“Wait, who directed The Meg 2?”
As the release of Meg 2: The Trench drew nigh, my social media feeds were filled with people aghast at the news that the latest project from Ben Wheatley, the film-festival favorite behind movies like Free Fire and Kill List, was the sequel to a movie in which Jason Statham fights a prehistoric shark. The pivot was less abrupt than it might have seemed—Wheatley was previously attached to direct a sequel to the Alicia Vikander Tomb Raider before production was scuttled by the pandemic—but it nonetheless came as a shock to devotees who still thought of him as a maker of twisted genre riffs like the 2021 eco-horror In the Earth.
You could have shocked Wheatley fans just as sharply if you’d given them the news after they’d watched Meg 2. There’s nothing in the movie to suggest it was made by a person, let alone a name-brand auteur with a penchant for stylistic flourishes. The images are flat and colorless and so are the performances, delivered by actors who look like they haven’t had their first cup of coffee. Worst of all, it’s no fun. The first Meg was a dumb but fun movie that knew its dumbness and its fun-ness were inextricable, but even critics who embraced it on those terms found themselves disappointed by the sequel. ScreenCrush’s Matt Singer, who praised the first Meg for its “innate understanding of its own absurdity,” called Meg 2 “the more typical, more conventional, less entertaining sort of junk; the kind you’ll need more than one drink to enjoy.” No wonder Warner Bros. served cocktails at the press screening.
In a photograph from the premiere of Meg 2, Wheatley stands forlornly between two 10-foot-tall shark fins, overshadowed and outnumbered and looking as if he’d rather be anywhere else. It’s hard to get away from the parallel between a director making his first movie for a major Hollywood studio and the story of humans doing battle with a dead-eyed monster whose only goal is its own survival. In the version of the story made for public consumption, humanity wins. But Ben Wheatley got eaten by the Meg.
Stroll down the hall from Meg 2 and you might still be able to catch The Haunted Mansion, although the $150 million Disney release flopped so hard that it’s starting to vanish from theaters two weeks after it was released. Like Meg 2, it was directed by a onetime film-festival sensation: Justin Simien, who broke out at Sundance with the sharp-edged campus satire Dear White People. And like Meg 2, it’s an inert and joyless experience, the product of a filmmaker going up against the system and losing, badly. When I ducked into a showing last weekend, the audience of perhaps a dozen made their dislike audible, blowing raspberries at the attempts to inject emotional depth into a movie based on a Disneyland ride.
The problem here is two-pronged. The first is Hollywood’s penchant for sucking promising young directors into its maw, tempting them into selling their artistic souls to the franchise devil with medium-fat paychecks and the possibility of speaking to a larger audience. The second is that the movies frequently end up being lousy, extinguishing whatever hint of personality made the filmmaker attractive in the first place and revealing them to be hopelessly out of their depth when tasked with bending a massive studio movie to their will. You don’t get the unique stamp of an artist, but you also don’t get the frictionless craftsmanship that would be brought to the job by a seasoned old hand—in other words, a hack.
There are many ways to define a hack, but the least judgmental is that you don’t know who they are. I’d bet there are loads of fans who enjoyed The Meg and eagerly awaited the sequel but couldn’t name its director, Jon Turteltaub. Turteltaub has been making movies in Hollywood for more than three decades, and chances are you’ve even seen a few of them: While You Were Sleeping, perhaps, or one of the National Treasures. But no one has ever referred to a movie as “the new Turteltaub,” and you won’t find cinephiles sparring in Letterboxd’s comments section over whether Cool Runnings or 3 Ninjas ranks higher in his oeuvre.
When the critics at Cahiers du Cinéma developed what became known as the auteur theory, they were careful to specify that not every filmmaker, no matter how accomplished, qualified as an auteur. Even Oscar winners like William Wyler and John Huston were deemed mere directors, because their filmographies offered insufficient evidence of the persistent visual style and thematic concerns that comprise an auteur’s signature. In the 1962 article that brought auteurism to America, Andrew Sarris wrote that one of its central premises was “the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value.” The Cahiers critics eventually stressed that the politique des auteurs was just one way of understanding movies, what François Truffaut called “a polemical weapon” for elevating the work of undervalued genre directors like Howard Hawks and John Ford. But as the studio system crumbled and a new generation bent on making movies personal rose up, Sarris’ version of auteurism took root, and before long, it started to seem like “personal films” were the only ones that really mattered.
