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This was going to be my first column, patient reader, but everything turned out wrong.
You see, I was planning to kick things off a few weeks ago with a nice theatrical review of a nice movie-in-theaters: Frank Miller's adaptation of
The Spirit, the latest in a (small) line of "digital backlot" features, in which live actors are placed inside computer-generated environments and sometimes physically toyed with as walking special effects.
Some filmmakers used the technology to try and empower smaller films with the grandeur of hundred million dollar mega productions, while others sought to centralize nearly all authority in the director's hands (and his Macintosh).
Sin City, however, saw Robert Rodriguez and Miller himself use the technology for a more adaptation-minded purpose: to insure as close a replication as possible of Miller's comic book style, from the blocking of shots to the way characters look. Zach Snyder subsequently employed similar techniques for his own close Miller adaptation,
300.
But anyone who's read the columns I wound up writing before this one knows that I'm wary of ‘exact' movie adaptations of comic books; the result is often stiff with literalism, blithe to the contortions of time and space (and therefore narrative) which the comics form requires, and devout to dialogue that often works better on the page coupled with still images as elements of intuitive graphic design.
So you could imagine my interest in
The Spirit: Frank Miller, promising to apply his filmmaking lessons to an inexact adaptation of some other cartoonist's work. Were people really upset that Miller wasn't going to be very faithful to Will Eisner, in a visual sense? That's the whole reason I was excited! It's an
adaptation, and one that had the potential to apply a comic book artist's rather unique interest in digital technology to joining his own aesthetic to that of someone different (but respected) in the comic book sphere.
However, as you all know,
The Spirit went out of theaters very quickly. Shortly after the first prints screened, I believe, although some theaters may have cut off during the end credits. My reaction outside the local not-a-megaplex was severe.
"
You mean it's not even in a two-dollar theater?!" I wept to the box office girl.
"
That's right," she sneered, "
now maybe comics can go back where they belong. In the crib. For babies!"
Well I wasn't going to take that defeat laying down, readers! If I couldn't see
The Spirit, I'd just have to track down
another digital backlot feature directed by a well-known comic book artist, adapting comics to the screen with an eye toward translating their own on-paper style to cinematographic form.
And I found it. It's called
Immortal, and it's directed by Enki Bilal, an undisputed European comics master. It was released in 2004, one year prior to
Sin City and the Miller-Rodriguez arrival, and it's still a damn sight more ambitious. Hey, maybe it's fitting how it came from Europe. After all, Miller's own
Sin City style was heavily derived from the works of José Muñoz, another Eurocomics great, if not a filmmaker or anything.
Bilal was born in Belgrade in 1951, but emigrated with his parents to Paris when he was still young. He began publishing with the famed French comics magazine
Pilote in the early ‘70s, initially working with scriptwriters but later formulating his own stories - among his best-known works is the
Nikopol Trilogy, its chapters published as books in 1980, 1986 and 1992. Just before the work's completion, in 1991, Bilal made his debut as a feature filmmaker, with the satirical sci-fi picture
Bunker Palace Hôtel. A second feature, Tykho Moon, followed in 1996; I've read that it's supposedly very stiff and stylized, and beholden to capturing the comics ‘style' on the screen, but I've not seen it myself.
Immortal was Bilal's third feature, this time an adaptation of the first two chapters of the
Nikopol Trilogy; sorry fans, that means no chess boxing. The comics have actually been released in English two or three times - the first two chapters (
Gods in Chaos and
The Woman Trap) were released individually by Catalan Communications in 1988, after which the whole trilogy was collected into a hardcover by Humanoids Publishing (the American aspect of French publisher Les Humanoïdes Associés) in 2000, and then a softcover under Humanoids' short-lived association with DC Comics in 2004.
Yet the comics alone won't give you everything; as the very credits of the R1 DVD version of the movie note, this is a "loose" adaptation of Bilal's source comics. The screenplay was written by Bilal and sci-fi author Serge Lehman, with all dialogue by Bilal. He also storyboarded the entire film, and headed up a full-length 3D animatic to set down where everything should go early. The DVD supplements give the impression that much production time was given over to working on the film's backgrounds, effects and people.
Yes,
people. One of the film's odder, more intense ideas is that only a few of its characters should be played by actual actors, while others ought to be entirely computer generated. And I don't mean Star Wars creatures; I'm talking
humanoid characters, fully animated so as to look a bit like Bilal's drawings, only real and tactile and breathing, interacting with real flesh-and-blood people, sometimes in Bilal-looking makeup.
Given that this thing only had a $30 million budget (roughly $10 million less than
Sin City the next year), hopes were surely set high, and it's fascinating that Bilal attempted to use the technology to project his comics
style into a narrative that nonetheless wasn't going to remain totally faithful to his actual
comics. But then, that's part of the classic potential of adaptation, retaining the core of another author's work for a new creation; it seems peculiar to American comics that technical advancements should be viewed as a means of ‘perfect' translations.
