The recent proliferation of superhero movies have taught us that, of all things, auteur theory ain't quite dead yet. Hand your project over to a director of unique vision, a man with deep obsessions and specific stylistic and thematic ideas, and you get The Dark Knight. Hand your project over to a director with big ideas but not enough talent to carry them off, and you get Daredevil. Hand your project over to a director with no ideas and no talent, and you get Elektra. As goes art, so goes action: even in the cinema of capes and cowls, it's all about the director.
So, given that, what can we expect from yesterday's announcements about who will be helming two hotly anticipated comic book projects? The new Captain America flick, the last big Marvel solo adventure until we're treated to the long-awaited Avengers movie, will be directed by Joe Johnston; the new Conan the Barbarian (which isn't based on a comic, but features a character whose prominence in modern-day geek consciousness is more attributable to Roy Thomas' 1970s Marvel comics series than it is to Robert E. Howard's original stories) has fallen into the hands of Brett Ratner.
Neither of these guys are Christopher Nolan-level filmmakers, or even Bryan Singer-level filmmakers. How successful these films will be depends on which director shows up with his A-game; if we get the Joe Johnston who directed the charming, underrated superhero movie The Rocketeer, then Captain America could be a patriotic, nostalgic romp, but if we get the Joe Johnston who directed Jumanji, we could be in for a long wait until The Avengers comes out. Ratner has nothing as good as The Rocketeer on his resume, and he's also single-handedly responsible for trashing the X-Men franchise. Add to that the fact that, instead of legit heavyweights like John Milius and Oliver Stone (who did the original 1982 film version of Conan) providing him with a script, he's got the guys who did A Sound of Thunder, and we don't think anyone will be forgetting Schwarzenegger's version anytime soon.
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