John Wick's world-building is so intriguing because the film is made like a sequel

John Wick has amazing action but the thing I like the most about it is how it expects the audience to keep up. There aren't obvious info-dump scenes and the dialogue is not awkwardly structured to explain things. And now it dawned on me that the writers did this so successfully by writing John Wick as if it were a sequel to a movie that doesn't exist.

The way certain scenes play out ("Noise complaint?" "Noise complaint.") or how certain characters meet (when the receptionist welcomes John Wick back at the hotel after a long absence) gives you a strong sense of history between everyone. It gives you a sense that this is a world that has been around for a while and you are given a glimpse of it sometime in the middle of its existence. But these scenes also feel like nods or references to a prior movie. Just try an imagine that there actually was a movie before John Wick and that the 2014 movie we know and love is its sequel. In it I picture a whole sequence with the cop that the "noise complaint" scene is referencing, winking at the audience ("Remember the last time the cop showed up because of a noise complaint?"). Like an easter egg for fans of the first movie. In sequels we often tend to cringe at these fan service nods, but in John Wick it works perfectly because we don't know what it is nodding to. It just lets us imagine what might have happened between them before, or who the cop really is, etc.

Submitted January 22, 2017 at 02:23AM by Ascarea http://ift.tt/2k0ObJa