He’s just defended Metropolis, and the world, from General Zod and his army, but Metropolis has been ravaged in the process, at the cost of thousands of lives. In those scenes, we watch a society (American society, in particular) grapple with the realities, and surrealities, of this newly arrived alien called Superman. Like in Watchmen’s beginning moments, this new film-as-brand-extension has a stretch, arriving somewhere in the middle this time, that is captivating, persuasive, resonant. Zack Snyder’s new superhero film, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, seems, unfortunately, destined for the same fate. Of course, then the rest of the movie happens and things get messy, Watchmen clunking down the well of cultural memory and disappearing into the dark. It’s a downright moving sequence, and makes one of the most convincing cases for translating superhero comics into film that I’ve yet seen. It’s a brilliant bit of world-establishing, and a tingling evocation of something so many comic books capture, and yet so few of the movies based on them do: a true sense of how these icons-vessels of our squarest hopes and most persistent cultural paranoias-have been mapped onto the American psyche, both reflecting and absorbing us. In the opening credits of Zack Snyder’s dour superhero movie Watchmen, there’s a montage showing a generation of superheroes as they travel through decades of American history, participating-triumphantly, tragically-in major events and riding undulating waves of public opinion.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |