The good news: the movie’s very enjoyable. The concept used to introduce brothers Gary and Walter – one human, one muppet – is a clever one; the songs are mostly great; Jason Segel’s excitement at being surrounded by these puppets is palpable. I laughed, I cried. And yet…

The bad news: the voices are wrong. For the first hour of the movie I cringed every time Fozzie or Piggy spoke. It’s like seeing your favourite band play but hearing a cover song boom out of the speakers. It made me feel a little bit like I was going mad.

This isn’t the first time. When Jim Henson died, and Kermit’s voice changed forever, I remember thinking that maybe the character should’ve been retired. But that’s a selfish thought – why shouldn’t new generations enjoy Kermit, just to spare my feelings? New voices won’t matter to the kids who see the film. That’s how it should be.

It’s harder to take in The Muppets because Frank Oz – the man who gave life to Fozzie and Piggy – is still alive. The fact that Oz was unhappy with the script and worried it didn’t “respect the characters” did affect my viewing experience. Couldn’t they find some way to allay his concerns and get him on board?

It doesn’t always serve art to give creators the final say over their creations. Everyone alive agrees the Star Wars universe would be much improved if someone had found a way to ignore George Lucas’ whims. Everyone except Lucas, anyway.

It comes down to this: what is a muppet? Is it a character that should stay an extension of its creator or creators? Or is a muppet a Robin Hood or a Sherlock Holmes or a Batman, kept alive by dozens and dozens of different interpretations by artists good and bad?

(Or, as Homer Simpson once said, a muppet might be “not quite a mop and it’s not quite a puppet… but man! So to answer your question, I don’t know.”)

My favourite new Muppet story isn’t the film. It’s the muppet comic book by Roger Langridge from a few years ago. They mimic the format of the 1970s Muppet Show, keeping its anarchic humour while managing some beautiful character moments. His muppets are pencil-and-ink abstractions of already abstracted foam-and-felt, but they’re absolutely alive.

Ignore the funk revelations of the decade-old Muppets in Space movie. Langridge provides the definitive answer to Gonzo the Great’s true identity, completing an emotional journey that began in 1979’s The Muppet Movie as he sang ‘I’m Going To Go Back There Someday’.

Scooter asks Gonzo: “Tell me… please… what the heck are you??”

And Gonzo replies: “Oh, Scooter. I thought you knew. I’m an artist.”

Buzzfeed summed it up like this: “So this is Herbert Chavez, who looks normal and not at all creepy. Strike that. Reverse it.” (Bizarro would be proud.) Andy Khouri, much more sympathetically, described it as an “unsettling quest” symptomatic of Body Dysmorphic Disorder. “It is of course within this man’s rights to alter his body in any way he sees fit,” he writes, “but it’s not hard to imagine the Man of Steel disapproving of Chavez’s actions.”

Ignoring empathy for a moment – sorry, Superman – this makes me think about Superman’s face. All the faces of comic book superheroes look wildly different depending on which artist happens to be drawing them. And I asked last year if we were willing to accept the ever-changing facial features of superheroes “because we instinctually think they’re only different artistic interpretations of the one, concrete, real-world face? A ‘secret identity’ that we’ll never actually get to see?”

But Superman isn’t a human being with a human face, caricatured onto the comic book page. The page is where he was born. Pencil and ink are his origin story; his planet Krypton. So what, in essence, does this Superman look like? He has a square jaw. A cleft chin. A spit-curl. Dark hair, white skin. That’s about it. Everything else can change on whim.

I’ve always wondered why Hollywood’s obsession with plastic surgery is only ever used to look young. One day, an actor will go under the knife to give themselves new emotive abilities: anime-sized eyes for augmented empathy, or expanded tear ducts to better gush during tragic third acts…

Writer Peter Milligan and artist Duncan Fegredo explored this idea in their fantastic mid-90s horror comic Face. It’s the story of David, a plastic surgeon who is summoned to perform surgery on an aged, reclusive artist named Andrew Sphinx. But Sphinx, who was a personal friend of Picasso, wants something different from the surgery. Something a little more… cubist.

