The Thing About Retconning | The Empire Blog

The Thing About Retconning

Posted on Thursday January 29, 2009, 14:56 by Chris Hewitt in Off The Wire

I’m not going to soft-soap this one, readers. As someone who considers John Carpenter’s The Thing to be one of the finest, if not the finest, horror films of all time, I was already in an almighty funk over today’s news that Universal is planning a prequel, with a first-time commercials director at the helm.

Regardless of the fact that Battlestar Galactica head honcho Ronald D. Moore is writing, I was highly sceptical of a proposed storyline that would show what happened to the Norwegian research station prior to the events of Carpenter’s movie. Been there, done that – do we really need this movie?

But then I read a rumour on CHUD that claims that the hero of the story (who is doomed from the off, let’s not forget) is none other than the brother of Kurt Russell’s R.J. MacReady, the hero of Carpenter’s flick. And that’s when I really got mad.

Not only does this make absolutely no sense whatsoever – perhaps it would if MacReady had mentioned that he had a brother stationed nearby; maybe he could have said it while he was EXPLORING THE NORWEGIAN BASE – but it’s another example of a practice that’s become a pet hate of mine: retconning.

Wikipedia (it is our friend) defines retconning, or retroactive continuity, as “the deliberate changing of previously established facts in a work of serial fiction”.

It happens all the time in comics – try to piece together the tangled history of Wolverine and Sabretooth and you’re likely to go insane – and TV shows (the ongoing issue, in Heroes, of Sylar’s parentage), but it’s still relatively rare in movies. But when it does happen – and, of course, it only happens in franchises - it’s more often than not deeply aggravating. Mainly because, more often than not, it allows people who are less creative than those who went before them to mess with canon.

Take Paul W.S. Anderson, meddling with the (admittedly slightly all over the shop) history of the Alien and Predator franchises in, well, Alien Vs Predator, which posits the possibility of a human encounter with those xenomorph bastards hundreds of years before the Nostromo picks up a distress signal from a grounded ship on LV-426. It. Doesn’t. Make. Any. Sense.

Then there are the times when a filmmaker has to bend over backwards to justify or erase events in a previous film because the storyline has made them obsolete. Case in point: no matter how much George Lucas might tell everyone that he had Star Wars mapped out from the very beginning, there’s little doubt that the revelation, in Return Of The Jedi, that Luke and Leia are siblings was a hasty retcon. And while the Luke/Leia family tie makes sense, from a certain point of view, it still makes Star Wars, in particular, uncomfortable viewing, given that Luke clearly has the horn for Leia from the minute they meet. Dude, she’s your sister!

There are examples when it works well – Sam Raimi neatly compresses The Evil Dead into the opening five minutes of the magnificent Evil Dead II, changing the backstory so that Ash (Bruce Campbell) now travels to the cabin in the woods with his girlfriend, and not four friends. Bang – they’re gone, just like that. Take that, accepted Evil Dead canon!

But Raimi is not without guilt in this area. Take Spider-Man 3, with its cack-handed revelation that it was The Sandman, and not the fat robber with dodgy blond highlights, who killed poor, endlessly sermonising Uncle Ben (personally, I’d have punched his ticket the second he started banging on about great power and great responsibility blah blah blah). Talk about putting the ‘con’ in ‘retconning’.

As ever, readers, I aim to provide just the tip of the iceberg. You take care of the rest – does this get on your wick as much as it does mine? Is this Thing prequel the worst idea in the history of bad ideas? And can you think of any other examples? The world is your oyster below…