Revisiting "The Crow"
Oct. 5th, 2017 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glitter_n_goreLike any holiday, Halloween comes with certain traditions. I always dress up, I always make sure we're stocked with candy, and I have a number of movies I rewatch every year. Hocus Pocus is a must of course, as are Practical Magic, Sleepy Hollow, and whatever vampire movie I'm in the mood for that year. But on Devil's Night, October 30th, which also happens to be my half-birthday, I watch The Crow. This year I read the graphic novel by James O'Barr for the first time. It was . . . surprising. Not that I didn't expect it to be different from the movie. I always expect that. However, usually in adaptations the plot is shortened and simplified and the characters are pared down from what they were in the source material. In the case of The Crow, it is completely the opposite.
GIF silhouette of man and crow walking towards a broken circular window
(Source.)
If you're one of the three people out there who has never seen, read, or heard of The Crow: A young couple is brutally murdered one night, but then the man is brought temporarily back to life by a mystical crow to seek revenge. This is the only thing the comic and the movie have in common. The way the young couple is murdered is different, the reason they're killed is different, their relationship with the little girl, Sarah, is different, the order and method Eric uses to go after the people responsible is different, his connection with Officer Albrecht is different, the whole subplot about Devil's Night and T-Bird's gang setting everything on fire is different--basically almost everything I think of as iconic to The Crow as a story isn't in the comics at all. Whole characters like Myca, Grange, and Skank didn't even exist on the page. The imagery and the aesthetic are similar, but everything else was invented for the movie.
The film bad guys all have distinct and memorable personalities where the villains in the comic blend into a mesh of mostly faceless thugs. Funboy is the main antagonist in the comics and therefore the final boss that Eric takes out, with Top Dollar being one of the lower-tiered names on his kill list. Also, you know how I sometimes complain about Shelly being kind of a nothing character, and I wish they'd give her more of a personality? Turns out, that's exactly what the filmmakers did. They gave her motivation and a backstory. She still gets fridged, because this story kind of runs on the two lovers dying horribly, but in the comic it's much more senseless and random. Their car breaks down and a car full of gang members stops and kills them because . . . they were there? I guess? It's nothing to do with this angry letter about tenant eviction that Shelly drafts and gets all her neighbors to sign, which also doesn't exist in the comic. Since this story is a tribute to James O'Barr's real-life lost love, I would guess that the comic version is probably closer to reality, and I can respect that. However, it changes everything about Shelly as a character.
The only scene lifted from the comic pretty much verbatim is Eric's attack on Gideon's pawn shop. That part is very close, and in fact it threw me off since by that point I'd realized the adaptation was in-name-only. The other more or less faithful scene is the "Mother is the name for God" speech Eric gives to Sarah's mother; although again, Sarah (who is not called Sarah in the comics) is a random street kid he finds and takes pity on, rather than a surrogate daughter / audience proxy devastated by Eric's death.
It's difficult to say how much changed after Brandon Lee's untimely death. The overall tone of the movie feels like a tribute to the actor more than anything else. The focus on Eric's grief is still there, but muted. In the film, there's a much bigger emphasis on the impact he had on the people around him both before and after his death. Eric's relationships between Sarah and Officer Albrecht, two characters deeply affected by the loss of Eric and Shelly, are among the few good people whom Eric reaches out to after he's brought back. Eric's insistence that Albrecht try to quit smoking and patch things up with his wife is film-only, as is that "nothing is trivial" speech, ad-libbed by Brandon Lee on the spot.
Overall, I still prefer the film to the comic. This might be nostalgia bias talking. The movie's been part of my life for so long now, I probably can't be unbiased in its favor. The comic is a classic for a reason, but it's also heavily metaphorical and verbose in a way that can get grating after a while. Also, I just prefer Movie!Eric as a character. He just has so much more personality. Comic!Eric keeps you at a narrative distance, an Avenging Angel figure too chilly and ethereal to feel fully human. Brandon Lee's Eric is just as violent, but he also highlight's the character's compassion, empathy, and sense of humor. I need those things to connect as an audience member. Movie!Eric feels like a real person muddling through the afterlife and struggling to make his own death mean something. Comic!Eric just feels . . . well, like a ghost.
GIF silhouette of man and crow walking towards a broken circular window
(Source.)
If you're one of the three people out there who has never seen, read, or heard of The Crow: A young couple is brutally murdered one night, but then the man is brought temporarily back to life by a mystical crow to seek revenge. This is the only thing the comic and the movie have in common. The way the young couple is murdered is different, the reason they're killed is different, their relationship with the little girl, Sarah, is different, the order and method Eric uses to go after the people responsible is different, his connection with Officer Albrecht is different, the whole subplot about Devil's Night and T-Bird's gang setting everything on fire is different--basically almost everything I think of as iconic to The Crow as a story isn't in the comics at all. Whole characters like Myca, Grange, and Skank didn't even exist on the page. The imagery and the aesthetic are similar, but everything else was invented for the movie.
The film bad guys all have distinct and memorable personalities where the villains in the comic blend into a mesh of mostly faceless thugs. Funboy is the main antagonist in the comics and therefore the final boss that Eric takes out, with Top Dollar being one of the lower-tiered names on his kill list. Also, you know how I sometimes complain about Shelly being kind of a nothing character, and I wish they'd give her more of a personality? Turns out, that's exactly what the filmmakers did. They gave her motivation and a backstory. She still gets fridged, because this story kind of runs on the two lovers dying horribly, but in the comic it's much more senseless and random. Their car breaks down and a car full of gang members stops and kills them because . . . they were there? I guess? It's nothing to do with this angry letter about tenant eviction that Shelly drafts and gets all her neighbors to sign, which also doesn't exist in the comic. Since this story is a tribute to James O'Barr's real-life lost love, I would guess that the comic version is probably closer to reality, and I can respect that. However, it changes everything about Shelly as a character.
The only scene lifted from the comic pretty much verbatim is Eric's attack on Gideon's pawn shop. That part is very close, and in fact it threw me off since by that point I'd realized the adaptation was in-name-only. The other more or less faithful scene is the "Mother is the name for God" speech Eric gives to Sarah's mother; although again, Sarah (who is not called Sarah in the comics) is a random street kid he finds and takes pity on, rather than a surrogate daughter / audience proxy devastated by Eric's death.
It's difficult to say how much changed after Brandon Lee's untimely death. The overall tone of the movie feels like a tribute to the actor more than anything else. The focus on Eric's grief is still there, but muted. In the film, there's a much bigger emphasis on the impact he had on the people around him both before and after his death. Eric's relationships between Sarah and Officer Albrecht, two characters deeply affected by the loss of Eric and Shelly, are among the few good people whom Eric reaches out to after he's brought back. Eric's insistence that Albrecht try to quit smoking and patch things up with his wife is film-only, as is that "nothing is trivial" speech, ad-libbed by Brandon Lee on the spot.
Overall, I still prefer the film to the comic. This might be nostalgia bias talking. The movie's been part of my life for so long now, I probably can't be unbiased in its favor. The comic is a classic for a reason, but it's also heavily metaphorical and verbose in a way that can get grating after a while. Also, I just prefer Movie!Eric as a character. He just has so much more personality. Comic!Eric keeps you at a narrative distance, an Avenging Angel figure too chilly and ethereal to feel fully human. Brandon Lee's Eric is just as violent, but he also highlight's the character's compassion, empathy, and sense of humor. I need those things to connect as an audience member. Movie!Eric feels like a real person muddling through the afterlife and struggling to make his own death mean something. Comic!Eric just feels . . . well, like a ghost.