I think, at 34 years old, I’m too old for this new version of The Crow, this version full of kind-of mullets, Jared Leto Joker tattoos, and Instagram filter cinematography.
I adore James O’Barr’s original comic – which is much less shallow and more philosophical than the movies that it spawned – and the original movie, starring Brandon Lee, is the kind of camp madness that only the nineties could produce, a gen-X interpretation saturated with gloom and gothery fit for the new millennium.
In this remake, the story is the same: Eric Draven (Bill Skarsgard) and Shelly Webster (FKA Twigs) make moon eyes at each other in their underwear, which makes them soulmates, they’re both murdered by some gang (led by a mildly embarrassed Danny Huston, whose career might come back as the Crow to claim vengeance on him) and Eric is allowed to return as the avian revenge machine. He has two jobs: kill everyone, and look hot doing it.
And look hot he…sort of does, I suppose. With the rise of a kind of nu-goth aesthetic in the mainstream, it makes sense that The Crow would be fodder for a remake, but this version looks….yassified, for want of a better word. The grungy, silly messiness is missing here, at least in this trailer: it all looks too deliberate, too measured, perhaps because it’s trying to capture that gloriously daft gothic earnestness of the original. I think this will struggle with the same problem the Suspiria remake did, which is that there’s not much more to be said in this story beyond what the original has already done, with greater style and a more original outlook.
The Grampa Simpson line keeps recurring in my mind: “I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I’m with isn’t it and what us it seems weird and scary to me.” Leave it to a trailer for The Crow to have me staring into the abyss of my mortality. What did you think of the trailer? How does it compare to the original? Let us know in the comments below.
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By Kevin Boyle
(header image via Paste magazine)
No But Listen 