If there’s a lesson to be drawn from Comic-Con this year, it’s that Hollywood has gone to a very dark place.
From Guillermo del Toro to George R.R. Martin, from Fox’s bleak “In Time” and angry “Rise of Planet of the Apes” to a bloody “Immortals” and a hyper-violent “Drive,” Hollywood is dark, angry and possibly reflecting a national mood.
This year, Comic-Con offered up a cinematic and cable television world increasingly populated by zombies, vampires, werewolves, aliens, witches, terrorists, more zombies, drug gangs, torture experts and spree killers.
We’re all just moments away from a brutal death, or just as likely, a lingering wait for extinction in a dystopian future -- whether it's small-time crooks or our hopeless fate writ large (as in the corrosive tween novel adaptations, positing a universe where you basically have to kill to eat).
Also read: Comic-Con: Fox's Dystopian Outlook, Courtesy of Ridley Scott, Justin Timberlake, Andy Serkis
Fox had an especially bleak trio of offerings that made us wonder if the lingeringly grim economy was having spiritual side effects, not just on Middle America and various nations teetering near default, but on the production chiefs at that studio and others.
* Fox unveiled "In Time," which places Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried in a world where anyone wanting to live past the age of 25 must pay their way into longer life. (Imagine the amount of sexting a doomed class of young adults woud indulge in.)
* The audience buzzed over a freakishly violent scene from "Drive," (having already won its maker, Nicholas Winding Refn, Best Director at Cannes), a noirish action showcase starrng Ryan Gosling as a shady driver with dirty hands. The scene showed Gosling stomp a victim to death until the subject's head exploded, in a scenario that Tarantino might have envied.
* "Game of Thrones" author George R.R. Martin had reasonably noted that he mourns the characters he rather bravely decapitates (and, later, gibbets onto a stick to scare their family with).
* Finally, Fox unveiled a re-boot of the "Planet of the Apes" franchise, featuring Andy Serkis as an ape who's medicated into being diabolically brainy by James Franco (who's a scientist attempting to cure Alzheimer's).
But the darkness was hardly limited to that.
Ridley Scott spoke from location in Iceland about "Prometheus," a return to sci-fi for him. It features Charlize Theron and Noomi Rapace (the queen of darkness in three Stieg Larsson adaptations in her native Sweden) on an alien planet. The film won't be a sequel to Scott's groundbreaking 1979 classic "Alien," as originally planned, but it will exist in the same narrative world as that bleak sci-fi horror film.
