The Crow: Real Love Is Forever
The beloved cult classic revenge movie turns 30.
Goth was never my style, but The Crow was an obsession for me. Brandon Lee’s tragic death on set in 1993 created a morbid buzz before the movie arrived in theaters a year later. I was swept up in it. I didn’t get a chance to catch it in theaters when it was released. I was eleven and didn’t know a single grown up who would take me to see it. When it dropped on VHS in June of ’95, my mom refused to rent “that trash”. My younger brother and I went to visit our dad in August of that year, and I bought it then. I watched it with my Dad that night. To no one’s surprise, he hated it, and I loved it. Pops was a movie snob with a bizarre penchant for Steven Segal action flicks. I was a twelve-year-old fan of alt-rock and superheroes, with a burgeoning interest in skateboarding. Goth was never my style, but I fell in love with The Crow.
It’s a low-budget revenge movie that was supposed to be a young movie star’s breakout performance, but instead it ended up being his last. As a result, there’s no separating Brandon Lee from Eric Draven, the movie’s main character. According to the film’s director, Alex Proyas (courtesy of the Blu-Ray edition’s audio commentary), Lee was meticulous in his physical preparation for the role and dedicated to understanding who Eric Draven was from James O’Barr’s source material. He put everything he had into this role, and it took everything from him. This is why there was an outcry when a reboot with Bill Skarsgård playing Eric Draven was announced. That character belongs to Brandon the way that T’Challa belongs to Chadwick Boseman. That was obvious back in the day, and that truth remains thirty years later.
For the 90s obsessed Gen Zers or geriatric Millennials (like me) who enjoy hits of nostalgia to take the edge off, The Crow is a time capsule slice of early 90s alt-culture. Eric Draven is a gothic superhero that introduced Joy Division to a new generation of mopey youth. Just like the film that it drew inspiration from, the soundtrack is a relic of that specific 90s scene. Actually, it’s more like a cross section of scenes. It has a little something for a variety of rock fans with a list of heavy-hitting acts from the era, like Stone Temple Pilots, Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails, The Cure, and Pantera. Henry Rollins and Helmet make appearances, and The Violent Femmes show up to bring everyone down. The songs all make appearances in the movie, which was intentional because one of the changes Alex Proyas made with writers David J. Show and John Shirley was to make Eric Draven the frontman and (presumably) lead guitarist of a rock band. It might be why he and his fiancée, Shelly Webster, lived in inner city Detroit. He was a musician, and she was a scenester, so suburbia was never going to work for them. I digress, the movie and its companion soundtrack have the magic to transport you back in time, and they are a fun ride.
“Fun” is a poor way to describe The Crow. It almost didn’t get finished because of what happened to Brandon Lee. The filmmakers went through with finishing it after Brandon Lee’s real life fiancée, Eliza Hutton, urged them to complete the work to honor him. They put together a thrilling if not incomplete story that was elevated by its star’s final performance. I watch it every few years, and I put it on last night in recognition of its 30th anniversary. There’s no doubt that it had a stylistic impact on movies, influencing the wardrobe choices of other leather clad cinematic heroes that followed Eric Draven, like Blade and the entire crew of the Nebuchadnezzar in The Matrix. And there’s no doubt that The Crow still belongs to Brandon Lee.