Of course,
Immortal is in no way perfect, in any sense of the term. The big, maybe overriding problem is that the technology just isn't quite there to deliver the creepy mix of bodies and architectures that Bilal seems to want. The backgrounds are often excellent, creaking and glowing with the aged anti-splendor of most Bilal futures, a heated jumble of mid-20th century urban architecture and mildly punky leather'n colored personal style. On the other hand, the animated characters range from slightly creepy-realistic (in a
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within kinda way) to too-smooth and low-detail, and not in a way that suggests some social function; casting unrealistic animations as outcasts would be one thing, a
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? thing, but
Immortal sprinkles its unreal characters throughout every social strata, to jarring effect.
Even this, I suspect, may have been part of the point, thematically, had the characters looked sufficiently detailed and ‘present' with the humans. The movie's original French (and Latin) title is
Immortel (ad vitam), which translates directly to "
Immortal (for life)," which acts as both a joke and statement of purpose. The premise of the film sees the NYC of 2095 populated by a melting pot of genetically modified humans of various types and a few literal aliens, as in ‘from space.' Also, a pyramid full of literal, authentic Egyptian gods has been hovering around for a while, long enough that by the time the movie starts it's become a somewhat less spectacular sight, albeit always a political hot potato (just imagine the Congressional fun if blatantly non-Christian gods popped up real in an American city today).
Into this chaos drops Nikopol, a former firebrand who got himself locked into a crappy, malfunctioning cryogenic prison decades ago. Upon his totally accidental escape, Nikopol discovers that he's become a slogan-propping urban folk hero whom nobody actually remembers as a person. He also loses a leg, and winds up cutting a deal with the errant god Horus, who's been sentenced to death by the other Egyptian gods for his shit, and is currently looking for a nice pure non-modified body with which to impregnate a woman and continue his line. He's also aware that the only suitable womb belongs to Jill Bioskop, a psychic amnesic who's friends with John, a space alien dressed in black facial bandages and seated on a cosmic throne, who's connected to the odd fact that Central Park is now a deadly arctic zone populated by penguins and the suicidal.
All of this more or less swirls together for 102 minutes, along with a bunch of added subplots that serve mainly as thematic spice; one particular digression with a corrupt senator gets resolved with all the grace of a hole being sawed out around the legs of a bombing vaudevillian from beneath the stage, although even the ‘main' plot tends to be somewhat elliptical. Bilal has deleted almost all of the political conflict from his comic, and greatly reoriented some of the character motivations, occasionally for the sake of cleverness -- a bit in the comics concerning Jill's red pills gets transformed into a red pill/blue pill Matrix homage -- but mostly to focus on portraying the future as a stage for the futility of centralized power.
Even the gods in here are only immortal for life in terms of power (get it?), and the rampant modification of humanity-as-multiculturism holds the potential to create a world ‘for life,' if one never totally free from the desires of ambitious forces. There's a really odd sexual subtext at work, with Jill constantly accusing Horus-as-Nikopol of raping her (which he is, via psychic suggestion and old-fashioned emotional abuse), while falling in love with Nikopol-as-Nikopol, who understands that he's being exploited as well. It all relates back to
human exploitation by the powerful, although Bilal doesn't seem especially concerned with individual consequences to his plot choices.
Presumably this grander focus is why the animations interact so fully with humans; now if only that future looked closer on screen, and poor Charlotte Rampling (as a doctor) didn't have to share screen time with an animated police detective who got half his plastic animated face chewed off, presumably right after having moved to the city from a Nintendo 64. Bilal does not seem like much of a director of actors -- indeed, I'm not sure how much he even
interacted with the human performers, although he did have almost all of the dialogue re-dubbed by new voices in post-production -- and the performances range from ok to absolutely terrible, with some of the virtual characters landing near the bottom of the anime dub acting ladder.
Still, there's some pretty impressive moments, particularly when Jill (played by former Miss France, Linda Hardy) is wandering around the city to busy sights and music by Sigur Rós & Goran Vejvoda, sometimes getting picked up by agents of a villainous corporation, which in one scene leads to mid-air showdown between a walking crimson hammerhead shark in a red plastic sport jacket and a giant falcon that shoots laser beams from its eyes, at which point the movie is suddenly screaming with the weird Eurocomics sci-fi energy of a particularly herb-saturated back issue of Heavy Metal.
If only more of these films would pursue a looser style of attempted cinema. I'm confident it'll get better - the technology and the creativity. At the dawn of sound, all the newspapers characters might read had to be kept wet to keep from screwing up the microphones. That changed, and so can digital fantasy.
Joe McCulloch is the fist behind Jog - The Blog. He posts to The Savage Critics, and prints with The Comics Journal, Comics Comics and Bookforum. Via fists.
The Watchman is ©2008 Joe McCulloch.
