TheBilcourt: My thoughts on this year's ComicCon

My thoughts on this year's ComicCon

So ComicCon was last week, and I think its rather humorous that it has become more of a place for studios to launch their next big ideas than a con devoted to comics. Oh sure, the comics still play a big role, but no one remembers anything about them. I'm not mad or anything that its about movies. At least its one place where movie fans can get together and see presentations from the studios. The only time studios do panels like the ones at ComicCon are at movie industry conventions like ShoWest or ShoEast. The regular public just can't get into those unlike ComicCon. But I digress....

Here are some of the things that got me really excited for the next year of movies....

1. Iron Man
I was never big into Iron Man growing up. I knew who he was and all, but I never followed his comics or anything. When I heard Robert Downey Jr. was playing Tony Stark, I was kind of like "whatever". I was eager to see the movie but I still didn't really care like I did with Superman Returns, Batman Begins, or even X-Men. That was until I saw the ComicCon footage. This has me really excited for this movie. I think this could be a really good movie like one on the level of a Superman/Batman comic movie and not like some of the the other turd comic movies. I'm looking at you Fantastic Four.

Here's the Iron Man footage...

[VIDEO] Ironman Footage From ComicCon [www.theluis.com] - Funny videos are here

2. Shoot Em' Up

I had never heard of this movie until last week. I think this film came out of nowhere and there seems to be some speculation that it could be the next 300. The folks over on G4 just raved about it on their ComicCon specials and I have gradually started seeing film websites give it glowing reviews.
Shoot Em' Up stars Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti, and Monica Belluci. The violence is apparently so over the top that it makes the movie great. After hearing the buzz, I found the red band trailer for the film. I can definitely see why people are talking. I can't wait to see this.

Four words: Carrot in a gun.

3. The Incredible Hulk

Marvel is going to try again with the Hulk. Ang Lee's Hulk left a really bad taste in a lot of people's mouths and I think Marvel wants to fix it. Personally, I thought Hulk was ok, but I thought that a sequel would have 10 million times better than the first film. Hulk spent so much time on the story that it lost people to boredom. People want to see the Hulk break stuff. They don't want to see two hours of how he became the Hulk. I think the sequel could have been great just because we wouldn't have to sit through a backstory. The minute that movie opened, he could have been hulking out and breaking stuff. The new film, aptly titled "The Incredible Hulk", stars Edward Norton, William Hurt, Liv Tyler, Tim Roth, and Tim Blake Nelson. Maybe this time they'll get the formula right and the movie will be everything the comic fans want.

Here's a clip of concept art of what the Hulk will look like...If you look at it, you start to see Edward Norton in his face...

[VIDEO] Incredible Hulk Concept Art From ComicCon [www.theluis.c - Funny videos are here

4. Star Trek
Let me start off by saying that when I was growing up, I was a huge Star Trek fan. I loved the Next Generation, the movies, the other next gen series, etc... I know that after a while, certain franchises lose their zing. Every successful film/tv franchise has and have had periods of udder crappiness. Star Trek started dying down in my opinion towards the end of the run of Voyager. In my opinion, one of the great things about Star Trek was the fact that you didn't need to see multiple episodes for a story arc. Most every episode had a self contained story, and the only continuing storylines were mostly dealing with personal issues with the crews. If you watch CSI, you know what I am talking about. Starting with the middle seasons of Deep Space Nine and so on, the Star Trek franchise began doing these multiple episode storylines. Needless to say, I couldn't keep up and I lost interest in both DS9 and Voyager.
Things didn't get much better for them when they started producing Enterprise. The series was supposed to take place long before the original series of Kirk and Spock, yet it looked like it was 20 years more advanced than the original series. That fact alone made me lose interest in it because it wasn't believable to the history of the franchise. That and it featured the wonderful continuing storylines. Anyways, because the series' were losing audience members, the movies didn't fair much better. Even though Star Trek: Insurrection and Star Trek: Nemesis were good movies, they didn't make the money that the studios had wanted. In essense, the franchise was shut down for a while. It needed some time to rest and let the people in charge of both the franchise and the studio figure out on what to do. Well, they have decided to let J.J. Abrams have a go at a new movie and try to retool the franchise. J.J. has a good record with fans. Alias was a great show, Mission Impossible 3 was good, and he did help create a little phenomenon known as Lost. Even though there aren't a lot of details about his movie, we know that it will feature both a young Spock and Kirk and it feature Leonard Nimoy in some sort of cameo.
This could be good and it could be bad. There is such a fine line that J.J. will need to walk for this to work right.
1. It's got to be action packed. No problem with that.
2. The original series already featured a pretty young Kirk and Spock. With Zachary Quinto(Sylar from Heroes) playing Spock, he's not too young. What kind of age are they trying to portray.
3. What kind of technology is going to be portrayed? The average moviegoer wants to see lots of CGI. If you haven't lived under a rock and have ever seen a glimpse of the original Star Trek, you know that there isn't a whole lot of great CGI going on. While the average moviegoer might like this movie, for someone like me who likes the franchise, this totally could screw things up! But if there's one thing that movie studios have proven in the last 10 years or so, it's that they could give a crap about the fans of franchises. Look at how many bad movies have been made tv shows. I'm not saying this one will be bad, because I want it to be awesome and I think J.J. will make an amazing movie, but the studios have proven that all they want is the name association and they could care less if the movie is good as long as it makes an arseload of money during the first couple of weeks.
To sum things up, I want this movie to be good. If there was one person who could make Star Trek awesome again, it's J.J. Abrams. I have faith in him. He just needs to realize that there is a fine line that he will have to walk to make sure the core audience backs it.

4. Indiana Jones and *********************

I don't really need to say much here. Like everyone else, I am kind of worried about Harrison Ford's age, but I also know that they have been working on a story for this movie for a long time. Lucas, Spielberg, and Ford all said that they wouldn't do it unless it was a great story. They have been figuring it out for the last few(maybe a lot more) years. That gives me some faith about it. At ComicCon, Steven Spielberg specifically said that he was making this for the fans. That really gives me hopes that this will be a great movie. He's bringing back Karen Allen to play Marion Ravenwood from Raiders of the Lost Ark. That gives me hope! I do kind of hope that maybe the rumor is true that it will deal with the Ark of the Covenant again. I think it would be a nice way of ending the series and great tie in to the original movie. I do think too that it might be nice to have a search for something new. If it is something new though, I want it to be something that no one has talked about before on a movie web site. No Spear of Destiny or Atlantis or City of the Gods(sorry Napoleon!). I want it to be something no one has thought of. There's really nothing else to say except I can't wait for this and I can't wait for the dvds of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. I never really got to watch the show when it was on so for me it will be an almost brand new Indiana Jones experience.

Here's a pic from aintitcool.com's Indy 4 panel at ComicCon...

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 04, 2007 at 6:28 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.

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My thoughts on this year's ComicCon

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