My Take Radio

The act of Simplifying Comic Book Movies and why I agree with it — From a Comic book lover

by Bryan on Jan.20, 2010, under Movies

How many times have you heard or read com­ments sim­i­lar to the fol­low­ing rants and raves?

“Hey, that sym­bi­otic ooze just fell from the sky and attached itself to Spider-Man’s motor­cy­cle, this is bull­shit! This is not how it hap­pened in the comics!!”

“Crim­son dynamo and Whiplash aren’t the same person!!”

“Johnny Blaze doesn’t even use the Penance stare, that’s Dan Ketch’s power!!”

“Wolverine’s back-story is noth­ing like this!!”

To those that make those com­ments, with all due respect and with great kind­ness, I sim­ply say , please read further.

The major­ity of peo­ple who bitch about sit­u­a­tions in movies like this don’t even read comics, and the ones who do read them, half of them don’t even have the facts right, so it’s usu­ally peo­ple talk­ing out of their asses con­cern­ing such things.

I have been a fan of comic books since I was a lit­tle kid. I would gather around with my bud­dies, we’d quiz each other with trivia, we’d read one another’s books, trade cards, and we pretty much kept abreast of all on goings in our comic book worlds. This has been the norm since the late 80’s, through­out the 90’s and up until now for me. I own more comics than I have space for in my 2 bed­room apart­ment , and I like to think that I have a wealth of knowl­edge of comics, par­tic­u­larly Mar­vel comics, and espe­cially con­cern­ing Spi­der Man, with scat­tered knowl­edge around the realm of all things comics in general.

The rea­son for my post is to be the fan boy that actu­ally takes the side of movie direc­tors as opposed to the mil­lions of the “other” fan­boys who do noth­ing but com­plain about any lit­tle deci­sion made by direc­tors to bring their favorite heroes to the big screen.

While I’m not here to insult or flame any­one I do feel that peo­ple have become com­pla­cent with just say­ing that a movie sucks because the direc­tors changed (or man­gled) the orig­i­nal source mate­r­ial around to suit Hollywood.

This is just my take on the whole bit. To start, let’s break down the facts here.

Let’s take, Spider-Man 3 for a good exam­ple. Not say­ing this movie was the best in the tril­ogy, in fact, it was the worst one, but look at how the sym­biote came into play, it lit­er­ally just splat­tered on the ground a few min­utes into the movie. No ori­gin, no back-story of any kind, noth­ing. Just a plop of goo from the heav­ens. This pissed off many a fan­boy, inter­net forums were set ablaze, peo­ple were out­raged, but not me. Not this comic reader who knows that the sym­biote orig­i­nated in the first Secret Wars dur­ing the 80’s (issue 8 exactly) and made its debut in the pages of Amaz­ing Spider-Man first in issue # 252. Know­ing this, I know that there was NO WAY IN HELL they could have intro­duced the sym­biote in a movie any other way.

Do fan­boys really think they would make a movie based on Secret Wars itself just to intro­duce the sym­biote in the Spider-Man movie fran­chise? Of course not, that would con­sist of numer­ous spin-offs and sequels of other heroes just to make it hap­pen, and Secret Wars wasn’t even all that great to begin with, let alone make a big bud­get movie out of it. An alter­nate course of action could have been to use the method used in the Spider-Man car­toon series, where astro­naut John Jameson’s space­craft enters Earth’s orbit with the Sym­biote attached to it. That would prob­a­bly have been bet­ter, but again, they’d have to cre­ate a whole sep­a­rate sub­plot just to intro­duce it, which would serve lit­tle pur­pose towards the over all ulti­mate goal of even brin­ing it to film — to make a black Spidey and to intro­duce Venom.

Do we really need the ori­gin of it? Is it really impor­tant to tell the story of a 2 hour movie, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that over 80 per­cent of the peo­ple watch­ing it have no clue how the sym­biote came to be anyway?

No.

You have to under­stand that sim­pli­fy­ing these films is the only way to even make them in the first place. There’s no way they can take 40+ years of comics to make 1 or 2 movies, it’s just a ridicu­lous thing to even think of. If they wanted to make it exactly like the books, assum­ing they’d use a hand­ful of books for each movie, we’d be watch­ing Spi­der man 200 some­thing by now. No way can a movie be exactly like a book, there’s just far too much detail to cover, and a book can go on indef­i­nitely when it comes to sto­ry­telling, whereas a movie can only go on for about 2 hours, 3 hours max.

Iron Man prob­a­bly did the best in this regard, they really didn’t sim­plify much, they actu­ally just updated the main story, though, please note that Iron Man’s story was less of a com­plex tale than Spiderman.

