Rupert Sanders’ The Crow was always going to be dead on arrival. Once a director starts talking about cool youth subcultures as an influence rather than just actually participating them in their artistic cultivation and development, you can expect a real cluster-fuck of appeals to the “fellow kids” out there in the world wrapped in a thick layer of missing the point. You can lead teenagers to Bill Skarsgaard outfitted with face tattoos and a Viking mullet, but you can’t make them think he’s cool, and Sanders does nothing to help his leading man out stylistically. However, the chief problem with The Crow – and this might be a controversial point, but it’s worth pursuing – is that it’s not inherently bad to update this story for a new audience of disaffected teens. The diary entries in which you’d scribble down Cure or Cobain deep cuts turned into Xanga entries, then morphed into Tumblr notes and now exist as Instagram captions – we’ve extended the expressions of our suffering beyond the aesthetic and transformed it into a kind of public performance of teenaged disaffection, one now intertwined with that same cultivated image, steeped in irony.
What would a story like this look like if someone gave a damn about something other than keeping the IP alive? The answer, probably, is Aggro Drift – Harmony Korine is perhaps the only filmmaker working today who could make a reboot of a style-driven film like this and appeal to the audience that it wants to attract on a stylistic level. The soundtrack would be filled with Travis Scott cuts (and hell, he’d probably play the lead) and Lil Peep b-sides, and the imagery would look less like tossed-off Fincher riffs and more like the hellish curation of internet imagery that Korine synthesized into his incomprehensible narrative. In short, it would have been a timed aesthetic experience that would quickly fade as its style fell out of fashion but might have accumulated a richness over the years, much like the original did.
Debates over whether or not The Crow was “cool” are silly – the soundtrack was dope, and Brandon Lee was, inarguably, the coolest dude before his tragic passing– but the movie lives and dies on a kind of earnestness that is anything but. Alex Proyas understood that the way to timelessness sometimes depends on an artist being timely: one needs to see The Golden Path, where your movie might slot into cinema history if you do something right. And right he did: The Crow is a top-tier aesthetic experience that does not give one iota if you think it’s cringe and will drag you to enlightenment one bloody fight and dope needle-drop at a time.
This is the exact opposite of Sanders’s approach to bringing James O’Barr’s comic to the screen, which he desperately wants to dub as a “second adaptation” of the book rather than a remake of Proyas’ film. But aside from emphasizing his lead’s pain – we watch Eric (Skarsgaard) heal, a grisly and painful process of bone and skin stitching back together and feel his agony – he abandons any of the colors that O’Barr used to make his black-and-white world a fantastical place where grief had a physical manifestation, a crow as a best friend, and a lot of the good old-fashioned ultraviolence to roll with it. Chief among the confounding choices Sanders makes is to have Eric fall in love with Shelly (FKA Twigs), the source of all his joy and pain, at a mental hospital. He then decides to the pace at Romeo and Juliet speed, with an unknown but surely a quick time before they’re both murdered. We never watch these characters fall in love – a Malickian stare-off behind a curtain isn’t as deep as the image suggests – and we never get the stakes that Proyas sets up.
His version of the character had so much to lose: A career as an artist, a surrogate daughter, a community worth defending from the superstitious and cowardly lot of criminals besieging it, and a fiancée who he loved so much he would throat-punch Satan himself to avenge her should he slander her name. Here, he’s just kind of a loser, as Sanders mistakes tattoos in the same way a Tinder user would while swiping: it’s not a substitute for a personality or a life lived in full, no matter how much trauma you want to imply is in the dude’s past. So when he begins his superpowered quest to topple the organization responsible for their depths, it’s about as light and airy as you might expect. This has to happen because the movie says it has to, not because it comes from a place of feeling.
Regarding style, there’s a problem that many IP-preservationist mature-audience efforts have had and will continue to have as long as we continue to make movies based on them: Most are deferential to a fault. Usually, this comes in the form of suffocating one’s ambitions and talents to imitate the exact style and pace of a previous and beloved installment in the franchise – callbacks in visuals and dialogue, a crushing fidelity to style, an unwillingness to explore – and this is typically because the suits and filmmaker are convinced that this is what the people want. Sanders has the opposite problem. He’s so afraid of charting his territory, of dishonoring the original, that he essentially handicaps himself, trying to make a big-budget adaptation of a particularly goofy goth comic without stepping on any toes. It’s a similar impulse to the one that “grim and gritty” comic book adaptations had back in the ‘00s, where the po-faced tone was employed to convince fans that their beloved property was being treated seriously.
Here, it’s to stress to fans of the original that he’s not trying to overwrite that one or insult Proyas’ memory. His boldest choice – to make Skarsgaard look like a mumble rapper – would never be accepted by people who thought the film series should have ended with Brandon Lee’s death. It’s odd for him to assume that if he makes the film look as generic as possible, people will somehow come to love it. As such, the goth cityscape is a Prague devoid of humanity; the villains are anonymous suits; the crow does nothing, nor does it play an essential role in the story; and the intangible mysticism is replaced by a guru in Doctor Strange purgatory.
Sanders has pinned his Crow reboot’s hopes and dreams on Skarsgard’s performance and the gory violence, as they’re the two attributes that seem to have had any care put into their development. The violence is surprisingly bloody, and Skarsgard cuts a strangely compelling figure once he relaxes into the performance: his third act shift is a suggestion that, had his director hewed more closely to Proyas’ playbook, he would have made for a really good Crow that wouldn’t have come near Lee’s just by its nature. But all the split-jaw kills and brooding Bills can’t sustain a film that’s so afraid of its own shadow that it won’t even try – an emo rapper failure would have been better than this dull horseshit.
The most significant way I can illustrate the difference between these two films is: Remember that cool scene of Lee running across rooftops set to a Nine Inch Nails cover of Joy Division’s “Dead Souls?” Well, there’s an echo of that here in the slapdash assemblage of vaguely gothy tracks that make up Sanders’ soundtrack: Eric and Shelly’s escape from the mental institution is soundtracked to “Disorder,” straight from Unknown Pleasures, and it cuts out after 30 seconds before Ian Curtis can even get to the climax and his emotional crescendo. And that’s fair because The Crow is devoid of spirit and has no feeling to lose – why even suggest that it might have one of them?