If someone wants to look like Christopher Reeve or Dean Cain or Brandon Routh – sure, that’s one thing. Truly resembling the comic book Superman, though, is something else. You’d need to make your nose into two quick strokes, like an upside down seven, and abstract your eyes into featureless circles attached to the eyebrows above.

Otherwise, like Andrew Sphinx says to his surgeon: “You’re still stuck in classical realism, and you’re not even aware of it.”

“They’re talking cars, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And people watch them race?”

“The spectators are cars, too.”

“What about, like, the mechanics?”

“They’re also cars.”

“But what about…”

“THEY’RE ALL CARS! ALL CARS!”

Where do these cars come from? Are they built, or are they birthed? I’m not the first to struggle with a universe entirely populated with sentient cars. (Okay – and some trains, boats, and helicopters too.) I found this hypothetical cutaway image of Lightning McQueen, guessing at the biology that could be sitting, squelching, inside his metal frame.

I find that to be the more comforting alternative, frankly. When I was visited by the Thirsty Mayor about halfway through the frenetic Cars 2, my vague suspicion of the franchise snapped into focus.

You see, Lightning McQueen is a slick racing car, without even headlights to spoil his smooth lines. But what about Mater, his dim-witted tow truck best friend? Unlike McQueen, Mater clearly has doors.

Doors.

They never seem to open, but they’re there. Are they vestigial remnants of a time before these cars came to life? Before their engines erupted with teeth and gums and flopping tongues? Perhaps there was even a moment of truce – a time when these cars could think and talk and dream, but were still happy to let their drivers inside.

Or maybe it happened in an instant. A signal was broadcast from aerial to aerial. The doors locked. The side windows fogged to grey. The windshields eclipsed with enormous cartoon eyes. From that point forward all cars would drive themselves, and the human skeletons still belted into their seats swallowed down like bad memories.

TWILIGHT ZONE SEASON ONE

Creator: Rod Serling

Starring: Too many to name

Country: USA

Commentary tracks and deleted scenes seemed so entrancing when DVDs first appeared, huh? Man, the novelty wore off fast. Occasionally, though, pop culture archaeologists dig up something that makes it all worthwhile. The new Twilight Zone set, collecting the first season from 1959, is a time capsule: commentaries, lectures, old sponsor advertising, and creator Rod Serling’s original pitch to the TV networks. He sells his show like a pre-Mad Men Don Draper.

Unfortunately, those extras are only on the fancy blu-ray collection, but show itself is available on DVD. And it’s more than just a time capsule. It still feels alive today. Watching it will make you embarrassed for a lot of the TV we’ve made since.

The Twilight Zone took the burbling anxieties of the time – alienation, nostalgia, war – and turned them into 20-minute nightmares, week after week, aided by some of the best science fiction writers of the day. They created little morality plays with limited budgets, gorgeous black and white photography, and narration that sounds like poetry.

Other reviews this month: The Adjustment Bureau and Never Let Me Go in cinemas; the probably-better-than-the-original Let Me In on DVD.

Issue #48 on sale now.

Why do these ‘heroes’ seem more interested in press coverage than helping those in need? What happened to following a good deed with a quick, humble disappearance? Don’t these guys remember the theme song to the old Spider-Man TV show? “Action is his reward”!

I’ve written before about the one thing Superman – the perfect, original superhero – says he cannot do. He laments that he can’t cross into our world, our reality, to save the day when we need him most. And if these men (yeah, pretty much just men) are the best we can do when it comes to real life superheroes, we’re doomed if we’re attacked by anything worse than an evil costume party.

In a rare burst of optimism, here are three examples I’ve found to prove Superman wrong about his limited abilities in the real world.

