Bill and Ted's Unexcellent Utopia

I just watched all three "Bill and Ted" movies last night, having seen the 1989 original "Excellent Adventure" years ago, but not the 1991 sequel "Bogus Journey." My general thought is that the first and third films are fun and worth the watch (see John Scalzi's thoughts here), while the second is mostly not, aside from the Bergman homage sequence, but is probably necessary for continuity.*

But what I want to talk about is the vision of utopia the films portray. The premise is that seven centuries in the future, the music of the eponymous Bill and Ted and their band, Wyld Stallyns (sic), has created a post-scarcity world of peace, equality, and time travel. A place and time where "Be Excellent to Each Other" is the international credo.

If there had been only one movie, I would not be writing this. The first movie is sweet and simple, and it was made with the technical limitations of 1989 and within, I assume, a limited budget. But because it's now part of a three-part series and made with fewer limitations over time, critique seems fairer.

My criticisms are two-fold: first, about what the utopia looks like in the films and what that implies about its nature, and second, about how the utopia is achieved.

First about the look of utopia and therefore its nature.

In "Excellent Adventure," the future looks like a dystopia rather than a utopia:

In fact, it almost looks like a scene from "Beneath the Planet of the Apes." Everyone appears to live underground, wearing drab, almost identical clothing, and behaving in unison to a few Wyld Stallyns' gestures. I know the appearance was probably related to the film's low budget, but it's not an inspiring vision of how these people live or interact. We're told that the air and water are clean, and the few future people with speaking parts seem cool (especially George Carlin's Rufus), but that's it.

In "Bogus Journey," the film's art directors made the utopia's inhabitants more colorful, at least, but they did it by wrapping them in velcroed neon neoprene and giving them oversized shoes: not exactly a sociologically thoughtful choice:

The main setting that's shown is a classroom, which looks like a cross between a starship Enterprise set and a college lecture hall of the late 20th century. As far as we, the viewers, can tell, everyone is still living underground. But at least they're getting an education, I guess.

In the new film, "Bill and Ted Face the Music," a bigger budget has kicked in and the future looks like a million bucks. It's outside, even! Unfortunately, there are practically no people there and it appears to be an all-white, Saarinen-designed airport:

The "public" spaces are empty and inhuman in scale. This is futurist vision as Modernism on steroids, which is several decades out of date when it comes to futurist thinking in our era of the climate crisis.

The government of this utopia also seems pretty autocratic and dysfunctional. For some reason, they couldn't warn Bill and Ted until 75 minutes before disaster was about to strike. And they make a Terminator-type robot to send to the past to kill people.

My second criticism of the film series is about how those people in the future got to inherit a utopia in the first place. The only answer given in the films is that music is magic.

The first movie, luckily, doesn't really have to deal with the question very much: the plot revolves around how George Carlin's character is sent back to rescue Bill and Ted's high school history project. It's intentionally lightweight, and its vision of a simplistic utopia (drab though it is) was a relief to me as a 2020 viewer. Somehow, because the Stallyns made music, they managed to institute world peace. Okay.

The second movie, though, has the premise that even in utopia, there is a Donald Pleasance-like hater-villain who wants to wreck things for no apparent reason. So a bunch of mayhem ensues, including an early scene that's much too similar to a school-shooter scenario for my comfort. (Yes, I know the movie was made before the Columbine shooting, but that doesn't help those of us watching it now.) After the first movie's sweet utopia, it was painful to see this jerk's challenge to the foundations of their society's basis. It was just too similar to all the ways assumed norms have been blown away in our country since 2016.

But all of that is just a distraction from the question of how Bill and Ted's music will lead to the future utopia in the first place. As long as they don't get killed by the robots sent by the villain, it's assumed that something they do will lead to music and eventually world peace. At the end of the movie (in about 1993), newspaper clippings are shown, indicating they are well on their way there at least in terms of fame, but it's unclear how the transformation will happen. Dragging things into a sequel made this question more important than it was in the first movie, where it could be ignored.

The newest movie — which takes place some time in the late 2010s, when we know that world peace was no closer and arguably farther away than it was in 1993 — has even more of a challenge. How can it connect Bill and Ted's (and our) present to the utopia they know they "will" create because they have seen it when they've been transported there?

Like our world, Bill and Ted's world has not been heading in the right direction since 1993: they're no longer performing at stadiums. Instead, the Wyld Stallyns have broken up and the two of them are playing covers at the American Legion Hall. Their album sales have plummeted. Yet somehow their music plus time travel must create not just world peace but also hold together the time-space continuum.

It's a heavy lift and so only magic can achieve that end. The movie doesn't bother to come up with even a single idea about any of the hard work it would take to materially improve the world toward something approaching a utopia. Just people dancing and singing on a freeway beside their fossil-fuel-burning cars.

Yes, I still teared up a little bit at the end of the movie, because wouldn't it be nice if it was as simple as a giant sing-and-play-along? Musicians from all cultures do share a common bond and lots of them playing together could be part of a solution. 

But unfortunately, I think we're beyond the naïveté of 1989 if we really want to face the music and make a civilization that can survive the many challenges we face.

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* "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey" is essentially incoherent, as too many sequels are. It appears to have been made just to cash in on the earlier film's existence. In my rough estimate, it's about 20% worth watching, 20% boring, and 60% actively bad.