Behold the crap-tastic dubbing in these trailers for “Guardians,” a forthcoming Russian superhero movie. As best as I can tell, the idea is that the Soviet Union created a small number of superheroes, folded, and now, decades later, supervillains are attacking Moscow and those superheroes need to come back to save the day. Given that the USSR fell a quarter century ago, I guess the heroes were just kids. Kids who grew up with terrible narration and even worse dubbing. But from the looks of the visuals, the film makers seems to have been on their game.
Now, the question is: if people are supposed to accept that super-powered metahumans produced by the Kremlin make for heroes, how about metahumans produced by Nazi Germany? North Koreas Captain Juche? Hamas Man? The mind boggles at the possibilities of “superheroes” produced by, for or in horrible regimes. How many of them would be accepted by the moviegoing public?
Let’s say the standard Magical Meteorite fell into Richmond, Virginia, in 1847, was picked up by a local plantation owner and its emanations turned his infant son into The Overseer, a Superman-like character dedicated to Truth, Justice and Maintaining The Peculiar Institution. During the War of Southern Aggression, The Overseer was just coming of age and was about to turn the tide when Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, used his arcane knowledge obtained from a deep reading of the Necronomicon to put The Overseer into suspended animation in a mirror-lined chamber deep under the Smithsonian. But now the Earth is under attack by Big Headed Yakub, and the US government needs to bring The Overseer out of the shadows to save us all…
Yeah. That’d go over well.