Sin City is one of those rare movies where the visual creativity matches the power of the script to create a rare, powerful movie.
Filmed almost entirely in front of blue screens a la Sky Captain and the World of the Tomorrow the film has a perfect comic book sense to it. Where Sky Captain tried to create stunning visual effects Robert Rodriguez used the world as a pallet to show their actors.
Like the comics the film is shot in black and white with spot color. Instead of the backgrounds and all the impressive CGI things that could be created the world seems more like a set for a stage play completely dominated by the characters and their emotions.
Rodriguez insisted upon giving creator Frank Millar co-writer and co-director credit In an interview with UnderGround Online he said
I wanted him to be a director rather that just there as a writer or a producer, because I felt if came to that, they might just stick him in the corner and feed him a sandwich every once in a while. But if he were a director, everyone would have to listen to him. I didn't want it to be Robert Rodriguez's Sin City. I loved the book so much, I wanted it to be as close to something that he would do in the movie as possible.
So much of the movie is taken directly from several comic books. The film stories are direct adaptations of; The Big Fat Kill, That Yellow Bastard, The Babe Wore Red and the first ever Sin City story, The Hard Goodbye. Sin City is more then just based on the comics it’s taken directly from it. There are shots, camera angles and entire sections of dialogue lifted directly out of the comic book.
Millar even appears in a small part, although I’m not going to give away which one, or how he dies.
The reason for this is that Rodriguez is a massive Sin City fanboy. He shot the opening scene with Josh Hatrnett and Marley Shelton without anyone’s knowledge and then gave the footage to Millar and saying it was either the opening of a movie or something cool to show his friends.
All of this careful devotion to Millar’s work has paid off in a stunning and completely mesmerizing film. It’s the kind of movie I saw Saturday and might end up catching another matinee during the week.
Article comments
1 - Hashim
gorgeous movie, indeed.