“Soulmates Eric Draven and Shelly Webster are brutally murdered. Given the chance to save his true love by sacrificing himself, Eric sets out to seek revenge, traversing the worlds of the living and the dead to put the wrong things right.”
Director: Rupert Sanders
Writers: James O’Barr, Zach Baylin, William Josef Schneider
Stars: Bill Skarsgård, FKA twigs, Danny Huston
Release: June 7, 2024
IMDB
1994’s The Crow is a movie steeped with history. It’s most known for the heart breaking truth that Brandon Lee, son of legendary martial artist and Hollywood Icon Bruce Lee, died on set being fatally shot by a prop gun. The incident was known to many who watched the original, but the recent incident that happened on the film set of Rust in 2021 brought Lee’s passing back into the conversation.
30 years later, whether or not the world is ready for it, we are getting a remake of The Crow.
For those unfamiliar, the premise of The Crow is very simple. It’s a film with two root emotions at its center: love and revenge. Eric and Shelly are a young couple in love, but their lives together are cut short when they are brutally murdered in front of each other’s eyes.
Eric is bestowed a gift, one that gives him the power of immortality and makes him an angel of swift death. With a new lease of “life”, Eric has one mission. To kill everyone responsible for killing Shelly, and the humane version of himself. Fueled by an undying love, Eric bestows death on many guilty parties while working his way up to those ultimately responsible.
As a premise, it’s simplistic gold. A revenge tale with a justified mission spiced with a dash of supernatural intrigue. The one thing you need to mix it up nice is a leading man with charisma to pull it off.
The Crow is a massive bet by Bill Skarsgård, on Bill Skarsgård. Years before this project even got underway, Luke Evans went on the record saying that he backed out of this reboot of The Crow because he felt “unworthy” of portraying Brandon Lee. Now that the trailer has been released, there has been fairly large public backlash about not only the look of the new movie, but also its existence as a whole.
Alex Proyas, the director of the original, replied to comments on Facebook and wrote:
“I really don’t get any joy from seeing negativity about any fellow filmmakers work…And I’m certain the cast and crew really had all good intentions, as we all do on any film. So it pains me to say any more on this topic, but I think the fan’s response speaks volumes. [‘The Crow’] is not just a movie. Brandon Lee died making it, and it was finished as a testament to his lost brilliance and tragic loss. It is his legacy. That’s how it should remain.”
Alex Proyas
The Crow is being directed by Rupert Sanders. In an effort to refute online backlash, Sanders has quoted to Variety that he sees his version of The Crow as a tribute to the late Lee.
“Obviously, it was a terrible tragedy, and it’s definitely something that we’ve always had in mind through the making of the film,” he said of Lee’s death. “Brandon was an original voice and I think he will always be synonymous with ‘The Crow’ and I hope he’s proud of what we’ve done and how we’ve brought the story back again. His soul is very much alive in this film. There’s a real fragility and beauty to his version of the Crow, and I think Bill [Skarsgård] feels like he is a successor to that.”
Rupert Sanders
Sanders has made seven films, three of which are feature length. After a few acclaimed pit stops orbiting the Halo universe, Sanders got his first big budget with Snow White And The Huntsman (2012) and followed it up with the controversial Ghost In A Shell (2017). The action genre is Sanders’ arena, and The Crow appears to be a further step into that bloody fray.
If fans of Brandon Lee’s The Crow can be assured of one thing, it’s that this new version is not going to be toning that aspect of the original one bit. If anything, this trailer makes it seem like this reboot is going to amp up the craziness. The immortality of The Crow is being tested with shotgun bullets to the chest, pistol firing barrages, sword plunging, and Life Free Or Die Hard (2007) bullet through the body killshots. If The Crow is promising one thing, it’s that there will be violence, it will be bloody, and there will be lots of it.
Having carnage on screen is a way to get people into the theater, but making that collage of ammo and weaponry mean something is most important. We have seen it work to perfection in the John WIck franchise where the violence tells a story in itself about the character or story. We have also seen it mean nothing like in base comic book films like Shazam! Fury Of The Gods (2023). You can’t have it mean nothing. It’s gotta be for something. And who is in charge of that?
The two new screenwriters in the long cast line of The Crow are Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider.
Baylin is a man on the rise. In 2021 he was part of King Richard which gave Will Smith his first Academy Award. Baylin then leant his pen to a few movies that surpassed expectations commercially and critically, Creed III (2023), Gran Turismo (2023) and Bob Marley: One Love (2024).
Josef Schnieder has one writing credit on IMDB for a short film 15-40 (2008). There is a long gap, but 2024 is his return to the sparkling lights. This year Scheider has The Crow, The Legend of Tempo (2023) and Return To Silent Hill (2023). Two of these three films involve niche fandoms that are passionate about previous iterations of their respective stories. No pressure Scheider, but love to see you going gung-ho.
Besides Skarsgård, the movie also stars FKA twigs as the love interest and Danny Huston as the over-the-top bad guy.
Despite not being your typical looking summer blockbuster, The Crow sweeps into theaters on June 7, 2024.
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