Viking Night: Tank Girl
By Bruce Hall
April 4, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com

Imagine what their second date will be like.
Most consumers have no problem loving a huge budget blockbuster. Movies that are meant to appeal to the widest possible audience usually do just that. But some films have a narrower vision, or simply contain more complex meaning than meets the eye. They aren't always art, and they aren't always even very successful. But for a devoted and eccentric few, they're the best entertainment money can buy. Once, beginning with Erik the Viking, a group of dedicated irregulars gathered weekly in a dingy dorm room to watch these films and discuss how what pleases the few might also appeal to the many. Time has separated the others in those discussions so that I alone remain to ponder the wider significance of cult cinema. But while the room is cleaner and I no longer have to skip class to do it, I still think of my far off friends whenever I hold Viking Night.

Now that the epic box office implosion of Sucker Punch is complete, gather with me around the smoking crater and let’s talk about something they used to call "Girl Power." It’s an ingenious concept from the '90s; a way of taking Madonna’s self-conscious iconoclasm and distilling it into a catch phrase. According to the Spice Girls, if it really is a "man’s world," that’s only because so many women aren’t sassy enough to just reach out and grab what’s rightfully theirs. That’s what Sucker Punch was supposed to be about, right?

I guess it doesn’t sound any less plausible than anything else you see in the movies, but all too often our entertainment wants us to believe that the only way a woman can empower herself is by becoming a sex object. To some, that whole "Girl Power" thing was never anything more than a clever way to peddle T&A under the guise of a self-help initiative. It’s a free country but if that’s the way you think, you’re not a very progressive person. Let’s be realistic; are being thin and pretty really the only two problems facing modern women? Are those even really problems?

Of course, movies are rarely realistic, so it isn’t very often the guys running Tinseltown handle female leads well. And when they do it’s usually with a genre picture, dumbing what it means to be strong down to a cut and paste cliché. Anyone with a backbone knows that real strength isn’t in the power you’re given, it’s in the power you’ve taken. But while I like Ellen Ripley and Jackie Brown as much as the next guy, where is the love for Tank Girl? Like all great heroines, she’s not a girl trying to be a boy; she’s her own woman and when you try to classify her you diminish her. And if you insist on objectifying her, I’d suggest you not do it to her face.

Deep down she’s not really a bad person, but if she’s your role model you should have your head examined. Tank Girl is just a regular gal who lives in a tank, loves her friends, hates her job and is trying to make lemons into lemonade the best way she knows how - with violence. And more violence. And beer. It started as an obscure comic from Great Britain, originally published in the 1980s. It had a crude, do-it-yourself style and its humor came from a distinctly topical, blindingly nihilistic point of view.

The narrative tone was improvisational and disjointed, filled with juvenile humor and off the wall pop culture references. It was designed to appeal to the less fatalistic, more intellectually focused post punk generation, and it did. Today, it seems inevitable that such a thing would eventually be made into a movie. And by the 1990s, the comic book film was already enjoying a renaissance, with Tim Burton successfully rescuing Batman’s live action fortunes from their campy, late '60s hell. But broad willingness to make any and every mildly intriguing graphic novel or comic into a movie did not yet exist in Hollywood. And Burton was one of the few directors who could command near total control over such a project when it was given to him. So in a way, Tank Girl’s big screen debut was doomed before the first foot of film ever rolled through the camera.

My theory is that what made the comic a hit with hipster college dropouts and tattooed record store clerks is what made the movie impossible to film. Tank Girl was a mercenary for an incompetent, retro futuristic government vaguely reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, circa 1988.

The process by which she goes from soldier to outlaw involves the country’s buffoonish president and a colostomy bag. Her boyfriend is a kangaroo. She’s vulgar, blasphemous, murders at will, drinks like a bitter old man, curses like a longshoreman and dresses like the love child of Joan Jett and Courtney Love. And then there’s the constant stream of cultural references and quirky characters which were designed to appeal primarily to Britain’s nascent fanboy demographic. These things were as much a part of the cast as the Girl in the Tank and without them; the brand loses what makes it distinctive. But these things also did not translate well into a big budget movie aimed at American audiences.

