Flash Gordon is remembered today – if at all – not for the original
1930s comic strip or the countless TV shows, animated series, books,
serials and the like, but for the 1980 big screen Flash Gordon movie
featuring that song by Queen. (“Flash . . . aaahh . . . saviour of the
universe!”)
Sony Corporation has recently acquired the film rights
to the original Alex Raymond strips with an eye to making a new big-screen
version of the character to be directed by Breck Eisner. Eisner directed
the 2005 movie Sahara which was based on the best-seller of the
same name by Clive Cussler and starred Matthew McConaughey. A passable –
if somewhat easily forgettable - action/adventure story, Sahara has
exactly the sort of light touch one would expect of any
Flash Gordon remake.
Only problem is that despite a stolid $122 million in
gross box-office earnings, Sahara actually cost a whopping a
$160-million to produce and $81.1 million to market and distribute, making
it one of the bigger box office failures of recent years. Despite the no
doubt ardent wishes of the film’s producers, no sequels were made and
Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt character didn’t exactly become a household name
in the same way that Indiana Jones or even Lara Croft had become.
Since then director Eisner’s name has been coupled to
remakes of Creature from the Black Lagoon (for 2009), George
Romero’s The Crazies (2010) and of course Flash Gordon
(2010). Since Sahara, Eisner has been relegated to directing TV
episodes again. (Eisner kicked off his career in television before moving
to Hollywood.)
One somehow expects that any new big budget version of
Flash Gordon will
probably suffer the same fate of both the 1980 movie and Eisner’s
Sahara. It’ll flop at the box office. The 1980 Flash Gordon was
ultimately a box office disappointment (except in the UK where it did
quite well for some reason). Nothing came of producer Dino De Laurentiis’
hopes that it would turn into a franchise. The failure of the recent 2007
Flash Gordon SciFi Channel TV series also doesn’t bode well. 1980’s
Flash Gordon may have grown into a cult favorite over the past 28
years or so, but it would seem that compared to bigger sci-fi franchises (Star
Trek, Star Wars) it is indeed a minor
cult at best.
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"Here’s our message to Hollywood: don’t bother with another
Flash Gordon movie!" |
But why the poor box office showing? Simply put,
audiences didn’t get the joke. Get Carter-director Mike Hodges
admits on the Flash Gordon DVD audio commentary that the only way
to handle the material at hand was a “tongue-in-cheek” approach. So what
audiences unfamiliar with the 1930s Buster Crabbe serial got was a
self-consciously camp, over-the-top Technicolor explosion instead of a
sci-fi effort trying to ride the whole late-1970s sci-fi wave following
Star Wars.
Interestingly enough Hodges
also admits in his director’s commentary that he mainly went to the
original Flash Gordon comic strips for inspiration. Some shots in
the film are actually directly cribbed from Raymond’s drawings. Hodges
doesn’t so much as mention the old B&W serials – all of which explains why
the 1980 movie is so much campier and over-the-top than the 1930s serial,
which is pretty surreal and whacked out in its own way.
To recap: Earth is bombarded by mysterious comets from
outer space. It seems that Emperor Ming the Merciless who rules the outer
space kingdom of Mongo is actually behind the attacks. Discredited “mad”
scientist Dr. Hans Zarkov realises what is going on and pressgangs “Flash”
Gordon and his female sidekick Dale Arden, who has conveniently
crash-landed into his backyard in a plane following another meteorite
storm, into helping him pilot a rocket ship to Mongo and try and stop
Ming. On Mongo Flash manages to unite the various small kingdoms under
Ming’s tyranny to overthrow his rule. In the original comics Flash was a
blonde polo player and Yale graduate. For the movie he is downgraded to a
blonde American football star played by Sam J. Jones.
Ming incidentally is a stereotypical Fu Manchu-type
Asian supervillain and was played by Max von Sydow. Just how they managed
to get a serious thesp such as Von Sydow (he appeared in all those angsty
Swedish Ingmar Bergman movies) to play such a deliberately camp character
is a bit of a mystery. Or maybe it was just a really good pay check. Who
knows?
The 1980 Flash Gordon is deliberately and
self-consciously bad. Whether you “get” the joke is up to you. It is one
of those “love or hate it” affairs. When I first saw the movie back in
1980 as a kid, I hated it. Even at that young age I found the movie to be
too childish. (The very erudite Hodges often refers to the film as a
“children’s movie” in his commentary.)
Re-watching it as an adult today I found that my
attitude to the movie has mellowed. It’s silly and extremely campy, sure,
but I still kinda enjoyed it. But in the interim I have seen the various
Buster Crabbe's serials and understood what the film-makers were trying to
do. It really is a faithful adaptation of both the comics and the serials.
Unlike the Buck Rogers TV series, no attempt
has been made to “update” the hardware and special effects to the era of
Star Wars at all. I was willing to look
beyond its surface crappiness – something which my wife whom hated the
movie – could not do.
And that is the problem with Flash Gordon. There
is no way to actually translate the material to celluloid without going
the self-consciously campy route that the 1980 movie went. If you don’t,
then it ceases being Flash Gordon and you might as well do
something else altogether. (George Lucas confessed in interviews that he
initially wanted to do a Flash Gordon movie, but couldn’t acquire
the film rights. So he did Star Wars instead.) But the chances are
that audiences probably won’t “get” it in the same way that they also
didn’t get the equally self-conscious Planet
Terror
and Death Proof. Tarantino claimed that audiences were ready for
something different, but the box office proved him wrong. Both movies
flopped.
The irony too is that while watching Flash Gordon I wasn’t thinking
about a potential remake, but instead of . . . John Carter of Mars! Yup,
the science fiction character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs before he
went on to fame and fortune with a certain Tarzan character. Something
about production designer Danilo Donati’s extravagant sets and especially
the costume designs worn by actress Ornella Muti as Ming’s daughter
Princess Aura reminded me of John Carter - Warlord Of Mars, the
1977 Marvel comics adaptation of Burroughs’ character by Marv Wolfman and
Gil Kane.
So here’s our message to Hollywood: don’t bother with another Flash
Gordon movie. You’ll just lose a lot of money most probably. Rather
let Andrew Stanton, the director of WALL-E
and Finding Nemo, write a screenplay for a 2012 John Carter of
Mars movie for Pixar as word has it he’s doing right now. Now that
we would want to see . . .
