Ah, The Spirit. What an odd mess of a film. On nearly every level, this movie is an absolute failure. It fluctuates wildly from cartoonish innocence to outlandish violence. That could possibly be interesting if it wasn’t so glacially paced. Frank Miller was clearly not the person to adapt Will Eisner’s titular character. In fact, even the word “adapt” is false. Miller doesn’t so much attempt to move the story to a new medium as try to take it’s name and force it onto his own creation. As such, here’s the CommentaryCast for Frank Miller’s Will Eisner’s The Spirit.
Will Eisner’s The Spirit (2008 DVD)
-Recorded in May 2015.
-Count the number of times I say the word “aesthetic”. It’s a lot.
–The Spirit is based on a series created by Will Eisner for a newspaper strip in 1940. Eisner quickly established a unique visual flair in this comic and his other work.
-The character has been adapted once before, in a TV movie starring Sam Jones. While much more faithful to the overall feel of the character, it was still not well received by audiences.
-The film has been in development in some form for decades. As mentioned in a previous post, at one point Brad Bird was working on an animated adaptation.
Comic Book Media 