#and honestly in this context this would've been pretty good compared to the other sequels!

[lookninjas]

So I went ahead and watched the new Crow trailer

Yeah, it's exactly what I thought. Simultaneously too clean and yet extravagantly gory. The villains lack any kind of the weirdness we got from Michael Wincott and Bai Ling, who were both so spectacularly deranged. Going to be a lot of CGI (which -- absolutely, yeah, use it for the shooting sequences, please, but if the original production could afford some ravens, you can afford some fucking ravens). Not a fan of them making it so the attack on Eric and Shelly appears to be targeted, as opposed to the random violence of both the original comic book and the original movie. And using a line from the original trailer that was voiced by Brandon Lee is probably just an unwise move in general. (Edit: actually, I'm pretty sure it was the girl who played Sarah who said that line in the trailers. Still not a great way to set yourself apart from the original.)

As far as it being "inspired by the comic book, not the film" -- I mean, okay, it looks like they have the Skull Cowboy? Which did get cut from the 1994 version due to Brandon Lee's death. But again, the whole Shelly backstory thing is very different. The villains look very different. What the fuck they're doing in the whole scene when it looks like there's a prison and everyone's in pink -- I don't know what that is. It wasn't in the comics. This wasn't a girl who saw some stuff that a billionaire crime lord was doing and then they came after her and her fiance. This was a random, senseless killing out of the blue.

And that actually matters, right? Because James O'Barr lost his fiancee out of the blue, to a drunk driver. The Crow was his response to that loss. Changing how they died really does change everything that comes next. It can't be helped.

And it just looks like extruded comic book product. It's like... again, everything's too clean and everyone seems kind of vaguely rich for no real reason but there's also this really cartoonish violence with armies of NPC characters, and it's just extruded comic book product.

Which is unfortunate, because I do get the sense that Bill Skarsgård is legitimately acting his heart out. But it just isn't enough to make this feel like anything but a cash grab on the part of the producers with at least one good performance.

He deserves better. This whole story deserves better.

I just don't think it's going to get that.