Long ago, in the Before-Time, not all action-adventure movies were based on comic books. The few films that did originate from pulpy pages with half-tone drawings tended to wear their stylistic roots proudly. Richard Donner’s Superman (1978), Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), and Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003) all explicitly announced their debt to the layouts and visual styles of their comic origins. These were the years before Marvel movies became their own style, as distant from their comic origins as modern Hollywood cinema is from pre-historic cave paintings. Tank Girl, directed by Rachel Talalay and released in 1995, was perhaps the most self-consciously comic book-coded movie to come out of the pre-Marvel era. It’s a sugar bomb of a movie, hyper-kinetic and snappy as a wad of bubblegum, and it makes for a compelling time capsule of the era while also prefiguring the themes of powerhouse films to come like The Matrix and Furiosa.
While Tank Girl is technically a movie, it’s also a lot of other things: cartoon, puppet show, multimedia collage and musical. The one thing Tank Girl doesn’t do is slow down. Critical reception on its release bemoaned the unrelenting pace with its hyperactive editing and fractured plot, which is less like a story arc and more like a stone skipping across the water from one wacky blowout to the next. The vibes borrow a lot from music videos and episodes of The Muppet Show, especially an extended song-and-dance sequence involving a race of genetically engineered human-kangaroo hybrid soldiers. “Wacky” doesn’t begin to describe it.
Probably the best way to enjoy the ride is to hitch yourself to the titular character, embodied by Lori Petty, and take the attitude that this is all happening inside her fever dream. That’s certainly the way she plays it, meeting every threat with a snappy one-liner like some kind of post-apocalyptic Bugs Bunny. Her character belongs to a tribe of misfits eking out an existence after the collapse of civilization following a comet strike on Earth. An evil organization known as Water & Power aims to rule the wasteland according to the whims of a comically psychotic bad guy, Kesslee, played with teeth-gnashing relish by Malcolm McDowell.
In fact, everyone onscreen seems to be having a blast playing full-throttle versions of their characters–exactly what one might expect from content adapted from a comic book where, like the laws of physics, patterns of realistic human behavior only loosely apply. After her camp is raided by the Water & Power baddies, Tank Girl is imprisoned and befriends Jet Girl (Naomi Watts), a negative image of herself. Reserved and watchful, Jet Girl makes for a perfect sidekick and maybe the only character to act somewhat like a real person. Teaming up, they escape by commandeering a tank and a jet, because, along with all the other hallmarks of comics-to-film adaptations, this turns out to be an origin story.
Nearly thirty years after its release, Tank Girl retains the goofy energy of a precocious pre-teen with the stamina of a distance runner but the attention span of a goldfish. Comic book movies don’t look or feel like this anymore. Christopher Nolan’s tenure with the Batman films injected gravitas and grit into the genre, steering away from the day-glow stylization and child-like tomfoolery that had previously accompanied comic book adaptations. Marvel sanitized things by retaining some of the inventiveness and absurdity of the source material but subtracting any tactile sense that the films’ own origin stories started with half-tone illustrations on newsprint. As an artifact from an alternate timeline where a movie still tastes and feels like the comic book that inspired it, Tank Girl is criminally underrated and worth a watch. She might not know how to manage her sass or keep out of trouble, but Tank Girl knows where she comes from.
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