Mason McDaniel is back at the Chaos for an article about costumes in superhero films. Read, enjoy and comment!!!
Capes or No Capes
When you think of comic movies what do you think of? Super powered good guys fighting it out with the forces of evil, An awesome Score playing in the background, hot chicks in danger awaiting their hero’s entrance? Right? But how many times does the costume come into play? When you’re watching these sweeping epics do you ever notice the lack of costume on your favorite hero? Does it pull you out of the movie to see the hero out of his normal threads?
Much of Hollywood is split between the costume or no costume when it come s to comic book movies. In this Article I will present evidence to both sides of this argument. Is it part of the package when you buy the rights to a comic franchise that the super hero must be in costume or is Hollywood saving us from ourselves by “maturing” up some of our favorite characters?
The Argument for Costumes
If It isn’t Broken then don’t fix it. The costume of our favorite super heroes shouldn’t change because they are classics to us. By dismissing the costumes aren’t you dismissing the true fans, the ones that have kept the books alive for thirty years? It is a comfort to see the characters we know and love depicted as we know and love them.
Exhibit A: Spiderman
The Spiderman movie series would have failed miserably if Spiderman had ditched his normal PJs for a ski mask and black leather jump suit. The suit itself is Iconic. It’s almost more important than the powers. Sure anyone can be strong and swing from webs, but only a few can sport the red and blue webbed spandex and make it work.
Now if we step back from our “geek” perspective and look at this like a salesmen, to quote Yogurt from Spaceballs “Merchandising, merchandising’s where the real money from the movie is made.” Spiderman is easily recognized because of his costume. Now you can slap his face on everything and kids are going to know who he is and what he does. This becomes what’s known as “brand recognition”. When kids see Spiderman on comics they know who this character is and now want to read his comics to see his other adventures. If Spiderman had worn the outfit described earlier kids would be confused on whether the guy from the comic is the same guy they saw in the movies.
Exhibit B: The Watchmen
In this movie each character was dressed almost identically to the characters from the comic book. Blue penises aside, did it make people snicker to see a man with a mask like an ink blot test or dressed as an owl? No. people were able to focus on the plot and were immediately drawn into the film. They bought into that universe and were able to let themselves escape for a few hours into this world of masked vigilantes and dastardly villains.
The Argument against Costumes
Let be honest with ourselves. Doesn’t seeing a man dressed in purple from head to toe pull you out of a movie and slowly start making you question why certain decisions were made during the filming process? We’re adults and having the characters drop the costumes allows us to straddle the line between being an adult and being a teenager again. In a sense were getting to have our cake and eat it too.
Exhibit C: The X-men
The X-men are a prime example of ditching the costumes for something more uniform, more down to earth, and pulling it off. This allowed them to seem more like a unit instead of individual lone guns all working towards their own goals.
We’re not looking at them and saying “thank god he’s not wearing yellow Spandex” and to feel a sense of pride when looking upon them. We don’t have to take our girlfriends to these movies and be forced to justify why Beast is only wearing a Speedo. I’m not sure how much protection a Speedo and Spandex can offer. Losing the costumes saved you from that awkward moment. But be honest with yourself, did it ruin your experience to not have Storm in her white costume or Emma Frost dressed as the White Queen?
Exhibit D: Galactus
In The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Galactus played the true villain of this piece. Now in the flick he was depicted as a giant formless mass of fog moving across the universe. I feel it truly saved us from some hard question and a bit of ridicule if they had gone with his comic book form.
Can you imagine a giant man clad in purple sitting on an enormous chair devouring planets. This would have broken the focus of most people watching with questions like; what’s with the purple helmet and where did he get a chair that big? Instead people were allowed to just enjoy the movie and focus on what was happening within the story. Thankfully the director decided to drop the costume.
Can’t we all just get along?
Now there are perfectly good examples of movies where they were able to give us our costume and were able to justify it and I think that is the key to keeping costumes in a movie. You could watch a movie about a man with a sock over his testicles if the story explained that the sock imbued him and his testicles with invulnerability.
A cloud's a costume . . . right?
Exhibit E: Batman
With a few lines of dialogue early on Bruce Wayne explains why he must dress as a bat and that is to instill fear into any who would break the law in his town. Okay so the story element is taken care of now how do we make him bad ass? Give him enough gadgets to make James Bond feel inadequate and on top of that let’s throw on some Kevlar plates for good measure. Now he has a suit that all audiences can get on board with.
Exhibit F: Ironman
An Iron suit thought up as a means of escape from a terrorist prison. Later Tony Stark improves upon his suit for the purpose of protecting those who are also terrorized. He adds a gold coat to keep if from freezing and a splash of red for flavor. Boom, story is taken care of. Now lets have some fun with character development and allow for some great action scenes.
Exhibit G: The Incredible Hulk
Gamma radiation turns Bruce Banner green and super strong when he gets angry. The angrier he gets the stronger he gets. The only question is how do his pants stay on? But I’d much prefer they stayed on then if they were ripped off. I’m sure it would have kicked up its rating from a PG-13 to an R in no time. Story and taste knocked out in one shot. I mean hell the only way they could have screwed up the hulk is if they made him grey and dressed him in a tux…. Wait, that’s our bad.
