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Sin City Preview 

Every year, there’s always a piece of movie Internet footage that causes a few shivers down my spine (and it’s not just the celebrity videos either!). The Lord of the Rings trilogy teasers successfully did it each year, so did the early Star Wars: Episode I preview and even the American Beauty teaser way back in 1999. This year, it’s the Comic Con(vention) footage from the new Frank Miller/Robert Rodriguez film adaptation of the graphic novel series Sin City.

You can download the footage right here (It’s 54 Meg and you’re gonna need the latest version of Quicktime to watch it) although if that server is down, you can try getting it off peer-to-peer networks or right here on October 1st.

The film, pegged for an April 1st 2005 release in the US, is essentially a collection of interweaving stories involving various characters all taking place in the corrupt, crime infested hell-hole that is Basin City. The cast looks impressive including Bruce Willis, Jessica Alba, Mickey Rourke, Maria Bello, Kate Bosworth, Josh Hartnett, Benicio del Toro, Brittany Murphy, Elijah Wood, Clive Owen, Rosario Dawson, Nick Stahl, Michael Madsen and many more. Johnny Depp was involved at one stage but his storyline was scrapped before production began. He might appear in further instalments if this film is a success (see some more interesting movie trivia on the film here including Tarantino’s $1 involvement and Rodriquez’s pitch to Miller). Now I don’t know about you, but that looks like a pretty goddamn cool cast if you ask me.

Sin City is one of many new productions (Others being Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and the Japanese blockbuster Casshern) to be shot on a complete “digital backlot”, which means that the actors are entirely surrounded with green screens. Now I wasn’t particularly impressed with the trailers for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow because I didn’t like the film visually. Plus I’ve never been a fan of too much green screening since it doesn’t give the actors a lot of room to feel the environment and often looks, well, almost too ‘real’. But here, because it’s heavily grounded in a film noir/comic book hyper-realistic world, it just seems to work. The integration just fits.

Performances come off a little stiff but Rodriquez has never been an actor’s director and since this footage is largely taken out of context, the final product is likely to be altogether entertaining. I personally think Rodriquez makes films that are just cool as shit, fun and get the audience pumped so I think he’s the perfect choice to co-direct with Miller himself. Now I’m taking a wild punt on this but from the looks of it, Miller has probably focused more on the visual side of the production whereas Rodriguez has homed in on the performances, action sequences, music, camerawork and editing.

I think Sin City the movie has cult classic written all over it (yes I know that’s a clich’e9 but it seriously does!) and with the talent involved, one could assume this will do well at the box office (that is until George Lucas releases that Revenge of the Sith movie). Not being a fan of comics or graphic novels myself, I haven’t read Miller’s work but judging from the shots taken from his work that they’ve incorporated into the Comic Con footage, it looks like a lot of dark, stylistic fun and Rodriguiez and Co. have done a brilliant job realising them to the big screen. It might not turn out to be the next Citizen Kane, but I will lay down bets right now that it won’t be the next Batman and Robin either.

Interesting Articles

- Ain’t It Cool News interview with Robert Rodriguez posted in July here.
- Interview with Frank Miller on his comic book series. Another here.
- Empire UK article.
- Dark Horizon’s report from the Comic Con back in July.