Updated: Seven Lesser Known Comic Book Adaptations

Not every comic-to-screen leap was a blockbuster success.

The comic book movie gold rush is in full swing. This summer no less than four of the studios’ tentpole releases draw inspiration from comics, and speculation and surveillance of upcoming projects including Christopher Nolan’s third Batman film and Joss Whedon’s The Avengers routinely fuel top-of-the update online news. Meanwhile Nolan and Zack Snyder’s Superman reboot, The Man of Steel, continues to announce unexpected and enviable casting decisions.

This image has nothing to do with the article. Its just too strange not to share.

Hollywood has gone to the comics well time and time again since the genre first gained notoriety in the early 1940s, most often for low- or mid-budget fare aimed at children and teens. And for every attempt that hit its box office or audience reception target, there are probably three adaptations that tanked, fell victim to restrictive budgets, or just couldn’t garner enough public interest to build a devoted cult fan base.

We’re sure a few of the following are sentimental favorites to forgiving fans of their respective inspirations. (We like The Flash TV series.) Some aren’t bad, considering their limited resources, and some had unrealized potential. And one or two are terrible. But they’re all from comic books, for better or worse.

Sable (TV series) Premiered November 1987; lasted seven episodes. Based on the First Comics series by longtime Green Arrow writer-artist Mike Grell, Sable followed the exploits of freelance mercenary Jon Sable (Lewis Van Bergen) who worked days as an author of children’s books. Rene Russo, very early in her career, played his girlfriend Eden Kendall.

The clip below shows its noirish promise, even if the show’s “alpha dog adventurer helps client of the week” conceit seems kinda passe now.

Steel (Movie) Released August 15, 1997; total U.S. box office: $1.7 million. In his own DC Comics series and in the Justice League comics and cartoon, Steel is a brilliant engineer and inventor who dedicates himself to defending good after Superman saves his life. So what better “actor” to convey such intellectual and moral strength than human marketing platform Shaquille O’Neal? Judd Nelson played the bad guy, while Richard Roundtree (Shaft) appeared as Uncle Joe.

Though admittedly the film carried a modest $16 million budget, “Shaq Steel” still looks as if he swallowed an electromagnet and walked through a junkyard:

Dr. Strange (TV movie) Premiered September 6, 1978. Clad in a snaredrum-tight Disco perm and piles of gold jewelry, New York psychiatrist Stephen Strange (Peter Hooten) trains to be Earth’s new “Sorcerer Supreme” and rescue a young woman from the evil sorceress Morgan LeFay (Arrested Development’s Jessica Walter).

Intended as the pilot to a television series that never happened, the telefilm featured Marvel Comics’ honcho Stan Lee as a consultant.

Supergirl (Movie) Released November 21, 1984; total U.S. Box Office: $15 million. For years the poster child for misbegotten comic adaptations, Supergirl was rushed into production after the success of the first two Superman films but struggled for distribution after Superman III flopped. Nevertheless, expanded versions released on DVD have clarified its choppily-edited story and somewhat repaired its reputation.

Peter O’Toole, Mia Farrow, and Faye Dunaway make the supporting cast pretty top-heavy, while underused 80s actress Helen Slater (Ruthless People) makes her debut as super-cousin Kara Zor-El.

Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV Movie) Premiered May 26, 1998. A decade before Samuel L. Jackson’s turns in Iron Man and Iron Man 2, David Haselhoff starred in this low-budget TV movie about Marvel Comics’ Man from U.N.C.L.E. riff Nick Fury. The superspy and his former love Valentine Fontaine (Lisa Rinna) take on rival organization HYDRA for possession of a deadly virus. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight scribe David Goyer wrote the script.

The Hoff plays the hyper-macho Fury as… The Hoff with an eyepatch. Watch how S.H.I.E.L.D.’s flying headquarters looks like a basement steam room somewhere. (actual video begins about 23 seconds into clip.)

The Flash (TV Series) Premiered September 20, 1990; lasted 21 episodes. CBS brought the Scarlet Speedster to the small screen apparently motivated by the runaway success of Batman the year before. A TV movie pilot got the family friendly series off and running, but constant schedule shifts and pre-emptions for Gulf War news coverage kept it from building an audience.

