Movie Review: The Crow tries hard to be and is not
Cinematically speaking, the comic book character adaptation genre has been very complicated. Not everything is about superheroes saving the world. Having a good representation must be as close to the vignettes as possible, which, along with its story, is something that lives up to the expectations of the creators.
Films like Sin City (2005) and 300 (2006) have been the best that have been presented to date. We see moving vignettes that, along with their plot, have taken this subgenre to a level that very few have been able to reach.
The creation and first adaptation of the work done by James O. Barr in 1994 surprised everyone. The Crow was perhaps one of the most complicated films in the history of cinema. The sudden death of its protagonist Brandon Lee in the middle of everything made its director Alex Proyas use a different filming technique to finish it.
The Crow is already a classic and cult film that perfectly represents O. Barr’s material on film, surpassing or matching this was a difficult challenge that unfortunately did not have the best results. Four independent sequels and a television series were not enough to tell the story of this character.
In 2024, it is director Rupert Sanders’ turn to bring a new adaptation to the big screen and tell this supernatural love story.
What is The Crow 2024 about?
The love that Eric (Skarsgård) and Shelly (FKA twigs) have for each other is interrupted when they are brutally murdered and the demons of their past become present. When one of them has the opportunity to save his true love, Eric returns from the dead and takes merciless revenge on his murderers, crossing the barrier between the world of the living and the dead.
For several years there were rumors of a reboot of this franchise, given what happened in its first adaptation to the cinema things were not easy at all, the studios as well as the directors did not have a clear idea of how to do it without having the inevitable comparisons with its predecessor, the director Rupert Sanders and the scriptwriter Zach Baylin and Will Schneider were chosen by Lionsgate together with Sony Pictures to bring back this character telling and modernizing his controversial story.
Here we can ask ourselves: was it necessary to make a new adaptation? How good or how bad is it to do it in these times? The answers to these questions have caused controversy among friends and strangers, while some say no, others are in favor and defend the final product, the truth is that these divided opinions have made this film not exempt from comparisons.
You don’t need to be a film expert to know that good films always have the same integrity that makes them a cult classic and the same goes for those that aren’t. The Crow may seem to have a simple plot, a man who is murdered along with his girlfriend who is the love of his life, and returns from the dead to exact revenge, modernizing it includes having more scenes and sequences of even more explicit violence which makes it difficult to narrate something timeless that they want to forcefully modernize.
This work has many elements that don’t work, including those recurring flashbacks loaded with symbolism about a childhood trauma that led the protagonist to a mental institution, and as viewers, we simply have to accept the fact that the love story that is the axis of everything is more important than its action simply because the film needs it and because the characters were created to tell it.
In these times and giving a name to all this that is now known as a remake, it is much more likely that its correct name is a well-made reboot, but here even that is not taken into account, it desperately tries to adapt the original work using completely new methods, so far things are going fairly well, what it intends is to have its personality and style breaking with everything that came before and starting from scratch.
Saying this sounds and reads very easy to do, the base material is already in cartoons and it only needs to be made up so that it seems like something new with its current problems and a moral discourse that tells us once again that love can do everything, even bringing a man back from the dead to take revenge on his murderers, what could be something that is compared to a gothic love with supernatural overtones must be treated as it should be if you want the results to be good and even more so to be to the liking and taste of the public.
To understand this story even more, we must know that all this happens in a world where dark fantasy exists, where everything is possible from deep love to the most extraordinary things, every detail and everything is made to help the plot to be credible, to transport us to another place where we are made to believe that dreams and impossible things can happen, that the desire for revenge is as valid as love and that in the name of the latter anything that is done is justified.
In this new adaptation, that previous dystopian world of dark gothic fantasy is replaced by a realistic atmosphere, this time the antagonists have also been modernized, they do not kill just for fun but have a fixed objective that is based on the actions and conduct of current mafia gangs, we understand from the first moment that Eric deeply loves his girlfriend Shelly and that he has to face his murderers, turning this into personal revenge in which his girlfriend will now play a very important role, a decision that is not entirely good.
