Spirittrailer
Hurry hurry! Leaked FULL trailer for THE SPIRIT movie is up, and getting VERY VERY mixed reviews.

[Thanks to TG for the heads up.]

UPDATE: Oh dear everything had to come down.

1 COMMENT

  1. Oh, good God.

    I’m sorry, what part of the stilted dialogue, Sin City look, 300-style logo, and the Octopus in a Nazi uniform (?!) came from Will Eisner? I must have missed those stories.

    Oh wait– they didn’t. That’s just Frank Miller “improving/reimagining” it. Hooray for Hollywood-stoked egos!

  4. I already had a customer wanting to see Spirit comics based on the first trailer. Showing him what we had (DC series, Eisner TPBs), I explained that style of the comics is completely different. Being familiar with Sin City, he agreed and left w/o buying anything.

    I can’t wait to repeat this scenario dozens more times in the next few months.

  5. It’s bad but it’s not even the same kind of bad as the first trailer. The first one was laughably terrible. But this one just kind of lays there. I can’t imagine that if you saw this and had no prior knowledge of The Spirit, it would make you want to go see it. What’s appealing there? “Oh, look, there are lots of women characters, who are all defined by the fact that they want to have sex with this Spirit fellow in the very cheap looking mask. And…is Samuel L. Jackson crying black tears the entire movie? Maybe it’s because he’s carrying those giant guns? Or maybe they symbolize tentacles, ya know, because he’s The Goddamn Octopus.”

  6. from Frank Miller

    the man who brought you 300

    based on the comics of Will Eisner

    terrible interpretation of amazing stories. way to whore it up Miller. giguratively and literally. i’ll be sure not to see this one.

  7. There you have it.
    Keep Frank Miller away from other people’s toys.
    Whether it’s the god damned Batman or the fever dream Spirit.
    (Of course,…you can’t judge a book by it’s cover and I don’t want to be completely unfair.)

  9. wow – that looks pretty bad. i suppose its going for a campy-low-fi kinda of look though? with kinda weird/not terribly inspiring special effects?

  10. I never knew that Will Eisner wrote a comic about a gigolo in a mask who boinks many women and occasionally gets shot at by a rival gigolo. Edgy and ahead of his time.

  11. “I can’t imagine that if you saw this and had no prior knowledge of The Spirit, it would make you want to go see it.”

    Really? Me, I can only imagine wanting to see it if you had NO prior knowledge of The Spirit!

    I might think it looks like a stylish, sexy, so-fucked-up-it’s-cool type of film if I wasn’t constantly comparing it to what I know of Eisner’s work.

    If this is the type of movie Frank Miller wanted to make, why couldn’t he just come up with a new character? Or make another Sin City movie? Weird.

  13. It seems Frank Miller is at the epicenter of a new movement in mainstream film: a break from photorealism and towards an abstracted hybrid of live action and animation.

    Whether or not it lives up to expectations of fans of The Spirit, I think that the technically adventurous Will Eisner would have approved of the experiment. (That is to say, the style if not the substance.)

  14. Oh my God. That’s… incredibly terrible. I’ve never read The Spirit, so it’s not like I have any prior expectations as to what the characters or the story should be like, but this is just bad. The “my city screams” teaser was like a parody of a Frank Miller Batman comic. This is a mess from beginning to end. Where are we? When are we? Who are these characters supposed to be? What’s the plot? I have no idea. The trailer seems to be trying to sell the movie on its style alone, which would be risky even if the style were original and attractive; on the basis of this trailer, it is neither. (Latino Review says it looks like an 80s Duran Duran video. Ouch.)

  15. Hear that high-pitched whine in the distance?
    That’s poor Eisner spinning in his grave, about to break the sound barrier as this bastardized mess approaches.

  17. Not sure how to take it. These are previews after all and their point is to get people to talk about the movie. They’re not the actual film itself. This could just be part of a certain sequence. Imagine trying to judge the plot or direction of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” if they only showed the dream sequences. Or perhaps the previews of Hitchcock’s “Psycho” which tease about the shower scene but which leave out everything that comes before or after it.

    Unless Miller’s going for a kind of Jack Cole/Plastic Man vibe where Denny Colt’s perceptions are so whacked out after his dunk in Dr. Cobra’s chemicals that he sees everything as if he were a heroic protagonist in a Fellini movie.

    Either way, I’ll be watching The Beat to see what Heidi says! ;)

  19. You know what else? Eisner did have a kind of hallucinogenic thing going with the title page of every Spirit comic where the city spelled out the Spirit’s name. This looks like it’s pushing that imagery a little further.

    I know everyone remembers the noir crime look of the Spirit. But Eisner was just bringing that look which was already established in the cinema to comics. This… this looks really different.

    I’m going to try and keep an open mind about this one…

  20. Hmmmm….I’m not impressed. I’ll wait for the DVD to make a total judgement on it. I won’t be paying $10 to see it at a theater though, it’s not making me curious enough to want to see it.

  21. My only Spirit frame of reference is the Cooke series from a couple of years ago. I think they should’ve had him do a D2DVD like New Frontier. I’d pay for that.

  23. I will go and see it and make a judgement then. Its gotta be better than the last few films i have seen, Hancock being the top of the mess list.

    looks interesting and over the top and kinetic and like…comics in a way.

    Hey, I loved SIN CITY.

