I'm not sure why people watch these adaptations. If you've read the book, you know the story, and the only reason to watch is to find out exactly how much the book is ineluctably better. If you haven't read the book... well, read the fucking book.
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And.. geez... somehow I think the cover art is worse than the first part!! Well.. it's fantastic art.. but nothing about it fits either the style or the story of Dark Knight Returns. How the hell does one fuck up one of the most iconic and notable Batman books of the past thirty years.
Imagine if Robert Rodriguez filmed Sin City to look like a Michael Bay film and released it with a generic full color poster with none of the actual actors from the film. Hell, even the Watchmen film that almost entirely missed the point seemed a bit more in tune with its source material.
This is almost as dumb as giving Eisner's The Spirit over to Frank Miller to turn it into a Sin City knockoff. Or that Frank Miller has become a psychotic Neo Con who wrote a crazy not-Batman vs Al Queda comic.. aaand has a girlfriend who just got sued for smearing feces all over her office.
( http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/holy_crap_batman_2IaaYHNNlcPOnq33z8BDpM )
Thankfully.. such a world is too horrible to imagine.
It would be very hard to represent Miller's actual style in animation, let alone make it marketable. It looks like WB's done a decent job using his designs and approximating them using their house style. Once part 2 comes out, I'll probably sit down and watch this. Why not?
Yeah. Frank Miller's style is totally unmarketable. We saw how Sin City and 300 bombed.
Yeah yeah.. both were debatably live action. Though I'd say they were just as much cartoons made with live action.
And yes,.. The Spirit bombed.. but I blame that on Miller applying Miller style to something it should not have been. Never mind it was current bat shit insane Frank Miller having total control over a movie. Even Sin City had Rodriguez in charge.
And let's not forget it's Miller and Janson on this, which is different from his later Sin City and 300 work. It was closer to more standard Batman art
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The first one wasn't nearly as bad as I'd feared. It wasn't a classic, but it was serviceable.
Therein lies the problem. The source material is a classic and a shinning example of the medium and charcater.. even in its own Miller way. For them to make a 'meh' movie that has none of that prestige or the distinct Miller / Janson art and storytelling? What is ghe damn point other than to cash in cheaply on a hollowed out brand name. It'd be almost as stupid as making a follow up to Watchmen by a patchwork of artists with none of the Moore and Gibbons touches that made the original what it wa.. oh.
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Speaking as someone who's never read the GN, I thought it was pretty decent, not spectacular, but good. Whether you can blame this on hype backlash or source material aping that I wouldn't notice otherwise is up to you.
I thought it had most (but not all) the strengths and all the weaknesses of the original. So yeah, pretty decent but not spectacular.
I was very pleased (and kind of disoriented) to see that they kept the late 80s Batman equipment intact. No explicitly acknowledged gliding cape, no grapnel gun, etc.
@Lordess @geekzapoppin Agree. First one is not bad. Nothing highly memorable, but not bad. Hope the second part works out.
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I wish I could see this with new eyes. Knowing the story all I can do is micro-criticize things that probably only matter very little. This is a unique story. I'm sure if anyone didn't get a chance to read it, this will fascinate and entertain. I'm only lukewarm about it. (if I upgrade to Vaderwarm I'll let you know)
So. Batman with a shotgun, riding on horseback.
This both frightens and fills me with intrigue.
I vividly remember the first time I read that and the sheer power of the image.
In this trailer.. geez.. I barely even noticed it. The awful opening line delivery didn't help. Weller is reaaaaaally hot and cold here. Yet that opening. Blech. Superman too is.. meh.
Well.. at least it seems Michael Emerson is rocking DKR Joker.
@Lordess That image, in the original book, is one of those "hairs on the back of the neck standing" moments.
@Lordess That part at least is from the book. Actually, most of it looked like it was from the book, which I think bodes well. Peter Weller's voice notwithstanding. We'll see if that grows on me or not.
Pretty much all of Part 1 was taken directly from the book, scene for scene and line for line, with a few narrative tweaks, most of which I approved. (Not that my opinion means much. ;) ) The one change offhand that I thought made no sense was Gordon's meeting with Wayne: it now happens in a fancy restaurant, where they're both talking pretty much straight out about how Wayne used to be Batman. Wayne, as previously shown a scene or two earlier, is still a famous and even notorious person in Gotham, so the lack of fieldcraft here didn't ring true to the characters: they should know better than to be talking about this in public where anyone could here. Aesthetic choices (a new setting rather than one in Wayne mansion that would be reused later) overruled characterization.
The art was a good anime-budget approximation of Miiler's work without the extreme detail.
While I'm still inclined to complain about Peter Weller's voice direction, I came to a strange but plausible conclusion by the end of Part 1: this choice was made on purpose by Andrea Whatshername (the DCAU usual voice director) because the producers and director wanted to convey that despite everything Batman was still a decent, honorable, upstanding and generally rational person. While that doesn't fit the far more nuanced original story (or for that matter some of what's happening on screen), it does fit an understandable editorial mandate not to make Batman too edgy.
Despite a few problems of that sort I was very impressed by Part 1, and I have good hope for Part 2. I wouldn't even mind seeing the same crew trying to salvage Miller's even-more-insane sequel where Batman pulls together a scattered Justice League to fight Luthor and Brainiac who have quietly taken over the world behind the scenes.
And now that I've said it, I'm starting to wonder if I'm just misremembering the Gordon/Wayne meeting for drinks from the book: it was framed in an obscure closeup (so to speak), so I might be thinking wrongly that it happened in Wayne manor...
