by Colleen Hannon
The hype machines for next summer's blockbusters are winding up, and I'm hopping mad. I am sick to death of everyone saying that they're making all these comic movies for comic geeks.
Regardless of what materials they start with, movie producers seem to come down to a simple formula for the films. The first one in the series goes over how the guy got to be "super", gets them a bad guy to fight, and then they reshuffle the story until they can add some sort of soap-opera grade love complication. Toss in a hundred million dollars worth of special effects. Schedule it for sometime in May, June, or July. Genuflect in the direction of Sam Raimi and hope like heck it does even half as well as the first Spiderman.
Handled properly, the formula can do all right. It's not the simple fact that things are changed that is so awful to a comic book geek. They’re used to changes. They have a special term for it - retconning. It stands for "retroactive continuity", and it means the comic book writers just decided to go back and change the way things were before and go on from there as if all that old stuff had never happened. They do this on a regular basis even to the biggest properties.
How do you tell the difference between a change that will work for geeks and change that won’t? Just ask yourself, is the change for the "super", or for the "man"? You have plenty of variations on their powers to choose from. You can rearrange their stories until even their own mother wouldn't recognize them if you are careful. You can change their costumes as long as you keep them in line with the story. But you cannot change the core of the people themselves. Once you do, this film isn’t for the fans of the comics anymore. You’ve just bought a very expensive cardboard cutout to hide your own character behind and you’re not going to fool the geeks with sixty years of materials to refute you.
Let's take the film "Superman Returns" as an example. This film was in the works for nearly eight years, and went through a rogue's gallery of directors, big name actors and scriptwriters. Bryan Singer, who so capably handled the first two X-men films, was pulled in very late to drop kick the moribund franchise out the door. He was entrusted with an iconic character who has been in print since 1933 and has been translated into radio, television, movies, and games not to mention just about every consumer product that can have a big yellow "S" put on it. And to top all that off, he had Richard Donner's defining 1978 classic movie hanging over his head. How did it measure up for a geek?
The super-stuff was great. Technology has finally given these artists the tools to show us what we imagined with our heads under the covers reading the latest issue by flashlight. All the effects and design departments did beautiful work. He flies. He blows super-cold air. The elements we all wanted to see back on the big screen were there. Landing that plane in the middle of that baseball diamond to the cheers of that crowd. The obligatory romantic flying scene. The cool thing with the eye lasers and that falling glass. That shot of him carefully tipping that runaway car over to evoke the cover of Action Comics #1. Kids and kids-at-heart are all set.
Let's talk about the man. Kiss curl and cleft chin. Check. But there’s supposed to be more. Even with the various shifts in the facts and figures about the character over the years, there has always been a set of core features. Superman's story is about the joys and sorrows of someone who truly lives the virtues we ascribe to the word "hero". He's trustworthy, brave, clean, and reverent and all the rest of the Boy Scout creed. He doesn't just act this way, he IS this way. And because of that, he can cover certain issues in a way no grayscale vigilante like Batman can. But in order for that to work he has to walk the walk. In this film he stumbles badly.
Let's see. He crash-lands in the fields again and his mother drives out to get him. You find out he left without a word to anyone, even her, five years before. He goes back to Metropolis and gets his job back and finds out that things are a lot different in the situation with Lois. She's moved on and has a family now. I'm not getting into the kid. What does our hero do? He eavesdrops until he gets her home address, and then he shows up and hides in the bushes and spies on the family. Creepy. Then they work late one night and he follows her up on the roof and starts scamming on her. Talk about not using your powers for good. The contrast between the super parts of the film they got right and the parts that trouble me pile it higher. All that good super-stuff makes him look like the kind of guy who catches falling airplanes by day when he's in front of people then goes and peeps on his ex-girl at night. Greaaattttt..... So not only is he a bit skeezy in the relationship department, he's a phony.
If this movie had handled the character as a geek would want to see, we would not be having any discussion of Superman where the word "creepy" could be used to describe any of his actions. When he uses his X-ray vision to see if someone's hurt, you're not supposed to even imagine he could be doing it to peek. This isn't a little tweak; it is a crack that extends to the core of the character and there is no amount of getting the rest of the trappings right that will spackle it over.