Whatever Kevin Feige might say in interviews, a studio like Marvel doesn’t really hire a Sundance phenom like Chloé Zhao to direct a movie like Eternals because they’re looking for her to make it personal, nor are they gambling that her experience making lyrical neorealist dramas on Native American reservations with nonprofessional actors makes her especially qualified to steer the battleship that is a $200 million superhero movie. In fact, I’d argue that, in at least some cases, studios are specifically hoping that directors used to making smaller and more intimate films will be overpowered by the machinery of blockbuster filmmaking—the machinery the studios themselves control. It’s an open secret that many of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s set pieces originate not with whatever indie darling the studio has placed nominally in charge but with Marvel’s second unit and visual effects departments. When the Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel met with Marvel to discuss directing Black Widow, she said the studio told her not to “worry about the action scenes, we will take care of that.” Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther is the most individual movie in the entire MCU, but even there, there’s a vast drop-off between the elegantly choreographed casino brawl and the final battle, in which weightless digital creations collide to a spectacular lack of effect.
That’s where hacks come in. A hack—or, if you insist on a less prejudicial term, a craftsperson—isn’t out to make a movie their own. Their aim is to fulfill the task set before them. Like former cinematographer Jan de Bont and former costumer designer Joel Schumacher, they often entered the business from the lower ranks of the crew rather than as writer-directors, rising to the top with an understanding based in the practicalities of production. A hack is a perfect match for a formula film, whether it’s the latest IP extension or simply squarely in an established genre, because they don’t consider themselves better than the material. Sometimes the results are inspired enough to energize an entire franchise, or even spawn one. You’d be hard-pressed to find an auteurist signature in the films of Jon Favreau, but he made Iron Man a launching pad sturdy enough to hold the entire MCU. Some hacks, like Ron Howard, become respectable enough to be called journeymen; others, like Sam Mendes, start out respectable and retain that aura even after it’s clear that they’re better at James Bond movies than they are weighty drama. (Mendes’ last movie, Empire of Light, was an intimate, small-scale drama, and it’s not a fraction of the movie Skyfall is.) But whether elevated or not, hacks share a lack of personality that makes them endlessly adaptable, able to approach a war movie or a romantic comedy with the same level of dutiful dedication. And they play a vital part in the movie ecosystem, even if it’s one that’s destined to go largely unnoticed.
Seasoned by the scars of past battles, a hack knows which fights to pick and which to avoid—Favreau, for example, was adamant that Robert Downey Jr., whom the studio considered unemployable, be cast as Tony Stark, a decision since vindicated several billion times over. A hack might even be savvy enough to insist up front that there’s enough time built into the postproduction schedule that VFX houses won’t be faced with abruptly shortened deadlines, resulting in onerous work hours and substandard results—a notoriously commonplace practice on Marvel movies. There have been a few instances of feature directors rising from the ranks of visual effects, like Godzilla’s Gareth Edwards, but in general the industry prefers to teach directors about VFX rather than letting VFX artists direct. With so much content already being created, it’s easier to elevate a director who’s already made a movie, or at least a few episodes of TV, than it is someone who’s only appeared in the end credits, especially since those hiring decisions are often made by people without much on-set experience of their own.
The end result of hiring personal directors to make impersonal movies tends to be that both sides lose. We don’t get the intricate delicacy of the former, or the sleek rush of the latter. Once in a great while, as with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, we miraculously get both. But mostly, what we’ve been getting is a slew of ungainly hybrids, movies designed to be one thing that try to be another, and fail at both. When a hack comes through, you get a solid piece of entertainment, sometimes even a spectacular one. But even if they don’t, they’ve taken the kind of job they’re best suited for, and prevented a more distinctive filmmaker from getting their spirit crushed. I would have liked to have seen Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man, a gig for which Marvel hired the writer-director before firing him for, essentially, trying to make an Edgar Wright movie. But now that Peyton Reed is three Ant-Man movies in, it seems like everything turned out for the best: Wright got to make original movies like Baby Driver and Last Night in Soho, not to mention a two-hour documentary about a cult band, and no one has to mourn the loss of the deeply idiosyncratic films Reed might have made if he weren’t occupied with studio product, since he never showed much inclination to make them in the first place.
As long as the economic disparity between indies and franchise movies persists, filmmakers will be looking to grab the brass ring: Gerwig’s next project is rebooting the Narnia franchise for Netflix, and Barry Jenkins’ is following Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk with a prequel to Favreau’s remake of The Lion King. But we’d all be better off if, instead of derailing promising young filmmakers as they’re just getting started, the studios put more effort into seeking out the Jon Turteltaubs of tomorrow, and stopped sending auteurs to do a hack’s job.
