How to make "Bill and Ted 3" most excellent

Pictured: A most excellent movie.

On April 13, Alex Winter, one half of the famous Bill and Ted duo, confirmed production of Bill and Ted 3. But many responded with “bogus,” not “excellent,” questioning the need for a sequel 27 years after sci-fi time travel comedy Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Yet judging by three criteria of sequel worthiness I’ve determined in my prior work, Bill and Ted 3 is justified: the originals are good; the new movie returns with key principals and positive additions; and the originals laid sequel groundwork.

First, let’s establish that the original Bill and Ted movies are good. Excellent Adventure begins the story of two California slackers and wannabe rockstars, Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves, in by far his best-acted role), whose music will someday bring world peace. The future utopia their music creates sends Rufus (George Carlin) back in time to make sure Bill and Ted pass a history report, their failing of which would otherwise doom that future.

Bequeathed a time machine by Rufus, they journey through time, meeting up with Napoleon, Billy the Kid, Socrates, Joan of Arc, Sigmund Freud, Genghis Khan, Abraham Lincoln, and Ludwig von Beethoven, bring them all to the present, and learn valuable lessons about history (and the correct pronunciations of names). Excellent Adventure also displays some of the best time travel logic in film, avoiding paradoxes through clever and amusing adherence to the Novikov self-consistency principle (basically: whatever happened, happened).

Sequel Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey begins with Bill and Ted still slackers, and confused that is the case. Time-traveling robot versions of themselves, created by a totalitarian rejecter of the future Bill and Ted utopia, then kill them. They explore an Earthly spectral afterlife, hell, and heaven before resurrecting by defeating Death in a series of board games. After all this, Bill and Ted finally decide to practice their music, beginning the path to world peace. If this all sounds absurd to you, you’re right. But Reeves, Winters, and writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon sell it all with a laid-back earnest goofiness that endears you to the characters and their bizarre journeys.  

A most excellent sequel.

Second, Bill and Ted 3 involves a worthy mix of old and new. For some franchises, like Conan or Die Hard, returning the main character suffices. But Bill and Ted has always been about Bill and Ted. Fortunately, both Winter and Reeves are returning. Though some great talents once associated with Bill and Ted--most notably, comedian George Carlin--have died, with Reeves and Winter, the movie can survive (I'm no fan of Jon Stewart, but I think he might be a good replacement for George Carlin). The new movie will also bring along director Dean Parisot, who proved skilled with sci-fi comedy (and time travel) in the excellent Galaxy Quest.  

There is, moreover, material in the original movies ripe for sequelization. For one compelling question always lurked beneath the juvenile affect of the first two Bill and Ted movies: Can Bill and Ted succeed independently? This idea has been present from the beginning, when Rufus first came back to ensure the duo passed their history report (and even in the historical figures they encounter, all of whom achieved their greatness on their own merit). If Bill and Ted would have passed without intervention, they wouldn’t have needed Rufus; that they required and received help places an asterisk on their accomplishments throughout the first movie that carries into the second, which opens with Bill and Ted wondering why they aren’t great yet.

Indeed, their self-consistent time travel reinforces this dilemma. For at the end of the first movie, Bill and Ted simply use the “whatever happened, happened” logic of time travel to set up a series of convenient outcomes that they have to remember actually to create later. This is brilliant thinking on their part, but amounts to long-term procrastination; at some point, they actually have to do the things they set up for themselves.

This problem, writ large, could furnish a worthy plot for Bill and Ted 3, as I, now well-accustomed to offering free, unsolicited, inevitably-ignored advice to filmmakers, shall proceed to prove. Imagine if somehow Bill and Ted still haven’t made the music that will establish universal harmony, and have been spoiled by time travel into thinking it will happen automatically. Though they know they will actually do it someday, the movie can chart their realization that they actually have to make it happen for themselves. Indeed, Bill and Ted 3 could even turn the absence of Rufus into a plot point, forcing Bill and Ted to accept that no one will make things happen for them anymore.

A mid-life-slacker-awakening, or some variation of it (one report suggest a journey into a future without their music) would give us a Bill and Ted 3 that not only satisfies the three conditions above, but that worthily sends off the goofy yet surprisingly intelligent franchise. If done right, it would be most excellent.