A Bald Kevin Spacey is not a Sufficient Villain

Brad Wilson’s reluctance to see Superman Returns hits on a reason I prefer series over feature-length movies:

Smallville’s Lex is smart, devious, capable, and above all, not yet evil. The on-again, off-again friendship between Lex and Clark, and the tremendous loyalty that they have both shown to each other, makes the idea of seeing a fully-evil, hell-bent on destruction Lex a lot less interesting. The Lex of Smallville is a conflicted, emotional, sometimes unstable human being. The movie Lex has tended to be an unrelentless force of super-human evil, a character of less dimension and interest.

When you have 24 episodes a season, you can afford to develop characters in depth. And if you’re working with a mythos with nearly 70 years worth of comics, movies, and cartoons, you need that space.

Possibly Related posts (machine generated):

  1. Everyone calls me “ma’am” these days
  2. Cutie Honey at SF Asian Film Fest
  3. Do not let your Mac lead you into evil…
  4. Myosin molecule keeps on truckin’
  5. The Toaster Dialectic

More like this: .

This entry was written by Bill Humphries and posted on July 4, 2006 at 10:43 pm and filed under media, Science Fiction. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the Atom feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.
  • http://www.leftfield.org/~rawdon Michael Rawdon

    Or you could just write a better story.

    The Khan of Star Trek II owes almost nothing (just his existence and his motive) to the Khan of the TV series, and yet he’s a terrific and memorable villain.

    The problem with series is that it’s rare that a series really produces solid episodes week after week, so there tend to be a few clunkers and quite a few mediocre episodes. (C.f. Sturgeon’s Law.) This is why I eventually stopped watching Smallville – too many mediocre episodes, and things were just moving too darned slowly. Does it really take 75+ hours of tube time to tell this story?

blog comments powered by Disqus