1980s – Page 14 – PopCult Reviews

Comic Book Review – Suicide Squad Volumes 1 & 2

Suicide Squad: Trial by Fire (2015)
Reprints Secret Origins #14, Suicide Squad v1 #1-8
Suicide Squad: The Nightshade Odyssey (2015)
Reprints Suicide Squad v1 #9-16, Doom Patrol/Suicide Squad Special, Justice League International #13, Secret Origins #28
Written by John Ostrander (with Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, Paul Kupperberg, and Robert Greenberger)
Art by Luke McDonnell, Bob Lewis, Erik Larsen, Keith Giffen, Al Gordon, and Rob Liefeld

In the wake of Crisis on the Infinite Earths, the DC Universe was changed. New doors were open, and the kinds of stories the company wanted to tell weren’t like what had come before. The 1987 mini-series Legends served as a sort of table setting, spotlighting the characters who would be central to the next two decades. Writer John Ostrander, new to DC Comics, plotted Legends and used it to introduce the Suicide Squad. This team was an old name repurposed into a new, exciting concept. Previously, the Suicide Squad were special agents sent on dangerous missions in a short-lived The Brave & The Bold run from the 1960s. Ostrander retroactively introduces a World War II-era group in the pages of Secret Origins to set the stage for the modern team’s grand debut.

Movie Review – The Seventh Continent

The Seventh Continent (1989)
Written by Michael Haneke and Johanna Teicht
Directed by Michael Haneke

Human existence has clearly reached a terminus point. The current world order is ending, and it’s scary not knowing how things will shape up next. In the face of climate collapse, social disorder, and a nightmare pandemic, it’s near impossible to see anything substantively hopeful in the future. My personality is not often turning and burying myself in escapist fare. Yeah, I read comic books regularly and am not averse to a dopamine-inducing video game, but ultimately I need to look into the void and see what lies within. Michael Haneke has been a filmmaker that has never hesitated to show us the worst of humanity, particularly the comfortable aloof middle class. He views them as both perpetrators of horrendous evil and victims of their own cruelty. For Haneke, an exploration of modernity and the senseless violence that accompanies it links us to our history and points to a dark future should we remain on this path.

Comic Book Review – Superman: The Man of Steel Volume 4

Superman: The Man of Steel Volume 4 (2022)
Reprints Superman #16-22, Adventures of Superman #439-444, Action Comics #598-600, Superman Annual #2
Written by John Byrne, Paul Kupperberg, Jerry Ordway, Roger Stern
Art by John Byrne, Ty Templeton, Karl Kesel, Jerry Ordway, Ross Andru, Curt Swan, Mike Mignola, John Statema, Ron Frenz

So it seems this will be the last volume in The Man of Steel collections which makes sense. These issues mark John Byrne’s final contributions to the Post-Crisis Superman, and the series title comes from his mini-series that rebooted the origins and supporting cast of the character. Volume Four manages to reintroduce some more elements from Superman’s mythos, updated for the 1980s. On reflection, this does not seem like a radical reimagining as it may have when the issues were first published. It’s very evident that Byrne is a fan of the Silver Age Superman but also wants to modernize the icon per his directive from DC Comics. This is also the first volume of reprints where Marv Wolfman was gone from Adventures of Superman, and thus Byrne was writing all three Superman titles monthly, plus penciling two of them.

Movie Review – Dead Poets Society

Dead Poets Society (1989)
Written by Tom Schulman
Directed by Peter Weir

Dead Poets Society was undoubtedly a box office success and garnered much positive acclaim from critics. In college in the early 2000s, I met several people who loved this movie, especially fellow English majors. You might love this movie. I didn’t watch it for the first time until around 2006, and so this was only my second watch, but…this is such a cheesy ass movie, not in a good or charming way. I was astonished that Weir would direct this, and he was working towards making Green Card when Jeffrey Katzenberg reached out to him about Dead Poets Society. I find the movie to be some of the worst examples of maudlin shallow sentiment and a film that began Robin Williams’ path down, making ridiculous pseudo inspirational tripe.

