Panel Work

Rating: Null/10 (8 February 2004)

*Sigh* It's at times like this after two years of writing reviews that I wish I could go back and rewrite some of the old reviews just to punch them up a bit. Oh, well, how times change...
American society loves comic books or graphic novels or even just the daily strips in the newspaper. We love the bizarre notions of reality that can be created with the pen and watercolors. Heck, just about every culture loves them. Names like "Dark Horse", "DC", and "Marvel" are thrown around to the cult following around them.
With film we have a more fluid medium. Ang Lee had a chance with 'Hulk' since he already had made a visually sound film, but that project had mixed results. Tim Burton had the visual look accomplished by the time he made 'Batman Returns', but then let Schumacher destroy the series. Raimi's 'Spider-Man' lacked his usual visual flair, probably brought on by studio executives who didn't want him to expand like in 'Darkman'. 'Superman' was pure Donner, but Donner's problem was that he didn't have a model to follow other than the prior cheesy series. Stephen Norrington is atrocious and Guillermo Del Toro is questionable at the moment (I'm waiting to see how 'Hellboy' comes out). I won't even mention the 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' or 'Men in Black'.
Despite all these branches, the genre really boils down to two camps. There is the light-hearted fare of 'Spider-Man' and 'Superman', reliant on truth, justice, blah blah blah. Then there are the pessimist, "dark" films. 'Blade' and 'Spawn' fall into the "wannabe" sections of this genre. 'Batman Returns' marks the high (low?) point.
It's as though the studios think they can't make a truly pessimistic "graphic novel" and be successful. So, as in the case of the first X-Men movie here, we get everything to us at 50% power. More emphasis is given towards what we know of film rather than the comic books themselves. How else do you explain the X-Men's costumes or Professor X as a weaker Dr. Treves?
Perhaps one reason why so many of these latest installments don't work is that they don't create the right environment. The Batman movies, though they boiled down to pure idiocy by the 'Robin', still created a world both detailed and ugly and reminded you that the world was real fake and not pure fake. That's another nail against these X-Men movies.
What do I consider to be the best "comic book" movies? Mystery Men, Darkman, Batman Returns, RoboCop, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. They annotate the genre (except Returns) with their own styles.
Singer did better the second time. There he used the characters as themselves, much like Kerschner did with 'Empire'.
Final Analysis = = Cinematic Dud