Last night, inspite of being tired beyond belief, I went and saw Daredevil. Some movies have to be seen before the critics get to me.

Not that I didn’t know it was a bad movie. I have been following the careers of comic-books-turned-into-movies with a great deal of interest, and more often than not, have been disappointed by how comic-characters, and storylines get tattered on screen. Ditto Daredevil! And that, despite being one of the rare movie adaptations that stick to established comic-book storylines without veering off towards the surreal, the mundane; or the bane of movie-making, directorial interpretation. (Nipples on Batsuits, anyone? )

Right now, this is a comic fan speaking, a guy who has been disillusioned once again by the Hollywood Machine, and wondering how on earth these guys managed to screw up, how they always manage to screw up a concept again and again, and how, I think, they will continue to do so.

Who are comic-book adaptations aimed at? The ideal answer should be “people who have read the comic book and are familiar with the character”. And not just the character, the locations, the people inhabiting that particular world, yeah, because almost every comic-book has it’s own world, even it’s own Universe. A world that is inhabited by these characters in “real”-time. A single story-line takes months to complete (considering the fact that I am talking about ongoing comic-book series that come out on a periodic basis ), and there are readers (like me!) who stick through a series for a long, long time, and for a variety of reasons – the writing, the artwork, the storyline, and most of the times the character itself – the way the character is being fleshed out, and because we want to know “what happens next” in the guy’s life.

Now don’t get me wrong.. it’s easy to say – “why identify with something like comics at all? Mindless, badly-written stories about people wearing tights and flashy costumes and hitting each other at random don’t make sense in today’s world.” Hmmm, come to think of it, that’s right. But then what makes sense in today’s world? (Shut up, beatzo, and stop getting philosophical about the whole thing.)

And what happens when a movie is made? You are supposed to talk to people who know the bare essentials. Spiderman is Peter Parker, the guy who was bitten by a radioactive spider and dresses up in red and blue and swings around New York bashing up villains. The X-Men are “mutants”. Superman is an icon, and Batman goes around at night. And after countless trailers, people now know that Daredevil is Matt Murdock, a blind lawyer with superhuman senses, and surprise! He fights crime too. How original!!!

I don’t know how “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon” got away with it. You know, all that arcane stuff, like people fighting atop bamboo trees and flying on rooftops. In a movie about “normal” people ( as Daredevil was made out to be, it was the normal New York we know), you just can’t take a blind man jumping off a skyscraper and grabbing hold of flagpoles and flying around. He’s a normal human being, for God’s sake! How on earth do you expect people to believe something like that in 70mm film. For that matter, of course, even The Lord of The Rings is farfetched, but that’s ok., you can go buy the book, read it and read the entire history of Middle-Earth for that matter, and then go see it again, and maybe you will see things in a more generous light. But what about comics? Something that nobody even reads in the first place, and even if they wanted to, they can’t!

The worst mistake the morons over at Hollywood seem to make is – Action! More action! Stunts! Lay it on, fellas, make him fly, make him dodge bullets, make it SO plausible that the audience can even take a guy killing an old woman sitting next to him in a plane with a well-aimed peanut.

Morons!!!!

For those who came in late, Marvel comics started in the 1960’s and started offering serious competition to Big Brother, DC ( then called National Periodical Publications ) Mostly because Marvel put superheroes in a more “worldly” light – Peter Parker didn’t just don his tights and go out to bash the Green Goblin, he had to skip a class, and find a plausible way to explain things at home and to his teachers about why he had missed the class. In other words, Superheroes were normal people like us, and having the odd-superpower or two didn’t necessarily mean you could be happy bashing up villains when you had to., You could also screw up, and sometimes screw up with disastrous consequences. The whole byline of Sam Raimi’s Spiderman hinged on the line “With great power comes great responsibility”. Raimi got the picture (almost) perfectly – his movie was not just about action, it was about relationships and about character developement. (Remember the scene in Peter’s backyard with Mary-Jane and Peter himself? Or the part when Aunt May comes into Peter’s room after his graduation and finds him on the bed, fighting back tears ? )

Daredevil – aaaaah, poor fellow – when he came out in the 1960’s, Daredevil was Marvel’s answer to Batman. The vigilante superhero of Hell’s Kitchen. The catch being, of course, that he was blind. A freak accident with a truckful of radioactive waste took away his eyesight and left his remaining senses heightened to such a degree that he possessed a “radar sense”. He grows up to become a lawyer, and by daytime, defends the poor people of Hell’s Kitchen, and by night, metes out justice as a red-clad Daredevil. His activities lead him against The Kingpin of Crime, who incidentally was responsible for the death of Matt’s father, Jack “The Devil” Murdock, a boxer who refused to throw a fight inspite of being ordered to do so.

