either. Back to the Future I is excellent in its own right; something which Back the the Future II capitalised on when literally revisiting the first film on top of its own plot.

Essentially this is the dream scenario; one that all sequel maker likely aspire to — with the exception of the team behind Bring It On Again, who clearly just wanted money and to bring misery to the world.  While so often sequels are definitively the worst, it is worth having a thousand Spectres for just one Back to the Future II.

See also: Return of the Jedi, Buffy (the TV series. Not the movie and definitely not the comics).

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My fingers are crossed that this time next week I won’t be eugoogolising the Zoolander franchise. I remain cautiously optimistic — after all, the spirit of the film is all about riffing on self-awareness. Plus, if it’s terrible, we can all get a whole lot of mileage out of the fact that the original film provided enough quotes and gifs that are strangely well-suited to mocking its own sequel.

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Zoolander 2 will be in cinemas from February 11.

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Elizabeth is the editor of Voiceworks, and has been published in Film Ink, Metro, The Punch, and Lip Magazine. She tweets terrible puns @ElizabethFlux.