Here’s a syn­op­sis of his ori­gin and updated ver­sion in one: Guy gets attacked and cap­tured in –Insert any war torn for­eign coun­try here– , guy builds giant robot suit, guy upgrades said suit, guy fights evil.

Sim­ple, in any time set­ting, it would have worked, but other movies would require a lot more nec­es­sary tweaks.

In the sequel, they took two char­ac­ters, Whiplash and Crim­son Dynamo, and just merged them into one, and gave him a back-story where Vanko is related to both some­how. So basi­cally, in the begin­ning of the film, Mickey Rourke’s Ivan Vanko will be the far weaker Whiplash, then towards the end, he will have made mod­i­fi­ca­tions to his tech­nol­ogy and will become the ‘Russ­ian Iron Man” Crim­son Dynamo.

Effec­tive and no one should com­plain, since Whiplash alone is lame as a vil­lain, but using him as the foun­da­tion of a far more pow­er­ful vil­lain is a superb idea.

Ghost Rider’s direc­tor opted to take the orig­i­nal Ghost Rider from the 70’s, John Blaze and just give him all the pow­ers of the one we’re all famil­iar with, Danny Ketch.

Blaze was a more house­hold name by the gen­eral pub­lic, but the Ghost Rider most peo­ple read about as kids was in fact Danny Ketch. Blaze had ketch’s pow­ers such as the Penance stare and the spiked cos­tume, but retained all of his own too.

This was fine, while the movie was some­what bad, the ideas they used for Ghost rider were fine by me.

Xmen Ori­gins: Wolver­ine was prob­a­bly too much story to han­dle, so they kind of made a mess of it in terms of comic book comparisons.

In fact, they almost com­pletely dis­re­garded the main ori­gin story of the books, only to make it more of an ori­gin story of the films them­selves, allow­ing them to (albeit poorly) segue into Xmen 1, Wolver­ine 2, and Dead­pool. While it still made lit­tle sense, even mov­ing for­ward into the sub­se­quent films of this fran­chise (why wasn’t Sabre­tooth speak­ing in part 1, ESPECIALLY to Wolver­ine??, WTF was Gam­bit doing here?) they served their pur­pose, and sim­pli­fy­ing the story helped flesh out the film and allow for addi­tional comic sto­ry­line butcher­ing spin-offs of Xmen Characters.

Per­son­ally, I think it sucked what they did to this film, even in sim­pli­fi­ca­tion form, it didn’t con­nect well to ANYTHING, but I still under­stand the goal of the director.

As a comic fan, I always tell peo­ple who ask me if I liked it “if you’re a fan of the comics, it’s bad, if you’re a fan of the movies, it’s good”, because if you have no idea about Wolverine’s back-story, the movie is an enjoy­able pop­corn flick.

I won’t even get into “Wanted” which said ‘fuck you, comic book” and did what­ever the fuck it wanted. Great mini-series by the way, How­ever, pre­tend­ing it never existed as a comic book, it was a decent action flick and I know many may argue against that.

So to end this, I sim­ply want to say, when it comes to sim­pli­fy­ing the story of your favorite heroes, let it be, there’s not much else that can be done by direc­tors, and any fan who thinks log­i­cally knows this, there’s no way a movie will be exactly like the source mate­r­ial you know and love down to the let­ter, and now you know why, and you also know why I sup­port it, and even though it can be fuck­ing ugly, you should try to get on board and sup­port the really well done and good choices (Iron Man) but have fun flam­ing the bad and poorly trans­lated choices (Wolverine).

I have high hopes, that sooner or later we’ll have more films with great updating/simplifying going on like the Dark Knight and Iron Man and less of the ones that do it poorly like the Wolver­ine and Ghost Rider type.

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11 Comments for this entry

  • BH Slick
    January 20th, 2010 on 9:32 PM

    I hate to dump all over such an excel­lent post, but I utterly dis­agree with you. While it is absolutely cor­rect that the true sym­biote ori­gin could not have been done, there is plenty of source mate­r­ial for an alter­nate ori­gin. Also, it is very eas to tell it: do what was done in SM1 — tell it through imagery in the open­ing theme. You could do that with either the car­toon ori­gin or the USM ori­gin (which I prefer).

    In gen­eral, the “man­gling” of comic book sto­ry­lines pisses off the purist sim­ply because there is no rea­son for it. The mate­r­ial is there, it is read­ily acce­si­ble and it in most cases can eas­ily be worked into a film. Film­mak­ers choose to butcher it for what­ever reason.

