COMIC BOOK MOVIES, REDUX
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James Joyner | Saturday, May 3, 2003 |
Apparently, this genre is hot right now.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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I'm on my way to see it now. Will report back later. I'm a big fan of comic books, though my fave was the Fantastic Four ("it's clobberin' time!"). I thought the 1980s/90s Batman films were done very well and even thought the 1950s Superman was good in a goofy kind of way. That cute Lois Lane was always getting into a bind.
There in an Incredible Hulk flick coming out soon as well--at Christmas, I think. The trailer is allegedly playing with at X2 (which I hope to go see next week).
To my dismay, the trailer for Hulk didn't play at my showing of X2. I was terribly miffed.
Hulk comes out in June. I heard that they had to go back and do much of the film because the Hulk looked a bit too much like an animated CGI character. I saw the trailer and it's not too bad, but it's not too good either.
X2 was rather pedestrian. It never grabbed my attention and I felt like I was always in a movie. Everything in the plot was predictable. Halle Barry still looks weird as Storm, though the leather does her body good. The hot chick of the film was Famke Janssen. It bothered me that Xavier had a very cool tie on throughout the movie, but changed it near the end when he visited the White House, though it would not seem like he had the time to change it. Interestingly, this movie had an odd religious subtheme to it, though it was never really developed well.
I still can't figure out why the X-Men movies are so "Wolverene-centric." I never read the X-Men as comic books -- too many characters. I thought Cyclops has the coolest powers, but he isn't featured much in this film.
It's been a while since I read X-Men, but Wolverine was clearly the most popular of the so-called "New X-Men" (who debuted in, gulp, 1975 and have thus been around far longer than the original group). I don't think any of the other characters spawned solo books.
As to Cap, who was always one of my favorites, it seems like Marvel has been trying to figure out what to do with him ever since I can remember. They resurrected him out of that block of ice for Avengers #4, but the political climate changed in the late 1960s. Cap has spent most of the time since trying to figure out who and what he is. He actually gave up the Cap identity altogether several times--starting with the Nomad gambit in the 1970s.
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