Holy multinational vertigo, Batman! With the announcement of Tudors thespian Henry Cavill as cinema's newest Superman, the British invasion of American superhero turf has reached a Kryptonite pitch. What in the name of the Queen is going on around here?
We watched as Welsh-born actor Christian Bale became one of the best Batmans ever with the assistance of cerebral director Christopher Nolan.
We know Tobey Maguire has abdicated Spider-Man's webbed throne to Andrew Garfield, who was born in Los Angeles but raised in England.
Cavill, the upcoming celluloid Superman, was born on the Channel Islands squeezed between England and France.
Which, by the way, is nowhere near Cleveland, where two Jews named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created the Man of Steel.
Nor Manhattan, where Stan Lee invented Spider-Man. The mean streets of Gotham are the birthplace of Bill Finger and Bob Kane's Batman, which means that the recent British usurpation of singularly American superheroes feels somewhat like Hollywood deciding that Brad Pitt will be the new star of a blockbuster reboot of King Arthur's tale.
It's not impossible – it's just weird.
But this pop-cultural cross-pollination has a long, long legacy. Theater companies around the world have been performing William Shakespeare's legendary plays in different styles and languages for centuries, a tradition that has continued in the age of cinema (with Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and Ran being two excellent examples).
Manhattan-born Robert Downey Jr. is currently filming his second Sherlock Holmes film, in which he will no doubt muster his best fake British accent.
Itinerant comics envelope-pusher Grant Morrison even created a Muslim Batman for his excellent new series Batman, Inc. – much to the chagrin of backwards nationalists who think the Dark Knight is only right if he's white.
Given Superman's sacrosanct mythos, no one expected Warner Bros., DC Comics and Zack Snyder to take a Morrison-size gamble on a live-action remake.
Cavill – who competed for the part against Brandon Routh, star of Bryan Singer's underwhelming Superman Returns – is a safe, if somewhat boring, bet.
He's a comparative unknown whose dark eyes and locks look the part, but he's going to need to hit the weight room with a vengeance so his physique can catch up to his acting chops. Cavill's bringing the blood, sweat and tears as mythic Greek warrior Theseus in this November's The Immortals, but it's going to take more than Tarsem Singh's sword-and-sandals epic to prepare him for a powerhouse reboot of Superman, something that hasn't been successfully pulled off since the '70s.
Sure, he'll get help from Snyder's hyperactive direction, but this feels like a missed opportunity to really turn up the volume on Siegel and Shuster's iconic American superhero.
Instead, we get another U.K. export, albeit one without the stellar resume of Bale, and an IOU for a film that perhaps won't be as disappointing as Singer's uneven stab. We hope the climax of Snyder's incoming film will be more ... climactic.
Blowback: What Do You Think of the New Superman?
Will British actor Cavill do the Man of Steel justice? Who would you pick for the role? What villains do you hope Superman will face in Snyder's reboot? Sound off in the comments section below.
Image courtesy DC Comics. Photo: David Shankbone/Creative Commons.
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