    Jimmy

  24. When I saw this in theatre I just sunk down lower in my seat –embarrassed I’m part of the comic industry.
    Frank Miller -the first comic book artist to become a director in Hollywood on a major film — and he’s gonna blow it.

  27. I was pretty sure that Miller had lost his mind after hearing him talk about “Holy Terror,” but this is the clincher. In nearly 50 years of movie-going, this may be the worst thing I’ve ever seen — its utter lack of connection to Eisner’s work aside.

    *Shudder*

  28. Speaking of “Holy Terror”, which do you think will come first?

    a) “Batman: Holy Terror”
    b) The last issue of Frank Miller and Neal Adams’ run on “All-Star Batman”
    c) The end of “The war on terror”

    I threw b) in just to be snarky (I don’t even know if DC is still planning on having Neal Adams on “All-Star Batman”), but sheesh! the time to release “Batman: Holy Terror” may be long past. Any longer and it’ll be as relevant as Jay Leno’s Monica Lewinsky jokes.

  29. For shame, Frank Miller, pissing on Will Eisner’s grave like you have.

    This can’t even be defended using the excuses people have been using to give a pass to Miller’s recent output, like “it’s an experiment!” or “it’s a joke and you just don’t get it!” Jokes fall flat and experiments fail, just like virtually all of Miller’s new work since the end of 300 (the comics series) has — a period of 11 years.

    Simply put, this is not good at any level.

  31. It already is everywhere. Lionsgate released the official trailer to Yahoo and it’s been grabbed and thrown on off-shore YouTube wannabes.

  32. If Will Eisner was still alive, I’m sure this trailer would have sent him headlong into the grave with an aneurysm.

    I never thought I’d be GLAD that Will Eisner was no longer alive.

  33. Heidi, I think there’s a coding error or something. There’s a Pantene commercial linked as The Spirit trailer.

  35. @ToddAllen: “Frank Miller’s Will Eisner’s Spirit.”

    I thought that was pretty funny.

    @ Sphinx Magoo. He said that Eisner did a lot of hallucinogenic stuff. That’s very much right. Is that turning people off? I thought that stuff was spot on to the visual spirit of Eisner’s SPIRIT. It’s been years since I read THE SPIRIT, but I can tell you certain things about it that make this trailer look good. Folks on here probably know it, but I’ll say them anyway.

    Eisner was all about weird perspectives and weird presentations. Check.
    Hallucinogenic openers? I think it went beyond the opening often enough. Check.
    Eisner also often liked to use The Spirit more as a point of view than as an actual protagonist. Don’t know if this will have that. (remember the story about the guy who could fly? The Spirit was in like two panels of that)
    The Spirit got has ass kicked a lot. I have a feeling we will see that in here, too.

    So, I mostly feel good about it.

    Like I said, I read my Spirit comix YEARS ago, when I was much less interested in girls. Did The Spirit get a lot of action? Was it even implied that he got a lot of action? There were definitely a LOT of vampish women around. I just don’t remember it even being hinted that he was scoring. I remember him as being almost monkish.

    Am I wrong?

    If they changed that element… it could be either that:

    A) Miller believes the Spirit was scoring and that Eisner just couldn’t depict that in a comic that went out in newspapers so Miller is setting the record straight.
    B) Hollywood made him do it.
    C) It isn’t even really that way so much in the movie, but the people making the trailer decided to make it look that way to sell tickets.

    Unquestionably, the role of women in this movie is going to be the big topic in our little world, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Is it really fair to say that there’s such a gulf between Eisner’s take on women and Miller’s? I feel like that’s been the suggestions all along as this movie has been dribbling out details.

    It’s true that Miller likes to portray women as literal whores whereas Eisner more or less just filled his pages with sexed up vamps, but… I guess I’m just saying that, because Eisner is gone and he’s one of the great heroes of our little culture, we are tempted to lionize him in all ways. Make him a prophet in things that he wasn’t such a prophet in. I just don’t think it’s fair to say that Eisner created self-possessed, in control women and Miller created whores. I think the character-center of both creators is considerably fuzzier than that and there are reasons why the women in both men’s works should both make people who care about such things uneasy and inspired.

    I guess we’ll just have to see, but I’m gonna go opening weekend, you betcha.

    Love the tie! Love, love, LOVE the tie!

  37. Well, judging from this … I’d say it’s safe to draw conclusions about the film without having seen it.

    The frightening this is … don’t they usually select the “best” scenes for the trailers?

  38. Oh this is bad on so many levels it’s hard to know where to start bitching about it. Makes me long for the bad TV movie from the 80s…

    He’s been wrong about how to approach this film from the get-go. He doesn’t care about the integrity of a character other than how he can filter it through his own limited perspective. He’s done it with Batman (and every character he’s touched in connection with that franchise) and now he’s moved on to the Spirit. It’s a shame. Wonder if he’d have had the balls to do something this hideously inappropriate if Mr. Eisner were still alive.

    The thing is, I bet Miller would be squealing like a 6-year old girl if someone took one of his toys and screwed it up the way he’s obviously screwed up The Spirit.

  39. “The thing is, I bet Miller would be squealing like a 6-year old girl if someone took one of his toys and screwed it up the way he’s obviously screwed up The Spirit.”

    Which is why he finally made SIN CITY with Rodriguez … in the dvd commentary, he even said that SIN CITY was “his baby” and he wasn’t letting anyone touch it.