Trends In Comic Book Films 2000-8
Finally got a chance to see Hellboy 2: The Golden Army last night with summer movie watching friends Allie and Tantek (and new twitter bud Jay Zombie) In addition to being an awesome time, we also got to see the previews for “Death Race,” which looks like it might become the next title holder to Greatest Bad-Good Action Film.
Anyways, the review on Hellboy? It’s insane. Total, uncompromising Nick-Cage-In-A-Bear-Suit-Punches-A-Peasant-Woman-level insanity.
It features (no joke):
-Drunken Barry Manilow Tunes Shared Between A Devil And A Fish-Creature Talking About Feelings
-A German Caricature who exists as a smoke-being which inhabits form an old school diving suit (left on the above picture).
-Mutual Love of Poetry Between An Elf And A Mutant Fish-Humanoid
In other words, you should see it. The difference reminds me a little of the differences between Ghostbusters I & II. The first movie is a comedy-adventure romp par excellence. The plot is simple, the wisecracks are good, and the thing unfolds in a way that seems to make sense. The second, on the other hand, is insane: instead of a movie, what we seem to be seeing is a bunch of randomly jumbled wacky hijinks featuring the Ghostbusters (that’s not that saying that that’s a bad thing — Statue of Liberty anyone?)
As Allie’s already pointed out, the ostensible plot of the movie hardly impacts the characters. It’s actually pretty simple: an evil elf is trying to activate a robot army to destroy the human world. But it gradually just transforms into a meandering weirdly paced soap-opera, with some evil-elf time thrown in at the beginning, middle, and end to remind you that hey guyz a plot is happening somewhere out there. Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) and Mike Mignola (The Amazing Screw On Head) wrote the script, and you can almost feel the schizo jump between weird comic booky action adventure and high falutin’ dream-fantasy wrestling through much of the movie.
Translating serial superhero comic books into a legitimately good movie is in some sense a ridiculous task even before the first word of the script is written. You’re trying to take a genre that was born and exists in a ill-conceived stew of over-the-top plot twists, poor characterization, and gratuitous boobage. There’s little character depth and high repetitiveness. You’re trying to turn nothing into something. This is a different problem than most movie adaptations, where you’re trying to trim down some huge number of possible ideas into a narrowly focused plot.
Strikes me that since the beginning of the Modern Comic Book Movie Revolution (beginning in roughly 2000 when the first X-Men owned at the box office and continuing to the present), there’s been two major developing threads of superhero film that succeed entirely by leveraging this lack of real characterization.
One leverages the flat, simple behavior of the characters and focuses on the mysterious or complex psychological reasons for it. The Batman reboots are probably the best example of this. Heath Ledger’s incredibly badass Joker in the Dark Knight sells itself on always suggesting that there’s some messed up mental universe that we just can’t comprehend. Aaron Eckhart’s role as Two Face does the same. You’ve taken a character with an otherwise ridiculous shtick of flipping a coin to decide what to do and developed a whole dark universe of motivations for his repetitive behavior. Doctor Octopus’ character in Spiderman 2, too, has much of that same approach. It suggests that the proper realization of superhero comic books are more complex than what they were able to achieve in earlier, paper manifestations.
The second takes the opposite strategy by assuming that comic books got it right the first time around — that the original creators intended character flatness to be part of the comic book genre. It keeps the psychology largely unaddressed while blowing the actions of the character into epic proportions. The greatest example of this, of course, was the 3-D IMAX version of Superman Returns, though its the strategy that largely got taken in Fantastic Four, and the older pre-2000 generation of superhero films (Batman and Robin, anyone?). In some ways, though it misses out on a world of possibility, I think that’s more authentic to why kids get into comic books in the first place (guns! girls! explosions!), in addition to opening doors for heroes to do amazing things like sing Barry Manilow together (ridiculousness reminiscent of this)
Watchmen is now officially on its way here. Despite the narrative breadth of the original, I think it’s still an open question as to whether or not it’ll end up in the first or second universe of superhero films (remember LXG?), esp. considering that the guy that did “300” is on board. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see…