You might remember a story from last year about a family, facing foreclosure, who were packing up their belongings when they found a copy of Action Comics #1 in their basement. That happens to be the first appearance of Superman from 1938, and it’s worth a frightening amount of money. Here Superman was, 70-something years later, appearing again to save the day.

New York suffered an infamous blackout in 1977: 3,400 arrested, 558 cops injured, 851 fires, and $1 billion in damage. Those statistics come from the New York Daily News – the newspaper that managed to go to print during the blackout. How? Because Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie was shooting its Daily Planet scenes in the building, and the newspaper borrowed the film crew’s generators. “The newsroom was bathed in generator-powered klieg lights,” as the New York Times described it, “which made it more difficult than usual to distinguish between fantasy and reality.”

(Like I’ve mentioned earlier: it’s not just that Clark Kent happens to be a reporter. It’s that Superman is “the mighty newspaper”.)

One more? In Joe Kubert’s award-winning graphic memoir Fax from Sarajevo, he mentions the cars that served as volunteer ambulances during the Serbian siege. They needed to carry the critically wounded through sniper-filled streets of Sarajevo to a makeshift hospital, not far away, but far too far. The inside of the cars were lined with comic books – because “two or three copies can stop a bullet or a bomb splinter.”

I don’t know the details of that family’s near-foreclosure; maybe it was too perfect a story to fact check too thoroughly. And maybe getting a newspaper out during a crisis isn’t exactly a miracle on par with flying around the earth so fast that time turns backwards.

Look closely, though, and you can see that Kubert’s drawn Superman on the covers of the comic books that served as ambulance armour. I hope the Man of Steel stopped a sniper’s bullet by letting it burrow deep into his paper chest.

Yes, TV Superman George Reeves was found dead by gunshot in 1959, whether from suicide or murder. And okay, fine, movie Superman Christopher Reeve was paralysed from the neck down after being thrown from a horse in 1995. But a curse? In his book Our Hero: Superman on Earth, Tom De Haven puts it like this:

For terrifying examples of the Curse of Superman, though, that’s about it. A lot of different actors have played the character over the past seventy-plus years, including Bud Collyer, who played him more often and longer than anyone, on radio and several different animated cartoon series, and he did just fine, becoming a famously affable network game-show host, died at a ripe old age.

There is no Batman Curse, either, no matter what the Daily Mail might’ve said during the filming of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight – even though many happily implied it was his role as the psychotic Joker that resulted in Heath Ledger’s death.

Cue ambiguous quote from an earlier Joker, Jack Nicholson: “I warned him.”

And now we have the ongoing parade of accidents in Broadway’s Spider-Man musical, awkwardly titled Turn Off the Dark. One performer was rushed to hospital after a thirty foot fall; the lead actress portraying the villain quit with the show still in previews; and other Broadway actors have made online statements like “DOES SOMEONE HAVE TO DIE?” Of course, there is no Spider-Man Curse. It’s ridiculous.

And yet.

And yet I can’t stop thinking of these accidents as modern echoes of ancient stories; myths of mortals impersonating gods and facing tragic consequences.

In comic books, ordinary mortals embodying superheroic abilities often ends badly. Taking the illegal, power-granting drug Mutant Growth Hormone can make your heart explode. In the collected manga Batman: Child of Dreams, ordinary people are transformed into Batman’s greatest foes like the Joker and the Penguin, but they can’t handle the strain. They burn out from the inside, weeping, physical falling to pieces. The “basic elevator pitch” of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents? “You get kickass superpowers for 365 days, and then you die.”

When super-team The Authority crashed into our reality – in Grant Morrison and Gene Ha’s short-lived, two-issue run of 2007 – the heroes were shocked to find that no one here had powers. What’s worse was they worried just being here would be too much for our fragile earth. As their team shaman explained: “Even in our weakened state, we’re still too strong for this place. We may as well be monsters, trampling over the laws of nature until they break.”

We can wear the costumes, and strike the poses, and say the lines. We can hope our CGI doppelgangers do most of the spectacular stuntwork for us and that we aren’t left, terrified, tangled high over the orchestra pit. There is no Superhero Curse.