    The three main XMen movies were ter­ri­ble — not even as X-movies, they were BAD MOVIES. Wolver­ine was a rather good MOVIE, but a pretty poor X-Movie. Iron Man was a decent flick with a crappy end­ing. Hulk was … let’s not touch that. The Incred­i­ble Hulk was very good, even though it altered the story for a more mod­ern audi­ence. The Bat­man flicks were very much accept­able, despite also alter­ing things. Trans­form­ers has no pos­si­ble excuse for the piss poor job it did in terms of sto­ry­telling and char­ac­ter rep­re­sen­ta­tion. 95% of it was just wrong.

    I am very grate­ful for the ones that come close, but most of them should go back to the draw­ing board and try again. I am going to be hope­ful for the new Spidey flicks — I loved the old ones and I would just hope that these can be even bet­ter.  (Quote)

    Reply
  • Bryan
    January 21st, 2010 on 1:18 PM

    So you want com­pa­nies to make a movie that is at least 12 hours long?
    Get outta here super blad­der guy.  (Quote)

    Reply
  • Handel
    January 23rd, 2010 on 10:34 AM

    I love how Bronx has to resort to insults when his the­ory is shot down.

    So let me gun it down some more.

    Trans­form­ers started with a three part minis­eries titled “More Than Meets The Eye!” By TV stan­dards, that meas it was roughly 66 min­utes long. If you count that there were open­ing and clos­ing cred­its on each ep, you can say it was maybe 62 min­utes long. Other than giv­ing their names, there was no human story ele­ment. Flesh that out and there are your other 30 min­utes for a 90 minute movie that sat­is­fies true fans of the fran­chise AND the peo­ple that give a crap about Shia LeBouf and Megan Fox.

    Gee, seems like I just pitched some­thing way shorter than 12 hours. You have failed, kind sir. Good day.  (Quote)

    Reply
  • Bryan
    January 25th, 2010 on 9:49 AM

    Insults?
    20 hour movie + Super Blad­der guy?
    Have we gone a wee bit sen­si­tive?
    Dude, any­one can tell you, Insults, that’s all you baby.
    All I do is laugh at it when you do.
    But what­ever sweet cheeks.

    My the­ory is solid, plus trans­form­ers is based on a line of toys, so with that in mind, it can go any­way it wants, just like when kids play with such toys.
    This fact pretty much allows me to point and laugh at you already, but, I’m not done my friend.

    Let’s take another road.
    Safely assum­ing that over 70 per­cent of the peo­ple who saw the films were CHILDREN (most of them born after the year 2000) actu­ally even saw the TV show or even give a crap about the show or it’s sub­ject mat­ter, or even read the comics, or even know who Starscream is, does it really mat­ter?
    How many of the movie­go­ers were ‘hard­core” trans­form­ers fans?
    I’m will­ing to bet a some­where among that 20–30 per­cent left­over after the kid­dies.
    The film isn’t try­ing to be the car­toon, it’s try­ing to be the movie which is try­ing to be it’s own thing.

    And another thing, I’ve been read­ing comics for­ever, and I couldn’t tell you more than 1 per­son that I know(I’m assum­ing you) who even reads trans­form­ers comics.
    And this is going back to the 80’s.
    Even my older brother didn’t read the books, and he had a rag­ing hard on for any­thing with a spark, so if we were bas­ing this off of comic books (which is what this entire post is about by the way, not toys, nice try though) then even that wouldn’t mat­ter, because no one knows what most of those are about anyway.

    In any case, assum­ing peo­ple were plow­ing through stacks of trasnform­ers comic books, You go stand out in front of Mar­vel or DC, or any other pub­li­ca­tion, and stand there with your pitch­fork and torch in hand telling them you want your movies to be exactly trans­lated from the comics, so every­one who’s ever read them can know exactly what will hap­pen, so every movie can be ridicu­lously long, and so every movie writer in the indus­try can be fired since screen­plays will be use­less, all we’d need to do is pick up a comic book, a cam­era and direct a film.
    It’s that simple.

    Have fun with that, I’ll be at the the­ater watch­ing Iron Man 2 and not com­plaing­ing about anything.

    For the record, I enjoyed the trans­form­ers movies, They were ter­ri­bly cheesy and goofy, but fun.  (Quote)

    Reply
  • Handel
    January 28th, 2010 on 8:35 AM

    Con­tin­ued fail.
    You wrote a whole dia­tribe and did not even touch on what I said which makes me think you did not read past the first two lines. The car­toon came out before the toy, albeit only slightly and I showed you a sim­ple for­mula to make a movie that sat­is­fys both those kids you men­tioned and hard­core purists and it can be applied to any such comic or cartoon-based movie: Use the basics of a sin­gle story arc and add a lit­tle to make it mod­ern — done.

