Okay, I’m gonna be up front here: Sin City is the best comic book adaptation ever.
Sin City looks incredible. The dark, rainy streets of Basin City come to life beautifully, and the set-like quality of the film (I imagine most of it was done in front of a green screen) only adds to the eerie noir-ishness. It’s much easier to believe in comic heroes (or anti-heroes in this case) and villains when the entire world is make believe, rather than a guy in a wetsuit swinging from buildings (Spider-Man) or a dude carrying a sword through downtown in peak hour (Blade).
Shooting the film in black and white was the only way to go – I can’t imagine Sin City in glorious colour, it just wouldn’t work. Even better are the truly comic strip moments where the images are reduced to a negative silhouette of the action.
The trio of directors have done an incredible job. Not once does Sin City seem like an awkward production-by-committee affair in the way Four Rooms did (which featured two of the same directors). Frank Miller obviously had the common sense to ensure his vision reached the screen with perfection, and this is probably Rodriguez’s best film.
You have to have patience for such thick, cumbersome dialogue. It’s rewarding once you get used to it, but all the same I am surprised that this film has been as popular as it seems to have been. At times I found it a little slow, and it could have done with a shorter running time. But any of the issues I had with the film were really problems I had with Frank Miller’s writing. This is a comic flawlessly transposed to the big screen.
Just as audiences may have gotten tired with comic book adaptations, we are blessed with Sin City. I hope the raising of the bar is a sign of things to come – especially with V For Vendetta and The Watchmen in the works.