So far so good. The movie follows this premise beautifully. Almost word for word, you might say. It even has in-jokes like using names of Marvel artists and creators as characters. The boxer who loses against Matt’s father is named Romita. (John Romita Sr and his son John Romita Jr are legendary artists mostly assocated with Spideman) Other boxers with names like Miller(as in Frank Miller), Janson(Klaus Janson was Daredevil inker and co-writer in the early eighties.) and Ditko are mentioned. The guy who wins the case against Matt, and proceeds to get his ass royally whupped by Daredevil is named Quesada (that’s Joe Quesada, Marvel editor-in-chief). Injokes, however, don’t make a movie. I seem to be the only guy getting them anyway. Something gets lost. in the whole process. The crucial part of why Matt Murdock becomes a crimefighter is shown to boil down to revenge – to find the killer of his father. Agreed, revenge is one of the factors which drove Matt to become what he became, but that’s not just it. The movie becomes a normal Jet-Li style revenge flick, the inner torment that drives Daredevil being summed up in a single line that comes up somewhere in the movie when Daredevil sees a kid crying after he has beaten up the latter’s father – who happens to be one of the Kingpin’s henchmen – “I am not the bad guy, kid”. “I am not the bad guy”- He repeats this to himself atop a rain-drenched skyscraper, and that’s it. Enough inner-self-realisation. On with the action!

What’s my problem, you ask? Just this – Daredevil is a comic character, a “hero”. Someone whose motivations, actions, and history has been beautifully laid down in 400-odd issues of 32 page softcover works. 30 years of history, and some hack with an eye for the market chops it down to a revenge flick that shows inane fight scenes. It’s hard to figure out which is more wooden – the storyline, or Ben Affelck’s face. But no, I am getting personal here. No need to get personal.

Frank Miller rewrote the origin of Daredevil in the 90’s , in a five issue series called “The Man without Fear”. Matt Murdock has his tragic accident when he’s trying to save a blind man from being hit by a truck. After Matt has his accident, he is visited by a mysterious blind man who calls himself Stick and who offers him a chance for a new life – no explanations are given about why Matt Murdock is the one to whom such an offer has been made, but Stick accepts him as a disciple and teaches him martial arts and other superheroic stuff, how to control his radar sense so that he does not get overwhelmed by them. Vague allusions are made to a female who had been accepted as a pupil earlier, and who has violated Stick’s laws – and is therefore one of the Dark ones now. When Jack Murdock gets killed by the Fixer’s men ( the Kingpin has no hand in Jack Murdock’s murder in the original comic – another case of cinematic license taken too far ), Matt hunts them down, one by one, and kills them, and in the process, he becomes responsible for the death of a young girl. Stick refuses to teach him further and vanishes as mysteriously as he had come, leaving Matt to deal with his grief and guilt by himself.

Elektra, Matt’s love interest in the movie shared a far more complicated relationship with Daredevil than was shown here. She was a diplomat’s daughter, true, but she was also a borderline schizophrenic whose pastimes included walking in deserted alleyways at night, luring killers, rapists and the like, and brutally slaughtering them. (She had been trained by Stick once upon a lifetime.) She loses her father in a hostage crisis ( again, The Kingpin had nothing to do with it) and joins a group of renegade Ninja warriors called The Hand. Later she comes to New York and employs herself as the Kingpin’s lead assassin – and one of her first assignments is to murder Franklin Nelson ( Matt Murdock’s law partner). She doesn’t. Bullseye is summoned. Bye, bye , Elektra.

All this back-story, all this indepth storytelling reduced to two hours of cinematic suicide. Shame on you, Hollywood. Can’t you let comic-books and comic-book readers in peace? Can’t you just make an action movie with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner without having to drag Daredevil (or any other comic character, for that matter ) into the whole bloody mess. it wouldn’t make much difference, you know. But at least it won’t lead people to say that “Here – another lousy movie based on a comic book.” Just a lousy movie doesn’t hurt. At least you are insulting a medium that has a history of mass-producing tripe. So does the comic-book industry, I agree. But it does not make sense to drag something that has entertained people for 30 years just to make some moolah. Grow up, turds at Hollywood!

(note: I started writing this yesterday, and went to see the movie again, just to make sure it wasn’t the mood that did it the first time. Nope, the movie still sucks!)

And psasidhar, you might be interested in this.