In another
post I'll probably address all of the things I found wrong with the film Green
Lantern. Or possibly not, that would be a long ranting diatribe that would
probably border on petulant. I'll just sum it up this way, Green Lantern is one
of my all time favorite comic book characters and the film version of his story
was laughably bad. And it may just have been so awful that it saved the comic book based film genre as a whole.
The reasons
for this can be laid at a lot of doorsteps, the director, the casting of Ryan
Reynolds (who although funny and talented was not the right choice for Hal Jordan),
and most of all at the feet of the writers and the studio. The whole comic book
movie revolution has been both a blessing and a curse to those of us who love
the genre. A blessing in the sense that in the last fifteen years there have
some amazing films with truly incredible casts made about a subject that up
until Blade hit cinemas was always regarded as the obsession of geeks and
losers.
As has been
addressed before in other articles from countless other sources, what was once
a subculture has become mainstream. As a person who once took X-men action
figures to school with him in the third grade and read the Knightfall arc in
Batman exhaustively between classes in Junior High, I now have to accept that
guys who have never picked up a comic book walk around wearing Captain America
shirts. Its frustrating but I can live with it because without that mainstream
attention great films like the Dark Knight, Iron Man, the Avengers, X-Men 2 and
First Class, and several others would never have been made.
But for
every one of the successful films there are at least three others that are
total misfires. This is for several reasons. The first is that Marvel at the
beginning of the Superhero movie craze farmed out a lot of their bigger
properties to other studios and in doing so put themselves at the mercy of
executives that don't necessarily care that we get the best version of a
Daredevil or a Mr. Fantastic on screen. This isn't saying that Marvel itself
has not made some blunders, I wasn't crazy
about the Incredible Hulk and I think Thor is really only saved by a few strong
performances.
It's really
not too hard to see what happened. Studios found out that extremely large
amounts of money could be made by producing films featuring attractive young
actors with super powers doing heroic things. They went about this in the most
efficient way possible, gathering up directors with mild to strong interest in
the projects and using in house writers to produce scripts with varying amounts
of respect for the source material. Sometimes this could work to amazing
effect. Zac Snyder, John Favreau, and the masterful Christopher Nolan being the
best examples. In Nolan we trust as my friends and I say.
But like
the films themselves for every Nolan, you get a Ratner, a Steven-Johnson, or a
Story (I don't mean to pick on the Fox films alone but they've been pretty
horrible). Film makers who were so poorly matched with the projects they were
given that you wonder how the studios ever thought they would be successful. Of
course in that first wave of comic book films it didn't really matter. As fans,
we knew that Daredevil was going to be horrible, you could see it in the
trailers, but we went. The same thing with Fantastic Four, and the same thing
with X-Men 3. Oh, sure interest may have been down but those movies still made
their money back.
Because in
those early days of the comic book movie the fans were so happy to simply see a
big budget film based on the Fantastic Four that we went regardless of how
horrible the Thing looked or truly questioning why they thought they needed to
Anglicanize Jessica Alba. Seriously Hollywood,
if you want to cast a person of different ethnic dissent than the original character,
that's fine. But slapping a blonde wig and some blue contacts on them to make a
Hispanic American actress appear more Arian is just stupid and insulting.
Jessica
Alba's acting ability or lack thereof is a different matter and a subject I'm
going to step around here. Suffice it to say that the film, both films, made
about Marvel's first family of superhero's The Fantastic Four, were truly
horrible films.
I mean
other than the fact that he's trying to kill them can anyone tell me what
they're trying to stop Doctor Doom from doing in that film? Nothing so far as I
can tell. He murders another man earlier in the film (call this guy 'jerk who
pushes the bad guy over the edge' man), but they don't know that. All they know
is that he's attacking them because Reed Richards got his science wrong and
turned him into a freak. In some circles what he was doing could be described
as temporary insanity brought on by extreme stress and the so-called 'heroes'
of the movie in fact try to murder him on the streets of New
York and are celebrated for it.
I don't
mean to go off topic but I think that this ties into the whole argument that
for a long time the films based on comic books were being made with a great
deal of misguidance. But studios didn't see any reason to change things because
it was making them money. The formula was straight forward, hire a writer that
has a dubious track record but can produce schlock (Simon Kinberg of X-men 3,
Jumper, Fantastic Four, and This Means War fame among others), and put around $150 million
toward a film that follows the same essential formula.
