A Reboot with Soul

So I got up nice and early and made bacon and eggs and coffee to take up to the missus in bed and still didn’t get to see the new Spiderman movie.

It’s not like she doesn’t go in for comic book movies – she loved Iron Man and enjoyed Avengers – but she just doesn’t get all giggly about the impending ‘Dark Knight Rises’ like I do.

At least superhero films these days manage to get decent actors and an actual live scriptwriter. I shudder at the thought of the pre-Nolan ‘Batman & Robin’ with Arnie Schwarzablahblah and she-of-the-weird-feet Uma Thurman.

It was fucking embarrassing when I insisted a group of us went to the cinema to see it. When we all left I was mortified and my girlfriend at the time patted me on the shoulder and said, “It wasn’t that bad” as though she was consoling me for the loss of my dog.

If they’d taken the piss out of me it’d have been okay, but they consoled me, for Christ’s sake. It was THAT bad.

But the good thing about these films is if you fuck up you always get another shot. Hell, the ‘reboot’ was invented by the comics. There are so many versions of Batman it’s hard to keep track so when I heard grumbles about it being “too soon” to reboot Spiderman I waved the notion away.

The Tobey Maguire Spiderman got a bit naff, so instead of wringing their hands about it they just had another go. I hear the acting's better in this one, anyway.

Comic companies are always reinventing these myths. They do them in creative ways like ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths” in the Eighties or “Zero Hour” in the Nineties, or they have cool asides like the fascist Superman in “Elseworlds” and the brilliant “Dark Knight Returns” by Frank Miller. If you think about it, the Batman turds that came after Tim Burton’s two were so different they were practically reboots; it’s just that there wasn’t the concept of ‘reboot’ in Hollywood yet so they called them sequels.

I hear so many new Batman fans sad because Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy is coming to an end. They think there’s not gonna be another Batman movie for ten years.

Personally, I think that if the Bane character in “Dark Knight Rises” does what he does in the “Knightfall” storyline in the comics (i.e: breaking Batman’s back and putting him in a wheelchair), there’s going to be another trilogy with the new Batman/Azrael character and how he goes psycho and Bruce Wayne has to come back and fight him and reclaim the mantle.

How cool would that be?

My wife knows better than to want a lie-in when Batman hits the big screen. Coz then she’d be waking up to an empty house while I’m munching popcorn and staining my trousers with excitement.