The Adventures at Comic-Con (2023) – 0.5 stars

Director: Jason Brown

Writer: Jason Brown

Running time: 3hrs 13mins

On the face of it, you might think that getting a three-hour movie on a budget of just $1,500 is some pretty good mileage. But by the end of Jason Brown’s mammoth holiday slideshow, in which the most elucidating moments have come from interview segments he ripped from YouTube, it is hard to say exactly where that money went.

Certainly, none of it went on the score, or art, almost all of which is Fair Use content from well-known Hollywood franchises. And considering The Adventures at Comic Con is a “musical love letter to art”, that lack of commitment to creation is possibly the biggest indicator of what Brown actually manages to serve up throughout his bloated run-time. As the seconds crawl on by, we are subjected to wave after wave of still images of famous directors, artists and actors; let’s play video game streams; and music lifted from movie, tv or game soundtracks.

This is all quite surprising, given the film’s title flags Brown’s adventure to Comic-Con in San Diego as its primary subject matter. But as the minutes turn to hours, and hours seemingly to weeks, it becomes clear that the supposedly formative interactions which he enjoyed at that convention are only going to play a minimal role, of minimal relevance to the matted bower of plastic pop culture he has assembled. At no point does he come close to weaving a coherent narrative, explaining how the content he bombards us with enriches people’s lives, or how his own engagement has changed his life. There is no meaningful attempt to engage with anything on screen, or to help the audience to engage with it – just piles and piles of stuff for stuff’s sake. This is not a ‘musical love letter’, so much as the filmic equivalent of a hoarder’s apartment.

On a technical basis, it’s also fair to say the film has more than a few issues. Structurally, it is split into more than 40 torturous vignettes, robbing the perversely expansive run-time of any flow. It’s not just driving with the handbrake on, it’s re-applying it after every five metres of travel. Each segment is prefaced with a monotonous voice-over from Brown himself, flatlining its way through a hyperverbose statement on how one of the forms of art present at Comic-Con is beautifully realised, how it engages audiences in ways they could never dream, and how it opens up new realms of possibility for creativity and self-expression.

To make these kinds of claims before lurching into another tedious slide-show of stock images and movie stills has a kind of cruel irony to it – representing the craft and genius of the last two century’s most celebrated creatives in the dullest, ugliest, least imaginative way conceivable. And that’s even before you get into the fact that the studios behind much of the content he is championing – from Disney to Naughty Dog – are renowned as some of the world’s most miserable content mills, where artists are ground into dust for the pursuit of profit above all else.

The only moment the film does come to life, is a segment lifted from a television show hosted by Marvel grandee Stan Lee. During one episode of ‘The Comic Book Greats’, he invited Will Eisner to discuss his creative process, and the benefits comic books had for society as a whole. The segment is 15 minutes of the un-edited show – so it isn’t something Brown can take any kind of credit for, beyond recognising it was worth procuring (and considering how scatter-brained the rest of his procurement is, that could have simply been a happy accident). The most interesting part of the discussion sees Lee suggest to Eisner – who sees entertainment and art as things which don’t necessarily go hand in hand – suggest:

“Anything has educational value, if it’s well-written, if it’s well-drawn, if it’s well-sung, if it’s well danced – whatever it is. I think the people who try to entertain, but who do it well, and do it with quality, they are contributing to society’s fund of knowledge. I don’t think you have to sit down and say I’m going to write a story with a message – I think it’s impossible to write a story without a message.”

It’s an engrossing interview, and is freely available on YouTube. But its inclusion flags up two fatal shortcomings for The Adventures at Comic-Con. First, Brown does with this gem what he does with everything else he has crammed into his hoard; he immediately buries it with another pile of stuff. A vignette starts up extolling the importance of Lee and Eisner’s discussion as though it was the falling of the Berlin Wall – suggesting its shockwaves were felt around the world, and then throwing in a bunch of movies like Blade Runner which were produced before it aired, as if to suggest it had effortlessly influenced them. Meanwhile, there are never any problems, any pushback, none of the creators ever struggle for commercial or critical acclaim, none of the works of art talked about have difficulty making their mark amid social or political upheaval. They exist in a bubble, which is only ever conducive to more creativity, more brilliance. But such a bubble would make the sentiment of Stan Lee utterly irrelevant then – because the reason that it is “impossible to write a story without a message” is that art is created by human beings who are informed by the world around them – and consciously or subconsciously, are using creativity as a means to explore that world as it was, is and could be.

That brings me to the second, inter-connected problem here. Comic-Con is an event which brings people from all over America, and the world, together. Drawn by their love of pop-culture, it is an event which leads them to forge new connections with the art that they have enjoyed, and sometimes its creators – but also with other fans. Why? What is the draw? What are they getting here that they don’t get elsewhere? What does that say about the world as it is? This is where the meat of The Adventures at Comic-Con should have been – where Brown could show us how his interactions at Comic-Con shaped the way he sees the world; in the way he has claimed multiple times before slideshows.

But such a story is never on the cards. What little footage we do get of Comic-Con is underwhelming to say the least. When it isn’t Brown waiting in line to speak to a miscellaneous video-game impresario, or pitching soft-ball questions to cartoonists slumped behind a booth about ‘how to get started in the industry’, the images largely consist of shady, hip-level footage of other people in costume. One lengthy sequence sees him photograph and film a large number of women in cos-play, who are for the most part looking in different directions, suggesting they do not know he is capturing the images. Arguably, that is par for the course at Comic-Con, and many of the women seem to be posing for someone else to take a picture while Brown records. But those people probably aren’t taking pictures with a plan to turn them into part of a film seemingly celebrating commodity as God – and commodifying those women in the process.

It is in these moments you feel Brown could have done something different. There was an opportunity for the kind of engagement his film is crying out for here. Why not talk to someone dressed up, have an extensive conversation about why their character speaks to them, or how it helps them scratch an itch that is left unattended in the world beyond Comic-Con? Why not speak to some of the creators about something less boiler-plate; maybe ask them what they thing of the Lee / Eisner discussion?

Then, maybe someone would have disagreed, and maybe we’d have got some much-needed cut-and-thrust to draw us into thought and debate ourselves. Or perhaps we’d start thinking about how cultural engagement in our own lives helps us cope with our everyday struggles, and be able to relate better to any of what we are seeing. And best of all, perhaps we wouldn’t have this grim sense of voyeurism that pervades the final third of the film, where we feel like we are being invited to scan the bodies of living human beings in the same way we were forced to stare at lifeless statues of Boba Fett and xenomorphs earlier in the film.

Nobody produces a three-hour film without putting in a significant amount of effort – and that is mostly why Brown avoids a zero-out-of-five here. But he was working hard when he could have been working smart. He could have stripped back almost three hours of footage (and David Lean-style segments for an ‘intermission’ and ‘overture’), and still had room to make more interesting interventions with the material. For example, Marjee Chmiel’s short-film Overselves, in Stories towers above this work, despite having a comparatively tiny run-time of 24 minutes – because it dares to engage with comic fans and artists as human beings. It asks them questions about their lives, and how art helps them understand and express themselves. In contrast, this hulking love letter to consumerism for the sake of it does little to get under the skin of the world it is supposedly enamoured with.