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The Lets Be Random Thread

ASIDE FROM THE ailing Batman franchise, superhero movies were few and far between in the nineties, giving no indication of what was to come.
On one side were “dark” or Gothic offerings like Sam Raimi’s manically inventive, pulp-infused Darkman, The Crow, and Todd McFarlane’s disappointing Spawn, which failed to capture the Marilyn Manson goblin screech of the comic book. On the other side were bloated Dick Tracy–style living cartoons and period pieces with no discernible audience, such as The Rocketeer, The Shadow, and The Phantom, or interesting awkward oddities such as 1999’s Mystery Men, which featured a cast of misfits culled from Bob Burden’s Flaming Carrot series, as portrayed by talented comedy and character actors like Ben Stiller, Janeane Garofalo, William Macy, and voice actor in The Simpsons, Hank Azaria, who played the film’s best character, the turbaned Blue Raja, who could “do things” with cutlery.
As the name perhaps suggests, Flaming Carrot was an indie black-and-white book starring a hero whose head was an enormous carrot, with a flame on top where the leaves would be. Burden’s Dadaist take on Golden Age superhero stories was genuinely inspired, and the book had enjoyed a season of faddish popularity during the first flush of the post-Watchmen wave of psychedelic superheroes. The Mystery Men from the back pages of Flaming Carrot were a disturbing bunch of redneck hobo loser supermen, and the movie failed to do them justice in spite of brave attempts by a cast that seemed uncertain as to the tone, which was never weird enough to truly honor its source or straight enough to keep the attention of a mainstream audience, who always felt cheated by “funny” superhero movies. The Batman franchise floundered in the same atmosphere of mockery and burlesque. No one had yet found a way to make superheroes convincing on-screen, but it was only a matter of time.
X-Men led the cavalry charge in the summer of 2000. Technology had caught up with the comics and believing a man could fly was as easy as believing a giant could be a midget. Despite being at least a foot taller than the pint-sized scrapper of the comics, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine was a defining role to which the actor brought exactly the right balance of toughness and sensitivity. Patrick Stewart, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard, cornering the market in “bald white men” roles, was born to play Professor Charles Xavier, and if Sir Ian McKellen was a little older than the comic-book Magneto, he brought a strength and a nasty twinkle to the role that pretty much stole the show.
The story wisely dumped Claremontian soap gymnastics, opting instead for a taut science fiction plot about the next stage in evolution trying to find a place in a fearful, threatening human world. Here was a superhero film that didn’t rely on powers and trademark costumes. In fact, X-Men uniforms had changed radically over the years, and here they were overhauled as black leather flight suits unlike anything seen in the comics. It was about characters we could identify with and a theme that resonated particularly well on the cusp of the new century: old versus new. Tradition versus tomorrow.
Director Bryan Singer’s X-Men was the film that made everyone in the comics business sit up and take notice, but comics were still the only place to find serious, well-made, and realistic superhero stories on a regular basis.
That too was to change a few months after X-Men, when the release of the masterly Unbreakable provided the first real hint of what was possible and what was to come. Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan had seemed to materialize fully formed with 1999’s powerful twist-ending ghost story The Sixth Sense. In Unbreakable he cast a lugubrious Bruce Willis as David Dunn, whose alliterative name immediately fingered him as a potential comic-book hero. Dunn began his journey as the sole survivor of a horrific train wreck. He was unable to understand how he’d managed to survive until the measured unwinding of plot compelled him to face the impossible truth that he’d never been hurt, never been injured in his life. David Dunn, the ordinary Joe, married with a kid and a mortgage, was the world’s first superhuman, and he’d lived to be forty without ever noticing.
Shyamalan gave the superman the full indie-auteur treatment. Piece by patient piece, he reassembled the building blocks of hero fiction to create what remains, in my opinion, the high-water mark of the cinema’s treatment of the superhero theme.
The pivotal scene where Willis pumped more and more weights, testing his limits to find there were none, seemed to reach into the beating, golden core of what the superhero represented. Willis gave us a muscular, sweating Everyman hero, but it was Dunn’s intense stillness, his self-doubt turning to conviction, and his character depth that made him feel like a Dark Age hero written by a Renaissance writer.
Even Dunn’s tormented relationship with his young son—whose soul became the movie’s battleground between forces of good and evil—was beautifully resolved in a compact, touching, and completely silent scene that set up a whole series of potential “Security Man” and sidekick movies—then judiciously left the sequels to our imagination. One hopeful rumor suggested a trilogy, continuing with Breakable and Broken. A scene in which he carried his wife upstairs was shot to look as if they were flying in a romantic, real-world echo of Lois Lane’s “Can you read my mind?” scene from 1978’s Superman.
Subtle, satisfyingly grounded in the everyday, Willis, with his Security rain cape and hood, even had his own secret identity, costume, and logo. But it was only if we recognized the tropes, or watched a second time, that we saw how matter-of-factly they’d been deployed in the expert construction of a definitive superhero origin story that was faithful to the form in a way we’d never seen before on-screen or in comics.
There was the ultimate exquisite death trap, which used three simple ingredients—a flexible plastic sheet stretched across a swimming pool, body weight, and deep water—to encapsulate the suffocating, no-way-out, black-hole horror of the most thrilling comic-book cliff-hangers.
There was a monster: in this case, the sociopathic inhuman beast with no name who turned up in an orange boilersuit on the doorsteps of nice middle-class family folks with the words “I like your house. Can I come in?”
Cue screams.
There was Dunn’s climactic fight with the psycho, which managed somehow to re-create the explosive high-stakes impact of a Kirby cosmic slugfest using a bedroom, a terrified hostage, and two men whose explosive releases of breath took the place of sound effects. And then there was Mr. Glass, the mastermind, pulling the strings since day one. The transformation of Dunn’s friend and adviser Elijah Price into the supervillain Mr. Glass was accomplished in plain sight, but only in those last moments did it all make as much sense to us as it did to the horrified hero. Elijah’s stylish purple suits and long leather coat, his wheelchair and spiked leg brace, and his private office with its multiple computer screens and memorabilia all assumed a grotesque new significance: He had become a cyborg master fiend in his secret lair. He needed someone to fight, to give his broken life meaning, and so he made big, strong David Dunn into his own personal superhero nemesis.
Samuel L. Jackson, himself a celebrity comic-book fan, was expertly cast as the troubled Price, a comic-book enthusiast with a disease that had left his bones brittle and easily broken—hence the cruel “Mr. Glass” nickname he’d been given at school. Price, who owned an art gallery with framed superhero originals on the walls, was the nerd pal of the hero: At first Jimmy Olsen, he became Lex Luthor, as admiration turned to hatred.
There was no pompous, triumphal march soundtrack, no striking of poses or corny melodrama. Willis was a world-weary, blue-collar Atlas with the weight of the world on his shoulders, setting the standard for a new decade of realistic superfiction with a stylish, original, and intelligent re-creation of the form.
 
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