This was great. An eight-part series based on a comic book that I’d never even heard of written by Garth Ennis, the same guy behind Preacher (a comic book which I read several years ago via the graphic novel reprints, and which was also turned into a tv series on Amazon). The Boys comic book was published between 20o6 and 2012, so as far as comic geeks are concerned, its ancient history already, but it’s interesting to note its ‘age’ because it possibly informs its approach. Basically it’s a superhero book that is consciously the opposite of all the standard comic book tropes of traditional Marvel/DC superheroes. It takes the premise of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, in postulating that superheroes are real and living in our real world, and what they and the world would be like- basically, what would the world be like if Superman was real? In Watchmen, Superman is Dr Manhattan, a scientist of the Cold War transformed into a being with Godlike powers, who grows increasingly withdrawn and distant from human affairs that unravel in his wake during the cold-war 1980s. In The Boys, Superman is Highlander, a complete and utter self-centered dangerous asshole who feels he is above the law- possibly above any authority in the world. Indeed, the superheroes here are as unaccountable as real-life celebrities appear to be in our world, using their power and wealth to manipulate the media in their favour (no, I don’t like celebrity culture).
Basically, in The Boys all the superheroes have gone Corporate, they are celebrities whose brands are used to sell anything from beers to cereals, and whose popularity and powers have generally corrupted them so that they become reckless and self-centered and endanger the safety of the public and the world at large. The title of both comic and tv show refers to “The Boys”, a clandestine group of ordinary people who are at odds with the superheroes, intent on breaking through the lies and abuse of their powers, uncovering the truth about them, revealing their wrongs and hunting them down… and blowing them up if necessary (or putting a power drill to the test).
Even for someone like me who loves the Watchmen graphic novel and movie (and hopefully the HBO spin-off series incoming this Autumn), The Boys is like a breath of fresh air. It deliberately sets out to undermine the traditions of the genre, full of gratuitous violence, sex and swearing and sending up most every standard trope that is celebrated in most any Marvel or DC superhero movie. We like to imagine that most anyone given superpowers would be like Captain America or Spider Man or Ant Man, you know, basically good and decent and set on ‘doing the right thing’ but the truth is, people aren’t inherently noble, are not generally incorruptible- people are usually greedy and selfish and self-centered, and most people given super powers would as likely be jerks abusing those powers as they would becoming noble, selfless heroes.
These guys lie and kill with wild abandon, and with no supervillains to keep them in check or validate their existence they run amok abusing their powers/position and manipulate public opinion through corporate videos and events. We can recognise the manipulation of social media and celebrity culture and it all looks pretty realistic.
The Boys benefits from coming out of nowhere, I think, as it constantly surprises. I gather many things are changed from the original comic book (some characters have changed sex and race, for instance) but part of the fun remains spotting the representations of familiar superheroes like Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and Aquaman, and how The Boys variants are shown as horrible jerks and twisted shadows of the DC counterparts. It can run fast and loose and isn’t at all weighed down by, say, seventy years of comics mythology that weighs down the traditional superhero characters- and as it deliberately intends to shock and surprise it just gets wilder and funnier and, yes, quite disturbing at times. The wanton gory human collateral of the superheroics is a brutal reminder of what the traditional genre movies rather forget- you cannot destroy skyscrapers or cities etc without killing dozens or hundreds of regular innocents, and watching HIghlander gorily cut apart dozens of ‘terrorists’ because they are not American, or leave a plane of civilians to die because he messed up the rescue, can be very sobering indeed. He could be a hero like Superman, but instead he’s an asshole, because he’s only human, afterall. And the Boys need to take him down.
Yeah, great stuff, and very well done. Its gory and violent and funny and quite a surreal commentary on the celebrity-obsessed, social media culture we are living in. The cast and the production design and scripts are terrific and I really can’t fault it at all. I look forward to season two next year.
Hey, August- a month of holidays and sun and.. well, no holiday for me and not really that much sun. How else to explain somehow getting through this lot when I should have been out having a good time getting on the beach etc?
