There’s so many geeky properties coming out in film and TV and games that when someone says “oh, that won’t work as a movie” or something it sounds weird. For the gods’s sake Peter Dinklage is THE fantasy hero and Marvel is giving us an uplifted Racoon with a machine gun who rides a sentient tree. Make no assumptions (except that Peter Dinklage is an incredible talent).
So in honor of an “un-adaptable” geek movie let me add this intro as how I’d do this particular property . . .
Some of us stand guard over the gates of Hell.
For some people they seem something horrible and all their ideas of reality break and they have to do something. Others they get recruited because some of us know they can take it. People like me, well, it’s a family business.
I deal with things no one wants to talk about, things we can’t talk about, echoes in the dark and things out of horror novels. My dad did it for decades, paid the price, and got out. My grandfather, well, he’s why my dad and I do what we do, because he didn’t ask for it, but he did his duty when the time came.
It goes back to World War II. Bad times and horrible things, but so much more horrible than most people know. People talk about it a bit, but not much, but around the edges the stories leak out; dark technology, corpse-eating creatures on the battlefields, human sacrifice, and far more. My grandfather stumbled into it by accident, which is a family trait to be fair.
So he started to solve things. He got good at solving things even if it required shooting people or things that were once people between the eyes, which was admittedly his preferred method. He and some of his mates, they got sent after things that didn’t wear a helmet or carry a gun, or whose uniform was a human face. Most of his old gang is gone now, and those that are alive, it does’t seem very natural.
It was hard on him. Hard on them. It took its toll. Until he met The Angel.
He talks about The Angel now and then, but only to a few of us. Hope and someone to fight with. Something that made him believe. Someone who was there in the midst of it all, all the blood and the terror and the wrongness.
The Angel is what kept him sane. Kept him alive. The Angel helped him and others, so many others, slam shut the gates of Hell.
That was decades ago. Grampa is gone and the notes people knew about confiscated and people would like to forget. Dad didn’t forget. I didn’t.
Only now . . .
See The Angel had a daughter. She’s here now. Somethings going to go wrong, something bad is happening.
It’s time for me to take my turn guarding the gates of Hell.
I always knew this would happen since I saw those notes in my dad’s terrible latin, all on a very poor photo.
Angeli. The Angel. Miraculum Mulier. The Wonder Woman.
Time to find her. Time to do my duty.
Steven Ezekiel Trevor III, 2014
Unfilmable? Nah. Some people need to have the courage to do it right.
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.