Last night, Joss Whedon spoke at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Whedon fans get a bad rap online – obsessive, evangelical – so I first want to say that this Q&A was the most sane I’ve ever seen at the festival.
(According to my rigorous statistical math, this proves regular book nerds are much, much crazier than Firefly fans.)
Whedon spoke a little about taking on the Avengers movie for Marvel. He said that until Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, he wasn’t convinced you could do a true superhero film – but also that Hollywood’s now jumped far too quickly to films like Watchmen, Kick-Ass, and Dark Knight. He wanted to enjoy more examples of ‘straight’ superhero movies before we started deconstructing them, and tearing their poor heroes apart.
It made me remember how superhero films used to be a rarity. Franchises were kicked off by Donner’s 1978 Superman and Burton’s 1989 Batman, of course, but nothing like the avalanche of onscreen superheroes we have now. Some of the best comic book movies weren’t based on comics at all, just inspired by them: Raimi’s Darkman is one of my all-time favourite B-films.
Sometimes, though, there’s nothing to do but squint if you want movies featuring your favourite superheroes.
Like David Fincher’s Se7en. (Do I really have to type the number in the middle?) It’s secretly one of the best Batman movies ever made. It has the endless rain, portentous dialogue, villain with a ridiculous gimmick, and the hysterical masculine dramatics that good Gotham City stories require. There’s only one difference: in a true Batman story, Brad Pitt’s detective would soon return as a grim new villain, out for revenge.
It was about halfway through the Bourne trilogy that it hit me: an amnesiac, capable of great violence, tortured by that same capacity, struggling to uncover his past but soon realising he might not want to know? If only Matt Damon had less height, more hair, and pointy retractable claws, these would’ve been ideal Wolverine films.
I’ve always thought Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop perfectly captured the mix of arresting violence and blacker-than-black comedy that defines Judge Dredd. There’s a new Dredd movie coming, and they’ve promised to never take off his helmet. It sounds superficial, yes, but it’s a good start. Still, Dredd is such a strange character (so political, so funny, so British) it’s hard to believe even a well-meaning American-filmed version could do him justice.
And it might’ve taken Buffy the Vampire Slayer until recent issues of her new ‘Season Eight’ comic books to become faster than a speeding bullet, but she was never less than a great Spider-Man. She suffered through secret identity blues in exactly the same way, and her regular-life-versus-heroic-calling provided a perfect example of Uncle Ben’s “with great power comes great responsibility” curse.
Whedon said being offered Avengers was a thrill because he remembers reading the comics when he was eleven years old. Comic book influences have always been obvious in his writing. TV shows like Heroes would later take on the trappings of superhero stories while getting everything else about them horribly wrong, but Buffy showed the real meat of Marvel Comics.