James O'Barr's graphic novel The Crow isn't a dense text. Its core themes aren't so thickly packed in metaphor as to obscure their meanings. Ideas aren't conveyed through riddles, nor are they hidden within stony allusions. Nothing is steeled behind enigmas, paradoxes or ironies delivered by Sphinx-like fates. The Crow is a simple story about love. In fact, the 2010 special edition of the graphic novel comes with an introduction that sets every record straight, and goes on to explain the meaning behind a newly added metaphor. O'Barr couldn't be more obvious about his landmark graphic novel's meaning if he tried.
The Crow is just human, which is something the Rupert Sanders-directed train wreck of a remake doesn't understand at all.
The film is written by Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider, and follows two "soulmates," Eric Draven (Bill Skarsgård) and Shelly Webster (FKA twigs), who are murdered by henchmen working for crime boss Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston). Eric is given a second chance at life by a character called Kronos (Sami Bouajila) to "put the wrong things right" — that is, to kill those who hurt him and Shelly.
As Eric enacts his revenge, he learns things about Shelly that sow doubt in his love for her. His doubt causes him to lose the opportunity he's been given by Kronos. After a moment's pondering, Eric makes a last-minute deal with Kronos, saying that he will sacrifice his eternal fate so that Shelly can be brought back to life.
The titular crow appears as a CGI afterthought, thrown into scenes after Skarsgård's body has left the frame, trailing after him as if the film's makers suddenly remembered that this film is called The Crow. But the thing is, Sanders's version would be better off and might have stronger legs if it were a film separate from O'Barr's and Proyas's vision — because the 2024 version of The Crow makes very little sense, and does an injustice to both O'Barr's work and Alex Proyas's 1994 interpretation.
In most other cases, it might be unfair to so diligently compare a film not only to its source text, but also to the film that was based on the same source text. A work of art ought to be judged by whether it successfully achieves what it sets out to do. But there's the rub — Sanders's film is an intentional attempt to adapt O'Barr's text, and to remake the 1994 The Crow; this is the film's goal, and it ought to be judged according to whether it succeeds in fulfilling it. It doesn't.
Sanders's version ungracefully balances atop a strange line as it works to tell its story. Though the film begins with a credit to O'Barr (a note that it's an adaptation of his graphic novel), it curiously features Eric Draven and Shelly Webster. O'Barr never gave his characters a last name. Draven and Webster were particularized characters created by screenwriters David J. Schow and John Shirley for Proyas's The Crow; in interviews, O'Barr rigorously credits the film for his characters' last names. By naming his characters Draven and Webster, Sanders intentionally calls back to Proyas's film and actively sets before himself the controversial challenge of filling Brandon Lee's shoes.
Further, when Lee, star of the 1994 film, passed away due to negligence on set, much of the film was completed, but crucial aspects involving a character called Skull Cowboy needed tidying up. Skull Cowboy was meant to function in that film in the way that Kronos works in the 2024 one — informing Eric of the rules around his temporary immortality, along with the crucial mythology of the crow. In final edits, Proyas decided to cut Skull Cowboy, because he left matters too convoluted, which meant that he needed a new way to explain the crow's connection to immortality; he found the solution in simple exposition.
The 1994 film begins with a preternaturally moving voiceover from street urchin Sarah (Rochelle Davis), explaining that the crow ferries souls between the lands of the living and the dead, and when a person dies in grave turmoil, "The crow can bring that soul back to put the wrong things right." Many of Sarah's explanatory words — absent from O'Barr's novel — appear verbatim in the 2024 film. Other lines from Schow and Shirley's script are parroted, too, and they carry all the emotional heft of a reading of the grocery list.
Sanders's film is not only unable to decide among its source material, it further doesn't seem to understand them. Though O'Barr is credited and Eric and Shelly appear in the film, they hold nary a resemblance to the characters as crafted by O'Barr, their love a strange facsimile that lacks any emotionality; they are neither true to the source, nor do they bring anything new to the table. What, in O'Barr's hands and then in Proyas's hands, was a love story for the ages becomes puttering sexual attraction, at best.
Unlike both the graphic novel and 1994 original, Sanders's film spends a tremendous chunk of its time on how Eric and Shelly meet. Accordingly, the onus is on the script and actors to show us that they have fallen cosmically in love with each other, which they don't. Skarsgård's Eric and FKA twigs's Shelly move around each other with all the poetic grace of two people on a blind date, stumbling and smiling until they make out. By the time they are murdered, they seem like really good roommates who are also fuck buddies and we're already bored watching them.
