Post by Harkovast on Sept 15, 2016 1:13:14 GMT
Spawn
Problems with Spawn 1- The Source Material
The Spawn comics are the only thing more 90's than Lara Croft's pointy boobs on Playstation 1.
At the time, I found them pretty baffling. (the comics, not the pointy boobs!)
They were the definition of style over substance. The characters had interesting designs that looked really cool and exciting, but there was basically no real story line and Spawn spent most of his time sitting in an alley being sulky until monsters would show up and fight him.
This was the "Dark Age" of comics, when being edgy was considered all important, so Spawn really managed to capture the mood of the times.
Unsurprisingly, something so perfect for its particular time ages very poorly, and these days there is very little interest in Spawn.
Basically this is all a fancy way for me to say the comics were shit.
With such weak source material to draw on, the film was always in for a rough ride.
The basic premise of the plot doesn't make any sense.
Spawn is a government assassin who gets horribly burned when he is betrayed by his own side, dies, goes to hell and gets hired by a demon to lead his armies to over throw heaven. You know, true to life stuff.
The demon gives him a super powered black suit which gives him a vague and ever expanding list of super powers that include but are not limited to- Shape changing, invisibility, regenerating, super strength, blades one his arms, prehensile chains, flying from a magic red cloak, flying by having a green glow under him (I don't know why he has two different forms of flying), super climbing (I don't know why he needs this if he can fly) and shooting out green energy all over the place that kills hundreds of people.
He uses this powers quite randomly, sometimes struggling with situations, other times solving them instantly with some new amazing power he just realised he had. At one point he starts using two machine guns instead of magic powers, which looks hilarious in his demonic super hero costume.
Eventually he decides that he's sick of working for the evil demon and so turns against him. Apparently the demon never considered this possibility and doesn't have anyway to take back all the powers he gave out. He has a big powerful demon minion called Violator he sends to keep an eye on Spawn to stop him doing this but this means one of two things.
Either A- This Violator is stronger than Spawn and so control him...and thus would be a better, stronger leader for the demon bosses army than Spawn and so Spawn is useless.
or B- Spawn is stronger than the Violator and so Spawn is the best to lead the army but The Violator is pointless and Spawn can break the deal when ever he feels like it.
Rather hilariously, Spawn not only beats the demon minion at the end of the film the angry demon boss tries to have all his hell army of other guys in spawn-suits try to kill our hero, so Spawn does the green energy beams and wipes tons of them out and flies away.
So not only is Violator a waste of time, the entire hell army is made up of losers that Spawn beats easily.
So the demon boss has a shit army and is an idiot who can literally be out witted by letting him give you super powers and then just deciding not to do what he says.
I always thought deals with the devil were a little harder to get out of than this.
Shows what I know. If Satan offers you cool stuff, grab as much as you can before doing a runner.
The story line also suffers from the fact that it is combining a story about covert government assassinations of betrayals with a super hero who fights in a war between heaven and hell.
To say these things don't mesh well is like saying hiding land mines on the pitch makes football a little trickier. Spawn carrying guns is just one example of this bizarre mixing of genres that don't have any busy together.
Spawn is written like an over excited kid scribbling down whatever they think is cool "Secret agents, assassins, machine guns...yeah that's cool. And Demons! Going to hell! Yeah, wow I am so edgy!"
So I guess in that sense the movie is pretty true to the source material.
Problems With Spawn 2- Special Effects
This movie looks BAD.
Like really bad.
We are talking straight to video level cheap and nasty.
The film uses a great deal of CGI and unfortunately while some things were better in the 90's...computer graphics not so much.
There is a reason Lara had such pointy triangle tits!
The film features explosions awkwardly pasted on top of scenes, big fake looking cgi monsters and a CGI cloak on our hero (if you thought Green Lantern was the first hero with a shit computer generated costume, think again).
Worst of all is during the final battle in hell that turns into such a blizzard of CGI nonsense where to this day I am not completely sure what's supposed to be happening.
There's kind of flying rocks and they are jumping on them some how...its kinda hard to explain.
The Demon Boss guy gets the worst of this. He looks like a bizarre computerised muppet, with his mouth hanging open and not moving while he stares blankly forwards.
What's the point of using CGI if the think you create looks more still, lifeless and has less articulation than a puppet would have? And I know the answer is saving money for hack film creators, it was rhetorical!
Problems With Spawn 3- The Bad Guys.
I've already established how unintentionally hilarious and incompetent the demon mastermind is, but the rest of the bad guys are just as goofy.
