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.
we should eat grandma pizza and hug about it.
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