Watching as Eric is resurrected and Kronos spits Sarah's words at him, we begin idly wondering whether we would risk our immortality for a Tinder date, because that's what Eric and Shelly's fling feels like. Skarsgård's Eric is muted and monotonous, unemotional to the extent that it feels unearned when he is given a second chance at life — he doesn't seem too distraught by either his or Shelly's deaths, just as he doesn't seem that in love with her in life. Skarsgård lends Eric a bluntness that is out of place in this story — we've seen his range, and we've seen him grow loud and rambunctious, but here he is contained and stoic, nowhere near to the Eric Draven Lee fleshed out.
Eric and Shelly's love isn't just unsuccessfully telegraphed, it isn't even in the room with us, and this is the film's gravest failure. The Crow has always been about a love so intense as to destroy you when it's lost — one so perfect, heaven couldn't even compare. All of the violence carved in the graphic novel and exploding in Proyas's film wouldn't be possible if such a pure love didn't exist between Eric and Shelly to begin with, and for it to be absent in this film — which rings with a flat sort of silence — is a gutting shame.
Though the film takes place in an ambiguous city with a rainy gothic sheen, it seems just a façade, for the story itself lacks any of the thoroughgoing intensity of emotion that is a trademark of gothicism (a genre absolutely dripping with pained feeling). This film feels cold and dead, damned and macabre, like the vivified creation of the Hollywood system it is. It fails miserably in posturing toward anything meaningful or worthwhile; it doesn't even work as an attempt at a sequel in the way that the original film's sequels worked: a different story with the same ache.
And then there's "Sparklehorse." The 2010 special edition of The Crow graphic novel came with a new sequence called "Sparklehorse," which O'Barr very directly demystifies in the introduction. Eric enacts revenge because he feels that it might ease his angst-ridden soul, but really this angst is guilt and he needs to forgive himself for not having been able to save Shelly. O'Barr embodies Eric's guilt in a beautiful white horse that Eric sees. The heartbroken man waves at the horse and distracts it; the horse runs into barbed wire and dies.
At the book's end, after he has killed everyone he felt he needed to kill, Eric sees the horse again, this time it is a macabre beast wrapped in barbed wire like a mummy. Eric realizes that his second life wasn't about revenge as much as it was about self-forgiveness. He shoots the horse in the head, killing his guilt and putting his soul at ease, after which he is allowed to move onto the next plane and be reunited with Shelly, which is all he wants. O'Barr explains that he was only able to add the "Sparklehorse" sequence after he was able to forgive himself for the events that led to the story of The Crow.
In Sanders's film, we see a bastardized vision of "Sparklehorse." The film begins with Eric as a child. He comes across a white horse lying on the ground moments from death, having managed to get itself wrapped in barbed wire. The horse dies, and young Eric is sad. At the film's end, in a flashback as Eric's soul is being traded for Shelly's, young Eric is standing before the horse again, but this time it is alive. In Sanders's hands, the fairly simple but poignant metaphor is not only sapped of meaning, but is also made nonsensical as it becomes literalized at a disjointed part in the narrative — what does the horse stand for here? Why does Eric see it as a child and what feeling is it a receptacle for? Why is it brought back to life? The horse becomes a meaningless spectacle for Eric to witness, robbing him of any agency or responsibility.
Just as the first act of the film is a spectacle of love, taking pains to tell us that Eric and Shelly are in love, without showing us any emotionality, "Sparklehorse" here is just a mockery of a reference, all pomp and circumstance and lacking a soul. Why would the filmmakers take something so important to O'Barr and hollow it out?
Under a different name and direction, this endeavour might have worked — it has the beginnings of many interesting ideas. But, as it stands, nothing about it makes sense. The cinematography and visual vocabulary are starched and bloodless, the soundtrack a sluggish bore. Huston's villain is incomprehensible, his motives unclear, and FKA Twigs's Shelly is a heavy-handed attempt at empowerment that doesn't translate well, seeming too much when so little is delivered by Eric himself.
Ultimately, this film doesn't seem to understand that it is about love. It doesn't even understand what love is. Eric loves Shelly so much that the pain of losing her leaves him unable to move on after death; he'd experience the pain of death again and again so he can put the wrong things right; he'd kill everyone just so he could be reunited with her.
That Sanders's film has Skarsgård's Eric choose to trade his soul for Shelly's means that the two will never meet again, turning Eric's tale — angry, messy, human — into a clean and easy tale of Christian martyrdom. And martyrs, so perfect and sleepy, are ever so boring.