Brett Ratner's Hercules has everything you would want from a film about a dung-shovelling demigod. It has a leading man (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) who has spent a lot of time in the gym. It has loincloths. There's also a big lion and an even bigger boar, and both Cerberus and the Hydra are present and correct. So far, so traditional. The surprise comes from the plot. Set many years after Herc completed his fabled 12 labours, he's now a "dark, world-weary soul" who has "turned his back on the gods" and formed a band of mercenaries. "These men and women never question where they go to fight or why or whom, just how much they will be paid." No, I don't remember that part of the myth, either.
It may seem odd that a Hercules movie should recast its legendary hero as a hard-bitten sword-for-hire, but it's standard practice at the moment for Hollywood to take a much-loved character, and then remove several of the key elements that made them much-loved in the first place. Maleficent is one example. Rather than producing a straight, live-action remake of Sleeping Beauty, Disney brought us a version in which – spoiler alert – the baddie is actually a misunderstood heroine. Darren Aronofsky's Noah transformed the avuncular animal lover we sang songs about in Sunday school into a homicidal maniac with giant rock-monsters for friends. Reverence is out. Revisionism is in.
Just consider how many recent attempts to revive a blockbuster franchise could have been advertised with the line: "Think you know X? Think again!" Think you know Superman? Well, in Man of Steel, he snaps his enemy's neck, and stands by as his dad is killed by a tornado. Think you know The Lone Ranger? Well, now he's a nerdy lawyer and Tonto is insane. Alice in Wonderland is a dragon-slaying warrior princess, Snow White hangs out with a huntsman and eight dwarves, and, on TV, Sherlock Holmes is a cold-blooded murderer who calls himself a "high-functioning sociopath". Anyone who grew up with the Paddington Bear books must be shuddering at the prospect of the forthcoming film.
In some respects, though, revisionist blockbusters are welcome. Before they came into fashion, Hollywood preferred to reboot its franchises by churning out prequels. George Lucas kicked off the trend with The Phantom Menace, and since then we've seen a dizzying number of origin stories explaining how Batman built his Batmobile and how James Bond got his double-O. Aside from being flagrant cash-grabs, the fatal flaw in these prequels is that, by definition, they can't take the characters anywhere new. Their selling point is that they are the opening chapters of a narrative we've heard already, so they can't contradict the franchise's mythology without seeming muddled and compromised.
In 2009, JJ Abrams's Star Trek went about things differently, by using some clever time-travel trickery to nudge its characters into a separate universe from the one occupied by William Shatner's Captain Kirk and his shipmates. That way, it could keep as much canonical Star Trek lore as it wanted, but it could also turn Kirk into a hot-headed orphan, and Spock and Uhuru into the galaxy's most unconvincing romantic pairing. Abrams and his screenwriters had found the Hollywood Holy Grail. They had relaunched a lucrative brand, but with younger actors and the capacity to tell unpredictable stories. They had served audiences something comfortingly familiar, but stirred in a droplet of novelty and danger.
That's the cynical way of looking at it, anyway. But, in principle, the revisionism heralded by Star Trek is bracing. Folk tales, after all, have always been modified to suit each successive generation, so why shouldn't film-makers strike out in new directions? The problem is that Hollywood's revisionism is already as formulaic as its prequelising. Rather than stripping back dated characters to their essence and then rebuilding them, piece by piece, the creative geniuses behind most current blockbusters simply give those characters a fresh coat of black paint. They throw in some sex, violence and psychological problems, and leave it at that.
It's a tendency that can be traced back to the mid-1980s, and the publication of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen, and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. These tremendous graphic novels asked how superheroes might behave if they existed in the same reality as the rest of us, the answer being that they would behave like sadistic weirdos. At the time, it was a radical idea to make cape-wearing crime-fighters appear so utterly human and so deeply flawed, and both had a seismic effect on superhero comics: soon, "dark and world-weary souls" were everywhere. Thirty years on, Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns are having a seismic effect on the movies, too. Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight lifted its title from Miller's work, while Zak Snyder, director of Man Of Steel, also made 2009's Watchmen film. Beyond that, it's now the norm for big-screen superheroes to be brutal, emotionally unstable, and generally miserable sods.
Imagine if blockbusters had taken a less mean-and-moody tack. With the budget and the digital effects at his disposal, wouldn't it have been fabulous if Tim Burton had made the definitive adaptation of Alice In Wonderland, rather than a post-Lord Of The Rings quest movie? Wouldn't it have been bolder and more impressive if the makers of Man Of Steel had got us to root for a true-blue paragon rather than the kind of person who would raze a densely populated city without batting an eyelid? And how about if the makers of Snow White And The Huntsmen had woven a genuinely enchanting fairy tale rather then a morbid, muddy Game Of Thrones wannabe?
Besides, revisionism is always going to rouse the ire of a franchise's most ardent devotees. A case in point is the imminent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film, produced by Michael Bay. During development Bay proposed that its reptilian heroes shouldn't be ordinary turtles which have been exposed to radiation, as they were in numerous comics, cartoons and films in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead, they should be visitors from another planet. But the fans' protests were so vehement that Bay backed down, and the Mutant Turtles got to stay as Mutant Turtles. Hollywood, take note. It may be OK to muck about with Hercules and Noah, but some things are sacred.
