When ‘Sin City’ hit theaters four years ago ‘mdash; sending sycophants into caps-lock, fan-blogging glee ‘mdash; it was on the lithe heels of ‘Spider-Man,’ a summer gangbuster that saw studios rushing pell-mell to patent every superhero they could seize. But while Spidey waxed epic-like with young love, familial loss and Kirsten Dunst’s ginger tresses, Robert Rodriguez and creator Frank Miller conjugated the graphic novel with a different accent, focusing less on the action hero and more on the antihero’s aura of homicidal cool.
Since then, it seems we’ve been inundated for the last five years by an endless font of adolescent pulp, streamlining sanguine-chic reproductions (not interpretations, mind you) and storyboarding the same flat ‘characters’ with intolerably faddish appeal. This year’s lot isn’t looking any nuanced.
‘The Watchmen,’ billed as the golden bough of comic fandom and Alan Moore’s wizardly genius (he’s worked on everything from the D.C. pantheon to self-published explorations of murder and eroticism), is one of the year’s most anticipated, and understandably so ‘mdash; especially now that Fox has settled its bout with Warner Bros. However, ‘The Watchmen,’ for all the purported brilliance it reams as a graphic novel, will probably brandish the same self-indulgent, hollow cinematic amusement (epitomized by ‘300’ director Zack Snyder’s kitschy filmography) as its predecessors. After all, slapping comic books onto screen ‘mdash; virtually panel for panel ‘mdash; with added slow-mo effects, bloated aesthetics and stretched CGI wallpapers seems hardly the point of adapting a screenplay ‘mdash; yet it’s been in vogue among a mostly male demographic for some time now.
In the ’80s, when Reaganite nostalgia for a morally upright small-town hero was in demand, Clark Kent became live-action as one of the first Americana icons. And while it would take nearly another decade, Tim Burton’s nocturnal, caped crusader followed suit. For all their costumed theatrics and cartoonish villainy, both ‘Superman’ and ‘Batman’ attempted to say something about the escapist worlds their heros inhabited, all the while scoring profitable celluloid debuts to boot. Of course, money-hungry studios at their imperial Cold War prime managed to ruin a good thing, resurrecting increasingly campy, zombified sequels of the first films and expunging any socio-significance they once retained.
That aside, translating comic-book art into film is nothing ingeniously fresh-faced to the current millennium, or to American independent cinema, for that matter. Terry Zwigoff’s catatonic ‘Ghost World’ (featuring a laconic and relatively green Scarlet Johansson) and the sublimely crotchety Paul Giamatti in ‘American Splendor’ both did it skillfully, fairing well at the vanity fair of festivals worldwide. Even this year’s Academy Awards featured an Israeli foreign language nomination (‘Waltz with Bashir’) that hoped to win as it had in the Golden Globes by whetting post-traumatic surrealism.
‘Sin City’ and ‘300’ ‘mdash; the collaborative efforts of Frank Miller and acolytes ‘mdash; were emblematic of comic-book cinema at its pits: digitally blown in proportion to their egotism and pieced together with picaresque hijinks. And whether angling for moral ambiguity in hooker heaven or vilifying effeminate Persian emperors, they measured out hyper machismo violence in tons.
Anyone remotely chaffed by now is probably thinking that films of the sort aren’t meant to be taken so seriously ‘mdash; that such creativity should be a welcomed change in a sea of big-budget blas’eacute;. That the graphic heavyweights are justif
ied in their kinetic energy, entertainment value and visual exuberance. And while they certainly master new levels of technical and imaginative clutch, it’s at the cost of an over-the-top aesthetic that obstructs any real-life significance.
Though ‘Watchmen,’ relishing in its comic-book genre’s vocab, certainly won’t be the worst of recent attempts (cough, ‘The Hulk’) it’s advertised and made in the same sullied vein that’s swiftly retrogressing action-adventure into an immature reinforcement of ‘cool,’ no brainwork necessary.