But what if Spider-Man’s skill, Superman’s strength, or the Joker’s psychosis are too much, too big, to be safely captured in mortal bodies and brains? What if comic book characters are described as ‘larger than life’ for a reason?

That’s Mark Ruffalo on playing The Hulk. He’ll be the third actor to embody the character – or, more accurately, the Hulk’s puny alter ego Bruce Banner – in just three films. First there was Eric Bana in Ang Lee’s misunderstood masterpiece Hulk in 2003. (Yes. You heard me. “Masterpiece”.)

Bana was replaced five years later by Edward Norton in The Incredible Hulk, a fairly terrible film I once reviewed as resembling “a panto acted out by action figures”.

Now, in Joss Whedon’s upcoming Avengers movie, Mark Ruffalo will step into the role. He’s a great choice, I think, but that’s not really the point. Some fans are annoyed – there are even online petitions demanding Norton return to the role.

No one seems to be questioning Ruffalo’s acting. The objection is simply to changing an actor mid-franchise. (Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to apply to supporting casts. Poor Katie Holmes was replaced between Nolan’s Batman Begins and Dark Knight and no one seemed to mind.)

It comes down to this: Bruce Banner should look the same in each movie, right?

Frankly, I’m not sure why.

It expects a visual continuity that comic books don’t possess. Look at these random examples, above and below. Does Kelly Jones’ Bruce Wayne really look anything like Denys Cowan’s Bruce Wayne? We might feel a discontinuity if the art shifts mid-comic, but radically different styles sit quite closely in other issues, other series, and it goes unnoticed.

The rules do shift once human actors embody these characters. I’ve written before about what celebrity logic does to these heroic alter egos. It makes the secret identity as famous as the costumed one, and results in heroes whipping off their masks at the slightest provocation.

Nevertheless, I think Ruffalo is right. The Hulk is Hamlet – or, at least, he should be.

Masks, costumes, and an obsession with alternate identities mean that if any screen characters can be played by multiple actors, it’s these superheroes. It’s not like replacing Michael J. Fox between Back To The Future sequels.

And just like I’d prefer more radical, auteuristic movie adaptations – Burton’s Batman, Lee’s Hulk, whatever – instead of a generic ‘house style’, I’m happy to see different actors coming to these roles. The many faces of multiple actors don’t make the heroes’ interchangeable. They make them less human, and more mythic.

A weird question for you: are comic readers willing to accept shifting facial features because we instinctually think they’re only different artistic interpretations of the one, concrete, real-world face? A ‘secret identity’ that we’ll never actually get to see?

Coppélia (Leanne Stojmenov) and Dr. Coppelius (Damien Welch). Photography by Branco Gaica.

Mostly, I focused on the ballet’s villain, Doctor Coppelius. He’s depicted as a sad and lonely inventor, surrounded by his odd mechanical creations – some half-finished, some almost human. In the original horror story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, though, he’s an alchemist suspected to be ‘The Sandman’, and is much more monstrous. (Like stealing-childrens’-eyes more monstrous.)

Yet he’s not the most horrific thing in the story. That role belongs to his beautiful, artificial faux-daughter, Coppélia. In the ballet’s programme, I write:

“The existence of a lifelike doll in Hoffmann’s original tale is not a charming curiosity. After the truth of his creation is revealed, Hoffmann describes lovers forcing one another to sing and dance off-key and out of time, just to prove they are human. Otherwise how can they be sure?”

Popular culture has provided us with more supposedly scientific ways to test if someone’s human, like the Voight-Kampff machine made famous by Blade Runner. The movie’s production designer described it like this: “Basically it was a lie-detector machine. The lie is, I am not a replicant.”

In fact, as I saw the frail Doctor Coppelius appear on stage, I was reminded of J. F. Sebastian, Blade Runner’s old inventor, living alone except for his toys. The nursery rhyme his toys sing to him – “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig” – still plays in my head with alarming regularity.

