The Spirit

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I'll admit that I'm not too familiar with The Spirit, a Golden Age noirish comic book from the legendary Will Eisner - I often confuse the series with The Spectre. As it turns out another comic book legend, Frank Miller has chosen The Spirit as his first proper film project (he directed some portions of 2005's Sin City, based on his own graphic novel series).

Adapted from the legendary comic strip, THE SPIRIT is a classic action-adventure-romance told by genre-twister FRANK MILLER (creator of 300 and SIN CITY). It is the story of a former rookie cop who returns mysteriously from the dead as the SPIRIT (Gabriel Macht) to fight crime from the shadows of Central City. His arch-enemy, the OCTOPUS (Samuel L. Jackson) has a different mission: he's going to wipe out Spirit's beloved city as he pursues his own version of immortality. The Spirit tracks this cold-hearted killer from Central City's rundown warehouses, to the damp catacombs, to the windswept waterfront ... all the while facing a bevy of beautiful women who either want to seduce, love or kill our masked crusader.

Surrounding him at every turn are ELLEN DOLAN (Sarah Paulson), the whip-smart girl-next-door; SILKEN FLOSS (Scarlett Johansson), a punk secretary and frigid vixen; PLASTER OF PARIS (Paz Vega), a murderous French nightclub dancer; LORELEI (Jaime King), a phantom siren; and MORGENSTERN (Stana Katic), a sexy young cop.
Then of course, there's SAND SAREF (Eva Mendes), the jewel thief with dangerous curves. She's the love of his life turned bad. Will he save her or will she kill him?


We're still waiting for the first teaser trailer for The Spirit, but judging by the poster art and first released pics, the film is very much in the vein of Sin City. Perhaps even too much so, given its predominantly red, white and black colour pallet and use of CGI-enhanced imagery. Is this really Will Eisner's The Spirit, as the film's title suggests, or Frank Miller's The Spirit? Considering Sin City 2 and 3 are currently in pre-production, perhaps audiences are being overdosed with such a hyper-faithful, stylised approach.

Then there's the question of whether audiences will warm to this Golden Age property, which, unlike Superman for example, has largely faded from the public consciousness over the years. If you remember, both The Shadow (starring Alec Baldwin) and The Phantom (starring Billy Zane) movies tanked badly back in the 1990s.


Still, the difference between those movies and this one is the fantastic casting (Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Eva Mendes, Gabriel Macht, Jamie King), and the exact transfer of comic book styling and cinematography to the big screen.

I'm still not tired of such stylish adaptations. The Spirit should be great fun. I'm looking forward to it.

Comments

Unknown said…
I'm not going to pretend to know a lot about this. But from what I've learned reading the Sin City letters pages (Frank used these as his kind of olden age blog). Eisner is one of Miller's greatest influences (especially his work on Sin City).

I think The Spirit is where the Sin City style of rain was originally developed. Anyway Miller is definitely a big fan of Eisner's. Here is a link to some of Eisners Original Spirit work. While more "cartoony" there are definite similarities in style.

And I'm really let down by that Sam Jackson image. The silhouettes in the background are outrageously jagged.
2:55 PM
Pfangirl said…
Thanks for the link, Rob. Very interesting.

As for the Jackson image, I totally agree - really shoddy quality. What's up with that?
8:38 AM
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