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I think what you've also got to remember is what videodrome pointed out about the "intro" thing.
We don't just want comics readers to go see these films. We want everyone to. So SOMEHOW you've got to get the backstory in. Both X-Men and Spiderman do that. You establish the canon again for those who haven't seen it. For instance, the easiest way to introduce us to the X-Men, Xavier's school, etc, is to bring an outsider (or two) into it. The outsider is the viewer; classic technique, but it works. It also means that all the people who've been reading Spiderman since they were tiny go "I know this! Oh, they got that wrong, it wasn't like THAT", etc. Which is a pain, but you've got to do it.
Some characters are more established in collective consciousness; Batman, for instance. The people who saw the Burton flicks may not have read Miller, or post-Miller Batman, but they may have encountered earlier stuff when they were younger, or seen the (superb but off-kilt) Adam West TV series. Burton can go off on his tangent, everyone who's read the stuff can say "yes! This is what it should be!" and then lend their mates loads of comics. The Arronofsky project is Year One: going back to the beginning, how Bruce becomes Batman. Which might need to be re-established on screen, if only to erase the Schumacher movie from memory.
I think part of X-Men's success was it had at least SOME characters that could be defined as Characters; OK, Halle Berry didn't have that much charactersiation (unlike the original draft script), but hey. It's worth noting that in the original draft, there are brief flashbacks to the moment when each of them first discovered their mutant abilities. Too much establishing, so it was cut. I think, if they don't cock it up, X-Men 2 could be MORE interesting. Remember, the first was given a relatively low budget because it was a summer comic-conversion; Fox might throw more money at it this time. And now we've got the characters established, we can start trying to answer the interesting questions it raised. I'm going to see it, anyhow.
I think Utopia's desires of an action movie are kind-of like my own. If I want a dumb shooty movie, I'll watch a really good one; I saw Matrix the week after I saw Woo's The Killer and no-one understood why I thought the Matrix was disappointing. I mean, the Matrix had lots of interesting possibilties lost in, well, splosions and dumb bits. The action sequences could have fitted in more neatly, and it could have been more intelligent, and then I'd have liked it.
Simple hope for the Miller/Arronofsky: it's got to be an R. They're going to try to force it into PG-13, so the kids can buy the toys, and it WON'T WORK. It doesn't need to be excessive or gratuitous; it does need to have a degree of power. Hmn. |
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