Blade Runner – and a gazillion other science fiction stories too, of course – are designed to make us wonder if we’re human after all. How can we really tell? Singing out of tune and moving off the beat? Close analysis of our pupil dilation at embarrassing questions? Maybe it’s just as the theme song ‘Coppélia’s Coffin’ from the anime series Noir says:

“People are dolls tired from dancing / Sheep on the altar / The mechanical dreams / Where are they headed?”

We’re all just dolls, tired from dancing. Coppélia tries to dismiss these question with the light-hearted farce and energetic dancing at its beginning and end – but they remain bubbling under the surface of the stage while we’re in Doctor Coppelius’ lair.

An odd postscript: Coppélia’s choreographer, Arthur Saint-Leon, isn’t only famous for his ballets; he also invented an early form of notation to record these all-important steps. Ironically, he failed to record his work on Coppélia, and it only survived as its popularity kept it in almost constant circulation – even though it was initially interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war. What if it hadn’t been so lucky?

And another: in 2007, Japanese scientists offered a strange solution: a human-sized robot that could mimic the steps of a human dancer. In this way, the specific movements of folk dances could be perfectly captured and replayed, even after its original performers were long dead. “My impression is that there would still be a human element lacking,” one English folk dancer is quoted as saying. “The robot would still look, for the want of a better word, robotic.”

We keep telling ourselves that – but I can’t help feeling like it’s just modernity’s equivalent of whistling past a graveyard.

I had a theory that Mark Millar’s stories would benefit enormously from quick edits and pop music. That cinema would maybe boost the good qualities of his writing (great concepts, snappy one-liners, black comedy) and cover some of its flaws (the sometimes shoddy execution of those concepts, or the way he can seem to get bored halfway through his own stories).

My review? Well, you might have heard that Kick-Ass is the story of what happens when a powerless nobody decides to become a superhero in the real world. Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of Kick-Ass, however, isn’t. It’s actually about what happens when a powerless nobody decides to become a superhero… and then meets some real superheroes already out there.

The movie’s definitely a success – certainly more than Vaughn’s only fitfully charming version of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. The action scenes are smart and inventive, especially considering the film’s semi-limited budget; they recreate the sense of John Romita Jr.’s art without being slavishly faithful to it like Zack Snyder’s Watchmen worship. Bursts of violence wrung at least three bursts of spontaneous applause from my audience.

Having actual humans step into these roles gives them new life, too. Both Aaron Johnson’s Kick-Ass and Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s Red Mist are better characters than they are on the page, and a hilarious Nicolas Cage as Big Daddy proves – yet again – that he’s developing a new alien form of acting that might only be properly appreciated by future generations.

The movie, though, is entirely stolen by Chloe Moretz as the tween assassin Hit Girl – and that’s part of the problem. Mortez is perfect in the role, oozing charisma, and I can see her becoming a cult figure for young girls everywhere. I’m not the only one, either. Read the half-excited, half-concerned “Hit Girl Could Be Your New Favorite Tween”.

Her relationship with her Big Daddy is the best part of the film that, and one of the only parts that doesn’t feel like empty calories. I’m a sucker for proud parents in fiction, and Big Daddy just seems so damn giddy to watch her in action; their bond has the best parts of Father Knows Best and Lone Wolf and Cub. Thankfully, the movie ditches Millar’s more painful Republican-versus-Democrat zingers, too.

But in order to make Kick-Ass an over-the-top action movie, Vaughn makes Hit Girl a pint-size John Woo-style killer. She ends up undercutting the supposed point of Millar’s comic. Millar said that the story originally began with Big Daddy and Hit Girl, and Kick-Ass was later added to reframe it into something more human, more real. You can tell. Kick-Ass himself never suddenly develops super-ninja-moves (as tempting as that must’ve been for this big screen version) but Big Daddy and Hit Girl would be entirely comfortable in the Marvel Universe alongside Elektra, Hawkeye, and whoever else suits the movie’s tagline: “I can’t fly. But I can kick your ass.”