Gutting the story was the first thing that had to happen, but doing so changed the material from refreshing fun into just another dumb genre story. That’s unfortunate because among the things the movie has going for it is visual style. The film’s world resembles a giant Toys-r-Us mockup of Cindy Lauper’s apartment. The end of the world has never looked so colorful, clean and fun.

Technically there is a story, and it involves a comet hitting the Earth, an evil corporation that hoards all the water in the world and Tank Girl’s wisecracking battle to bring them to justice. It’s not really important, and the film never attempts to make it feel that way. But almost every core attribute that made the comic a success was stripped away, except the look and the energy. And if Red Bull has taught us anything, it’s that energy without substance tastes bad and wears off fast. The comic was rarely about anything, it was mostly a loosely connected series of madcap misadventures involving a girl with a tank and a kick ass wardrobe.


This might sound unfair, since movies and books and comics are all very different media. This almost always requires some changes, and it almost always upsets fans of the original version. But part of what makes a comic successful is when it can give you something fun that you can’t get anywhere else. And lucky for Tank Girl, the structure of comics makes it possible to lack long term narrative flow. But on the movie screen, it doesn’t hold water.

Tank Girl is a hurricane of random acts and raunchy humor soaked in beer and dipped in candy. But in movie form that lack of narrative and depth becomes a liability, especially when you’ve already stripped the material of its most successful components. It was partially an issue of studio pressure, and I can’t say I blame the suits on this one; the film was already getting an R rating. But there aren’t enough letters in the alphabet for a movie where the lead character is roaring through the Australian Outback half naked, mowing down crowds of people with her tank and having sex with kangaroos. It all had to come out, which suggests to me that perhaps the film should never have been made.

Forget Watchmen; I say Tank Girl is the Great Unfilmable Comic. But it isn’t all bad. Highlights include Lori Petty, who despite being about ten years too old completely nails Tank Girl’s insolent debauchery. Malcom McDowell channels Standard Evil British Guy, but with 50% more scary mechanical hand and a tendency to evangelize while walking barefoot on glass. Naomi Watts (as Jet Girl) doesn’t have a lot to do, and she shows no sign of the well regarded actress she would one day become, but it’s nice to see her anyway.

The film’s soundtrack is a must have, featuring great songs by Devo, Bjork and Ice-T. (Yes, Ice-T. Believe it or not, he used to be a rapper). Overall, the music is used well and it adds to the film’s zany atmosphere. Occasionally, scenes that might have required a massively expensive set or loads of special effects are represented by comic panels or stylized, hand drawn animation.

Combined with all that manic energy and a palette of color lifted from a bowl of Fruit Loops, it’s all a bit of sensory overload. Much of it works, but if you could film an ice cream headache, this is what it would look like. If nothing else, in the category of “movies meant to look like a comic book," Tank Girl is right up there with the best of them.

This is a high spirited, aggressively ambitious film that sought to take very media unfriendly material and use it to redefine the comic book movie genre. It fails to do that for all the reasons I’ve mentioned and more, but it happens in a way that for the most part, is still a lot of fun to watch. And it popularized the comic, turning it from a minor cult phenomenon into a major one.

The best thing I could say is that if you enjoyed the movie at all, then the comic will be a pleasant surprise. You can see that the film makers were going for, but it’s just a hell of a lot more satisfying when you’re reading it on glossy paper. Tank Girl is a silly comic that’s great fun to read, and a terrible movie that’s great fun to watch. I happen to love both versions, and it’s precisely because despite what the movie lacked, it had enough going for it to get me into the comic. I’ve said this about many cult films and I’ll say it again about this one; I love it for what it tried to do more than for what it did.