Comic-Con 2010: A Superhero For The Disillusioned

While superhero movies have saturated theaters with film adaptations of the many angst-ridden quandaries and vengeful battles waged by household-name caped crusaders and more obscure, underground vigilantes in the last few years, the genre has more recently begun shifting its focus from traditional comic-book crusaders to more relatable Everymen who are derived from an original concept. One upcoming film to mark this transition is Super, James Gunn’s (Slither, Dawn of the Dead) newest movie starring Rainn Wilson (The Office) as a frustrated, slightly awkward schlub named Frank whose wife (Liv Tyler) has chosen drugs and a sleazy new man (Kevin Bacon) over him. To curb his broken heart and overall disenchantment with life, Frank reinvents himself as Crimson Bolt, a civilian avenger with a homemade costume and complete lack of emotional control.

At the Super discussion panel on Friday at San Diego’s Comic-Con, stars Wilson, Tyler, Ellen Page, Nathan Fillion and Michael Rooker, along with producers Miranda Bailey and Ted Hope, all expressed enthusiasm for Gunn’s eccentric take on the societal pressures contemporary, “normal” men like Wilson’s character experience on a daily basis. What makes Crimson Bolt’s case unique are the shocking and hilarious methods he uses to deal with his continuous strife. Based on the preview shown at Friday’s panel, Super looks to be a sublimely silly, tongue-in-cheek slapstick blend of the imperfect, civilian makeshift superhero element from Kick-Ass and the everyday consumers’ maddening aggravation with society a la Falling Down. Or, as Hope succinctly put it, “An f’ed up, low-rent Watchmen.”

Gunn described how his vision of Super took a long time to find fruition. After working on the script for years, he struggled with the dilemma of finding the right leading man for his complicated anti-hero. “There was really no one who could do the part service in my mind,” said Gunn. “It was a very difficult role to fill. It had to be a guy who had the comedic chops, but it also had to be a guy who had the dramatic chops, because there’s a lot of drama in the movie, and it also had to be somebody who you could believe could be picked on by everybody … and yet be powerful enough to take down a bunch of people with a wrench and a shotgun.”

After Wilson’s co-star on The Office, Jenna Fischer, introduced them, Gunn realized he had finally found the actor who could believably exhibit all the required characteristics to play Crimson Bolt.

Despite his misanthropic disposition and tendency to blow things out of proportion to a violent degree, Crimson Bolt does manage to make a few friends along his journey towards reinvention. Page turns up as Libby, an equally dissatisfied drifter brimming with naiveté who becomes Boltie, the obligatory sidekick, as a result of her self-propelled dogged campaigning. Page described Boltie as well intentioned, but “definitely a sociopath inching on psychopath.”

Fillion, to the audience’s delight, revealed the name of his character — another rudimentary, do-it-yourself superhero — as The Holy Avenger. According to Fillion, this self-proclaimed pillar of  virtue possesses “that ‘I really want him’ power, but kind of mixed in with the church,” he joked.

While Super certainly has its fair share of comedic essence, the audience’s laughter doesn’t necessarily come from a place of happiness for the characters’ state of being. The humor in the movie results in the kind of uncomfortable, shocked laughter one expresses when they can’t believe what they’re seeing. “I read the script and I thought, ‘This is fantastic, it’s dark, it’s funny, it’s got the grotesque angle you’ve come to expect from James Gunn,” said Fillion, regarding some of the movie’s shockingly blatant violence in the midst of a normally comical situation.

Super certainly exhibits black comedy as a primary tone, but the film as a whole possesses character development and emotional evocation most viewers may not anticipate. “I had no idea how intensely sad and dramatic it was going to be,” added Fillion, saying his initial read of the script caused him to go home “tight in the chest.”

Bailey said she was intrigued because Super “kind of mixes the genres,” adding, “it was the kind of thing you couldn’t resist. It wasn’t a question of how we were going to make this movie,” because it simply had to get made. Wilson himself echoed this sentiment, describing how he got “about 27 pages” into the script before he called Gunn and declared that he “had to play this role.”

Tyler expressed her initial difficulty with the frantic pace of shooting the movie on a tight schedule and nearly nonexistent finances, calling the experience “pretty intense, guerilla-style filmmaking.” Gunn agreed, saying the grueling process of making Super so quickly for so little money wasn’t exactly something he’d call “fun,” it was actually “a pretty terrifying experience all the way through.” In fact, he added, “I wasn’t sure it was going to work until people started seeing it a couple of weeks ago,” when positive word of mouth began flooding the blogosphere, resulting in an eager crowd at Comic-Con.

After its wildly successful promotion at the convention on Friday, Gunn’s statement that the harried process of making Super on a shoestring budget at a dizzying speed is what “became the spine of the film,” he may come to realize the hard work could pay off more than he ever imagined.

Super is currently in post-production pending a release date. Follow updates for the film at www.thecrimsonbolt.com

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Photographs courtesy of Bilal Mian and Poptimal.com.