    FYI, Michael Bay’s bull­shit WAS based off of the car­toon; the sim­ple fact that Peter Cullen was Opti­mus Prime and Frank Welker was Sound­wave proves that he WAS look­ing to draw that purist audi­ence along with new fans.  (Quote)

    Reply
  • Bryan
    January 28th, 2010 on 4:54 PM

    I’m sorry mr han­del, I wasn’t lis­ten­ing, I was too busy look­ing at this:

    “The Trans­form­ers (retroac­tively called Gen­er­a­tion One or G1) started as a joint ven­ture between two com­pa­nies: Has­bro of Amer­ica and Takara of Japan. After an idea to rebrand and sell Takara’s Dia­clone and Microchange robot toys as a whole new line with a new con­cept behind it, Has­bro unknow­ingly would wind up cre­at­ing what would be one of its longest-running franchises. ”

    Oh snap, did I just pull that FAIL outta my ass?
    Oh wait, there’s more:

    http://transformers.wikia.com/wiki/Transformers_timeline

    If you look at this time­line, you can see that the orig­i­na­tion of the trans­form­ers began approx­i­mately 2 years before it debuted in the USA.
    Not only that, but the actual toys came out sev­eral months before the toon launched:

    Feb­ru­ary — Has­bro Bradley unveils their new Trans­form­ers toy­line at Toy Fair.
    March — Mar­vel Age #17 announces the April debut of the Trans­form­ers comic book.
    Spring — The first ani­mated com­mer­cial adver­tis­ing the Mar­vel comics airs on US TV.

    So tech­ni­cally, the comic is based on the toys, the movie, and the toon are based on the toys as well, all of them are based on the toys.

    And the fact that some­one uses the car­toon voice actors, doesn’t mean they’re bas­ing it on the same source mate­r­ial where the actors are from, as we’ve seen in Bat­man Arkham Asy­lum.
    So my friend, our bat­tle was fierce, but ulti­mately, you FAIL.

    And you should know better….transformers aren’t even my thing……

    I still love you though, you big bald bas­tard.  (Quote)

    Reply
  • Handel
    January 28th, 2010 on 11:13 PM

    “And the fact that some­one uses the car­toon voice actors, doesn’t mean they’re bas­ing it on the same source material”

    Most retarded thing you have ever said. There was no other rea­son to make the announce­ment at COMIC-CON, a room full o’ nerds that Peter Cullen would reprise his role as Opti­mus Prime.

    And I am not even going to argue any of that crap with you because you still can­not admit that I pre­sented a sim­ple for­mula to make a hit movie that sat­is­fies old fans and draw in new ones. Watch those first three episodes of the series. Not count­ing Dev­as­ta­tor, they had more action, more robots and more TRANSFORMING than both movies put together. Only part that stands up is the Dev­as­ta­tor fight and that was a pile of shit.  (Quote)

    Reply
  • Bryan
    January 29th, 2010 on 12:09 PM

    I facepalmed so hard I broke a hole through the wall behind my desk.

    Peter Cullen doing the voice of a char­ac­ter he’s always done does not mean that Michael Bay chose to use the same mate­ri­als of the car­toon, it just proves that Peter Cullen was in need of a check.
    Noth­ing more.
    Now I’m not say­ing bay did or didn’t base it on that, It’s just based on what you’re saying.

    And as for your for­mula, accord­ing to your logic, that’s what Bay did, and you still hated the movie.
    He took famil­iar char­tac­ters such as Mega­tron, bum­ble bee, jazz, etc , he took famil­iar voices, cullen, Welker, etc , he updated and upgraded the old story (with con­tro­ver­sial results, but still), and you hated the shit out of it.
    Same goes for Spi­der man, iron man, etc, you hated or dis­liked, all of them, no?

    So based on your own logic, you don’t even agree with your­self, but please, cor­rect me if I’m wrong.  (Quote)

    Reply
  • Handel
    January 29th, 2010 on 12:31 PM

    My for­mula is not what Bay did. You don’t even read what I said. You’re just get­ting shits and gig­gles because your thread is pop­u­lar.  (Quote)

    Reply
  • Bryan
    January 29th, 2010 on 1:50 PM

    I think we just have two stub­born jack­asses who won’t give in here.  (Quote)

    Reply
  • Handel
    January 31st, 2010 on 12:50 PM

    we should eat grandma pizza and hug about it.  (Quote)

    Reply

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