TrueGentleman

That's a very interesting interview with Nolan on the eve of Inception's massive, but far from sure-fire, success. Let's quote him at proper length, though, since he's an inarguably intelligent and articulate director:
Star Wars, LotR, and the Matrix all have deeper themes than just sci-fi/fantasy epics, but Nolan is very specific about what lessons he takes from their successes, i.e. taking inspiration from their theatrical achievements, not their creative content. When it comes to thematic influences, however, Nolan cites another movie in the same interview:
"Last Year at Marienbad with 'splosions" might be a crude pitch line for Inception, but at least Nolan acknowledges the indirect influence when he's working with similar themes.

Please note he's playing the same media game that Snyder did in talking up his movie with the press just before its release, right down to bringing up successful movies he'd like his to be associated with. The difference is that Nolan delivers where Snyder comes up short. When Snyder claims, In Sucker Punch: The Art Of The Film, that "what begins as a fearful retreat becomes an empowering coping mechanism", it might almost sound like a gloss of Brazil, but in Gilliam's approach to the theme of escapism in fantasy, he examines it from multiple perspectives and critiques it even as he embraces it visually. Snyder, who is all about the visual, doesn't get near such depth in his movie, even though he tells the press he was "inspired" by it. Ironically, by presenting a simpler treatment of the theme, Snyder's movie isn't winning over audiences any better than Brazil did initially*, and critically, it's fairing far worse.

* Gilliam claims that the studio's botched national release of Brazil damaged its box office badly.

How soon we forget (Tron, Scott Pilgrim, Serenity, Green Hornet, Kick ***, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Superman Returns, Spider-Man 3, and, oh yes, Watchmen).

Please believe me, I don't want to have to think about Sucker Punch at all - and the Comicon trailer strongly suggested its audience wouldn't - but once Zack the Hack invoked Brazil, he might as well have slapped me across the face with a kid glove and challenged me to pistols at dawn.

Fortunately, there are paid professionals out there who are more than ready to articulate how much they dislike this film.

One could get away with the anime argument if the movies' themes weren't the same. When Gilliam has a giant samurai, though, he's using the visual image to shrink his protagonist down to a child's scale, undercutting the heroic fantasy at the heart of the escapism. When Snyder has one face off Baby Doll (and let's not try to unpack that misfiring nickname), he's only thinking of how cool it looks.

If you're going to claim influence, don't use an example that suggests you don't get the original. (I'm struggling to avoid a derail into how poor the movie adaptation of V for Vendetta was, but that's a separate thread.)

The summer before, with District 9 and Moon, also was rather good for smart science fiction, wasn't it? And those films' production bugets combined didn't amount to even half Sucker Punch's.

When the very proportions of the giant armored samurai vs. the protagonist are virtually the same in a movie with the same theme, then the term "knock off" is entirely applicable. If Sucker Punch were any good, and the consensus is that it's not, it might get upgraded to "hommage".

But in claiming influence, you've chosen a detail that's simply wrong. "Eggy's in a basket" is a failed attempt at verisimilitude to anchor the science fiction elements, something that Moore, who was quite explicit in creating a very English dystopia, found emblematic of the way his graphic novel was badly adapted. That example nicely illustrates the problem of claiming influence while not fully grasping the source material, something that's a particular problem for Zack the Hack.

So why did Snyder bring up Brazil at all? I suppose it's better that he did ahead of Sucker Punch's release instead of everyone pointing out the thematic and visual similarities, from the escapism-as-brain-damage climax to the protagonist's battle with a giant armored samurai.

"Eggy's in a basket" was an interpolation from the mediocre screenplay adaptation for the V for Vendetta movie that Alan Moore found absurd, with its ersatz attempt to portray realistic English details to offset the sci-fi dystopia.

It's not a question of having influences, which is inescapable; it's of recognizing and appreciating them and then making something new and interesting out of them.

Yes.

When Snyder, in an interview months before Sucker Punch, claims Brazil "really inspired me" in making it, he's hyping his movie by bringing up a touchstone of geekdom. Of course, his final product now turns out to be qualitatively miles away from Gilliam's landmark movie.

When Moore wrote that afterword to the collected V for Vendetta (which had seen separate publication in the UK and then, years later, the US), he had an established success and could note the many influences on the making of the series without self-aggrandizement. (I'll have to look up precisely what Moore wrote before going further.)

"Zack the Hack" has been doing this for years, by the way. With his Dawn of the Dead remake (which lacked the satiric bite of the original), he was trying to claim the idea of "running zombies" for himself, although that innovation belongs to Dan O'Bannon's cult classic "Return of the Living Dead".

