BUSTIN' STILL MAKES ME FEEL GOOD

I was nine years old when I saw the original Ghostbusters. For a while back then, it was my world. Oh, how I loved that film – which seems odd in hindsight when you consider how adult much of its humour is. I think as a kid I didn't even think of it as a comedy. Ghostbusting was a serious business.

My wee girl is now pretty much the same age I was when the first film came out, and we find ourselves with a new, rebooted, female-led version. You may have noticed that this has caused some consternation online, with disproportionately angry men attacking the idea at every opportunity, declaring it sacrilege, an insult and the worst film ever (months before it came out, of course...).

Naturally, all of this embarrassing nonsense made me sympathetic to the notion of a Ghostbusters reboot. As a general rule, I'm pro anything that angers people who use terms like 'feminazi' and 'SJW', or who feel an unhealthy amount of ownership over corporate geek culture. Even so, I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun Ghostbusters 2016 is. It's more overtly comedic than the original, broader and lighter in tone, but has a lot of laughs and thrills, a few effective scares and a strong story. There are also not only pleasing nods to the so-called controversy surrounding the film, but a general metatextual thread relating to the Ghostbusters asserting their legitimacy. The well-balanced main cast are all really strong, especially Kate McKinnon as eccentric and delightful scientist Holtzmann. And the final climactic showdown is ace – dare I say, better than its 1984 counterpart?

Most importantly, the girl and her pal loved it. Stories and ideas go in cycles. Every generation has their Robin Hood, their Tarzan, their Wonder Woman, their Jedi... and now their Ghostbusters. For cultural concepts to be living things, rather than dusty museum pieces, we must be open to kids approaching them on their own terms. Much as I still love Ghostbusters 1984, it's a film very much of its time. It's now more than 30 years old. When I was a kid, films from the 1950s might as well have been from outer space for all they resonated with my contemporary experience. So it saddens me that some fellow ageing geeks are angered – actually angered, for god's sake – by the prospect of the next generation enjoying new iterations of stuff we loved, in ways that are relevant and meaningful to them. My daughter now has Ghostbusters of her own, and that's something to be celebrated.

COLOSSUS: THE MOTION PICTURE - A REVIEW

Double confession: Despite expressing my lack of interest in the Deadpool movie, last night I went to see it.

Even more shamefully, I enjoyed it. Mostly.

In my defence, I had a free ticket courtesy of my friend, but even so, I felt a little grubby about the whole affair. Deadpool to me symbolises the very worst of ’90s comics, the tipping point at which Marvel turned to a crapfest of guns and pouches and everything being EXTREME. The arrival of Deadpool represented the start of what might well have been the slow death of my interest in comics. I turned away from Marvel, turned away from comics completely, only to be saved by a chance encounter with one of DC’s finest titles (as discussed at nauseating length here).

Maybe this whole comics obsession thing wasn't such a good idea after all.

So Deadpool had a mountain to climb to reach my affections. To make matters worse, I’ve never been able to stomach Ryan Reynolds in anything. Green Lantern, Blade Trinity, X-Men Origins: Wolverine… his snarky, cocky charisma clearly connects with lots of people, but I find him pretty much intolerable. Nothing personal, just a matter of taste. He's the cucumber of actors. 

And then there were the painfully unfunny trailers. It looked like a complete disaster. Never have I been less interested in a comic book movie – and I even went, with some mild enthusiasm, to see Fan4tastic, so this is a pretty low bar. Yet the entire geek community seemed to be absolutely in love with this dreck.

I have never felt so alone.

There was, however, one big, steel fly in the ointment of my wrath – Colossus. One of my favourite X-Men, one of my favourite Marvel heroes, one of my favourite fictional characters, full stop. And here he was, looking pretty good, with an actual personality and actual lines of dialogue, far more than he’d ever been given in any X-Men film. Damn you, Fox. Damn you. I may have no choice to see this after all.

Two-ton dreamboat.

So it came to pass that I found myself in a cinema, watching a Deadpool film, loathing myself a little bit. And it was… pretty good, as it happens. Utterly generic, but knowingly so. Some really great action sequences (especially the brilliant climactic battle), a startling horror atmosphere during one sequence, and some surprisingly sweet romance beats. The supporting players are for the most part excellent – Colossus was handled really well, and gets into some brutal action during his brouhaha with Gina Carano’s fantastic Angel Dust, who is in no way responsible for my burgeoning evil-women-with-quiffs-and-super-strength fetish. Brianna Hildebrand's Negasonic Teenage Warhead is a charmingly surly adolescent who packs a big punch, and Morena Baccarin’s Vanessa is a compelling romantic foil, albeit thanklessly relegated to the clichéd damsel-in-distress role during the third act.

Why no Monster Magnet cameo in this movie? Dave Wyndorf needs new bell bottoms.

On the downside, I recognise I have some baggage here, but my least favourite aspect of Deadpool was Deadpool himself. To be honest, little about the film served to change my mind about either Reynolds or Deadpool. It was unclear whether we, the audience, are supposed to like/sympathise with Wade Wilson at all. Yes, he undergoes a horrible ordeal and does everything he does in the name of love, but on the other hand he’s relentlessly annoying and a complete arsehole. It’s like being trapped in a wardrobe with Adam Sandler.

Further downsides are the agonisingly nondescript and forgettable main villain, who makes Ant-Man’s Darren Cross look like Dr Doom by comparison, and supposed comedy relief sidekick TJ Miller, who is roughly as entertaining as a dead dog floating in a toddler pool.

Squeeze, Gina. Squeeeeeeze.

