A few weeks ago, I was in the mood for something fun and dumb and ended up watching Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. This is the movie in which a group of kids in detention stumbles upon an old video game while having to clean out a school storeroom and soon find themselves in the world of the game as the characters they picked to play. I think most of the appeal of this movie is seeing the adult movie stars playing the teenage characters because the actors seem to be having a blast. We’ve got Dwayne Johnson playing the videogame nerd who’s never been big on physical stuff but who does know all about games and who has to get used to his character’s capabilities and Karen Gillan as the nerdy girl stuck as a Lara Croft kind of character.

The biggest contrast between actor and role is Jack Black playing a shallow, social media-obsessed teenage girl (the character had a name she thought sounded like a girl, so she’s not happy to find herself in the body of a middle-aged male scientist). I’ve never really thought of Jack Black as a serious actor. He pretty much has one persona he plays, and the difference between characters is mostly just dialing up and down how intense he gets with that persona. But here he takes on an entirely different character and pulls it off. He may ham it up a bit, but he gives a good performance that shows depth and vulnerability for the character and gives a real growth arc. If an actual young actress had played the role exactly the way he did, we’d say it was a good serious performance. It just becomes hilarious when it’s someone who looks like Jack Black doing it.

But the main thing that got me started thinking from this movie was the idea of predicability/inevitability in writing. It may just be that I’m a story structure nerd, but I felt that the various arcs and outcomes were really obvious. You knew which characters were going to be tested in which ways, which relationships would form or be revived. And yet this didn’t bother me because all of these things felt inevitable. I’d have been disappointed if these things hadn’t happened. These were the things I wanted to happen. I wanted the nerd and the jock who were best friends in elementary school but who had fallen apart once the jock became popular to find their friendship again. I wanted the shallow girl to learn to think of others, to the point of being willing to give up something important to help another person. Even though I saw all the arcs, transformations, and outcomes coming, I still found it to be an emotionally satisfying movie, one that ended with the sense that all was right with the world.

About the only way to escape the trap of being satisfying without being predictable is to find a way to do the thing the audience wants but in a way they didn’t see coming. If you surprise the audience by not doing the thing that feels inevitable, they may be disappointed. Surprise is only good in stories if what happens in the story is even better than what the audience expected or wanted to happen. And that’s really, really tricky. It’s awesome if you can pull it off, but sometimes the expected outcome is so satisfying that you don’t care that you predicted it.

I do have to remind myself that what’s obvious to me may not be obvious to everyone, just because I’ve spent so much time studying this stuff and tend to read and watch with an analytical eye.