A random
character or characters (our heroes) are introduced, they're the underdog in
the story with some sort of odd character defect, they have a love interest
that for whatever reason is beyond reach, they gain abilities, they learn to
use the abilities, they doubt their own power, meanwhile some quasi evil but
reflective character develops into a villain that the hero must dig deep to
defeat learning a lesson and becoming a better person in doing so. A few of the
films toyed with that line but not many. For a long time studios kept
generating the same basic film because if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
If you want
to get technical Iron Man actually follows this exact formula to the best effect.
That is the one time that doing it by the numbers paid off in terms of story.
But when you rewatch Iron Man, there are so many original dashes of inspiration
that it's hard to argue with the results. Robert Downey Jr. as has been stated
elsewhere was an inspired casting choice for Iron Man. The rest of the cast was
excellent. The effects were old school and still hold up and there is a genuine
love and craft going into it's execution.
Of course
more original films have been made even from the beginning based on comic
books. Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy is the best example but V for Vendetta, 300,
Watchmen, and quite a few others. Some are hits and some (I'm thinking of the
truly strange Superman Returns) are misses but they at least tried to branch
out from the standard formula.
Fans like
me though would go to the formulaic movies and think about what might have been
merely shrugging. Trying our best to find the silver lining that, horrible film
or not, someone was making an actual movie with Deadpool in it, even if
the end result was bastardizing almost everything about that character. It felt
like things were going to continue on in that vein until Green Lantern was
released.
Green
Lantern was DC's attempt to fire back at the growing juggernaut that was Marvel
Studios. At the time DC comics through Warner Bros. studios had the Dark Knight
Trilogy going but little else. Meanwhile, Marvel was wracking up hit movie
after hit movie each summer with their empire building gambit that as we all
know paid off in the billions. So, going to the old formula, DC applied the A
(find an attractive likeable actor whose persona is 'quirky') times B (go with
same origin story plot from countless other films) equals C (generic crap fest
where a hero who isn't really heroic fights a CGI monster no one cares about)
equation.
Unfortunately
for Green Lantern, fans finally wised up. This isn't to say that Green Lantern
didn't earn it's place as a bomb. It's a horrible film. Something that had the
easy plotting of a kids sci-fi film from the 1980's without any of the heart or
base originality you can find in those films. Ryan Reynolds was stuck (and I
have to give the guy the benefit of the doubt and believe he wanted to play it
differently) in the same quip-py guy role that has hounded him since Van
Wilder. The CGI 'suit' looked like a bad body paint job. Blake Lively was so forgettable
as Carol Ferris she could have just been called "paycheck". And
finally (I swear) a villain that literally looked like shit.
When I say
that fans wised up, I mean that for truly the first time, comic book and movie
fans looked at the previews for a film, read the reviews and decided they could
catch it On Demand. Green Lantern did okay at the box office but overall it was
a critical and commercial failure. This is a huge step forward. Because the
only way that studios change what they're doing is when profit margins and
markets change. With the death of Green Lantern, the film studios finally
realized that they needed to do something different.
There are
still origin stories being produced but they're becoming few and far between.
The Amazing Spider-man was a good film. The biggest complaints about it were
the areas where it unnecessarily overlapped with the Raimi films and the sequel
looks to be moving in a better direction. The few origin stories we do have in
the works look more and more interesting. The studios are finally trying to
produce original and well crafted versions of our stories.
I believe
that we are about to witness what I would think of as the 'Next Wave' of comic
book based films. I think that The Avengers was the official end of the first wave and that Man of Steel will lead the charge of the second. The news coming out about
casting and directors for the working projects look truly exciting. Josh Trank
who made the great and underrated Chronicle directing a new series of Fantastic
Four films. Edgar Wright making an Ant-Man film. We're seeing projects like
Guardians of the Galaxy and a possible Dark Universe film from Guillermo Del Toro.
All of this
is to say, that if it took one of my most treasured superheroes being
sacrificed to the Gods of Cinema to get studios to figure out that they need to
actually put effort into these films, then I'll live with it. Because if
superheroes, as has been stated many times before, are our modern mythology
then the cinema is our most revered modern church. There will always be new
films being made by new directors with new techniques and new writers to guide
them. I don't mind one bad Green Lantern film because I'm fully confident that
sooner or later another actor will wield the ring on film and I can't wait to
see how they do it.
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