Still, The Flash’s (John Wesley Shipp) costume has aged well, as have the special effects. The script quality suffered as the season wore on, however, though fan favorite guests stars like Mark Hamill, Tim Thomerson and Jeffrey Combs frequently livened things up. The series is even collected in a no-frills DVD package.

Captain America (TV movie) Premiered January 19, 1979. An attempt to update the character for the Evil Kenievel/motorcycle years of the 70s, this adaptation featured the original Captain America’s son trying to stop terrorists from detonating a hydrogen bomb on Phoenix, Arizona.

There’s almost nothing about the clip below that doesn’t feel dated, especially the ersatz Cap’s costume and the long, loving takes of motorcycle stunts. A sequel TV movie, released just eleven months later, offered a comparatively more comics-accurate uniform and included Christopher Lee as its villain.

Marvel Studios’ Thor opens nationwide this Friday.

- Michael Kabel

DVD Review: Inception

Unconvincing leads and too many script problems bring a rude awakening to Christopher Nolan’s latest thriller.

Inception (available December 7 in a variety of gift-ready DVD and Blu-Ray editions) will amaze you only as long as you want to be amazed. If you’re skeptical, you’ll likely feel less so. If you start to think about its mechanics and workings for too long, it might even disappoint. It’s not a film that ages well in the days after viewing, and it requires your more or less unqualified complicity to really work even as you’re viewing it. And like the dreams at the center of its story, logic and internal cohesion sometimes break down, and not everyone within is convincing.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan’s reportedly worked for a decade on its script, moving it through horror and heist movie genres and refining the dream logic and its trip-wired narrative implications. The final product, as with so many of his films, is a combination of several styles and forms, and he makes them fit together seamlessly. Still, a succession of colorless performances and murky internal logic keep the film from gaining the narrative momentum of The Dark Knight or even The Prestige, Nolan’s 2006 similar examination of reality’s slippery surface. Ultimately, Inception is neither a misstep nor a leap forward, but something in-between and something less than its antecedents.

Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) works in a vaguely suggested near-future as an “extractor,” pulling information out of his targets’ unconscious minds by invading and manipulating their dreams. When he and his cohort Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt) fail to extract information by Saito (Ken Watanabe), one of their assignments, they’re compelled to work for him or face the wrath of their previous employer, who it’s said severely punishes unsuccessful operatives. Except Saito doesn’t want information withdrawn from a mind so much as planted into the head of the son (Cillian Murphy) of his business rival, the better to prevent his competitor’s incipient monopoly. This act of imbuing information – the inception of an idea – is much trickier, and one with which Cobb has a complicated and haunting history. Meanwhile, Cobb doesn’t travel into dreams alone: he carries the spectre of his dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), a presence that actively works against his efforts in the dreamscapes.

Cobb agrees to the assignment, in part because of Saito’s promise to help him return to the United States, where the children whose faces he literally can’t bear to imagine reside. Cobb is wanted, it seems, as a suspect in Mal’s death. Journeying instead to Paris and elsewhere, he recruits a new team consisting of a forger (Tom Hardy), a chemist (Dileep Rao), and Saito. Cobb also employs a neophyte dream “architect” named Ariadne upon the recommendation of his ex-father-in-law (Michael Caine.) Despite Arthur’s misgivings that Cobb’s guilt and fear will sabotage the mission, the team embarks into the scion’s mind, invading multiple levels of his subconscious to reach the heavily guarded area where Cobb can implant the spore of an idea.

The levels are for the most part exquisitely staged set pieces, with the final level – a snow-capped, mountaintop fortress worthy of a James Bond villain – offering particularly impressive visuals. The crumbling, tide-battered metropolis that represents the underbelly of Cobb’s own consciousness is also spectacular, as much if not more so than the folding streets profiled in the film’s marketing campaign. If only everything worked as well, or with such imagination. For as lovely as they are to look at, there’s a depressing literalism to the elements of the dreams presented: safe places in the mind are castles and fortresses, inner turmoil is depicted as roiling surf, protectors and defenses are presented as soldiers and military hardware. It’s not a bad creative strategy, per se, but it’s not a complicated or original one, either, and serves to lend an air of predictability to the film that it doesn’t deserve. Perhaps that was Nolan’s intention; maybe it wasn’t.