Conclusion
This is a terrible conclusion for the reason that there can’t be one. Both sides have points but it’s up to you the reader to decide what you want and vote with your wallet. If you don’t like what a studios doing with your favorite movie then don’t see it or only see it once and buy the regular version on blue ray instead of the special edition directors cut that adds $10 to the price.
Please post below and tell me what you think about the topic. Let me know if there are some key points you’d like to add to either side. As for me, well you read the article so draw from it what you will.
Personally I didn’t like the Fantastic Four sequal. Not because of Galactus, but just because it didn’t feel like it flowed properly. I love comic books and comic book movies and I will be the first to admit that I am more of a DC than a Marvel. However, I think that certain movies can get away with taking away the heroes standard garb for the sake of story.
By God though if they even think of removing Hal’s Ring or Suit I will lose my mind.
I think I am going to be one of that movies toughest critics, so much so that I am pretty sure I am going to be unfair to it.
To be on topic, it really is a gamble you take when you decide to take out/leave in the costumes, like for instance, if they decide to take the little wings of thors boots, or even use his Ultimate costume, I can roll with that, but on the flip side if the metal bowl with the wings on the side were gona from Jay Garrick I would be p-i-ssed.
Capes are awesome in comic panels where they hold still and strike dramatic poses around the hero, violating physical reality constantly. That doesn’t work as well with a movie where the cape actually has to move during the scene. A cape hanging limp had more or less the oppoiste effect, looking flacid and disappointing so the cape must always been dynamic to work well with the hero. If you’ve got some CG imaging you want to throw around al la Spawn (old now but I love that cape just the same) to make your cape do exactly as desired, awesome. For a physical costume with a real cape, that’s not as easy.
I like to see things look good, even if they don’t look the same. I liked the design for Galactus in the movie, what I objected to was the complete lack of background or explaination. Calling what happened to Galactus a costume change doesn’t fit for me.
While the X-Men didn’t wear their comic costumes, efforts where made (arguable not enough efforts) to preserve personalities and iconic habits from the source material. Wolverine was rough, Beast acted civilized normally and fought like an animal in battle, etc, their basic characters remain involved even without their original designs in play. Galactus, however, was normally a banterer. He and Reed would argue, debate, deal, Galactus would get to do a monologe, and so on.
With the movie, he was downgraded from villain to fucking MacGuffin.
So, please movies, change visual elements when doing so works well while leaving the story somewhat intact. Please?
You have a good set of summaries here. I think it comes down primarily to good design (which includes good storytelling design): Is the costume practical/functional? (ruling out most capes) Is it too elaborate/baroque/silly? (Mr Sinister from X-Men comes to mind–I mean, come on…) Is it just plain cool looking? (most versions of Batman and Spidey are not only classic, but eternally cool because they were just good designs from the outset). I think in the last 10 years or so, costumes have been pretty well handled in movies, at least compared to some of the earliest Marvel movie disasters. (on the other hand, those movies can be considered awesome in light of the previous “Zardoz” entry.
I think the above poster said it best.
And also i’d have to say it seems the majority of films nowadays do tend to keep the costumes pretty accurate. The only big offenders of it that i can think of off hand would be X-Men and Daredevil. As for your examples i hate storm so i could care less about what her character wears, and Emma Frost has not technically appeared in any film yet until first class (the girl in Wolverine while she had the diamond power was credited as Emma and one would assume has the same last name as silverfox being that they were sisters).
Daredevil didn’t even really suffer because of the costumes, i mean they weren’t great, bullseye was cool, the rest of the movie just sucked.
The Galactus cloud i was 50/50 on it would have been cool to see the big purple armor, but would be really silly, at least we got the shadow of the helmet on the planet as it floated by.
Though one thing i’m sadly going to be the incredi-nerd to point out is, Tony didn’t encounter the freezing problem until after his suit was painted, Jarvis made the suit entirely gold, and Tony said to just throw in some red.
But anyway for the most part it seems they are keeping costumes. The classics are all there like Superman, Batman, Iron Man, the FF were incredibly slightly altered, Ghost Rider, looked great, Hellboy is fantastic, though he doesn’t technically wear much of a costume in the comics, Captain America looks ok, Thor looks amazing.
I fear for green lantern though, that entertainment weekly pic looks terrible with all the ribbing, and should they ever make a Wonder Woman movie, would they try for her signature costume? Sure they explained it easy enough in the animated film, but would it work for a feature, or would that Erica Durance costume from the smallville episode be a better choice?
I think another issue worth talking about is the fact that the more practical movie costumes are finding their way into comics. The most obvious example, of course, being Wonder Woman’s most recent makeover. Although, a quick look-over of any comic store shelf will reveal that there are tons of people fighting crime in little more then a T-Shirt and jeans. A few quick examples are Superboy, Luke Cage, Wondergirl and X-23. Too, note that all of my examples didn’t start out this way, they all at one point had a real superhero costume and decided to ditch the capes and spandex for something more comfy.
From a logical perspective, I get why these characters don’t require a full-on costume, I mean they’re all practically invulnerable, but the fanboy in me really loves seeing a traditional costume on his heroes. What do you guys think? You think we’ll soon be seeing Superman wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a super shield or will Wonder Woman soon re-claim her star-spangled panties?