Kick-Ass’ high-school-loser realism and Hit Girl’s tween-ninja antics and angst never quite mesh together. It’s sometimes more like two movies sitting together side-by-side and occasionally intersecting, or, better still, two comic books that periodically cross over to boost sales. The movie’s hyped ‘realism’ is just an opening hook, not a high concept.

With my experiment in not reading the source material for once finally over, I came home from the screening and read them in a single sitting. I discovered that there’s a twist to Big Daddy’s character in the comics that didn’t make it into the film. It might’ve singlehanded short-circuited this logic glitch, and it’s a real shame the Kick-Ass movie decided not to keep it.

And you know what? The pop music did help. Everything’s better with The Banana Splits.

So despite a predictable childhood obsession with James Cameron’s Aliens and Terminator 2, I approached Avatar with a healthy dose of skepticism. With its maybe $300 million budget – and the swirling rumours of much, much more – I was afraid that no matter how good a film it might be, I’d be stuck staring at the price tag dangling invisibly from the corner of the screen and wondering if it was worth it.

But Avatar successfully stopped me thinking about its dollar signs. It’s a massive 160 minutes long and I didn’t once look at my watch. Yes, it trades in clichés – ‘naive scientists’, ‘evil corporations’, ‘noble savages at one with nature’, and (perhaps unfortunately) ‘white man saves the day’. Some are already complaining that the story’s too simple. Well, ‘complicated’ doesn’t equal ‘good’ – Matrix sequels anyone? – and Cameron’s simple story is masterfully told.

It’s far too deliberately paced for action fans, and barely a sci-fi at all. Cameron has little interest in exploring any ideas behind the projecting-human-minds-into-alien-bodies technology that provides the film’s title. It’s a deeply earnest and old-fashioned adventure story. If anything, Avatar is a conceptual, mirror-world sequel to his Aliens from 1986. Imagine if one of Aliens’ marines had a change of heart and decided to fight alongside the creatures with acid for blood. It even has a new Paul Reiseresque corporate stooge!

And here’s the ultimate compliment for Avatar’s special effects: they’re so good that I don’t feel much of a need to talk about them. Yes, the world of Pandora and its giant blue inhabitants is visually overwhelming at first. Too busy, too day-glow, too outdoor rave. Once you adjust, Avatar is completely immersive. The Uncanny Valley that turned films like The Polar Express into horrific parades of undead fleshbots is nowhere to be seen – thanks to being artfully subsumed into alien facial features.

I’m nervous about saying it in case Avatar completely falls apart on a second viewing, but there were brief flashes where I felt like a kid watching Star Wars for the first time.

All Avatar‘s above pleasures, however, depend on your ability to process this pair of facts: it’s about a noble indigenous population fighting corporate greed and American imperialism in defence of their world’s vibrant ecosystem… that also happens to be the most expensive film ever made.

As Alanis Morisette might say: that’s the black fly in your chardonnay.

Does the production of a film affect your enjoyment of it? Read this unmissable New Yorker piece about Cameron’s creative process on the set of Avatar, and wonder if we should dismiss all art made with money that could have been better spent. I think it’s only human to hear an obscene Hollywood budget like this and have a flicker of thought about starving third world children – but if you follow this logical path, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify the cost of any art at all.

Is the disjunction between Avatar’s moral message and its decadent production an unforgiveable hypocrisy? Or is the fact that Cameron convinced his backers to throw hundreds of millions at a film that’s so overtly anti-corporate and anti-America the ultimate act of insider subversion? Does it matter?

If it sounds like I’m making excuses, I don’t mean to be. It’s perfectly reasonable to think the amount of money spent of Avatar is repulsive, and avoid it for that reason alone. It’s to James Cameron’s credit, though, that I was so completely taken in by the movie that these questions didn’t even occur to me until after the credited rolled – and after the hideous Titanic-style ballad began.