More troubling is Nolan’s in media res approach to the dreamscape idea and to the explanation of its mechanics. The script offers an explanation that the technology was originally developed by the military, and its various drawbacks and pitfalls are explained and at times – such as Arthur’s weightless jaunt through a hotel – imaginatively staged. At other times, the method of presenting information as it becomes necessary for a given character to know gives the impression, somewhat inaccurately, that the script is making up the rules as it goes along. Nolan surely had all his ideas thought out in the decade leading up to the script’s completion; the invitation to wonder otherwise is distracting, and unfortunate. For the film’s many intelligent ideas to work, every idea and every detail has to make sense. This happens most of the time, but not all, and the one’s that don’t work, such as the collapsing bridges and mirrored walls, seem especially conspicuous in contrast.

The production design is exceptional, with interior and exterior spaces alike having a lived-in realism that contributes miles of authenticity to even the most fantastical story elements. As an example of Nolan and his production team’s persuasive savvy: Cobb and his accomplices are attached to their target’s conscious via wires that connect to the wrist, eschewing the visual need for the complicated and often unconvincing headgear featured in similar movies like Brainstorm and Strange Days. It’s a small choice, but a compelling one nevertheless.

Perhaps the biggest problem comes from a cast that most often isn’t up to the material, with DiCaprio especially lacking the dramatic muscle to bring Cobb’s character to its complete potential. Playing a man that’s a fugitive from himself, his country, and his family and who can find solace only in his nightmares, DiCaprio summons only lukewarm pathos, never letting his own box office persona become submerged within his character. Page, too, seems out of her depth as Ariadne, and somewhat lost without the zingy, snark-flavored dialogue of her earlier films. By contrast Cotillard, lovely and fragile without ever seeming weak, gives the film’s best performance. You understand why Cobb couldn’t stand her absence, even if DiCaprio can’t convey as much on his own. Murphy, Levitt, Watanabe, and Hardy are all good, if underused in favor of more face time for DiCaprio and Page.

Ultimately, Inception is a triumph of ambition but not of achievement; it’s unlikely that it would have been made at all had The Dark Knight not made a bazillion dollars, but it speaks to Nolan’s artistic integrity that for his next effort he set his artistic bar even higher. It’s too simple, and unfair, to say he couldn’t have topped The Dark Knight because his whole body of work suggests that he can and that he will. Inception, the epitome of a three-star film, is a narrow miss on the way to that eventual realization. And like any dream if you want it to amaze you it will, but its impact will fade as it recedes into memory.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: Inception

Christopher Nolan’s intriguing thriller is a dream come true, for better and for worse.

Inception will amaze you as long as you want to be amazed. If you’re skeptical, you’ll likely feel less so. If you start to think about its mechanics and workings for too long, it might even disappoint. It’s not a film that ages well in the days after viewing, needing your more or less unqualified complicity to really work while you’re viewing it. And like the dreams at the center of its story, logic and internal cohesion sometimes break down, and not everyone within is convincing.

Visually gorgeous and packed with suspense throughout its hefty 2 1/2 hour runtime, Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to The Dark Knight arrives in multiplexes as probably the most anticipated movie of the summer, and most people will likely be indeed wowed. Nolan reportedly worked for a decade on the script, moving it through horror and heist movie genres and refining the dream logic and its trip-wired narrative implications. The final product, as with so many of his films, is a combination of several styles and forms, and he makes them fit together seamlessly. Still, a succession of colorless performances and murky internal logic keep the film from gaining the narrative momentum of The Dark Knight or even The Prestige, Nolan’s 2006 similar examination of reality’s slippery surface. Ultimately, the new film is neither a misstep nor a leap forward.

Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) works in a vaguely suggested near-future as an “extractor,” pulling information out of his targets’ unconscious minds by invading and manipulating their dreams. When he and his cohort Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt) fail to extract information by Saito (Ken Watanabe), one of their assignments, they’re compelled to work for him or face the wrath of their previous employer, who its said severely punish unsuccessful operatives. Except Saito doesn’t want information withdrawn from a mind but rather planted into the head of the son (Cillian Murphy) of his business rival, the better to prevent his competitor’s incipient monopoly. This act of imbuing information – the inception of an idea - is much trickier, and one with which Cobb has a complicated and haunting history. Meanwhile, Cobb doesn’t travel into dreams alone: he carries the spectre of his dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), a presence that actively works against his efforts in the dreamscapes.