Violator takes the form of a small fat clown played by the insufferable John Leguizamo who is meant to follow Spawn around to keep him under control and make sure he leads hells armies. He spends all the time he's on screen messing around and making stupid jokes, such as farting out green clouds or pulling off his underwear to show the skid marks. No really, they wrote that down and decided to put it in a film. John Leguizamo in a fat suit showing off the shit stains in his pants. I think it perfectly fits the "dark and moody" tone of the Spawn character, don't you? The Clown turns into Violator to beat Spawn up when he wont do what he's told, which seems a pretty crude threat. "Obey hell or I will punch you", but as mentioned above, Spawn kicks his ass in the end so he can't even get that right! You had ONE JOB Violator!
Weirdly The Clown is allied with the evil boss of the secret spy agency Spawn used to work for, played by Martin Sheen. I don't really understand why a powerful master of a top secret organisation would want the help from a short fat man spouting annoying puns. Its never really clear what arrangement they have.
At one point The Clown says that he wants Sheen to get a device fitted in his heart so if he gets killed it will set off a dooms day virus his organisation has been making and kill all life on earth.
The Clown explains that this will mean no one will try to kill Sheen and Sheen agrees this is a good idea.
Okay, so how exactly is this meant to stop people killing him?
How will would be assassins know? Is he going to announce this arrangement on the news? Or just shout it at people who come at him with weapons?
Interestingly they also have no problem arranging surgeons to do this, who seem entirely aware of what they are installing (I guess they would have to be to set it up right). Why would they agree to this? What if the guy gets hit by a bus? Or when he gets old and dies? The inevitable result of this device is that the virus will go off sooner or later.
The Clown wants spawn to kill the guy, but Spawn is warned that if he kills the guy the guy will go to hell and become a powerful minion of the demon guy. Well if Spawn doesn't kill him...wont that eventually happen anyway? I mean Sheen can't live forever (though based on they way they treat that Virus plan, maybe they think he will?) Or is the plan to hope Sheen finds Jesus in the mean time? Spawn kills other bad guys, like an assassin woman who works for Sheen, won't she join Hell's evil army? Is this bad script writing or rampant demonic sexism?
And why does it even have to be Spawn that does it? Why not just hire a hit man to kill Sheen? Or get a gun and do it himself? Or turn into his demon form and just eat the guy? Its like there are some really specific rules The Clown is following but he hasn't bothered to share them with the audience.
The Clown wants the Virus bomb to go off, but for what purpose? If it kills everyone they will just go to Heaven and Hell as normal. Perhaps more of them go to hell (people are assholes, I can buy that) but those people would have gone to hell anyway! At most this is just speeding up the inevitable.
The people making this film never let making sense get in the way of scribbling down their sugar rush induced stream of consciousness.
Problems with Spawn 4- The Final Battle Takes Place In The Fucking Living Room of Spawns Ex Wife.
In a film about the ultimate battle of good and evil, where demons and angels are going to wage war for the souls of humanity and a cursed super hero has to stop a corrupt secret agency from unleashing a doomsday virus...why in the holy hell bound fuck does the final battle take place in the living room of Spawns Ex wife?
It seems the good guys have won but the Violator morphs through the wall like a ghost (I guess everyone from hell can just make up new powers when ever they feel like it). He tries to bite onto Spawn, so Spawn makes hilarious spikes come out of his head and then Spawn wraps a chain around Violators neck and spins it quickly to saw the things head off.
Violators head turns back to the Clown who makes a few final bad puns before being sucked back to hell through the fire place. Yes, even decapitation takes a bit of time to stop this asshole from spouting unfunny bullshit.
And while I am nitpicking about the shitty ending, why does the living room have a huge roaring fire in it? The family has a young daughter, there's no fire guard and this huge blaze is only a few inches from their carpet. One spark and we would have no where to stage the anti climatic final confrontation of a shitty 90's super hero movie.
But after all this, you know what bothered me most about Spawn?
It made me think about how much worse society seems to have become.
These days if someone made a film about a black super hero movie it would be a big controversial issue.
You would have loads of racists online saying it was ruined Superheroes with this PC culture bullshit and pushing political social agendas in movies.
Then you would have the social justice crowd respond about how anyone that didn't like the movie was a massive racist.
Everyone would yell at each other and obsess over the races and colours of everyone involved at the expense of everything else. Are the black characters strong? Are they stereotypical? Did a white guy write it or direct it? Is it empowering or appropriating? People would tie themselves in knots over this shit.
Back in the 90's there were a few different black super heroes.
Some of them were awesome (Blade), some were horse shit (Steel) but their race always seemed pretty incidental. It just doesn't seem a point of controversy or interest for anyone. The movies just seemed to get judged on their merits (or lack of merits in the case of Spawn.)
Maybe its the rise of the internet giving a mouth piece to ever asshole with an opinion that has caused this (and yes, I get the irony that I am an asshole spouting my opinions online right now).
