The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

The BBC reports that the Iron Man movie enjoyed huge success over its opening weekend, raking in some $101 million in the US and Canada alone. This comfortably exceeds the initial expectations that it would garner around $70 to $80 million and makes it one of only ten movies to break the $100 million barrier in the opening three days. Which has to be a huge relief to Marvel Studios – with Marvel producing their own films now instead of allowing another studio to use their characters there was a lot at stake and such an excellent performance for their first offering via Marvel Studios can only be a boost:

“It’s the perfect way to start the new studio, to blast it off. We’re fortunate to have this powerful Marvel brand which means something for movie-goers around the world,” David Maisel, Marvel Studios Chairman, talking to Reuters (found via the BBC).

(the red, right hand)

To be honest I’m not sure that it was just the ‘powerful Marvel brand’ which tipped the movie from doing respectable, summer blockbuster type box office to being in the top ten earners. That brand appeals to we comics geeks, but let’s face it, outside of comics readers that brand won’t mean as much and in the non-comics-reading cinema-going public only a handful of superheroes like Superman, Batman and Spider-Man will be really familiar to them. Despite Iron Man being a major player in the Marvel Universe I suspect plenty of non comics reading viewers wouldn’t have known much – if anything – about him before the film. And yet they’ve been going in droves – the comics audience alone would not have propelled it to those sort of box office figures.

And having seen it I can understand why – it isn’t just that the effects are slick (frankly these days we expect anything imagined can be recreated digitally and convincingly) or that it has the summer blockbuster requirements of big spectacle (in fact it has less big fight scenes than you’d expect and yet I didn’t feel shortchanged, what was there fitted well, more would have been detrimental). It actually had a decent story and, very importantly, a convincing actor in the lead role. Despite his personal problems with substance abuse and brushes with the law (which I thought actually made him perfect to play Tony Stark) I think people sometimes forget Robert Downey Junior is actually a good actor – the effort he put into Chaplin for instance spoke of someone who can seriously work their acting chops when given the chance. Iron Man might not be quite that challenging, but Downey Junior still makes the effort to create a character that is a lot more rounded and believably human than many comics-to-movies adaptations manage. In fact, although it is an enjoyable action-comics-SF summer romp I’d say it is also a mainstream comics adaptation made for a more adult audience and that showed (although there is also a ton of references to classic comics moments littered throughout for the geeks to enjoy spotting too and we all know we love doing that). Unlike, say, the Fantastic Four movies.

(Tony Stark regretted testing his new deep sea diver’s suit in a landlocked country)

Its very different from another recent (to the UK at least, we had a long, long wait for it) comics-to-movie adaptation, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. A mostly black and white animated feature in a foreign language with subtitles; despite the huge international success of the original graphic novels (which appeal to far more than the traditional comics-store browsers) this means the film version has had a fairly limited release in the UK. Its picked up good worth of mouth but between the limited release, subtitles and lacking the marketing budget of Marvel it is barely making a blip compared to Shellhead’s flick at the box office. Which is a damned shame because there should be room for both (that already limited release will be further squeezed out by the start of the summer blockbuster season demanding space at the multiplexes). Although it shouldn’t be a great surprise since it mirrors the way in which superhero comics tend to vastly outsell more unusual graphic novels like Persepolis – which is not, by the way, a dig at the capes and tights comics because I love those too, its only to suggest that there are a lot more varied works out there which are deserving of attention that they don’t always get.

(Marjane talks to god in Persepolis, asking those questions many ask – if you’re real and you are good why are bad things happening to good people?)

Persepolis the graphic novel can be seen as fitting into an expanding area of publishing which has been growing since at least the early 90s, the autobiographical work of someone who, for want of a better term, is not already famous. By this I mean that traditionally in the booktrade – especially the mainstream trade – celeb biographies are traditional bestsellers. But books like Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Jung Chang’s Wild Swans drew on the lives of the non-famous – ‘real’ lives, ordinary families, events most readers could empathise with much more readily. In fact I often recommended readers (especially women) who had enjoyed Wild Swans (a huge international seller) try Persepolis and usually found those who could get over the fact it was a ‘comic book’ really enjoyed it. But it is getting them over that perception hump that can be the trouble and I imagine the animated film version will suffer from the same problem, despite good reviews in a lot of mainstream press and in the book pages of women’s interest magazines (the same pages that celebrated works like Wild Swans).

And that is indeed a shame – I really enjoyed Iron Man, but I would love to see Persepolis enjoying at least a fraction of that success because it really deserves to. With Marjane being so involved with the film and with the fairly basic animation mirroring the style of the graphic novels it really captures much of the spirit of the books (and it has the voice of a true Queen of the Screen, the wonderful Catherine Deneuve, no bad thing). And when I say basic animation, that isn’t a criticism – basic doesn’t mean rough or lacking, just that it eschews the slickness of most feature animations today, which is a good thing because a slick approach would have been totally unsuited to the style of the tale. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t some lovely visual flourishes in there too – most of the scenes are very similar in style to the black and white graphic novel pages but there are some lovely little scenes which go off briefly into other areas, including some historical/flashback scenes which reminded me a little of Lotte Reiniger’s beautiful Adventures of Prince Achmed (one of the oldest surviving animated features in the world).

(Marjane is allowed to visit her uncle in prison before his execution)

Mostly, however, the film version succeeds exactly where the book succeeds (and where works like Wild Swans succeed) – it convincingly conveys emotions across that flickering screen. As the Iran-Iraq war rages (fuelled by weapons being sold to both sides by Western and other governments) and the religious hardliners use it as an excuse to clamp down, forever restricting more and more freedoms, arresting, torturing and killing ‘dissidents’ its impossible not to empathise with Marjane, her family and her friends. When her uncle, who had been imprisoned and tortured during the despotic reign of the Shah is freed only to be re-imprisoned by the new fundamentalist regime you would have to have a heart of stone not to feel tears. Or the simple wave of relief when Marjane returns home to find part of her street destroyed in a bombing raid, staring in shock then sudden relief when her mother calls her name and she realises her family is safe. Its very different from Iron Man, just as the comics they both come from are very different. But they are both drawn (no pun intended) from our favourite medium, they’re both very fine examples of how to do a good comics-to-film adaptation that can appeal to a wider (non-comics reading) audience – which hopefully makes more folks want to read the comics too – and they are both deserving of your attentions.