I can’t for the life of me understand why Hellboy II: The Golden Army has got such glowing reviews. Nothing too unusual about the likes of Empire and Ain’t It Cool offering unstinting praise to a comic-based film (4 stars from Empire for Sin City? I mean, come on…Sin City?), no matter how average, but I was a bit surprised to read glowing reviews from The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw and from Time Out, normally bang to rights with every review.Seemed to me Guillermo del Toro fell straight into the Tim Burton trap of caring far more about the production design than the camerawork, pacing, editing etc. If you care too much about what’s on screen and too little about the tools you use to put it up there then you’ve basically got the cinematic equivalent of prog rock.
The saving grace was some of the interaction between characters – Hellboy and Abe, pissed and singing along to Barry Manilow was a nice touch – but too often this just seemed like the usual semi-ironic approach you get to superhero films. It seemed like any other director could have directed that film and not much would have been different – as though del Toro spent so much time designing the things in the scene that he forgot to design the scene itself, if you see what I mean. One of the things that’s so beguiling about the comic is the sense of design in every frame – sparse, gloomy and impeccably laid out. In this, every scene was chock full of bloody goblins, making it a bit like how the inside of Games Workshop must appear to twelve year-old boys. And there was too much CGI.
And too many goblins.
And Harry Knowles loves it, and he’s a fat tit.
3 comments:
hey man...completly agree...i am a HUGE Hellboy (and mignola) nut, but have been very underwhelmed by the screen adaptions...yes they are enjoyable brainless escapes, better than most cinema fare...but coming as a fan i miss the comics - but not in the purist sense, like im whining on about costume changes or character origins bullshit, but because the comics have such great stark design, such bold colours and most important...ATMOSPHERE. The comics conjure such vivid atmosphere its amazing - you could cut it with a knife...but the films just completly devoid of any feeling, tension or atmosphere. Hell even the Harry Potters films have great atmosphere...
The other thing is now everyone is proclaiming Del Toro as the motherfucking bees knees and so he is getting the gold pass on everything and whats he doing? making all the creatures from his designs, and im not feeling them...look at the comics (THE SOURCE) and the monsters are fantastic in design...and as monsters are an essential element of the Hellboy universe, it pisses me off to see such crap design with a hellboy seal on it.
Del Toro is good - but i dont get the hyper bole chucked at him...anyone remember Mimic? To me pans labryinth was OK but not life changing, and i still prefer Cronos, Devils Backbone and Blade 3 to everything else.....so im slightly nervous about the hobbit...with new shit original Del Toro designs :(
I'm in the middle of reading Watchmen, and even though it's the first graphic novel I've read it's clear to me that the framing, the look and even the 'editing' of each frame is extremely well considered.
I feel this presents the director of any comic to film adaptation with a problem : how does that director bring something new to the party when so much of the visuals are already set out? To be a great director requires great vision and a great ego. So if the director disregards too much of the original graphic novel in favour of their own style, are they doomed to making a sub-standard and indulgent piece of cinema? Similarly, I wonder if the director is too faithful to the original comic, is the film written off as a mere exercise in 'adaptation for adaptations sake'? Tough balance.
My pondering doesn't excuse any flaws in Hellboy 2, but I do think it takes a light and deft directorial hand (and ego) to really make a comic book adaptation truly magical on the screen. I shall wait to see how Watchmen translates to the screen.
Fair point, anonymous - though you may well find that Watchmen is constructed a lot better than many other graphic novels, except those that Alan Moore (our father who art in Northampton) has a hand in.
I think comics adaptations work best when using a long-established character like Batman or Spiderman, where the director can pick and choose from the mythology, adapt those elements that they want and ignore those they don't without causing too much of a stink. When you pick a specific work, like From Hell, then you're stuck with the same problems as with a novel adaptation of character, favourite bits, changing the story for brevity's sake etc, plus the problem of adapting the visual identity. Generally I think it's a pretty bad idea, with the odd exception like Persepolis.
There's an extra problem when you're dealing with Alan Moore, who goes to an enormous amount of trouble to build an entire world within his comics - economics, social problems and all. You can't portray that with some expensive set design and flashy camera movements. Anyway, I bet you a million trillion pounds the film of Watchmen will suck balls.
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