Somehow, I can't help feeling we might have regressed.
Problems with Spawn 1- The Source Material
The Spawn comics are the only thing more 90's than Lara Croft's pointy boobs on Playstation 1.
At the time, I found them pretty baffling. (the comics, not the pointy boobs!)
They were the definition of style over substance. The characters had interesting designs that looked really cool and exciting, but there was basically no real story line and Spawn spent most of his time sitting in an alley being sulky until monsters would show up and fight him.
This was the "Dark Age" of comics, when being edgy was considered all important, so Spawn really managed to capture the mood of the times.
Unsurprisingly, something so perfect for its particular time ages very poorly, and these days there is very little interest in Spawn.
Basically this is all a fancy way for me to say the comics were shit.
With such weak source material to draw on, the film was always in for a rough ride.
The basic premise of the plot doesn't make any sense.
Spawn is a government assassin who gets horribly burned when he is betrayed by his own side, dies, goes to hell and gets hired by a demon to lead his armies to over throw heaven. You know, true to life stuff.
The demon gives him a super powered black suit which gives him a vague and ever expanding list of super powers that include but are not limited to- Shape changing, invisibility, regenerating, super strength, blades one his arms, prehensile chains, flying from a magic red cloak, flying by having a green glow under him (I don't know why he has two different forms of flying), super climbing (I don't know why he needs this if he can fly) and shooting out green energy all over the place that kills hundreds of people.
He uses this powers quite randomly, sometimes struggling with situations, other times solving them instantly with some new amazing power he just realised he had. At one point he starts using two machine guns instead of magic powers, which looks hilarious in his demonic super hero costume.
Eventually he decides that he's sick of working for the evil demon and so turns against him. Apparently the demon never considered this possibility and doesn't have anyway to take back all the powers he gave out. He has a big powerful demon minion called Violator he sends to keep an eye on Spawn to stop him doing this but this means one of two things.
Either A- This Violator is stronger than Spawn and so control him...and thus would be a better, stronger leader for the demon bosses army than Spawn and so Spawn is useless.
or B- Spawn is stronger than the Violator and so Spawn is the best to lead the army but The Violator is pointless and Spawn can break the deal when ever he feels like it.
Rather hilariously, Spawn not only beats the demon minion at the end of the film the angry demon boss tries to have all his hell army of other guys in spawn-suits try to kill our hero, so Spawn does the green energy beams and wipes tons of them out and flies away.
So not only is Violator a waste of time, the entire hell army is made up of losers that Spawn beats easily.
So the demon boss has a shit army and is an idiot who can literally be out witted by letting him give you super powers and then just deciding not to do what he says.
I always thought deals with the devil were a little harder to get out of than this.
Shows what I know. If Satan offers you cool stuff, grab as much as you can before doing a runner.
The story line also suffers from the fact that it is combining a story about covert government assassinations of betrayals with a super hero who fights in a war between heaven and hell.
To say these things don't mesh well is like saying hiding land mines on the pitch makes football a little trickier. Spawn carrying guns is just one example of this bizarre mixing of genres that don't have any busy together.
Spawn is written like an over excited kid scribbling down whatever they think is cool "Secret agents, assassins, machine guns...yeah that's cool. And Demons! Going to hell! Yeah, wow I am so edgy!"
So I guess in that sense the movie is pretty true to the source material.
Problems With Spawn 2- Special Effects
This movie looks BAD.
Like really bad.
We are talking straight to video level cheap and nasty.
The film uses a great deal of CGI and unfortunately while some things were better in the 90's...computer graphics not so much.
There is a reason Lara had such pointy triangle tits!
The film features explosions awkwardly pasted on top of scenes, big fake looking cgi monsters and a CGI cloak on our hero (if you thought Green Lantern was the first hero with a shit computer generated costume, think again).
Worst of all is during the final battle in hell that turns into such a blizzard of CGI nonsense where to this day I am not completely sure what's supposed to be happening.
There's kind of flying rocks and they are jumping on them some how...its kinda hard to explain.
The Demon Boss guy gets the worst of this. He looks like a bizarre computerised muppet, with his mouth hanging open and not moving while he stares blankly forwards.
What's the point of using CGI if the think you create looks more still, lifeless and has less articulation than a puppet would have? And I know the answer is saving money for hack film creators, it was rhetorical!
Problems With Spawn 3- The Bad Guys.
I've already established how unintentionally hilarious and incompetent the demon mastermind is, but the rest of the bad guys are just as goofy.
