[Trailer] Solomon Kane

[Klaus]

It's perhaps worthwhile noting that Solomon Kane's background is hinted to be shady, at the least.

For example, in The Blue Flame of Vengeance he says, "Aye. I led a rout of ungodly men, to my shame be it said, though the cause was a just one. In the sack of that town you name, many foul deeds were done under the cloak of the cause and my heart was sickened ... and I have drowned some red memories in the sea --." In Hawk of Basti, Hawk, recalling a time when he and Kane fought together against the Spanish, calls him "my sober cutthroat" and "my melancholy murderer".

I think it's a fair enough change by the movie makers, even disregarding the differences between the two mediums and their audiences. That said, I'd have been perfectly happy without the added backstory. I think it would make him more menacing.

Those two quotes seem to hint at a Privateering background for Kane, where he performed bad deeds for a good cause, and drowned memories in the sea. Not too far from the backstory given him in the movie.

It's a common adaptation technique to take things that are only hinted in novels and expanding them to underline/accentuate the character.

 

[Rykion]

I don't mind the added backstory as long as at some point in the movie we get the character of Solomon Kane from the books. I don't want him spending the whole movie worrying about straying from the path of peace. I want him destroying evil and knowing he is doing the right thing.

 

[Mouseferatu]

It's perhaps worthwhile noting that Solomon Kane's background is hinted to be shady, at the least.

*thud*

I don't know how I forgot about that during this discussion.

I think some rereads are in order.

 

[Felon]

Yes, but that introduced internal struggle is a bit of a cliche, really. Look at what they did with The Shadow in the 1990s film. Almost exactly the same thing as here. We can't have a hero who isn't conflicted, so we'll give him an EEEEEEEVIL past so his motivation is to redeem himself or whatever.

True, it's a cliche. Heroic fiction inevitably breaks down into cliches, because audiences don't expect the comfort of familiarity when it comes to do-gooders who solve all problems with violence.

Why not a history in which he didn't act, didn't do the right thing, and someone he cared about suffered for it? You could use that and have charact development without this hackneyed change to the character.

Well, that's been done too. Spider-Man springs right to mind.

Well, if we're gonna go there, Purefoy's Solomon Kane does look more like Jackman's Van Helsing than the classic Gary Gianni paintings. More belts and buckles and no white collar.

Neither character seems to have much, if anything, to do with their source material, and were given a contrived internal conflict (although they didn't really do much with it in Van Helsing). It's not depth, it's just a different two-dimensional shape.

I would also argue that Howard's Solomon Kane had depth. He wouldn't be as compelling as he is if he didn't.

Still don't see how you can say the guy we saw in the trailer doesn't seem to have much to do with the soruce material. Belts and buckles? Just seems like nitpicking. Then again, the character had no supporting cast, no recurring characters, no base of operations, no special talents, or any other elements that can really said to be character-specific. Take a tall lean man, dress him in black, put a pilgrim hat on his head, a sword in his hand, a flintlock on his belt, and slap a grim coutenance on his face. That's Solomon Kane (I guess you could subtract or add buckles as desired).

I think the concept of Solomon Kane as presented by Robert E. Howard is strong enough to stand on its own. That is why the stories are considered classics. There is a long history of people messing about with classics and creating significantly inferior works. We don't need origin stories for each and every character.

It may be worth noting that The Dark Knight kept the origins of the Joker a secret, and I shouldn't need to tell you the results of that particular storytelling experiment.

People know who the Joker is. Solomon Kane does not enjoy that level of name recognition. Is an origin mandatory? No. Can it help audiences get into the character? Yes. Does providing an oriigin really amount to anything negative? Depends on execution.

The long history you refer to ha less to do with taking liberties as it does with just not giving a damn about quality. Lord of the Rings took liberties for all the right reasons. Catwoman took liberties for all the wrong ones.

 

[NiTessine]

Still don't see how you can say the guy we saw in the trailer doesn't seem to have much to do with the soruce material. Belts and buckles? Just seems like nitpicking. Then again, the character had no supporting cast, no recurring characters, no base of operations, no special talents, or any other elements that can really said to be character-specific. Take a tall lean man, dress him in black, put a pilgrim hat on his head, a sword in his hand, a flintlock on his belt, and slap a grim coutenance on his face. That's Solomon Kane (I guess you could subtract or add buckles as desired).

