I'm a sucker for origin stories. They appeal to my inner continuity nerd: I like being there from the beginning. I also like the fantasy of having a regular life, with parents and crushes and money problems, that suddenly gets up-ended by a radioactive spider bite, or a magical power ring, or a mugger with two bullets. (It's not always a pleasant fantasy.) I love the transition between a reality I can basically understand, into one that isn't quite possible. A good origin story grounds the adventures to come, gives us stakes that are easy to relate to, and makes all the mythos and plot twists more than just a game.
Of course, not every hero needs this. A good origin has to have its own arc to be successful. Simply explaining how a character got their powers, or discovered their purpose in life, isn't enough. As in: the first two-thirds of Batman Begins shows us Bruce Wayne's journey from moderately happy pre-teen, to mopey, self-absorbed college student, to grim but passionate do-gooder. It works because each of these stages expands his character, feels organic, and makes his ultimate decision to dress like a six foot bat and beat up muggers appear somehow well-justified. We watch the transitions because we know where it's leading, but also because there's satisfaction in the progression itself. It's not primarily expository, and while there's never any doubt that we'll get the body armor and wonderful toys, we can follow the decisions Wayne makes to arrive at that point, and that makes a potentially absurd concept palatable.
On the opposite side: The first Fantastic Four movie had a lot of problems, from bad casting (I'm still convinced Jessica Alba's presence started as a bad joke that went horribly wrong—casting an actress whose career is based on her looks as the Invisible Woman has to be a gag, right?) to bad writing to this painfully bland sort of Fisher Price tone that drained away every potential moment of drama or darkness. Having an origin story wasn't the worst of those problems, but it was arguably the least necessary of them. Does actually seeing the cosmic radiation as it happens really make Reed Richards' stretchiness somehow plausible? Nobody in The Incredibles stopped to explain the biology behind Mr. Incredible's super-strength. Either you justify a scene through emotional resonance or suspense, or you make it so crazy cool that's impossible to forget. Fantastic Four gave us a beginning not because it had anything new to say, but because it had nothing else it could think of worth telling us.
The Phantom is not a character in particular need of an origin story. A comic strip hero created in 1936 by Lee Falk, Kit Walker, aka The Phantom, aka, "The Ghost Who Walks," aka, "Yeah, I'm wearing purple spandex, you want some?", doesn't have super-powers. He doesn't spring from a grand personal tragedy. The character's big gimmick, aside from that crazy outfit (love a guy who fights in the jungle and dresses like he's on his way to a Pride Parade), is that there have been 21 Phantoms all told, and that each new Walker takes on the role when the old one dies to give the illusion that the character is immortal. Oh, and he works with the natives. That's basically it. A silly/fun outfit, skull belt-buckle, potentially offensive native servants, and guns. There's no need to spend time explaining any of that. Sure, the original Walker had some motive beyond do-goodery for his actions, but that was a long time ago. This is the sort of hero that was designed for the action to start in the middle. Give us larger than life bad-guys, give us fisticuffs and stunts, and don't get too worried about the details.
I'm not a huge fan of the 1996 big screen Phantom movie, but it at least gets that part right. Billy Zane is great fun as the title character, and while there are references to his past, they never dominate the narrative. Given the popularity of Batman Begins, though (and the first Spider-man film), it's probably inevitable that when the SyFy Channel decided to boldly re-invent the franchise for a new generation (I'm not sure I saw that phrase on the promo material, but it's practically coded into the movie's DNA), we'd get an origin story. So instead of first meeting an adult Kit while he's battling against the villainous Singh Brotherhood, we get an overly arty teaser with a boy and his mom on the run from some thugs, and then we get Chris Moore (Ryan Carnes), a generically nineties looking twenty-something who likes parkour, hitting on EMTs, and law school.