Violator takes the form of a small fat clown played by the insufferable John Leguizamo who is meant to follow Spawn around to keep him under control and make sure he leads hells armies. He spends all the time he's on screen messing around and making stupid jokes, such as farting out green clouds or pulling off his underwear to show the skid marks. No really, they wrote that down and decided to put it in a film. John Leguizamo in a fat suit showing off the shit stains in his pants. I think it perfectly fits the "dark and moody" tone of the Spawn character, don't you? The Clown turns into Violator to beat Spawn up when he wont do what he's told, which seems a pretty crude threat. "Obey hell or I will punch you", but as mentioned above, Spawn kicks his ass in the end so he can't even get that right! You had ONE JOB Violator!
Weirdly The Clown is allied with the evil boss of the secret spy agency Spawn used to work for, played by Martin Sheen. I don't really understand why a powerful master of a top secret organisation would want the help from a short fat man spouting annoying puns. Its never really clear what arrangement they have.
At one point The Clown says that he wants Sheen to get a device fitted in his heart so if he gets killed it will set off a dooms day virus his organisation has been making and kill all life on earth.
The Clown explains that this will mean no one will try to kill Sheen and Sheen agrees this is a good idea.
Okay, so how exactly is this meant to stop people killing him?
How will would be assassins know? Is he going to announce this arrangement on the news? Or just shout it at people who come at him with weapons?
Interestingly they also have no problem arranging surgeons to do this, who seem entirely aware of what they are installing (I guess they would have to be to set it up right). Why would they agree to this? What if the guy gets hit by a bus? Or when he gets old and dies? The inevitable result of this device is that the virus will go off sooner or later.
The Clown wants spawn to kill the guy, but Spawn is warned that if he kills the guy the guy will go to hell and become a powerful minion of the demon guy. Well if Spawn doesn't kill him...wont that eventually happen anyway? I mean Sheen can't live forever (though based on they way they treat that Virus plan, maybe they think he will?) Or is the plan to hope Sheen finds Jesus in the mean time? Spawn kills other bad guys, like an assassin woman who works for Sheen, won't she join Hell's evil army? Is this bad script writing or rampant demonic sexism?
And why does it even have to be Spawn that does it? Why not just hire a hit man to kill Sheen? Or get a gun and do it himself? Or turn into his demon form and just eat the guy? Its like there are some really specific rules The Clown is following but he hasn't bothered to share them with the audience.
The Clown wants the Virus bomb to go off, but for what purpose? If it kills everyone they will just go to Heaven and Hell as normal. Perhaps more of them go to hell (people are assholes, I can buy that) but those people would have gone to hell anyway! At most this is just speeding up the inevitable.
The people making this film never let making sense get in the way of scribbling down their sugar rush induced stream of consciousness.
Problems with Spawn 4- The Final Battle Takes Place In The Fucking Living Room of Spawns Ex Wife.
In a film about the ultimate battle of good and evil, where demons and angels are going to wage war for the souls of humanity and a cursed super hero has to stop a corrupt secret agency from unleashing a doomsday virus...why in the holy hell bound fuck does the final battle take place in the living room of Spawns Ex wife?
It seems the good guys have won but the Violator morphs through the wall like a ghost (I guess everyone from hell can just make up new powers when ever they feel like it). He tries to bite onto Spawn, so Spawn makes hilarious spikes come out of his head and then Spawn wraps a chain around Violators neck and spins it quickly to saw the things head off.
Violators head turns back to the Clown who makes a few final bad puns before being sucked back to hell through the fire place. Yes, even decapitation takes a bit of time to stop this asshole from spouting unfunny bullshit.
And while I am nitpicking about the shitty ending, why does the living room have a huge roaring fire in it? The family has a young daughter, there's no fire guard and this huge blaze is only a few inches from their carpet. One spark and we would have no where to stage the anti climatic final confrontation of a shitty 90's super hero movie.
But after all this, you know what bothered me most about Spawn?
It made me think about how much worse society seems to have become.
These days if someone made a film about a black super hero movie it would be a big controversial issue.
You would have loads of racists online saying it was ruined Superheroes with this PC culture bullshit and pushing political social agendas in movies.
Then you would have the social justice crowd respond about how anyone that didn't like the movie was a massive racist.
Everyone would yell at each other and obsess over the races and colours of everyone involved at the expense of everything else. Are the black characters strong? Are they stereotypical? Did a white guy write it or direct it? Is it empowering or appropriating? People would tie themselves in knots over this shit.
Back in the 90's there were a few different black super heroes.
Some of them were awesome (Blade), some were horse shit (Steel) but their race always seemed pretty incidental. It just doesn't seem a point of controversy or interest for anyone. The movies just seemed to get judged on their merits (or lack of merits in the case of Spawn.)
Maybe its the rise of the internet giving a mouth piece to ever asshole with an opinion that has caused this (and yes, I get the irony that I am an asshole spouting my opinions online right now).
Somehow, I can't help feeling we might have regressed.