Ooh, fantastic movie. I loved the book, and I loved the film. One of the few that I’d go to see again. It’s increadibly rich in detail and nuance.

It’s also a superhero movie—and a relatively stylised one—which is far more grounded and relevant than the supposed crop of gritty, rebooted things like The Dark Knight. Which is nice.

It ‘works’ in the way that the best fantasies work: it takes an outrageous premise (an alternate 1985 in which Nixon is president, superheros are real, including a man who has been turned into a superman by a nuclear accident), and tells an interesting story.

They have changed one thing from the book: the giant squid at the end is, er, something else in the movie. But it works. (It actually makes a little more sense than the monster in the book, I think.) And thematically, historically and in terms of character, it’s all very faithful to the novel, which is astonishing in itself.

The soundtrack is very 1980s, and rather enjoyable. (Ride of The Valkyries in the Vietnam War sequence is kinda odd—at least to me who hadn’t seen Apocalypse Now.) Richard Nixon was a little less than convincing-looking too. But there’s not much I can criticise it for.

3 thumbs up