Suicidal Optimism (Suicide Squad SDCC trailer)

I am cautiously optimistic here. The big cast photo did not inspire me but the trailer that came out of SDCC has turned me around, rather.

For one thing Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn looks so much better as a performance than as a static image. She injects a huge amount of manic personality into the role that goes straight to that “I exist to amuse myself and the whole rest of the world is just a playground” place that my favourite versions of Harley inhabit. Will Smith is clearly very engaged in the chosen scenes. Most of all, though, Jared Leto's Joker persona is much better than the design foisted upon him. He's a straight-up sadist and there is a cold whimsy to how he delivers his lines, like a tired comedian who has come to view their own material as chore to get over with.

I just wish that DC-Warner didn't feel the need to include a scene that all but screams “LOOK! WE PROMISE YOU BATMAN IF YOU JUST COME AND WATCH THIS FILM!”. It speaks to a (admittedly not unjustified) lack of confidence in the product.

The Fantastic Four reboot still looks really rubbish, though. 

The Comics Ramble: Harley, is that you?

Left to right: likely Bronze Tiger; Captain Boomerang who isn't called Captain Boomerang;
apparently Enchantress; definitely Katana; almost certainly Rick Flagg; claims to be
Harley Quinn; heavily marketed as Deadshot; take your pick of Blockbuster, King Shark
or Killer Croc, cos I dunno; and what I am assured is El Diablo and not a zombie. 

Oh, I could rant about this image for hours. It'd be an easy post, a post you've likely already seen elsewhere because I am slow as hell with these things and we all know how it goes. I could point out how this image started a forty-comment long Facebook conversation between myself, three other comicbook geeks and an ICT teacher whose Google Fu is worryingly good yet there were still two character we couldn't identify. I could draw all the standard comparisons between the DC-Warner and Marvel-Disney approaches. I could make all manner of hyperbolic, nay histrionic, statements about how DC's obsession with looking like adults does nothing of the sort.

But I'm not gonna. I'm tired of being angry, about this and so many other things, so I'm going to try and unpick something interesting (if still highly critical) out of this image. You might remember when the photo of the Leto Joker hit I said that when they released a publicity shot of a halfway decent Harley Quinn then I would permit myself to hope.

Well...

Now, I don't want to use the phrase “slutty schoolgirl fantasy” out of politeness... but I suspect the phrase probably came up in a design meeting or two at Warner, is all I'm saying.

Harley's been a lot of things over the years: a gangster's moll; an abuse survivor carving out a life for herself; an arch-manipulator capable of using everything from her education to her own mental condition to twist others around her finger; an anarchic free spirit running an apartment building for some very odd tenants... that's a lot of different interpretations. I've seen her “be” a lot of different characters in a lot of different media, so what is it about this version that screams “Not Harley!” to me?

Hell, I don't even mind the whole “Property of the Joker” line on the back of her jacket. I mean, it does combine with the Joker's “damaged” tattoo to make me wonder exactly how many show don't tell violations this film will have (does Will Smith have “sniper” written somewhere on his rifle, I wonder?) but when introducing Harley to a whole new audience its probably important to start with her in classic The Joker's Girlfriend mode and work up to the later interpretations we comic fans all know and love.

(I'm giving you credit here, Warner Bros., so please make her more than a beaten woman and prove me right, okay? That shit's okay as a starting point in the story, not as a whole character. Please don't make me cringe through continuous scenes of abuse with no pay-off. Please don't make me explain those scenes to the many co-workers who come to me after every comicbook movie with trivia questions. Don't do that to me. Thank you.)

No, my essential problem with this costume is it looking nothing like a harlequin. It actually seems to have escaped everyone's notice when designing this thing that Harley's name is a pun. Even this monstrosity...

… makes reference to that fact in its use of colour. Even though its the least Harlequin-esque of her costumes it conveys a few important visual cues about her personality: the red and black are a bold contrast, noticeable, its a performative costume that she wants to be noticed; its more blatantly sexualised than her more usual look but that still draws attention to her physicality and Harley is a very physical character; the white skin (bleached in this version, usually make-up in others) references her link to the Joker and serves to make her stand out even further.

Movie Harley has a bit of slap on her face, almost invisible given the lighting of the picture, and we return to one of my initial problems with the image as a whole: who are these guys? There's not much visual information conveyed about these characters: some are clearly soldiers, some are in civvies; there's a mummy hiding in the rear to be as indistinct as possible; a relatively on-model version of a very minor hero; there's Will Smith being all marketable; and our subject for today: what appears to be a bad modernisation of Sandy from the final act of Grease.

Yet I can see what they're going for here once I scrape away my confusion about who's who and look at this as marketing. Let's just take the bull by the horns and compare this cast to the Avengers: there are more women on this team and its more ethnically diverse even than the post-Age Of Ultron Avengers. That message just gets drowned out because so few of the characters have good visual identifiers and its the geek media who are meant to share this around and go “Look! Look which characters they're doing!”.

And yet here I am confident the woman in the middle is Harley Quinn only because she's the blonde. There should be more to work with than that. 

Jared Leto's Joker... I don't hate it

Let me be perfectly honest with you all: when they release publicity stills of a halfway decent Harley Quinn for this Suicide Squad film only then will I permit myself to hope. I have been burned too many times by DC's film publicity looking good.

And this certainly looks good. Its an interesting twist on the Joker, even if I think the “damaged” tattoo across his forehead is a bit on the nose. Truth be told, I want to like it because it is different from the usual portrayals of the Joker and DC doesn't tend to go in for innovation with their films when there's perfectly dreadful Frank Miller interpretations to copy (though the publicity still does go for the next worst thing: referencing Brian Bolland's cover for The Killing Joke).

Also, its not like Leto was ever going to get a fair hearing from a lot of quarters, taking over the role from the practically sainted Heath Ledger is the definition of a lose-lose scenario: Leto could play it like Ledger and be judged an inferior tribute act or he could turn in a new interpretation that would inevitably be compared to Ledger anyway, probably negatively.

And I just plain want these films to be good. I don't like this constant expectation I have that the DC Cinematic Universe will suck forever. Green Lantern had way too much clunky exposition and spent all its money in all the wrong places but it wasn't disastrous. The Chris Nolan Batman films were all entertaining the first time round even if none of them really stand up to repeat viewings. Man Of Steel was an absolute disaster on almost every conceivable level but it had visual spectacle to spare.

At the end of the day, though, the DC Cinematic Universe has only had one movie (two if Green Lantern turns out to be canon) and Nolan has left the building. There really isn't much to judge this project by. What there is to judge it by is a complete trainwreck that its hard to fathom how it got made, I admit, but the point stands.

Well, and the Batman v. Superman trailer of grimness.

And the fact DC have commissioned Frank Miller to write The Dark Knight 3 as a practical tie-in.

And that oh so very 90s Aquaman design they released to the press.

This is going to suck forever, isn't it?