The Climax-Breaking Down the Big Finish

Wow, three blog posts in one day. It’s a record.

One of the things I never really did when I talked about my simplified version of the Hero’s Journey (or three act structure as it’s also called) was fully explain what happens in the Climax. I’ve recently been reading Blake Snyder’s third (and, no doubt, final, due to his untimely death) Save the Cat! book: Save the Cat! Strikes Back. And in this book, he does a good job of breaking the Climax down into five points.

I’m not about to plagiarize his book, but I will be using some of the information from it for the information I give you here.

You might remember, Blake Snyder had his own version of the three act structure graph that I briefly touched on. Just like Syd Field, Christopher Vogler, and a host of other authors, they all break the story down into three acts and just pick out different pieces, or, in many cases, pick out the exact same points and simply give them different names.

If you recall, heading into the Climax on my graph, the protagonist had an idea to outwit the “antagonist” in the final showdown. Remember, the antagonist doesn’t have to be a specific person. It can be a group of bad guys (like Loki and his army in The Avengers, it can be a thing (like the meteor coming toward the Earth in Armageddon), it can even be a concept (like patriotism in the movie Ali). But for the sake of convenience, we’ll refer to it as the antagonist.

At this point, we head into the five point Climax. The five points, as I am going to refer to them are:

1. Assembling the Team.

2. Execution of the Idea.

3. Things Go Bad

4. Soul Search for Another Idea

5. Execution of Idea #2.

For further convenience, I’m going to continue using the movie The Avengers as an example for each step.

1. Assembling the Team

This is where the protagonist gathers all his forces together and gets ready to, as Blake Snyder puts it, “storm the castle”. In The Avengers, it’s where Iron Man figures out that Loki’s going to use the Stark building to set up the Tesseract and so he, and the remaining Avengers, head off to Manhattan. This stage may involve assembling tools, arming or equipping the team, or even amending relationships before the protagonist can convince everyone to come along.

2. Execution of the Idea

The plan gets put into action. The plan should have some semblance of being rational enough that it might actually work, yet, at the same time, there should be a sense that it’s completely crazy. The team (which, by the way, may only be the protagonist) must be in way over their heads. But, in the beginning of the execution of the plan, they look good. They look like they are going to pull this one out of a hat. They are almost winning. It’s in this stage that the minor characters often arc and we see growth payoff for them. They may also get to use any items they found along the journey.

As they get close to the goal, as Blake Snyder says, we get the sense that this is all too easy.

3. Things Go Bad

In his book, Snyder sticks with the castle metaphor and says the hero reaches the high tower in the castle only to find: there’s no princess!

This is the stage where we find out the antagonist has been waiting for the attack all along. He expected this to happen. He was ready for it. In The Avengers it’s where Loki knows his outer space army is big enough that the heroes can’t possibly keep fighting long enough to bring them all down. Sooner or later, Loki’s army will win. At this point, a ticking clock starts for the heroes. They’re running out of time.

In The Avengers the ticking clock is the nuclear missile that has just been launched at Manhattan.

4. Soul Search for Another Idea

Of course, the team doesn’t have a backup plan. It is at this point in the story where the hero reaches deep down into his soul for that last ounce of whatever he’s got left and looks for some small glint of an idea, even considering things he would never have in a million years considered when the story started. This shows how much our hero has changed throughout his journey.

5. Execution of Idea #2

The hero come up with a solution. This is the touched by God moment I sort of spoke about the other day. An idea comes to the hero from the grace of divinity.

In The Avengers it’s where Robert Downey Jr. decides to go after the nuclear missile and take it up through the hole in the atmosphere created by the Tesseract, even though it will mean his own death. That sacrifice is part of what makes the decision divine.

The hero puts this second idea into action and it works. In The Avengers, not only does it get rid of the nuclear threat, but the explosion of the aliens base in space takes out all the soldiers down on Earth in Manhattan. Iron Man saves the day.

But what did he give up? He falls from the sky, seemingly dead, only to be caught by the Hulk. It’s in that final moment when the Hulk roars that Robert Downey Jr. experiences his resurrection and becomes a true hero.

And that’s a basic Climax.

I know I’ve used an action movie as an example, but the same plot points hold true for any story, whether it’s a comedy, a romance, a fantasy, or whatever. It was just easier to use The Avengers as an example, as it almost uses the elements literally. But your romantic comedy would have the protagonist trying to get the girl with a hair-brained scheme that was crazy. It would look like he might actually pull it off, until he realized she wasn’t falling for it; she actually suspected he’d try something stupid like that all along. To make matters worse, her plane’s leaving for Kansas in thirty minutes. So the clock’s ticking. So he regroups and digs way down in his soul for that one idea that comes from the divine. Once he has it, he executes it. It’s something unexpected and it sweeps her off his feet. He wins the girl and either goes to Kansas with her or they both decide to stay in Maine.

I think that pretty much puts a cap on three act structure. It fills in the bit I was missing from my earlier post. Coming up soon, I want to talk about Archetypes.

Until then,

Michael out.