Cobb agrees to the assignment, in part because of Saito’s promise to help him return to the United States, where the children whose faces he literally can’t bear to imagine reside. Cobb is wanted, it seems, as a suspect in Mal’s death. Journeying instead to Paris and elsewhere, he recruits a new team consisting of a forger (Tom Hardy), a chemist (Dileep Rao), and Saito. Cobb also employs a neophyte dream “architect” named Ariadne upon the recommendation of his ex-father-in-law (Michael Caine.) Despite Arthur’s misgivings that Cobb’s guilt and fear will sabotage the mission, the team embarks into the scion’s mind, invading multiple levels of his subconscious to reach the heavily guarded area where Cobb can implant the spore of an idea.

The levels are for the most part exquisitely staged set pieces, with the final level – a snow-capped, mountaintop fortress worthy of a James Bond villain – offering particularly impressive visuals. The crumbling, tide-battered metropolis that represents the underbelly of Cobb’s own consciousness is also specatacular, as much if not more so than the folding streets profiled in the film’s marketing campaign. If only everything worked as well, or with such imagination. For as lovely as they are to look at, there’s a depressing literalism to the elements of the dreams presented: safe places in the mind are castles and fortresses, inner turmoil is depicted as roiling surf, protectors and defenses are presented as soldiers and military hardware. It’s not a bad creative strategy, per se, but it’s not a complicated or original one, either, and serves to lend an air of predictability to the film that it doesn’t deserve. Perhaps that was Nolan’s intention.

More troubling is an in media res approach to the dreamscape idea and to the explanation of its mechanics. The script offers an explanation that the technology was originally developed by the military, and its various drawbacks and pitfalls are explained and at times – such as Arthur’s weightless jaunt through a hotel – imaginatively staged. At other times, the method of presenting information as it becomes necessary for a given character to know gives the impression, somewhat inaccurately, that the script is making up the rules as it goes along. Nolan surely had all his ideas thought out in the decade leading up to the script’s completion; the invitation to wonder otherwise is distracting, and unfortunate. For the film’s many intelligent ideas to work, every idea and every detail has to make sense. This happens most of the time, but not all, and the one’s that don’t work, such as the collapsing bridges and mirrored walls, seem especially conspicuous in contrast.

The production design is nothing short of breathtaking, with interior and exterior spaces alike having a lived-in realism that contributes miles of authenticity to even the most fantastical story elements. As an example of Nolan and his production team’s persuasive savvy: Cobb and his accomplices are attached to their target’s conscious via wires that connect to the wrist, eschewing the visual need for the complicated and often unconvincing headgear featured in similar movies like Brainstorm and Strange Days. It’s a small choice, but a compelling one nevertheless.

Perhaps the biggest problem comes from a cast that most often isn’t up to the material, with DiCaprio especially lacking the dramatic muscle to bring Cobb’s character to its complete potential. Playing a man that’s a fugitive from himself, his country, and his family and who can find solace only in his nightmares, DiCaprio summons only lukewarm pathos, never letting his own box office persona become submerged within his character. Page, too, seems out of her depth as Ariadne, and somewhat lost without the zingy, snark-flavored dialogue of her earlier films. By contrast Cotillard, lovely and fragile without ever seeming weak, gives the film’s best performance. You understand why Cobb couldn’t stand her absence, even if DiCaprio can’t convey as much on his own. Murphy, Levitt, Watanabe, and Hardy are all good, if underused in favor of more face time for DiCaprio and Page.

(A smaller note about the cast: Tom Berenger makes a brief but welcome appearance as the scion’s advisor, marking something of a trend in Nolan’s films: he seems to enjoy hiring 1980s-era leading men for supporting parts, having used Rutger Hauer and Eric Roberts in earlier films. With a third Batman film in pre-production, Michael Pare and Steven Bauer should start polishing their resumes.)

Ultimately, Inception is a triumph of ambition but not of achievement; it’s unlikely that it would have been made at all had The Dark Knight not made a bazillion dollars, but it speaks to Nolan’s artistic integrity that for his next effort he set his artistic bar even higher. It’s too simple, and unfair, to say he couldn’t have topped The Dark Knight because his whole body of work suggests that he can and that he will. Inception, the epitome of a three-star film, is a narrow miss on the way to that eventual realization. And like any dream if you want it to amaze you it will, but its impact will fade as it recedes into memory.

- Michael Kabel

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