junk-monkey

A bland, pretty uninformative, whistle stop through the history of American superheroes. I. E. Superman & Batman, and Spiderman (with vague mentions of the Flash and Captain America, Daredevil and the X-Men) which fails to tell anyone who knows even the slightest bit about American Superhero comics anything. For one thing there is hardly any mention of any women; characters or creators. One mention of Marie Severin (over a static library photo) and one or two passing mentions of Wonder Woman and that's pretty much it. And watching this you wouldn't get the idea that there were any Black or Asian superhero characters either. Mention is made that Marvel's business model in the 60s involved keeping up with current events and trends - artists were admonished not to make their comics look like thay had been drawn ten years ago - so things like student unrest on the campuses was incorporated into story lines, as well as drug use, but where was the Civil Rights movement? Where were the Black characters who were invented in response? The Black Panther, The Falcon, Luke Cage? Nowhere. Not even in the endless rostrum camera panning and scanning of the endless number of comic book covers that seemed to take up 50% of the films running time. (Though artist Jim Lee turns up as a talking head so we know comics weren't only created by old White men.)

On the upside it was interesting to see the likes of Lee, Mike Kaluta, Joe Kubert, Carmine Infantino, and Dave Gibbons talking - names I know from their signatures on their art but couldn't put a face to before now (even if what they had to say most of the time wasn't very informative).

Valiant effort to make a low (zero) budget movie with an intriguing idea but sadly let down by an vastly overly wordy script - I have heard radio plays with less dialogue. Technically it looks good. For the money they had, the designers did a pretty good job of making a small enclosed space that, I presume, could be dismantled into sections to enable the camera to get in from different angles. Initially the relationship between the main protagonist and the flight control girl is interesting. But after a while the plot holes, and the 'wait! That doesn't make sense!' moments just kept on coming and by the end I really was itching for it to be over. I hope the long list of people listed as 'crowdunders' (sic) on the end credits felt their money was well spent.