The plot of 'The Crow' remake recreated using only quotes from scathing reviews.
Caw, caw, bang, fuck, I'm dead. Again!
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The Crow remake opened this weekend but didn’t screen for critics, and it’s always a bad sign when the studio that made a movie doesn’t trust people to share their opinions about that movie. Especially so when that movie is a remake, a known quantity, a movie we’ve all essentially already seen (and I saw The Crow many, many times as an angsty, over-earnest pre-teen).
A remake is the kind of movie where you’d think they’d want to generate the most buzz possible, with a big to-do premiere and influencers flown in from all over the greater Calabasas area. I’m getting silly with it, but you know what I mean: usually the deal with a remake or “established IP” is that it’s a big deal because you’ve heard of it, and you’d presumably want to remind people of what a big deal it is at every turn.
Only Lionsgate didn’t do that with The Crow, and it’s hard not to assume that was because they thought slash knew it sucked. And were some combination of slightly embarrassed about this, and trying to withhold that information from the public for as long as possible (probably a lot more of the latter).
I was naturally reticent to go see a movie that I know and you know probably sucks, just to write the expectedly sarcastic takedown (not that I have anything against sarcastic takedowns…). I figured my time might be better spent giving it the Plot Recreated with Reviews treatment.
That’s where I read as many reviews of a bad movie as I can, and then try to piece together a coherent recounting of the plot using only expository quotes from those reviews (no analysis!). The theory being, that with a certain type of movie, hearing bored or annoyed critics’ recountings of the plot is usually more entertaining than the plot itself.
I did worry that a remake of a movie many of us have seen wouldn’t contain some of the necessary surprises that make this feature so enjoyable (Miley Cyrus turning down a piano scholarship to Juilliard so she can rescue sea turtles and whatnot). But I knew from the very first sentence of the first review I read that it would be okay.
Rupert Sanders directed (of the execrable Snow White and the Huntsman and the much-better-than-everyone-said remake of Ghost in the Shell), in what was billed as not a remake, but a “remagining of the original graphic novel.”
The original Crow series was written by James O’Barr, apparently inspired by the death of his fianceé after she was killed by a drunk driver, and starred Brandon Lee in his breakout role. Lee would go on to die in an on-set accident (an early harbinger of the Alec Baldwin accident on Rust) just a week before the production wrapped, tragically making The Crow the only glimpse of his lost potential as an action star.
The circumstances surrounding the release, combined with a brilliant performance by Lee, and an immersive alternate history depiction of Detroit as a supernatural dystopia created by director Alex Proyas, made The Crow a sort of schlocky-yet-intensely-earnest work of goth perfection. It was a movie so romantic in its pervading sadness that it kind of made you want to be sad too, if only to experience that kind of epic melodrama, even if you were just a boring preteen whose biggest drama in life was your lame parents making you unload the dishwasher.
A cynical remake in development hell since 2008 (sporting the name of producer Edward Pressman, who presided over the original production that got Lee killed, no less) naturally couldn’t recreate the perfect storm of circumstances that helped the original become a cult classic, of course. And it sounds like they over-wrote the plot to try to compensate. Making it, oh boy, perfect for a Plot Recreated with Reviews.
Let’s dive in!
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Boy
Eric Draven (Bill Skarsgård) is a recovering addict who falls in love with Shelly (FKA Twigs) in rehab. Except they’re not just in rehab, oh no. Shelly is in rehab because she has a secret video of a billionaire supernatural supervillain named Roeg (Danny Huston). -The Wrap
I can’t say for sure that the doomed lovers in the new The Crow were modeled after Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox. But once it occurred to me, the comparison became impossible to shake. -Vulture
A grim and pretentious opening sequence involving a hurt horse and a mucky rural landscape [somewhere in Michigan] establishes this Eric as a country boy with vague but damning childhood trauma. -Mashable [Indiewire]
It's also implied that his mother died of a drug overdose -SlashFilm
-but that’s about as deep an exploration into his past as this movie goes. -Indiewire
This “Crow” was shot in the The Czech Republic and -Movie Nation
…it takes place in an apparently American city where almost every resident has a different international accent. -Vulture
Meets Girl (and Villain)
Shelly is a singer on the rise unwisely drawn to the hedonistic scene bankrolled by shadowy tycoon Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), who’s always on the lookout for fresh talent. At his shindigs, good people seem compelled to do bad things. -Variety
A friend (Sebastian Orozco) shoots a cell phone video that gets her bestie Zadie (Isabella Wei) killed. -MovieNation
The content of this clip isn’t revealed until midway through The Crow, and it turns out to be intensely underwhelming. -The Daily Beast
Roeg, it seems, is in league with the Devil -SlashFilm
and has the ability to coo some evil-ASMR that causes people to become either stabby or self-destructive. -Rolling Stone
He has been feeding souls to Satan (not pictured) in a Faustian exchange for eternal life. -SlashFilm
“You go to Hell so I don’t have to,” he tells the unfortunate Zadie. -Variety
Rehab
To escape Vincent’s henchmen, Shelly gets herself arrested and thrown into a recovery center that operates like a prison. There, she meets Eric, an oft-bullied recovering addict who has few friends and fewer things to say. -DailyBeast
With his mullet, myriad tattoos and sweetly sardonic air, frequently shirtless Eric is like Pete Davidson with a world-class personal trainer. -Variety
They endure the indignity of being made to wear pink sweatsuits and fall in love during group-therapy exercises. Eric imagines Shelly topless in the sketches he pins to his wall, while Shelly is irresistibly drawn to the way Eric sits by himself, declaring him “quite brilliantly broken.” -Vulture
When Roeg and his minions show up at the facility, Eric helps Shelly escape with just a bit too much ease (why didn’t they think to cut off their ankle bracelets and hop out a laundry room window sooner?), and they hole up in a mauve-dappled apartment owned by Shelly’s friend, who’s in Antigua. -Indiewire
The self-proclaimed "degenerates" wander into the swanky apartment, allowing for a fashion show in designer clothes and lovemaking on silk sheets. Then they tumble into a day out with friends (whose are unclear) — which is odd as Shelly is on the run. -Mashable
Shelly, posing with a book at an Instagram-ready picnic, informs Eric that she’s reading Rimbaud -Vulture
…the most on-the-nose gothic literary reference in material steeped in them. -Indiewire
“Do you think angsty teens would build shrines to us?” Shelly asks Eric. -NY Times
On the run for either one very eventful day or a few weeks or months — in any case nobody is looking for them very hard, even at their own apartments — by the time Roeg’s henchmen do finally track them down they’ve fallen in deep infatuation with each other. -The Wrap
Sanders and screenwriters Zach Baylin and William Schneider will get around to the superheroics in due time, but first, they want to give you Crowmeo and Juliet. -Rolling Stone
Tragedy
Eventually, the bad guys catch up to them, both are murdered, and Eric wakes up in a limbo filled with steel girders and birds. Lots and lots of birds. -Rolling Stone
In this way station, he meets an entity called Kronos (Sami Bouajila), who explains that Eric’s love was so great that it couldn’t be carried by crows to the afterlife. -DailyBeast
Shelly is going to hell, but Eric can save her if he comes back to life and kills Roeg, because that guy sold his soul to the devil. -The Wrap
His soul for Shelly’s. The catch is that Eric has to kill everyone responsible for their deaths. Luckily, he has crows on his side — hooray! — and can feel pain, but can’t be killed. -Rolling Stone