There is a recurring character in the stories, actually, N'longa, who is in both "Red Shadows" and "The Hills of the Dead". You might also count Sir Richard Grenville, who makes appearance only once but is referred to often. The rest of the content in the trailer just has jack to do with the character. As stated before, Solomon Kane simply never did any of those things, and their explanation for how a Puritan ended up in a monastery must be interesting indeed. I also disagree, by the way, with the decision to bring the Devil into the story, when Howard's stories draw more from Lovecraft's mythology (especially "The Footfalls Within") and have sorcerers, monstrous creatures and undead, but no presence of any supernatural forces from the Christian mythology.

That, incidentally, is what makes Solomon Kane's unswerving faith so remarkable. He has met and fought monsters and fell creatures from before man, and wields a magic staff from the age of Atlantis, but has never seen direct proof that what he believes in is in any way real. In here, the inclusion of this Reaper thing cheapens that aspect of the character - having tangible proof brings hard knowledge, which kills faith, and it's not hard to believe when there's a demon out to drag you to Hell.

People know who the Joker is. Solomon Kane does not enjoy that level of name recognition. Is an origin mandatory? No. Can it help audiences get into the character? Yes. Does providing an oriigin really amount to anything negative? Depends on execution.

The long history you refer to ha less to do with taking liberties as it does with just not giving a damn about quality. Lord of the Rings took liberties for all the right reasons. Catwoman took liberties for all the wrong ones.

It isn't a case of whether it helps the audiences get into the character - it's that it's the wrong character.

It is far easier to make a bad movie than a good one. The LotR movies, if you'll note, did take from Tolkien things other than the name. I'm not sure if anything beyond the name, the hat and the sword has survived here. While it's too early to pass final judgment with only a trailer and a pair of reviews to go by (though the mindless gushing on AICN was particularly informative and uncommonly repellent), it does look a lot like they took the name and stuck it on something that may or may not have been written before they picked it (cf. King Arthur, Van Helsing).

For a movie where the hero's background was never explained, check out Shoot 'Em Up. It's pretty far from Solomon Kane in tone, but Clive Owen's character isn't actually very far from what Solomon Kane might be like in the modern day. It works there. Clint Eastwood's Western career has more than one such a character there. It can be made to work, and it is not even difficult if one has the will to do it.

 

[Felon]

There is a recurring character in the stories, actually, N'longa, who is in both "Red Shadows" and "The Hills of the Dead". You might also count Sir Richard Grenville, who makes appearance only once but is referred to often. The rest of the content in the trailer just has jack to do with the character. As stated before, Solomon Kane simply never did any of those things, and their explanation for how a Puritan ended up in a monastery must be interesting indeed. I also disagree, by the way, with the decision to bring the Devil into the story, when Howard's stories draw more from Lovecraft's mythology (especially "The Footfalls Within") and have sorcerers, monstrous creatures and undead, but no presence of any supernatural forces from the Christian mythology.

That, incidentally, is what makes Solomon Kane's unswerving faith so remarkable. He has met and fought monsters and fell creatures from before man, and wields a magic staff from the age of Atlantis, but has never seen direct proof that what he believes in is in any way real. In here, the inclusion of this Reaper thing cheapens that aspect of the character - having tangible proof brings hard knowledge, which kills faith, and it's not hard to believe when there's a demon out to drag you to Hell.

Kane generally referred to most of the supernatural things he was up against as being hellish and Satan-spawned, just like real-world Puritans conflated any form of paganism with devil worship. Puritanism made it simple: if it's not of God, then it's witchcraft.

Our recollections of Howard's depiction differ somewhat, as the most striking detail of Kane was that at his core, he was no true Christian. He was born out of his proper time, a larger-than-life hero in a world where such men had become all but extinct, and Christianity was just an engrained affectation that allowed Kane to come to terms with his nature.

It isn't a case of whether it helps the audiences get into the character - it's that it's the wrong character.

You seem flatly unappeasable, having reduced this whole thing to a binary equation. Taken to its logical extent, this suggests there's no way to build on Kane's canon--the only option is to simply regurgitate a Howard story word-for-word, detail-for-detail, buckle-for-buckle.

 

[NiTessine]

Kane generally referred to most of the supernatural things he was up against as being hellish and Satan-spawned, just like real-world Puritans conflated any form of paganism with devil worship. Puritanism made it simple: if it's not of God, then it's witchcraft.

And yet, in "The Footfalls Within", he realises that there exist creatures and things outside this frame of reference, such as the Horror, or, I think, the Staff of Solomon.

