A lot of people have emailed me asking about Comicon and what I am most hyped about and usually my answer is “none of it.” (Well, other than TRON Legacy, but we already knew about that.) Most of what gets advertised at Comicon nowadays is adaptation piled on top of adaptation, and although I’ll doubtless go see the Avengers movie and probably enjoy it very much, seeing the actors all in a line doesn’t juice me like it does some people; I at least need a trailer, you know? And this goes for most things at Comicon. I’m looking forward to seeing The Walking Dead on AMC, but I’m not really deeply excited about it. New Rocketeer comics? Well that’s nice I guess. And so on and so forth.
This is an exception, precisely because it is new. God knows I’ve ripped on Zack Snyder before, but I’ve never really had a problem with his visual style of directing per se. (Sure, you can make fun of the stylized slo-mo Matrix-lite bits easily enough, but they’re an easy and predictable target, much like Brian de Palma’s endless tracking shots or Michael Bay’s absolutely everything he does.) My problem with Snyder’s movies has always been that he has a tendency to take an existing work and become worshipful towards it, turning 300 and Watchmen into adulations of the source material rather than good movies in their own right.
But this – this is his own thing. That alone holds a lot of promise for me. That it is his own thing that also has dragons, samurai, giant mecha robots with bunny faces, Nazis, mobsters, spaceships, and apparently everything else in the world that is violent makes it even more something that excites me. And that is all I want: something new.
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There was a TRIPLANE in that trailer. Why is there a goddamn triplane fighting goddamn samurai in a goddamn mental hospital?
I love this movie already.
Honestly, looking at the teaser, my guess is that Zach Snyder heard about Dollhouse and realized that the basic concept would work better as a movie where you can actually have a conclusion.
And then he threw in a bunch of combat, dragons, and kung fu because he could.
OK, I’m sold.
I have zero interest in most Girl-Fu, but I will watch this. Oh yes.
I don’t get it sorry. Looks like almost any Xbox game. *yawn*
Rich K is right! I couldn’t tell the difference between that and Halo!
Definitely looking forward to this. Zach Snyder as an adapter of comics = terrible, but Zach Snyder as a director is not so bad. And this looks appropriately absurd.
One panel that people don’t seem to be talking about is the newly announced Rex the Wonder Dog movie. Here’s the film’s two stars: http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/uploads/JohnByrne2/2006-10-16_112349_maria_menounos_2.jpg
…
I want.
I sorta think this might be fun (the fact that the protagonist is named Babydoll is not a good sign).
Snyder calls it “Alice in Wonderland with guns” which is hilarious because it’s sounds like a parody of a video game pitch.
IP + guns = video game. Halo? It’s Ringworld with guns. Fallout 3? Oblivion with guns. Tomb Raider? Indiana Jones with boobs and guns.
First time I saw that trailer, thanks for pointing it out 🙂
Not a whole lot of things out of comicon excited me, but Batman Inc really did it for me. But thats probably because of my irrational love for the Club of Heroes (c’mon, we all know that this is more or less an ongoing for the Club of Heroes).
That film looks like distilled excitement.
“it is his own thing that also has dragons, samurai, giant mecha robots with bunny faces, Nazis, mobsters, spaceships, and apparently everything else in the world that is violent”
But not a coherent script, I suspect…
I’m surprised to find no comments on Scott Pilgrim in this, but perhaps that was covered elsewhere. I been busy.
What movie are you talking about here? I can’t actually find anything you wrote here that actually tells us what you’re talking about.
So much for original:
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2010/07/27/swipe-file-sucker-punch-vs-silent-dragon/
That one seems like a reach.
Mary, the first word in the second paragraph is a link to see the trailer for Sucker Punch. I missed it the first time, too. (And even after I sheepishly realized it was there, I couldn’t actually watch it, so I’m really just going by the file name and general knowledge of Things that Were Seen at Comic-Con.)
Dollhouse? What the hell does this concept have to do with Dollhouse?
I hate to say it, but yeah, I kind of have to agree that Snyder might give us something cool with his own original properties, when he’s not mucking up other people’s. It’s not even his worshipfulness towards properties that’s the problem, it’s his worshipfulness towards the most utterly superficial aspects of those properties, at the expense of everything else. Dawn of the Dead, to him, isn’t a devastating bit of social satire, it’s a KEWL MOVIE ABOUT ZOMBIES DOOD and THE ZOMBIES TOTALLY RUN BECAUSE THAT’S SCARIER. Watchmen isn’t about complex storytelling and the negative ramifications of superheroes, it’s about AWESOME ALTERNATE HISTORY and SUPERHEROES WHO ARE DARK AND GRITTY and RORSCHACH BEING AWESOME BECAUSE RORSCHACH IS AWESOME. Even 300 had more life on the page than his movie adaptation, which was wall-to-wall visual fetishism.
I’m happy to let his little-kid id run wild on something of his own creation. And maybe without being stringently faithful to an existing narrative, he’ll be able to provide a good story.
Thanks. For some reason that link doesn’t show up as bright blue the way they usually do. I couldn’t see it at all.