So, that new Superman movie is pretty damn good huh?
Honestly, the newly reformed DC Studios couldn't have had a better title for a relaunch. Fun, thrilling, gorgeous to look at, a perfect course correction for portraying Supes on screen. Plus, the fact it's pissing off so many of the right wing online is ideal for me. (They are probably extra angry that they are portrayed as :REDACTED FOR SPOILER: even though it's pretty damn spot on.) However, musing about it, I realised that this film actually borrows an interesting narrative trick that's only been used a few times before, one that's adds an interesting little meta layer to proceedings. To explain what I mean, let's look back some four decades and change to a sci-fi film that was somewhat less successful at the box office than Superman currently is; namely The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension.
Now Buckaroo Banzai is sort of based around a single joke; the idea that the film is, like, the 17th or so instalment of a series that doesn't actually exist. The whole thing is written and portrayed as though we the audience have already seen all the other ones, so we know all the characters' relationships to each other, what they are referring to when they mention other adventures, and that we should be surprised that they have retconned an established villain to have been actually an alien all along. It's almost an expansion of what George Lucas did with the original Star Wars to a degree, although there are differences; Lucas likes to pretend he had it all figured out from the word go, but we all know that wasn't true. (At least, given accidental incest, I hope not!) With Buckaroo Banzai on the other hand, writer Earl Mac Rauch and director W.D. Richter had developed a whole bunch of half finished short stories and such about the character first, they had what we might call now a Show Bible for the character, featuring loads of stuff not in the finished film. In fact, some of that, when the film didn't do well enough to warrant a sequel, Richter would repurpose into Big Trouble in Little China. (It's often been claimed that Buckaroo Banzai v.s The World Crime League promised at the end of 8th Dimension was fully reworked into Big Trouble, but that's overstating it, more just one or two ideas from Banzai's "Lore" got worked into the script.)
So why do it this way? Well the character of Buckaroo Banzai is kind of a homage to pulp paperback heroes like Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, so this film is kind of an embodiment of what for a lot of people it's like discovering those characters for the first time. You'd pick up a book with a cool looking cover, then quickly go "oh wait, this isn't the first one, is it?"; if the dialogue between characters doesn't clue you into that, the editors footnotes saying "See Doc Savage On The Run From The IRS for more details" will. Hence the whole film is pretty much made like that, bar those footnotes (I do wonder if they were thinking of having things like that as captions on screen at points in the film?). You know what, I'll let Moviebob explain this better than I can.
I should also mention that I know this experience pretty well; as a Doctor Who fan (yes, I will always drag things to Doctor Who, get over it!), I came to the show at a rather odd time for the whole thing, the 90s, the age we now call The Wilderness Years. So often experiencing the show would be just be getting out from my local library the Target Paperbacks, or my parents occasionally buying me one of the VHSs, and not having TARDIS Wiki or anything similar back then, just trying to muddle my way through, so a lot of the show and various stories I came to in quite an eclectic order. I often jumped around the timeline a lot, and often even had issues such as, with the Target books, trying to work out which Doctor the story was even about if they weren't on the cover. So engaging with a long running series in this way, yeah I kind of get that.
Now what does all this have to do with Superman? Well plain and simple, James Gunn has done a similar trick, but instead of pulp paperbacks, we have comics, and rather than do it as a joke, it's a quite clever way of helping to establish what sort of world this new DC film universe is. Now I am willing to bet that for quite a lot of you reading this that your very first superhero comic was not a first issue, you probably got one part way through a series or run, or it's one of those annoying cases of "Issue One" when it's actually a re-numbering and you've been tricked into jumping in at the deep end. (That happened A LOT in the 90s). This Superman is plotted and written pretty much like that; the way it opens in medias res is like this is like we're picking up the story right after a big cliffhanger happened last issue. A brief text crawl at the start does read like an editors note on the inside cover, setting the scene. The way the characters talk to each other, we get and understand their existing relationships, and that they have history together.
I love that we have a Superman movie that uses an Iggy Pop song, and it works perfectly!
So what's smart here is that, rather than introduce this take on Metropolis through yet another Supes origin story, we're seeing... Tuesday. We get the impression that this is a world where Superheroes, weird science, kaiju etc. are just things that happen, and people are impressed, surprised by them, but the idea isn't (ironically) alien to them. It helps to set a tone, and establish a way that the future films in this universe can work, that we can skip origins etc. and just get right into the meat of the matter from the word go. Will every single film from DC Studios do that? Maybe, maybe not, it's not going to be a "one size fits all" approach to every character and story, but it does mean that it's an option on the board. It's worth noting that parts of the old DCEU did try doing something similar, suggesting a longer history to the characters being introduced, in particular Black Adam with its take on the Justice Society, which was by far the bit that worked best about that movie. (Pierce Brosnan's Doctor Fate felt like he'd had an entire franchise before this!) However the difference there is that a) it still clunkily tried to work in more origin story stuff, and b) it didn't lean into the metatextual conceit, they didn't use the way comics would try to make things easy for those jumping on board as a template.
Now of course there are big differences; in Buckaroo Banzai you are meant be a bit lost and confused by it, that's part of the joke, it would be like coming to the MCU films with no experience of them whatsoever and starting with Infinity War, which makes zero concessions to those just tuning in. In Superman though, it's more there to act as worldbuilding, it's written in such a way that you can and do get up to speed with who these people are very quickly. It's actually a testament to the casting that you can tell a lot of this less from the dialogue etc. and just the way the characters act, how they are performed, they bring across so much (I have to highlight all of the Justice Gang in particular for feeling like beloved old pros despite this being the first time on the big screen for any of them). You never feel like you needed to have done your homework beforehand, it just makes you curious about them, and it feels like an organic way to have the series develop; introduce these characters and concepts, see what the audience makes of them, and maybe do a bit more with them in future.
More of him please. A LOT more of him!
So both Buckaroo Banzai and Superman use the conceit of pretending there was a series of stories before this when there weren't, both paying homage to a particular medium of storytelling, but to two very different effects; one deliberately alienating an audience, one drawing them in. A very clever little trick, though one I hope not too many people try to reuse; I can see various ways it could go wrong, and it could encourage somewhat lazy writing shortcuts if used irresponsibly. Plus as both films show, you need fantastic actors to pull it off, ones that can sell the chemistry between characters in those non-existent tales well. But it's still amusing how two very different sci-fi actioners across two very different time periods (though in many ways we're not so different to the 80s... that's a political rant for another day) can use such a gambit. Though, given his film geek credentials, I do want to ask James Gunn if he has seen Buckaroo Banzai before; I'd be surprised, given his tastes, if he hadn't...
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