The result of all of the above is due to a series of difficult decisions that lead to this not fulfilling either what was promised or expectations, the question we now ask ourselves can be very divisive: is this a film that advocates a lot for nostalgia and relies on its predecessor to be in the taste of the new generations? The answer can be a resounding no, some things should no longer be re-adapted and modernized for such a weak generation that does not care about anything at all, but this is not the case, violence sells and it is believed to sell very well.
It is very difficult to continue to see the positive side of all this, anything that can be even slightly highlighted is accompanied by a but… this whole visual world that the film has would have been beautiful if they had also respected its timelessness and its dark and gothic tone, modernizing this environment and this line is one of its biggest flaws, at times what we see does not become depressing as it should be and it is not because we want it that way, it is because it is already established as an important part of its story, another of its flaws is the poor handling of CGI throughout the entire film, unfortunately, everything that should look spectacular and credible looks very poor and very clumsy.
The pretentious violent scenes are very well done, with good choreography, good camera handling, good shots, and good work with the masks, and here too there is a but… it would have been much better if the filmmakers had committed themselves more and had prolonged the violent and explicit episodes more, and then we would justify a little better that this revenge took up more time in the film, which at times goes from love to supernatural to action and then to violence but then to love and then it does not have an effective narrative line that unites all this symmetrically instead of guessing whether it is or is not.
Another flaw is undoubtedly its script, written by Zach Baylin, which never manages to have the necessary strength to make us, as an audience, believe that everything we see is strategically thought out to work, that this revenge becomes the central axis of everything, that everything happens and is resolved by chance and in favor of the same, that its poorly stated and even more so, terribly executed moral discourse tells us that true love must be avenged however it may be and against whomever it may be because love is love and everything else doesn’t matter simply because it is love. We won’t get them out of this bullshit.
The structure of its characters is not the best either and it is another of its flaws, for example, the antagonist, villain, and bad guy of this movie, Roeg (Danny Huston) is not just a common human criminal oh no no no, he is a vile and powerful creature that according to his description has existed for a long time and can corrupt mortals and their souls, that is, a twisted version of the devil, the demon, Lucifer or something similar, unlike what we know and saw before this work goes completely to the supernatural side beyond resurrecting a dead protagonist to take revenge, it is rather a poorly made horror movie about devils, demons, monsters, and stolen souls, here evil is portrayed as a power that can very easily be turned into a weapon, transforming and stripping others of their goodness and this “Crow” spends most of its metaphysical development scenes in an intermediate space between the living and the dead or simply a purgatory.
Despite all its errors and flaws, including of course the lack of originality in its imaginative compositions, the film has something, perhaps a good intention that should inoculate it against all those claims that say this is a remake to make money, it is not a film that cares about having a detailed and concrete cosmology that puts the motivations of the characters in a correct context and lets the film build a plot that goes beyond the bad guys killing the hero’s girl and the hero returning to kill the bad guys, it pretends to be deep and fails and falls into absurd laughter.
Proyas’ version is infinitely better than what we see here, we see the clumsiness of his script that tries at every moment to be convincing, they probably thought that all this was going to end up being an example of a film in which style is a fundamental part of all its substance and that adopts that aesthetic with much more force to justify all the violence, which can be seen separately and absolutely nothing would happen.
The cast is made up of Bill Skarsgård, FKA twigs, Danny Huston, Isabella Wei, Laura Birn, Sami Bouajila, and Jordan Bolger who do what they can with what they have, in the case of Skarsgård his performance feels like very apart from everything and everyone, an actor who has outgrown the character and who could give much more and be more authentic.
The music composed by Volker Bertelmann has good moments and at times reminds us of what Graeme Revell did but in a more subtle and modern metallic tone, if anything it helped its predecessor, and being the 90s, the music was also something important, bands like The Cure, Stone Temple Pilots, Nine Inch Nails, Pantera and Medicine are far above Joy Division, Traitrs, Cascadeur and Enya herself.
In conclusion, The Crow 2024 is a failed reboot that tries hard to be and isn’t, a clear example that there are things that shouldn’t be touched simply because they are already classics and not for studios to try to make money, an opportunity that is more than wasted in wanting to modernize and attract new generations, a job that could have been somewhat better and the filler for some streaming platform but that didn’t work.
The Crow is now in theaters in our country.