Accurate yet empty, the changed ending notwithstanding. Visually, it was a near-perfect panel-to-storyboard adaptation, but dramatically, it was all bombast.

No, Snyder specifically talks about his inspiration for Sucker Punch from Brazil, which implies a deeper creative link, even though there's patently none. (And if there's any film director out there today adapting comics who's less concerned with "anxiety of influence", I'd like to know, if only to avoid their work.)

Rip-off can indeed imply theft, but it can also imply a cheap imitation. I used a colloquial expression in this case, but if it is a matter of semantics, then "knock-off" will do fine.

The irony is, I haven't anything against the "girls with guns" subgenre, which can be a lot of fun in the right hands (Adam Warren's updates on The Dirty Pair, for instance).

Good call. I haven't seen Snyder acknowledge that as an "inspiration" yet.

Nobody's calling Snyder a thief (he's one the drawing comparisons between Sucker Punch and Brazil). He just puts me in mind of the saying "Good artists borrow. Great artists steal." He's inarguably good at design and action sequences, but he's emphatically not a great artist despite repeatedly drawing "inspiration" from them. Moore, a great artist who steals all the time, is quite open about his inspirations for V for Vendetta, but his final product actually backs them up.

Again, I'd be a lot less harsh about this film if it weren't an $82M would-be blockbuster whose track record is going to impact a comic book-based movie with much more potential. These days there are too many big-ticket geek-centric busts that should be low-budget b-movies. At a certain point after so many flops, it's going to be hard for anyone to receive studio financing of any sort for these kinds of movies.

I'm being especially harsh on Snyder because he's made such claims before without backing them up in his movies. Romero, Moore, and Gilliam put so much more into their works than Snyder, so his upward career arc is particularly annoying. As for the escapism theme, while it's hardly unique (Walter Mitty, anyone?), Gilliam's take on it is brilliant and disquieting. Snyder appears to be only looking to pander to the fanboys while claiming to have a "feminist" subtext the same way the Pussycat Dolls do. (I've been getting pressure from my geekier friends to see Sucker Punch, so I'm warming up my arguments to say no.)

Oh, I wouldn't have gone into such detail if I didn't think there wasn't a slight chance of relevancy...

"Rips off" was my phrase. Snyder, in an interview, claimed Brazil "really inspired me" in making Sucker Punch. Taking that at face value, Snyder's idea of inspiration is "mimick the cool stuff, lose the substance, and ignore the subtext's critique of the theme". Just as with Watchmen and Dawn of the Dead, he's claimed that he's a huge fan of the original work yet doesn't seem to have absorbed anything beyond their "look" and "mood".

(Ordinarily, I wouldn't be complaining about this lightweight flick, but it's feeding into my misgivings about Snyder's helming the Superman reboot.)

It's a must-see. Despite its dystopian weirdness, it's a very funny movie. As for prettines, it has its moments.

Isn't anyone complaining how much Snyder rips off Terry Gilliam's Brazil in this movie, from the weird fantasy-sequences that mix genres to the "Return I will to old Brazil" finale? Once again, Snyder has taken superficial inspiration from a classic and produced a sleek but hollow pastiche.

Why not also contrast it to the serious science fiction of the first half of the decade, e.g. A Clockwork Orange, Silent Running, Slaughterhouse Five, Solaris, Soylent Green, a few Planet of the Apes sequels, and, of course, Lucas's own THX 1138? Even Woody Allen's Sleeper had lighthearted fun with weighty science fiction themes.

Although Star Wars did have hints of seriousness common to the era - its New Age-y Force and its political backdrop of corruption and rebellion in the context of the Viet Nam War and Watergate - Lucas de-emphasized those in favor of the "wow factor" of its special effects spectacle, which ultimately overwhelmed them. The message Hollywood took from its success was that even the smallest element of seriousness in a science fiction film was unnecessary as long as the SFX budget was big.

Edit: Death Race 2000 is a sneakily hilarious satire, on a par with Robocop or Starship Troopers. B-movie king Roger Corman knew that having a satiric element was important, and good for business, despite the schlockiness of the project.

Alan Moore would be the first to agree with you:
When one considers the ways great comics artists and writers tend to go nuts (Steve Ditko, Neal Adams, Basil Wolverton, Dave Sim - and I'm betting Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman are headed down the rabbit hole themselves), Moore's sense of humor about his self-invented brand of craziness is a relief.

I'm not sure if TG will comment on this aspect of comics, but I'm looking forward to the next installment.

I hope you will contribute your reasons for such optimism to this thread.

In the meantime, a supposed early draft of the script from 2008 has been leaked on the 'net. Here's its introductory crawl text:

That leaves plenty of room for ... improvement ... for Mr. Whitta. (Incidentally, I see that in addition to screenwriting credits for the distinctly middling Book of Eli, he also contributed to Duke Nukem Forever.)