Having an ex-boyfriend who is exhibiting those behaviors as a normal human is scary enough. Having Superman display those behaviors is terrifying. I can hear you now, "But what did you expect him to do? He’s a man in love with a woman." I expect him to be Superman! Geeks know he’s loved and lost Lois several times over the course of his run, and for each one there are four-color examples the film could have used to have him pursue her with total integrity and honesty.
Superman's issues are somewhat glossed over by having mainstream materials to reinforce the comics and at least impose some corrective structure. When you've got a film without that, it gets worse. Take "The Fantastic Four". With that one they managed to screw up both the "super" and the "man".
All mainstream viewers had to go on was a couple old Saturday morning cartoon series. Apparently the writer hadn't seen even them. They took Reed Richards, Sue Storm and Victor von Doom in hand and tore them down until they could draw a shaky love triangle out of thin air between them. It dominates the storyline and infuriates anyone who's ever seen what Mr. Fantastic and Dr. Doom can really do in the original materials.
Who cares if Reed can stretch his arms forty feet if he's a spineless dolt and a miserable scientist who makes grade-school errors that play with people's lives? Not a thing he touched in that film actually worked. Dr. Doom menaced, what, almost an entire city block? Hang on to your hats! It took a well-deserved beating at the box office from both the mainstream and the geeks. And defying any sort of logic, they actually made a sequel. No, they didn't learn anything from the first go-round. I would rather drive a toaster through a car wash than watch that again. I'm not even going to bother watching the rumored next film unless they meet up with the real Galactus. He would stub them out like a generic cigarette. Except he won’t. They'll probably have him sniffing Sue Storm's panties or something. Because they don’t listen to geeks.
The geeks will still go. The Hollywood types still get their opening weekend bankrolled by the comic book geeks nine times out of ten. Fans of these stories are so desperate for any treatment at all they shut off their brain as best they can and trudge off to the theater with the mantra that "It doesn't matter if the bear dances well or not, it's that he dances at all." To some degree they're right. At least the bear with the big yellow "S" is shuffling around. You may not realize it, but Bryan Singer is a bona-fide miracle worker. Several years ago the studio paid 20 million dollars to realize how bad an idea it would have been to have Nicholas Cage in Superman’s costume and another 20 million to see how off-track Tim Burton could get as a director. Geeks everywhere shuddered in horror.
There's no end in sight. The Transformers splashed tribal flames all over just about everything this last summer, and if you know where to put your ear you can already hear the rumble of the geeky Leviathan that surfacing under it's 2009 slated sequel. Michael Bay had Stephen Spielberg and all of Dreamworks special effects skills backing him up and a ridiculous bankroll but it wasn't quite enough. It looked like Independence Day recast with the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. Its supposed to be a story about a giant robot war, but it's infested with humans. Stupid humans. Not to mention one nauseatingly blatant piece of eyecandy that would have better graced the cover of "Car and Driver". It didn't suck the chrome right off a trailer-hitch like the Doom movie but it was bad enough. Mainstream moviegoers had plenty of pretty pixels to look at, but if you're geeky enough to know that Bumblebee was supposed to be a Volkswagen Bug you walked in ticked off.
Comic book movies aren't made for geeks. I'm tired of hearing it in reviews, and out of people on the street. They're making them for the masses, crossing their fingers and hoping they've waited long enough that the average guy remembers the Cliff's Notes of the stories fondly from his own childhood reading under the covers after lights-out but doesn't remember exactly what it was supposed to be. Staple on some chick-stuff, and they figure maybe they’ll get his girl to tag along, too. Pack 'em in, rake in the dough, and move on to the next property.
That big "S" on Superman’s chest is not supposed to look like a dollar sign and I didn't make it look that way. Stop blaming geeks for this string of $125 million dollar stinkers that share some names and little else with their originating comics. Start pointing fingers at producers, directors, and others in charge that insist on warping past recognition the very characters and stories they've invested so much money in to bring to the big screen.
Colleen Hannon is a Seattle-based geek of all trades and mom. By day you'll find her at her Daily Planet job, but by night you can find her at MsZilla, Gamerdad and Gamers With Jobs. Hmmm... we're seeing a trend here....