Overlord should be a guilty pleasure, a pulpish, b-movie blast. It reminded me a great deal of Planet Terror, a film I really do consider a guilty pleasure. It has that same kind of madly self-indulgent, OTT approach, but Overlord certainly isn’t anywhere near as bold as Planet Terror was. Instead of grindhouse this film is way, way more mainstream, and yeah, plays things surprisingly (considering its as gory and violent as it is) safe. I find myself thinking that had Overlord been a Quentin Tarantino flick, it could have been great- it just needs that edge, that wild dialogue and those crazy shocks that Tarantino is so famous for, which its lacking.
Well, Warners are bringing The Matrix back. Its been rumoured before, but the announcement this week seems more official: Lana Wachowski (one half of the Wachowski, ahem, sisters who brought us the original trilogy) is signed up, as is Keanu Reeves and (somehow) Carrie-Anne Moss. Presumably shooting next year for a 2022 release, who knows, there’s still plenty of time for it to fall apart. Keanu is, as the Hollywood parlance goes, rather ‘hot’ at the moment, with his John Wick films doing so well, which likely explains why Matrix 4 is finally happening. The Wachowski’s have struggled post-Matrix (although I did really enjoy Cloud Atlas) so in some ways it’s a little surprising that Lana is even attached to the project, but I guess it keeps the fans onboard. Speaking as a fan of all three Matrix movies (I actually have a sneaky adoration of the second one in particular, as freakish as that may seem) I’m intrigued to say the least at seeing what might happen next. At their very worst, the Matrix trilogy is odd and confounding and subversive and full of good (and bad) ideas, and I’ll take that over the generic fodder we seem to get lately. I just hope they bring the Architect back.
Less is more. Its a lesson that patently escapes most modern filmmakers (and producers/studios) on the evidence of most blockbusters these days. Aquaman is a film that squeezes two or three films into its 2.5-hour running time; when I was watching it I felt oddly divorced from what was going on, almost absently watching it, and it only occured to me afterwards that it was likely because I simply couldn’t keep up with it. Aquaman is really The Aquaman Trilogy in one huge package, and in doing that it repeats the same mistake that blighted Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, and others.
Gerard Butler’s finest gift is appearing in daft tosh such as this and yet acting as if he’s in some classic serious arthouse flick. Its as if winking to the audience like Arnie always did is beneath him- no small feat considering the lines of dialogue he delivers and the preposterous plots of the films he so frequently stars in (and produces, no less).
Hmm. Let’s get the positive out of the way first- this was possibly the nearest I’ve yet seen to a dreamstate, that is, the sense of being inside a dream, that I have ever seen in a movie. The strange, disorientating, anxiety-ridden sequence of events closely mirrored the feeling I have had in dreams, of being inside/outside of events, the sense of bewilderment and things not really making any sense. If Darren Aronofsky’s aim was to achieve that sense of being in a dream in this film, indeed if that’s what this film really was, a repeating, never-ending dream loop, then I’d say he succeeded, triumphantly.
Distressing news last week (at least I think it’s distressing, your own mileage may vary) was that Disney, having now gobbled up 20th Century Fox, is looking at all the IP its bought and is looking at ways to maximise the potential returns. One of the first properties under its uncanny eye is Alien, and it has been reported that it is looking to reboot the franchise.
I really thought this film was a distressing but tragically fitting document of our times: like many of us, perhaps, Michael Moore cannot quite believe the world we are living in. “Did we dream it?” he asks, as if doubting his own sanity. The title is a nod to Michael Moore’s most famous documentary film, Fahrenheit 9/11, here cleverly inverting the title to Fahrenheit 11/9, and referring to the election of Donald Trump on 9th November 2016. Yes, in this film Moore examines the broken American political system, the lies, hypocrisy, lack of gun control, corporate mendacity, and chiefly the rise of Donald Trump and how the impossible happened, how it came to be that he got elected. There’s plenty of people in his sights, including, perhaps most distressingly of all, the Republican party’s opposition, the Democrats and the the rise (and Democrats own destruction) of Bernie Sanders. Everybody in power is dishonest, in it for themselves- the whole system is corrupt, leaving the ‘little people’ (yeah, I sneaked in a Blade Runner reference), the general public, left behind poorer and ignored in its wake. Its all oddly reminiscent of John Carpenter’s They Live, sadly.
the ghost of 82 