* No, not that "The Event". This is a completely different The Event.

Meh. The marketing is on ComicMix's part to begin with. If that site pulled a tenth of the Alexa traffic rankings of, say, Newsarama or Bleedingcool, their little bracket event might have attracted the notice of the heavy-hitters that are in finals. (The fact that most of my personal favorites were eliminated after the second round is irrelevant.)

A Hugo-winning, Einser-nominated multi-volume series loses out to an all-ages upstart because the latter put a link on her site and the former didn't? This is why I hate online popularity contests.

That's definitely one of the themes at work in Akira, which originated during the Reagan phase of the Cold War (n.b. the "Star Wars" SDI's space-based lasers). Finding a contemporary analog for that will be tricky. Even the current post-quake nuclear crisis in Japan isn't on the same scale.

Those are all good adaptations, but even the best had to lose a great deal to work. The Seven Samurai, for example, is a tremendously rich film that manages to comment on both feudal and post-war Japan, while the highly entertaining Magnificent Seven doesn't have nearly as much to say about the American West or the post-war United States.

(Fun fact: Yojimbo was an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novels Red Harvest and The Glass Key, both of which were made into movies, neither of which are as good as Yojimbo or Fistful of Dollars.)
LA's combination of skyscrapers and sprawl was certainly impressive enough to be updated for Blade Runner. The Akira remake could do worse than rip that off.

To approach Akira from another angle, Kaneda and Tetsuo are clearly low-class punks. (I wish I read Japanese and could confirm exactly how low down they are on the culture's hierarchy, though I'm pretty sure they're not burakumin, the rough equivalent "untouchables"). At the very least, they're presented as working-class delinquents being shuttled through an educational system that's only a temporary holding pen, dead-end kids with no prospects for the future. While the US doesn't have a comparable class system, race is a sufficiently analogous issue, and recasting Kaneda and Tetuso as inner-city gangbangers wouldn't be a stretch for the directors of Menace II Society. There is of course no way that interpretation would entice Hollywood risk a $150M movie, which is at least the budget a live-action Akira would require.

Which boils down to say that there's a lot more to Akira than futuristic motor bikes, psychic powers, body horror, and orbital lazzors, which is probably all that this Americanized version will get, assuming it ever makes its way out of development hell.

Honestly, I'm exasperated with Hollywood constantly treating adaptations as the excuse to stick a familiar title on whatever hackwork they can commission on the cheap as long as they can attach marquee-friendly names to it.

The manga is a masterpiece that the movie, awesome as it is, can only echo faintly. It's well worth the investment.

Just to grab something from the headlines to start with, consider earthquakes. It's quite something to see Otomo's detailed artwork juxtaposed to the photographs coming after the Sendai quake - one would think he'd been drawing with those as his models. (Also consider the blank, inscrutable, yet incomprehensibly powerful Akira as a metaphor for the force of nature.) New York City has never and will never experience an earthquake like that, but such an event is something that people in Japan simply have learned to live with.

If I were adapting Akira for a US setting, the logical place would be Los Angeles, which has not only an impressive skyline surrounded by urban sprawl, but also a vulnerability to earthquakes. Los Angeles also has the advantage of tapping into West Coast biker culture for an analog for Kaneda's, something that New York City just doesn't have to the same degree.

But that's just a couple of examples off the top of my head. A truly successful adaptation would also have to find analogs for the firebombing/a-bombing during WWII, Unit 731, urban overcrowding, social friction along class lines, the generation gap, superpower conflict, authoritarianism, educational systems, etc. It's a daunting task that, bluntly, the Hughes Brothers aren't up to. The last time they took on a graphic novel with multiple complex themes, Alan Moore's From Hell, they turned it into a standard-issue serial killer thriller, performed in period dress and with bad accents.

Incidentally, a further problem with this adaptation's direction is the age group of the actors they're trying to cast for roles that were originally teenagers: Joaquin Phoenix (age 36), Michael Fassbender (33), James McAvoy (32), Chris Pine (30), Justin Timberlake (30), and Andrew Garfield (28). Whatever the acting abilities of these guys, none of them will be able to convincingly portray on screen characters who are somewhere between 15 and 17 despite adolescent rebellion and self-discovery being the key themes of Akira.

Crying Freeman - 1995

Gundam Saviour - 2000

Also, there was a little-known adaptation of Speed Racer years and years ago.

Hollywood must be terrified of coming up with ideas of their own.

The hack producers can get around this by having their "Akira" be Japanese-American or, better still, a lovable tow-headed, freckle-faced rascal adopted by Japanese-American parents.