My first experience with geek culture was thanks to my dad, who introduced me to the same character he empathized with while growing up: Spiderman.
I still remember him taking me down to the epicenter of Hutchinson, Kansas (Wal-Mart) and buying me my first comic book. I wasn’t old enough to read the words next to the drawings, but I still followed ‘Spidey’ as he fought Fish Bowl Man, (who I found out later had the less descriptive title ‘Mysterio’) all while telling bad jokes between right hooks.
So you can imagine how this ‘Wall Crawler’ aficionado felt while watching Sam Raimi’s Spiderman film.
It matched the comic book to a tee: Spidey dealt with villains who willingly referred to themselves as ‘Green Goblin’ or ‘Doc Oc,’ he made horrible puns while swinging from web-lines that seemed to attach to thin air, and most importantly, it was as campy and silly as the comic books.
That sort of attempt to bring a super hero to the silver screen with non-sensible and stylistic trappings that accompanied him in the comic has fallen out of fashion, thanks to a little film called “The Dark Knight.”
The movie had a monumental impact on the film industry. Suddenly the Joker was no longer shooting people with laughing gas, he was forcing them to try and blow each other up with crude explosives. Suddenly Batman is now trying to keep surveillance on Gotham City through a series of cell-phones, all in the name of stopping crime.
Gotham City no longer felt like a familiar, and at the same time exotic, fictional location with bank robbers that dressed as clowns.
This isn’t to say that this evolution is a bad thing. Christopher Nolan’s realistic take on the caped crusader at the very least makes it easier to believe that a man can dress up and fight crime, and at the very most make for a thrilling story.
But I couldn’t help but think about this approach while recently sitting through “X-men Origins: Wolverine.” The Blob, Sabretooth, Gambit and even Dead Pool were all present on screen, but without their level of fantastic and campy veneer that the original comics employed, they felt like empty shells.
Nobody wants to return to the Adam West “Batman” or the extravagance of “Batman and Robin.”
Still, it can make a film that more engaging when the valiant hero defeats his arch nemesis through means that are nearly impossible and deliver a bad joke to break the tension, making it easier to believe in a world without authorized torture or wars that never really end.