My biggest problem with Deadpool is that, while it’s a pretty good comic-book movie, its focus is largely comedic. No bad thing in theory, except that, to be brutally honest, Deadpool is nowhere near as funny as it thinks it is. There are a handful of good gags, but the seemingly endless stream of witless duds is frankly wearying. If you buy into Reynolds’ smartass/dumbass motormouth schtick, maybe it’s a lot more effective, but his delivery just doesn’t work for me. In combining superheroics and comedy, it superficially has a lot in common with Guardians of the Galaxy, but the latter does so much more successfully – thanks in no small part to the naturally funny, dangerously personable and thoroughly dreamy Chris Pratt. 

What Deadpool does is weld a good, if formulaic formula superhero/revenge flick to a tiresome frat-boy comedy under the pretence of being subversive and irreverent. While there is some fourth-wall breaking and a few digs at superhero cinema (the X-Men franchise in particular), that side of it is relatively polite, almost cursory. But that's where Deadpool's real potential lies, and I feel the film would have benefitted from pushing these elements much, much further to create something far sillier and much bolder. And maybe it will do that in the inevitable sequel (which should ideally be called The Inevitable Deadpool Sequel). I’m thinking Adaptation meets Adventure Time meets Byrne's She-Hulk meets the end of Blazing Saddles. With katanas.

THE UNCANNY VADERY

As discussed in my last post, I've been a Star Wars fan for as long as I can remember. I was but a sprout when Episode IV was first screened on ITV and captured my imagination and heart. Star Wars was my world. Well, Star Wars and comics. More specifically, Star Wars and Marvel...

  

But until last week I had never read a Star Wars comic in my life (let alone read an EU novel). Which seems ridiculous – surely this would be a perfect synthesis of my interests? For some reason, I've always been repulsed by the very idea of it. I've never quite been able to put my finger on why...

'A laser-gun' might have had something to do with it.

  

A few days ago, I met up with an old, old friend who I see not nearly enough. He and I were tiny sprouts together, we grew up playing with each other's Kenner figures and playsets, we pretended to be Luke and Han in our back gardens, drew Star Wars pictures, went to see Return of the Jedi in the cinema. Our childhoods were inextricably intertwined with Star Wars. Obviously, I was really keen to hear what he thought of The Force Awakens. But he hadn't seen it and had little interest in doing so. I was stunned. For the love of Jabba, why, man, why? He told me that the prequels had completely crushed his interest in Star Wars, because 'It's amazing how much of the appeal of Star Wars is in things that aren't explained.'

My god. He's right. That's it.

So much of the original trilogy is left to your imagination. Who the Bothans are and why they died. What the Senate is and how it was disbanded. The badassness of Boba Fett. Who the hell Mon Mothma is. Anakin and Obi-Wan's relationship. Tosche's station. What happened in the Clone Wars. Those spider-robot-brain things in Jabba's palace. How Han won the Falcon from Lando. What a womp rat is. What happened to Dengar's face. Half of the familiar names are never even said in the films themselves but came to us via the toys – AT-ATs, Ugnaughts, Y-wings, Bosssk, Gamorrean Guards, Lobot, Wampas, Salacious Crumb...

Who hell he?

This willingness to drop the viewer into a world without feeling the need to explain every detail is a huge part of what makes OT Star Wars so compelling. It's also one of the many reasons why I find the prequels so unsatisfying. And it's the main factor, albeit a subconscious one, in my avoiding the comics and the EU for the last 30 years. I don't want to someone else to fill in the gaps for me, because the gaps are where quite a bit of the fun lies.

If the OT taught us anything, it's that not everything needs to be spelled out, while the prequels explained too much. Yet one of the recurring complaints I've read about The Force Awakens is that not enough is explained or resolved, and too much is left open for the sequels. Needless to say, I don’t think this is a problem – we're now in an age of serialised movie storytelling, and I embrace the wider scope of that. I'm all for movies working in isolation, but I'm equally excited about them working towards something bigger. TFA gets the balance right, and in leaving a number of questions unanswered, it opens up a lot of directions in which modern Star Wars can go.

All of this is a very long-winded, circumlocutory way of saying that I recently read the first two trades of Marvel’s new Star Wars and Darth Vader series. Set just after A New Hope, these intertwining stories follow Luke, Han, Leia et al as they mount a raid on an Imperial weapons factory, and Vader as he tries to uncover the identity of the Rebel pilot who blew up the Death Star. From a pure comics storytelling point of view, I enjoyed these quite a bit – especially the Vader one. Both are rollicking, multi-layered tales that interconnect in interesting ways and explore new facets of the Star Wars universe. And both have fantastic art, from John Cassaday and Salvador Larocca, respectively.

  

However, I do still have a psychological block with these titles, partly because of the aforementioned wish not to have the gaps filled in, but also because there is a slight element of uncanny valley to them. When comics are converted to films or TV, they are of necessity more or less faithful adaptations, taking sometimes considerable liberties with the source material in order to work in a live-action medium. The conversion of films to comics, however, entails a tendency to replicate the movie visuals as accurately as possible – which is, of course, great for purists, but for me often makes for an unsettling, stilted experience, heavy on photo reference, full of designs optimised for the screen, not for the page. Star Wars is, of course, full of classic, iconic design, and I’m in no way suggesting they should be reworked for the comics – but it makes it harder to see the comic in its own terms, rather than an as ersatz version of the real thing.

Ultimately, this is my brain’s problem. And I’m seeking help with it. But the comics are pretty good. If you can handle them.