I re-watched the first ten minutes of the film X2 today. Though I don't remember much about the the movie, the opening scene stuck with me from my first viewing some five years ago, and I was pleased to see that it held up to my remembrances. The premise is simple, for anyone not familiar: the scene is an assassination attempt on the President in the Oval Office by a superpowered mutant, and it's less that three minutes long.
Speculative fiction, and superpowers in particular, require a special commitment to clarity. The mutant in question is Kurt Wagner [alias Nightcrawler], a long-time inhabitant of the X-Men universe. He has blue tattooed skin, hyperagility, adhesive hands and feet, and a long prehensile tail pointed like a devil's. And he is a teleporter.
Now, for some - I might even say most - viewers, and especially those used to navigating the mental world of science fiction or fantasy, a teleporter provides all kinds of plot-related problems before they even appear on the scene. Like telepaths or shapeshifters, they simply remove an astonishing number of the barriers that characters have to deal with in any story, but particularly action: how do we get in there? How will we cross this river? How can we get a message to the next cell without alerting the guard? And if a writer brings up these problems and doesn't use the resources they've placed into the story - if Nightcrawler stays helpless in the locked room with his comrades - the audience is likely to throw down the book or switch off their TVs in disgust [see Heroes]. Even a seasoned storyteller can find an audience applying their characters' skills in practical ways they themselves never anticipated.
The first and simplest solution to the particular issue of teleportation, and one that has been a part of Nightcrawler's character since he was introduced in the seventies, is this: Kurt is unable teleport to anywhere he can't see, for fear of materializing over a lava pit or inside a wall. It solves a lot of the plot-related problems and keeps the character from being an undefeatable superweapon.
This is a fairly basic tenet of the character's ability and would be easily accepted by anyone who was familiar with X-Men arcana, but part of the goal of the films was to reach out to audiences who hadn't grown up with the comics. How, then, to explain the boundaries and limits of Nightcrawler's abilities within seconds of his appearance [as the scene is fully of him popping in and out of thin air] without jeopardizing the suspension of disbelief that is so important in superhero movies?
Nightcrawler has no lines and there are no other mutants there to banter back and forth with him to explain his limits, a commonly used trope even elsewhere in the film. "I can't shoot out the bridge, my psibeam will ricochet and kill the girl!" It's simple and effective, but if the audience recognizes its use it will alienate them, especially if the character is speaking to someone who should already know the information they're being fed.
The other alternative, used to great effect here, is simply this. Make the rules clear, and follow them scrupulously. Even if they are never laid out explicitly (though in X2, they are if you hang around long enough), the writer must understand utterly the limitations of the character. If they adhere to them, the audience will come to have the same understanding, even if they can't articulate it. There is only one difficulty with this more sophisticated method: you can never cheat. Ever. Not in the name of a great action shot, or a telling dramatic moment, or a wacky bit of comedy. Because as soon as you do - as soon as you break or even bend the laws and precepts you have created inside your universe - the entire thing collapses in a pathetic heap of unbelievable crumbs. And nobody wants that for their story.
So, we go back to the scene in the White House. Kurt is hopping back and forth through a maze of twisting corridors, baffling the security as he does a kind of destructive waltz towards the Oval Office. Most of the shots are tight; a few are point-of-view from Nightcrawler's perspective as he gallops along on all fours towards this door or that. But when he teleports, without fail, the camera pulls back. We don't get a cut to a new location; instead, the audience can see that he disappeared from there and reappeared here, just a few feet away behind the head of the guard. When they reach the final door, he does not teleport through it with a pop; instead, the door goes down and the camera gives us a direct line of sight between Nightcrawler and the President before Kurt snatches up a guard and the waltz begins again.
It's visual clarity. Without a single word of dialogue, an attentive viewer completely new to the character will understand instinctively what Nightcrawler can do and, more importantly, what he can't.
In another dimension [with voyeuristic intentions!] the scene works as a thematic capsule of the film as a whole. Even without ultimate power, working within what we could call the reasonable boundaries of the X-Men universe and his own abilities, Nightcrawler incapacitates at least two dozen men in the span of minutes, infiltrates the White House, pins the President to the desk and escapes. It sets the tone for the rest of the movie perfectly: the story opens with a worst-case scenario, the ultimate argument for mutant registration and control. "Perimeter breach," the security guards bark as they twist wildly through the corridors. "Multiple subjects." Of course, we know that there are no multiple subjects. Just one person, though they refer to him as 'it', that the most highly trained humans in the country are utterly unequipped to handle.
And isn't that a terrifying way to start a movie about freedom and control?
Cheers
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