Or, More on Movie Magic, as we now consider director Shawn Levy's take on his piece Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. Again, there aren't very clear subdivisions of the material discussed, so a general summary will be provided.
Levy and Stiller both agreed that no announcement of a sequel at all would be made until they were sure they had a story that was worth it. So many sequels are bigger in scope and pile on more spectacle than the original but this does not typically make them better films than their original works. They knew that going to the Smithsonian would automatically create scale, but in order to produce a worthwhile sequel, they needed a deeper theme/character journey, and in this case it was the story of Larry "who has found success but lost joy" and needed to "find his way back to his better self." Therefore the sequel opened with Larry "almost unrecognizable" rather than "picking up where they left off", so Larry is now a successful businessman even though he no longer has "the coolest job in the world", and needs to go on this journey to find what he has lost.
Ben Stiller had the idea of his character being a "Jedi Night Guard", where he has greatly advanced from "Night 1 Larry" in that he can kick butt and do cool things with a flashlight, which serves several purposes in Battle of the Smithsonian: One, it allows him to impress Brunden and gives him the opportunity to steal the guard's key card (in the first movie, he had to teach himself magic in order to save himself from Attila, so this makes sense); two, it saves Larry's ass in the climactic battle with Kahmunrah, since he has no other weapon and he's up against a guy with a sword; three, it presents a symbolic tie-in to Star Wars, specifically Return of the Jedi, where Larry learns to accept his role as "Jedi Night Guard" and decides to stick around for a lot longer than he did following the first movie.
There is a lot of emphasis from other characters (Teddy and Amelia, to name two) on Larry actually not knowing what makes life worth living. Teddy believes that Larry doesn't know the key to "true happiness" and Amelia looks at Larry and sees "a man who's lost his moxie".
Hank Azaria, besides his two different serious vs silly takes for each scene, would also do the script a few times before going offroad with some of his other jokes, which he'd written beforehand. Also, he went through roughly ten different accents/voices for the pharaoh Kahmunrah before settling on Boris Karloff with a lisp. Furthermore, he was originally lined out for temporary voicing of the Thinker and Abraham Lincoln, but as no one could be found who was worthy of replacing the great Hank Azaria, he officially plays three parts in this movie.
The close-up of one of the Horus warriors coming out of the gate was insisted upon by the studio in order to sell that these things were really coming out of the underworld to wreak havoc and help Kahmunrah take over the world and whatnot. It had to be added in a week before release, pretty much, but as I said, the execs insisted.
Some of the concluding scenes, such as Stiller and Ricky Gervais improving and doing their whole-heart scene, were not actually essential, but he believed that "the movie is better for it." Levy is a big believer in leaving stuff in "not because the movie needs it, but because it's good."
Speaking of improvisation, like the first Night at the Museum, much of the middle section is the work of the actors making stuff up. This includes everything from Larry interacting with Brunden to Larry arguing with Kahmunrah over the fate of Jedediah and the rest of his "museum family". Levy in particular enjoys the fact that "the argument devolves into a couple of six-year-old boys". Also, a lot of contributions to the movie were not the work of the director, and actually it results in a better piece (on which we can all agree, yes? I hope so, if you're reading this blog).
A lot of the deleted scenes were cut because the audience in the test screenings wanted not to stray too far from the Larry/Amelia storyline, and one in particular, where Christopher Guest's character Ivan the Terrible is interrogating Larry, landed right in the middle of the narrative structure, where the ante is suddenly upped and Kahmunrah gets the idea to use Jed as a hostage to get the information he suspects Larry to have. This scene in particular came off as interruptive because of that fact.
Sadly, that deleted scene is not on my copy of the DVD, so it won't be making an appearance in the Commentary Underground epilogue. But plenty of "rogue scenes" will, so be watching!
Next on "For the Love of Night at the Museum": The epilogue to Notes From the Commentary Underground. That's right, folks, I'm talking about the deleted scenes!
Countdown: 333 Days to NATM 3
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