I mean, how can you fuck it up so badly?
I know the sequels were trash. I know the original can very much be accused of fridging...but there was a simple elegance to the orginal, undercut with some amazing cinematography, which was very much done on a budget.
[Spoilers ahead for The Crow (1994) and The Crow (2024)]
In the 1994 film the pre-story is done and dusted in 12 minutes. We know the motives of everyone, we know who the bad guys are, and who the good guys are. We've been handed the lore in a well-paced, understandable way (this is an urban hellhole, and once a year nutters run round burning shit and killing people). We are into the main course...revenge. We have met our narrator (Sarah), and had some exposition via voice-over...normally a lazy post-production film-makers technique, but to be forgiven here as the main actor died during post-production filming.
The sequel takes 50 minutes to do this. I mean, fuck, it takes almost 35 minutes to even reach the fridging moment. A dull, tedious half hour of trying to make a couple of fundamentally unlikeable characters mean something (and you can tell the actors are not really into it either. Skarsgård plays a character that seems more at home in a ganster film, and FKA Twigs (I bet her mother doesn't call her that) just seems...bored? When you compare their tedious, drawn out relationship to the Eric and Shelly from the 1994 film (told via flashbacks as Eric/The Crow re-encounters various objects and locations) it's all insipid shit. This is not the true love that brings in supernatural powers.
The BBEG in the 1994 film is Top Dollar, and we are never provided any doubt...he's a cunt. No mystery, no complications. Fantastically played by Michael Wincott, and given a number of excellent "I am a bastard" lines. In the remake, the BBEG is played by Danny Hudson...and I'm not entirely sure what he is. A rich guy, but some sort of supernatural being. He's somehow monetised being able to give people contact lenses by whispering in their ear (some sort of soul-sucking ability, I think), but it's never explained...either directly or indirectly.
The original has plenty of time to have a number of fantastic set-scenes as T-Birds crew are hunted down and picked off one-by-one...punctuated by one liners, as all good superheros should have;
- Victims, arent we all?
- Is that gasoline I smell?
- Mother is the name for god on the lips of children
- Actually, when he gets T-Bird he says nothing, but T-Bird provides the commentary "I felt how awful goodness was"
The sequel has 1 good scene. One.. It's actually longer than this, dragged out through several sub-acts...and then it overly focuses on gore. The kills in the Crow original were all symbolic, and "personalised" to the target. Here everyone is a lump of meat to be carved...as such losing any impact or meaning. And it's been done better, recently. The overhead scene in John Wick 4 achieves the same goal (remove the henchmen, make way to BBEG), is a beautifully crafted shot, but fits into the overall film a lot better.
While I put some blame on the original for using a voice-over to fill in some exposition gaps, the 2024 film randomly has a "between the worlds" area where a spirit guide called Kronos lives. It literally feels like they realised the film made no sense, so added in some scenes here (we come back multiple times) so that Eric can have some of the mechanics of the film explained to him. The entire thing reminded me heavily of 7-Zark-7 from Battle of the Planets, who was drawn into the original anime to try and justify what the fuck was going on.
(the entire Battle of the Planets/Gatchaman story is amazing btw...an american production company bought the rights to it, but had no-one capalbe of translating the Japanese, so they sat round and tried to work ut what the fuck was going on from the visuals alone (and with some heavily restrictive guidelines around death, sexuality etc)...realised it made no sense, and added in an entire setting and narration arc to fill in the gaps. It's a great benchmark for "we've fucked the filming of this up" post-production techniques to try and rescue a film).
The ending just fizzles away...the BBEG is killed via some sort of ex-machina, un-explained trick to throw him into the underworld (he's some sort of demon, won't he be fine down there?). Eric and Shelly are never meant to be together, so it ends on some massive downer (she lives, he doesn't), and the audience are non-the wiser as to if anything has even been achieved...and there is a really problematic time paradox that occurs, but the credits roll before you can get to it amongst the long list of issues with the film.
TL;DR - go watch the original again (I did).Mourn the loss of Brandon Lee, and try to pretend that no-one has remade the film.
Comments
I enjoyed this way more than I ever will the remake. Why remake The Crow. It doesn't make sense. The original had its flaws, as you rightly mentioned (RIP Brandon Lee) but it is no so flawed that the nub of idea needed revisiting.
Fucking Hollywood is trying to reduce risk but remaking but then fucking it up. They need to start taking risks (not like this though) and making something new that fits in.
I have a pet peeve and that's where movies over-explain things that should be kept ethereal, mystical, unexplainable. The Crow (1994) couldn't help it (as you pointed out), Bladerunner had that fucking stupid voiceover (which was then removed by Scott) but that sort of fit because it was a cop doing film-noir voiceover like a 1930s movie, Matrix 2,3,4 all tried to explain away all the magic.
The joy of the Crow (1994) is that beyond the fairy-tale like description you get from Sarah, Draven is the only really mystical/fantastical thing in the movie. Everyone else is bog-standard human (albeit some are right bastards, noted). As soon as you bring one other magical thing in then it becomes a super hero/super villain film. Boring. You also get to fill in some of the gaps, which is awesome.
Brandon Lee was a great talent, taken too early. Gone but not forgotten.
I'd actually say the original Crow asked the audience to just accept a lot, which was never justified or explained. All the "gain memories by touch" is just assumed from the off (first flashback occurring once the crow leads him to the apartment, this is then expanded when "takes" Albrechts memories of Shelley in hospital...shared vision between Eric and the crow, and finally a psychic attack when he hands the memories from Albrecht to Top Dollar).
I'd say my pet peeve is over-complication for the sake of over-complication. I'd say sequals are guilty of this, a percieved need to add density to a story. The John Wick series is a good example of this. The first film is (in my opinion) far and away the best. Retired hitman accidentally provokes gangsters, who kill his dog. Retired hitman loses his shit, kills everyone. The sequeals added in complex, dense lore around gold coins, the mythos of the Continentals, and layers of exposition that removed a lot of the "wow, you just pissed off John Wick, you're as good as dead" running joke that ran through the first 1½ films. They are still good films, but lose some of the focused experience of the original). The Fast & Furious franchise is another. Let us not forget that in the first film, they were stealing DVD players to fund upgrading their cars. In Fast X, they are recruited by a mysterious government agency to steal a computer chip (Gods Eye) that can access all surveillance equipment in the world.
(I have the same issue in computer games and sequels...GTA3 and sequels being a good example. All I really want to do is enjoy the story and run people over. Having to manage stamina, RP elements and various make-work gameplay elements removes from the core gameplay loop. As a general "Pete" rule...adding RPG elements and crafting are just lazy ways of increasing playimte without providing gameplay...aka, they just add grind).
So yeah, sequels often just add grind to a film.
I'm quite happy to accept a lot! Let me fill in the gaps. I don't need everything explained.
I'm with you on John Wick. That's totally over-explaining to me. I much preferred the Continentals being unknowable and murky and unexplained. I think they could have kept doing new John Wicks with the first film premise. I too enjoyed JW2 and JW3 (don't think I've seen 4 yet?) but they could have kept the focus as you point out.
I like the idea of Sequels adding grind. Matrix very guilty of that. While we're at it, it's time for the 2003 MTV awards Reloaded