The Crow (2024)
It’s well documented on this website- and others- what a profound, foundational experience Alex Proyas’s “The Crow” was for me in 1994. Having said that, I’ve never held the film as a sacrosanct thing, something that should never be touched by other hands. The reason is how it deviated from James O’Barr’s original graphic novel. The sequels are what they are, as is what I’ve seen from the TV series, “Stairway to Heaven,” which tried to expand Eric’s story into a season-long arc. A new adaptation, however, I’ve always been curious about. Now, after years of fits and spurts, it has arrived, and it’s as frustrating as a lot of its predecessors have been, but not without value.
One of the most disappointing moments I’ve had with a film is actually 1996’s “The Crow: City of Angels.” That film was my warm-up for “The Phantom Menace” in how I anticipated it, and got what I could prior to its release. That included the novelization of David S. Goyer’s screenplay. If you have read that, you know that the movie, and the original screenplay, had very different endings, no doubt because of studio concern about not having a “happy ending” for the main character, Ashe. I’ve always wished that the original ending stuck, not because I don’t like happy endings, but because maybe it would have pointed a way forward in the storytelling for this franchise that didn’t always make each entry feel like a lesser carbon copy of the original film.
By telling a new version of Eric and Shelly’s story, director Rupert Sanders and his writers, Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider, have opened themselves up to criticisms of desecrating not just a cult classic, but the memory of Brandon Lee, who was tragically killed during the production of the Proyas film. What I appreciate most in this new film is how we see Eric and Shelly’s love develop. The passage of time in this film is one of its screenplay’s many issues, but as we are introduced to Eric (Bill Skarsgård) and Shelly (FKA twigs), they are very much cut from the same cloth as O’Barr’s couple, a pair of misfits on the outskirts of society who found each other, and share a beautiful connection. The performances are really lovely in these moments, and we see the seeds of what will drive Eric when Shelly’s past catches up to the two, and they are killed by henchmen of a powerful businessman (Vincent Roeg, played by Danny Huston) with a link to the supernatural himself.
Compared to this film, Proyas’s film is practically a beat-for-beat recreation of the graphic novel akin to Zack Snyder’s “Watchmen.” The concept of the supernatural is fleshed out here in ways that give Sanders a chance to create an interesting visual representation of the River Styx (or Purgatory, however you want to look at it), but it’s not far removed from the aesthetic this film’s “real world” exists in. I didn’t dislike it, but I also didn’t feel like it took advantage of the possibilities this film could have run with, given what we learn about Roeg as a character. One of the unassailable facts about both the 1994 film, and “City of Angels,” is that they create a tactile, haunting reality their stories exist in. There’s nothing of that in this film, and that is part of why this film failed to resonate with me in a lot of ways. Especially as the film becomes a violent bloodbath at the end, there’s no sense of style or stakes in the action; it all feels lifted by other, more noteworthy sequences in not just the 1994 film, but modern revenge films in general.
Probably the most significant change made from the graphic novel to the film in 1994 was the removal of the Skull Cowboy, a character intended to guide Eric on his vengeful quest. While it doesn’t go all the way with that route, a key figure in this film is a mentor named Kronos (Sami Bouajila) that will teach Eric the lessons of being a vengeful spirit, going after those responsible for their deaths. These give the film’s sequences in its representation of Purgatory a compelling, otherworldly sense that it wouldn’t have had otherwise, and is a big part of why I connected with this version of Eric’s vengeance. As his journey progresses, it feels like Shelly is slipping further and further from him, and he has a choice to make that I was pleased to see this film introduce, and especially follow through with. It feels like we can definitively say what side of the battle over “The Crow: City of Angels” longtime franchise producer Edward R. Pressman was on.
I’m less interested in how they bring in the supernatural when it comes to Roeg’s character. Part of what made the original villains so menacing is that they were simply human, albeit profoundly amoral in how they viewed life and death. Roeg is similarly amoral, but the supernatural dimension added to his character is unnecessary when you have the possibility to make him a monster just by the simple fact that many wealthy, powerful people are. He would be in keeping with the original villains in that the rich often view people like Eric and Shelly as disposable. Honestly, it felt like the supernatural aspect was simply added to play to ideas of demonic worship among the wealthy that conspiracy theorists like to play to.
If I haven’t mentioned the soundtrack yet, it’s because I don’t have much to say about it. The songs don’t really feel as though they have a rhyme or reason to their inclusion except to remind people that these movies often have songs and score to them. The score is by Oscar-winner Volker Bertelmann (“All Quiet on the Western Front”), and I’ll be honest, this might be another one of his scores I have to listen to separately in order to appreciate fully. (I bounced off of his “Western Front” score watching the film, but listening to it on its own recently I have a greater appreciation for its musicality.) As an in-movie experience, I didn’t get much out of this film’s music, and I wish I could say otherwise.
On the other side of this long journey towards a new “Crow” film, I’m still glad to see someone take an opportunity to put a different spin on this basic story. One of the most frustrating things about the sequels was how they all ended up just chasing the 1994 film in a lot of ways; here, we at least get something novel and not without interest. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t still pale in comparison to the film that started it all, though.