There's also the fact that Howard (an agnostic, as I recall) chose not to include explicitly Christian supernatural elements in the stories, opting for black magic and hints of something vaguely Lovecraftian, despite his main character being a Puritan and repeatedly mentioned to be such. To the reader, an outside observer, there is no proof that what he believes is in any way real, and there are in fact hints to the contrary (For one thing, I'd consider the monotheistic Christian view and Cthulhu Mythos mutually exclusive as true in the same diegetic frame - the first one kinda defines its god as the only god and the second one hinges on the assumption that there are many gods and none of them are what you'd call nice - of course, this is all in how great conclusions one is willing to draw from "The Footfalls Within", Howard's agnosticism and ties to the greater body of his work. I think much could be written about this.).

Our recollections of Howard's depiction differ somewhat, as the most striking detail of Kane was that at his core, he was no true Christian. He was born out of his proper time, a larger-than-life hero in a world where such men had become all but extinct, and Christianity was just an engrained affectation that allowed Kane to come to terms with his nature.

I'd rather not enter a debate as to what constitutes a true Christian, especially on these forums. The history of Europe runs red with such debates. Yes, Solomon Kane was a bit of a throwback to the age of Conan, but he had faith and he kept it, even if what actually kept him going was a superhuman willpower and physique and an atavistic urge to stuff someone's own kidneys down their throat.

You seem flatly unappeasable, having reduced this whole thing to a binary equation. Taken to its logical extent, this suggests there's no way to build on Kane's canon--the only option is to simply regurgitate a Howard story word-for-word, detail-for-detail, buckle-for-buckle.

Well, that is, in a way, true. The core of the Solomon Kane canon has been written and cannot be added to, seeing as Robert E. Howard has lain in his grave these past 70 years or so. Whatever anyone else does with his characters will be by definition a derivative, lesser work (a great deal lesser, in many cases).

However, there are still derivative works that I can approve of, and I tend to rate these in terms of faithfulness to the source material and quality. Arnie's first Conan film qualifies despite diverging occasionally from the stories and yoinking a villain from a Kull story because it is a very good film. The second one doesn't, because it sucks. Red Sonja can burn, though the character is so very far removed from Howard's work that no meaningful comparisons can any longer be drawn and she fails entirely on her own lack of merit.

I have, for the most part, refrained from commenting on the story itself, not only because it's still for the most part unknown but also because the episodic nature of the pulp heroes lends itself well to the adding of new tales, and there is nothing wrong with it - as long as it is done well. What we know of the character, though, leads me to believe that Bassett's Solomon Kane has no more to do with Howard's Puritan swordsman than Sommers' Van Helsing had. There's more to Howard's character than the hat, and especially the AICN review contains details that run directly contrary to the character. So, it can still be a good fantasy action movie, but it doesn't look like much of a Solomon Kane film.

It all just leads me to wonder why take the name if you won't use the character, especially when the character is so little known that you can't really sell the movie with it, or even the author's name, and will only end up pissing off the hardcore fans.

 

[Kunimatyu]

Did Captain Jack Sparrow have a backstory? Internal motivation?

Not much, and what little backstory was added in the later movies detracted rather than added to the character. Memorable characters aren't made memorable by their origin story.

 

[Darth Shoju]

Not much, and what little backstory was added in the later movies detracted rather than added to the character.

It did? I thought that the movies were 45 mins too long and crowded with usesless double-crosses detracted from the movie. Jack's background and motivations were just fine with me.

Memorable characters aren't made memorable by their origin story.

Tell that to Spider-Man or Batman.

 

[Mercutio01]

I feel about this trailer the same contempt I do for the Sherlock Holmes trailer. It's about the amount of faith to the character (read: name and look only) and changes just about every other detail in such a drastic, and bad, way as to make me vehementy reject the possibility of even daring to watch the films.

It's one thing to change a story completely and talk about it as a different vision of a character--like the various Batman movies have done. It's another thing completely to create a de facto "official" film interpretation of a character and to stray so far from the source material. The addition of a demon trailing Kane and the implied "deal with a devil" are story elements that belong in Spawn, not Solomon Kane.

For what it's worth, backstory for backstory's sake pisses me off just by existing. There's no backstory for Indiana Jones until the third movie, but does that make the other two (well, Raiders, anyway) less enjoyable? Is there any doubt about what Indiana Jones is? Personally, I thought the introduction of a back story actually made me like Indy less, and was a serious let-down. But then, I appear to be the only person in existence who would rather watch Temple of Doom a thousand more times than Last Crusade even once more.

I do not intend to support this movie in any direct fashion. Maybe when it comes out on DVD and Netflix has it I might deign to watch it. I think this looks like the exact analogy of Arnie's Conan is to Howard's Conan as Purefoy's Kane is to Howard's Cane. The only difference is the production value of the film, which isn't enough to sell it to me.

In short, not interested. Or rather, interested but only in the rubbernecking-as-you-drive-by-a-car-wreck interested.