August 16th, 2014 Movie – The Crow

A couple of years ago, a friend asked me once to list my top 5 comic book based movies. Surprisingly, only one movie was from the two big powerhouses of DC and Marvel (although one was from Vertigo comics, which is a DC offshoot so I guess technically they had 2 movies). The rest of the list was movies based on books from lesser known comic companies or indie comic one-shots. Today’s movie, The Crow, was on that list, and still is to this day.

The plot: On the night before their wedding, Eric Draven is murdered and his fiance Shelly is beaten and raped before she dies from her injuries. One year later, a crow brings him back to life in order to get his revenge on the people that killed him. Eric begins hunting down his killers one by one, giving them a taste of their own medicine. But as he makes his way through the gang that killed him, Top-Dollar, the crime boss in charge of the gang, has his own plans on killing off the dead man.

Whenever a movie is made, there is always a certain amount of hype involved with it, both positive and negative. When a movie is made based on a comic book, you get even more hype from all of the fans of that comic. And when one of the actors dies during the filming of that movie, well that just adds even more hype to the film. Add up all of these factors, and The Crow was one of the most talked about movies in 1994. There was a lot of talk on how well this movie would do after Brandon Lee died and I think it lived up to all of the hype, possibly even surpassed it.

If I could only use one word to describe this film, it would have to be Emotion, because that was the driving force in this movie. You have the emotion of revenge which was one of the main forces. Eric’s desire for revenge against those who robbed him of his life and the happiness he would have had with his fiance. The only emotion more powerful than revenge was love. The emotion of love was definitely a major factor in this movie. Eric’s love for Shelly was what motivated the him to gain revenge for their deaths. But you also had Eric’s love for Sarah, as an adopted little sister, the let him think past his own revenge and try to help improve her life. On a smaller scale would be the emotions of greed and power since these both motivated Top-Dollar in his life.

I love this movie. When I first saw this in theaters, I thought this was a great movie and did a decent job of catching the feel of the comic, and I still do after all the times I have watched it. I also loved how colors, or the lack of them, helped fit the mood of the movie. The movie was very dark so there were not a lot of variance in colors. Most of the characters were dressed in black or some lighter shades. The only character that had some real color in her dress was Sarah, which made her seem like a symbol for hope. Then you factor in the soundtrack which was just as good as the movie. In fact, the soundtrack was a first in the trend of bands putting out previously unreleased materials on a movie soundtrack.

So if you would like to watch a dark tale of love and revenge, you really should watch this movie. And also listen to the soundtrack.

Rating: 5 out of 5