The Phantom is split into two parts, both airing tonight. If you strip away the commercials, that gives you roughly three hours, and if you think Chris will take on the mantle of his forefathers before midpoint, well, you haven't watched that many SyFy originals. There's a lot of build-up here, because three hours is a lot of time to kill, which means time with Chris and his friends, time with Chris and his family, time with Chris and his potential love interest (Cameron Goodman), and also time introducing us to our main villains, the now-gone-corporate Singh Brotherhood led by Jan Thijs. Oh, and Isabella Rossellini shows up as the head scientist on a mind-control program funded by the Singhs. She makes housewives put rat poison in brownies through the power of television, and that is not a thing that should happen to brownies. Eventually, a bald man arrives in New York and tells Chris that he's the latest in a long line of etc, etc, and that it's his job to so on and so forth, and now everyone he loves is in mortal you know. So it goes.
It's not exactly the most intellectual critical description, but if you've seen SyFy original programming before, you have a rough idea of what to expect here. The pacing is, to put it kindly, uneven, with the slow burn in the first half working surprisingly well, until a second half that gets overly mired in conspiracy plotting and people running from place to place and shouting. This is not a story that needed three hours to tell, so there's a lot of not really necessary emotional conflict—will Chris do his duty? Will his mentor ever think he's ready for action? Will there be kissing? Will Rossellini ever take off that horrible wig? Much of this would work best playing in the background while you e-mail friends or fold laundry or construct elaborate schemes to get revenge on your overly noisy neighbors. (Having screaming arguments at three am on a Wednesday? Come on.) If you're distracted, you might never get a look at the new Phantom's "modern" costume, which is every bit as awful and ridiculous as you'd expect. Part of it looks like the kind of padding a skater might wear if he was incredibly insecure about his abilities to not die, part of it looks like a gimp suit, and then there's the supposedly ultra-high tech visor that doubles amazingly well as a cheap piece of shaded plastic.
Still, there are moments that make The Phantom, if not exactly worth the time investment, at least not a complete embarrassment. Carnes isn't going to set the world on fire, but he's personable, and there's something sweet and likable in his relationship to Goodman. As unnecessary as the origin story is here, some of the best moments of the film come from getting to know our hero and his world. I kept having my expectations pleasantly subverted: Chris's home-life is supportive and warm (his mom looks terrified most of the time, and his dad reads him the riot act about his parkour stunt, but there's no sense that he doesn't get along with either of them), and there's no manufactured drama between him and the people he's closest to. Goodman's dad is a cop, and we get a fair number of pointless "cop investigating what we already know" scenes, but the guy also isn't an unlikable hardass. It's all very good-natured, and the more dramatic moments are often surprisingly smart. The problem is, those moments tend to exist in isolation, but it's good to have them. I was bored sometimes watching this, but I was never outright hostile to the experience.
The bad guys aren't too bad, either. This is a lot of fun, and the mind-control sequences, at least initially, have a nice, nasty bite to them. Rossellini doesn't really get to do a whole lot, and the action sequences are a mixed bag, especially once Chis starts running around in his gimp suit. So yeah, this isn't what I'd call good. The ending is clearly setting up for an on-going series, and I'll give them points for a final twist that is probably enough to bring me back for an episode or two. (Although I'm not crossing my fingers.) The cast is competent, and maybe in a tighter format, this could be a fun way to spend an evening. As is, it's too plodding and mediocre to really get excited about (and I can't stress enough how awful that costume is), but if you're a fan of the character, and if you're a sucker for origin stories like I am, this probably won't ruin your day.
Stray Observations:
- Oh, another warning if you're curious to watch this: the opening flashback is over-saturated and over-edited, and the first sequence with Chris plays like a rip-off of some crappy MTV-type reality show. Things calm down soon enough.
- The only real problem with the origin story here is that no one ever explains why it's so important to get this Walker back into the fold. Yes, he's the last of the line, but since he has no official training or powers, wouldn't it be easier to just find someone else more qualified and change their name? (Of course, Moore turns out to have some decent skills when it comes time to go full hero, but that's really a cheat.)