Recently I've watched The Equalizer 2. It is by no means a good movie. The development is boring, the beats are old. Hidden assets, private military groups, betrayal. But then the last act has ended and it has got me to thinking. It's a 2 hour long movie, and that last act takes place across probably 30 minutes of screentime in a unique location with various elements at play. It has that epic final battle quality to it. Which seems weird in retrospect, because for the most of the movie locations were interchangable and fleeting.
And yet, this last act alone makes me feel like the movie was good. Why is that? I attribute it to the feeling of "How did we get here?". Great adventure stories often involve you in iterations, making stakes bigger in progress, evolving main characters from humble beginning to the proper hero. John McClane, in the first Die Hard movie is, as always, a perfect example. While the whole film takes place in a single building, it never feels like just one location. And to McClane every room he enters is new — a challenge to overcome and a puzzle to outsmart. He is just a detective down on his luck in the beginning. He is an action hero by the end. And it wasn't easy for him to get there. It may be hard to look at John this way now, after multiple movies have established him as a badass who can defy odds. But taken as a single movie, it definitely is a hero's journey, by the end of which you can look back and ask "Wait, this is so big now, but it was so quiet just 90 minutes ago! How did we get here?"
Which is why Skyscraper with Dwayne Johnson hasn't worked. It's a fun action movie, but what separates Will Sawyer from John McClane, is that the former is established as a war hero, a badass who can overcome his disability at the very start. His escapades later on are impressive, but they are made so not by making him small and the problems just big enough for a human, but by making him great and therefore requiring problems to be unrealistically greater. He also knows the entire building (though, movie does a bad job at showing that). He improvises on a small scale while having a perfect and clear big picture. John McClane has only seens a paper model of the tower he is trapped in. Like a videogame hero, he sees the endgoal, the target 20 hours later into campaign before getting down to the gutters to get there.
You know, like Half-Life 2. Within the first 10 minutes you see the Citadel. You know, that you will get there and you will destroy it. Not a single soul needs to tell you that. And then, by the time you get up there and take one final look at the City 17 before making your final move, you can wonder: "How did I get here?" The canals, the Ravenholm, beaches and Nova Prospect. So distinct, challenging and yet so interconnected. It has always been Valve's great talent to make the whole game feel like a one continious journey. However grandiose the adventure, it's never disjointed. Even when you are knocked off in the original Half-Life and moved to a different place, it does not feel like a cheap way to move you places without actually going anywhere. You are still in Black Mesa Research Facility and have to escape it by your own means.
Which brings me to my last point. Black Mesa is an amazing remake. A love child 15 years into making. The technology may be old and rough, but the talent of Valve and Crowbar Collective is undeniable. The original game was mostly great, but a lot of encounters can be interpreted as cheap and irritating ways to increase challenge. Then there is Xen... And that's the ingenuity of Black Mesa often missing in remakes: it takes the good parts and it reimagines the bad parts so that it makes sense in the context of the remaining good parts. Gameplay is still solid, if slippery. But weapons are unique and useful in different ways. Events are much better scaled, and so are many maps which originally have been no more than a bunch of polygons with muddy textures. Encounters are rebalanced and always make sense in the grand scheme of things. And Xen has a character now, that makes it unique and atmospheric. All that creative power that Crowbar Collective has poured into recreating the last act of the game is brilliant. It's all new, but somehow incredibly familiar. Only one new mechanic is introduced for Xen, but everything else you do there you've done in the BMRF. That takes a sense of taste.
And, of course, by the final train ride with G-Man you can reminisce in memories of your first train ride hours before and the adventure that followed. And ask "How did I get here?"