Movie Review – The Mosquito Coast

The Mosquito Coast (1986)
Written by Paul Schrader
Directed by Peter Weir

Peter Weir was going to make a movie of Paul Theroux’s novel. Weir bought the film rights as soon as it was published in 1981 and was in pre-production when he was sidetracked with Witness. Unlike Witness, a side project for Weir, which gained massive critical and audience acclaim, The Mosquito Coast is considered a box office failure. Even critics were unsure what to make of this very different, bleak film. Harrison Ford was cast completely against type, one of the movie’s most interesting elements. But apparently, moviegoers and critics wanted something less abrasive, so Weir was dealt the first of several blows in the middle part of his career.

Movie Review – Witness

Witness (1985)
Written by Earl W. Wallace, Pamela Wallace, and William Kelley
Directed by Peter Weir

Peter Weir was in the middle of pre-production work on The Mosquito Coast when backing fell through. He’d return to the project, but Paramount offered him the director’s chair for a picture they had trouble courting someone for. Witness, based on an episode of Gunsmoke, had been circulating in Hollywood for years. It was 182 pages (about 3 hours in movie time) and was critiqued by some executives for focusing too much on the Amish lifestyle rather than the thriller elements. Harrison Ford had already shown interest, so Weir’s first American film was a bit of a gamble but certainly helped by his star’s prominence in the industry.

Movie Review – The Year of Living Dangerously

The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)
Written by David Williamson, Peter Weir, and C.J. Koch
Directed by Peter Weir

In a complete coincidence, I am currently reading The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins. I’m just about four chapters in but am already learning a lot about Indonesia and the part the CIA played in completely destabilizing that country. However, I was completely unaware that this film is specifically about the coup attempt in that country in the mid-1960s. This immediately raised my radar, wanting to see how the picture treats its communist characters. Will they be nuanced, developed participants in the story or faceless monsters like orcs in Lord of the Rings. Is this a movie influenced by anti-communist Western propaganda or an honest telling of what was happening in Indonesia?

Movie Review – Gallipoli (1981)

Gallipoli (1981)
Written by David Williamson & Peter Weir
Directed by Peter Weir

Set around a decade after Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir’s Gallipoli continues his interest in looking at the so-called “wonder of civilized society.” He does it this time by making a war film that spends a large chunk of its time looking at the characters on their way to the war. His purpose is to examine ideas closely related to white Australian culture that might not be immediately familiar to people outside of the continent. One of these is the idea of ANZAC, the belief that Australians and their cousins in New Zealand possess unique traits that set them apart from their ancestral lands. In many ways, this is the myth of American exceptionalism Down Under. Weir also knows that you cannot talk about war in this era without addressing male friendship and how profound that love can be and how easily it is abused.

Movie Review – Tron

Tron (1982)
Written & Directed by Steven Lisberger

I never grew up aware of this movie, but around 2000, it suddenly became an old Disney film thrust back in the spotlight. Possibly due to a lack of cable, thus an absence of access to the Disney Channel (Tron was shown on the channel’s first day on the air), I just passed it by. I had seen bits and pieces of the movie and wasn’t too terribly impressed, but I am always fascinated with this period of Disney’s output, a weird dark territory where they were taking risks and on the verge of bankruptcy. It’s a much more interesting time for the company than now, where they churn out processed formulaic drivel. So I decided to give the two films in the Tron series a shot and finally see what drew a cult following to them.

Movie Review – Ghostbusters II

Ghostbusters II (1989)
Written by Harold Ramis and Dan Akroyd
Directed by Ivan Reitman

Ghostbusters was always meant to be a standalone movie, but financial success in the 1980s meant you had to make a sequel, which remains true today. But something weird happened where a new chairman of Columbia Pictures took control in 1986. David Putnam liked smaller movies that garnered critical acclaim, even greenlighting a handful of foreign directors’ transitions into American films. So as big as the hype around Ghostbusters even years out from its release, everything seemed to point to the franchise being dead. The main actors were also obstacles as many of them were booked up or simply weren’t keen on revisiting the world of Ghostbusters. Putnam was eventually removed as chair in 1987 after making some incendiary comments about Bill Murray and others. Dawn Steel was put in charge, and after numerous box office failures for the studio, she saw Ghostbusters II as a way to redeem Columbia financially.