Comic Adaptation Week: Darren Aronofsky's Silver Surfer: Requiem

Darren Aronofsky has gone from turning a movie script into a comic, so it really shouldn’t be too hard to reverse the process. His tone is a perfect match for a character who at his heart is contemplative, truth-seeking, and at least a little depressed: Max in Pi, Tom in The Fountain, Randy "The Ram" in The Wrestler. The slow, ponderous pacing of his movies and his ability to juggle intense real life moments with crazy metaphorical events and images make him ideal to direct a Silver Surfer movie.

The Surfer’s original comic series was the home of more than one philosophical monologue pontificating his place within the cosmos. Straczynski and Ribic’s Silver Surfer: Requiem has many of the Surfer’s original philosophic elements, only it ups the tragic aspect of the Surfer even more than usual. The whole series focuses on a dying Silver Surfer as he and others come to terms with his eventual death. A scene with the Surfer and Spiderman would be perfect if portrayed in the same style as in Aronofsky's The Wrestler; grand, and epic, but brutally realistic at the same time.

The Fountain deals with similar sorts of themes: life, death, and literally, the cosmos. One of the three storylines of The Fountain is a man floating through space with a tree in a bubble. There are scenes of a silhouette doing Tai Chi in front of a star field and like the one shown above where Hugh Jackman’s character meditates through the cosmos. It’s easy to picture the Silver Surfer flying through a similar backdrop as his silver shell slowly blackens.

The Surfer’s final act in Requiem (not For a Dream) is to give everyone on his planet a small portion of himself and his power. It’s the same circle of life idea as in The Fountain as all of the storylines combine into one another and the Tree of Life dies and is reborn. The power unleashed from the nebula in this scene makes me believe that his action sequences, what little there are in Requiem would be exciting. It’s clear Aronofsky could make every scene of Silver Surfer: Requiem come alive, while still being true to it's ponderous, philosophic nature.