A CGI-concocted mess that makes a mockery of both the medium it's told in, and the medium from which it's derived

Rating: 1/10 (18 April 2005)

Scott McCloud, in "Understanding Comics," made the important observation that in comics, and media in general, there is a tendency to confuse form with content. Every medium has its own tools for storytelling. The best creators make full use of the distinct language of these media, and overcome their limitations. When adapting material from one medium to another, good creators take heed of these different tools, resulting in masterpieces like Sidney Lumet's "Twelve Angry Men", or "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan." But with movies based on comics, there's this bizarre fallacy that the fact that the story is derived from a comic should somehow affect what the movie looks like, which doesn't hold for movies based other media.
Say someone adapts a play into a movie. Do they show, on the movie screen, curtains being closed and opened in between scenes? Of course not. When adapting a best-selling book, do they show pages being turned on the screen? The very notion is silly to suggest. Each medium has its own tools for telling a story, and these things are merely aspects of the medium from which the film is being adapted. To suggest that the "mechanical" nature of the medium from which a film is adapted should somehow inform the look of the film ("The film is based on a comic book, so we have to show pages from the comic book in the opening title sequence") is to engage in non-sequitur. Hollywood doesn't get that, and gives us a Batman TV show with actual sound effects written on screen, not realizing that such things are in comics because they don't *have* sound, or even dumber, a "Hulk" film that attempts to use actual panels, as if the otherwise-lauded director doesn't get that panels are only used in comics because they are, by nature, told through a composition of static images. Some, get it right with the "Superman" and "X-Men" films, but some seem so focused on making good "comic book movies" that it doesn't seem to understand that they should instead be setting out to make good "movie" movies.
But if Rodriguez and Miller's travesty of a film shows no wisdom of this point. Why is it necessary to include narration in which the sound of a gunshot with a silencer is described? In the movie, we *hear* the silencer, so we don't need this cornball musing on it. Marv's ranting about the "blood-for-blood good old days" or Dwight's saccharine "Valkyrie" metaphor for Gail, made me cringe.
Why the obsession with having so many shots mirror actual panels in the books? The white-silhouettes-on-black backgrounds, which work in the comics, look utterly ridiculous on the screen. Is the story really enhanced by fluorescing Hartigan's tie, or the bandages on Marv's body so that we can see them when they rest of their figures are in shadow? The almost entirely-CGI backgrounds, which Rodriguez cluelessly lauds as making his work easier are lifeless and artificial. When Josh Hartnett walks onto the balcony in the film's prologue, never once do I feel that what I see behind him is real, and any suspension of disbelief is lost. The subsequent pan of the buildings when this prologue ends, is equally about as vibrant as a bowl of oat bran. So oblivious are the directors to the simple reality that elements that work in comics may not work in film that no attempt is made to modify the scenes of Marv getting hit head-on with a car, or dragging a perp from his own car at 50 miles an hour, or Hartigan gushing blood when getting perforated by bullets, and the result descends into cartoonish preposterousness.
The directors would rather bury a big-name star like Oscar-winner Benicio Del Toro under gobs of facial prosthetics, despite the fact that there is nothing particular about his character that would require it . Squandering a film's star power like this underscores a total lack of judgment on the part of the directors.
What they did change is mind-boggling. Why was Bob, who shot Hartigan, his partner, several times, the one to greet Hartigan upon his release? Why was "That Yellow Bastard" cut up so that the first Act was shown before the rest of "The Hard Good-bye", and the rest of "Bastard" shown later? Why is Kevin seen in the beginning when he's about to kill Goldie, thus destroying the suspense of knowing her killer's identity? Why do Rodriguez and Miller include Manute's mention to Gail about "serving a new master," which is a reference to the events of "A Dame to Kill For", which isn't in the movie? Why did they hire an actress to play Nancy Callahan who refused to do nudity, when that scene is so crucial to the story? I don't mind that the others didn't do the nude scenes in which their characters originally appeared, but the moment when Hartigan sees Nancy performing in "That Yellow Bastard" is a vital plot point in the story, because when we see that the little girl he saved is the same stripper we have come to know and love from previous stories, we're able to feel the same creepy feeling Hartigan does.
Armond White nailed it: "Graphic art has its own principles and justifications that become inane when converted into live action. Rodriguez and Miller try to resolve this problem through digital photography that simplifies the imagery, recreating the starkness of print panels. Their wasted effort does little more than turn cinema back into two-dimensional flatness.
Rodriguez (uses) the same elastiviolence as in the "Matrix" movies: Killing and brutality are absurdly amplified yet have no effect. Rodriguez and Miller don't actually have an esthetic's, just a gimmick.
As shot by Rodriguez, "Sin City"'s digital b&w lacks the mystery of photochemical b&w photography. A noir without the enveloping quality of shadow or the tactile sensation of smoke, it fails at what makes movies a great visual art form."