METAL HURLANT CHRONICLES: A Wildly Uneven French TV HEAVY METAL Adaptation
Metal Hurlant Chronicles: The Complete Series hits Blu-ray from Shout! Factory on April 14th, 2015
I’m not sure Heavy Metal is a property that should be adapted outside of a hand drawn or animated format. Granted, I’ve never been a reader of the magazine and don’t count myself even a novice when it comes to Heavy Metal’s history and legacy. But I do enjoy just about all the artwork I see which comes from the books, and generally find stuff like warlocks and tough dames and mech suits and androids to be things that are totally awesome, most especially when smashed all together and set to heavy metal music. So what I’m trying to say is that while I’m not an expert on the property, I’m totally in its target demographic and am familiar with the work of some of its more famous contributors such as Moebius, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Berni Wrightson, not to mention the animated feature film.
You may be wondering why I’m talking about Heavy Metal as, like I was until I had already begun watching Metal Hurlant Chronicles, the chances are good that you are unaware that Heavy Metal was known in France as Metal Hurlant and even originated there. So us Americans who know it as Heavy Metal are actually just familiar with a ported over version of the magazine. Famous for telling “adult” stories with Twilight Zone-esque twists and politically biting themes and content paired with phenomenal artwork and set in fantastical worlds of science fiction and fantasy, Heavy Metal is structured as an anthology with very little tying the stories together beyond some of the themes and similarities I’ve just mentioned.
Metal Hurlant Chronicles, a two-season (thus far) television series masterminded by writer-director Guillaume Lubrano, takes about a dozen stories from the original books and adapts them here into roughly half hour live-action television episodes. As a Scott Adkins (Ninja 2, Undisputed III) superfan, I’ve been hearing about this series’ existence for years. Adkins isn’t the only big name in genre cinema featured in the series; it also boasts appearances and performances from the likes of Michael Jai White (Black Dynamite), Michael Biehn (Aliens, The Terminator), John Rhys-Davies (Raiders Of The Lost Ark), Rutger Hauer (Blade Runner), Dominique Pinon (Amelie), and the list goes on. Many of these actors feature in more than one episode of the show as the anthology approach allows them to [potentially] die and reappear as wholly other characters, and so on.
As I mentioned at the top of this piece… I’m not convinced that Lubrano (or folks like Robert Rodriguez who are trying to adapt Heavy Metal for the big screen) are really doing the source material any favors by adapting it. The artwork, character design, world building, and bold vision of the hand-drawn imagery in the magazine is what makes Heavy Metal, in my estimation. The twist-heavy and adult-themed stories of the magazine likely worked well as extremely short, imagery-based, sci-fi/fantasy Twilight Zone riffs. The format really IS the property, in other words. But, expanded into half hour episodes and recreated in live action with limited budget and often clashing and lacking practical and digital work, I’m not entirely sure that all the effort to craft the series was worth it. I will say that watching it made me even more interested in the original magazines, however.
That said, while I think the adaptation as a whole may not have been successful, I still found myself really enjoying some of the episodes (some far more than others). I can’t deny that seeing action hero favorites of mine like Adkins, Jai White, and the late Darren Shahlavi acting in multiple storylines had me stoked. And while some episodes were all-out failures that land with an abject thud, others (usually the wackiest or most “out there”) tended to land with me and honor the vibe I’ve always gotten from the world of Heavy Metal.
I will note that the series vastly improved from Season 1 to Season 2, and even begins to interconnect in very fun ways. The entire series just seems to have gotten into more of a groove and perhaps mined better original stories from the magazine in order to make the second season land much more firmly.
In the end, I think anyone who is curious about the series for the talent involved or because of their previous interest in the magazines should approach this with caution. The time commitment isn’t an enormous one to mainline both seasons, and you’ll get some fun highlights mixed in with some pretty lame lowlights. Die hard Heavy Metal fans may or may not agree with my assessment as only a nominal fan, but I just don’t think that overall the series makes a wholly successful and faithful leap from the page to the small screen. If you’re already a fan of the series, then the Blu-ray package that Shout! Factory has put together is pretty top notch and would be well worth a purchase. Those simply curious could easily get away with a rental.
Season 1 Highlights
Episode 1: Kings Crown — Featuring Scott Adkins, Michael Jai White, Darren Shahlavi, and choreographed by Larnell Stovall, the series kicks off with a bang. Set in a futuristic/medieval hybrid world, our favorite action stars are battling in a tournament to the death in which the winner will be crowned the successor to the king. Seeing great fighters fight, spout humorous “medieval” dialog, and wrapping up with one of the better twists of the series, this episode is the easy highlight of Season 1.
Episode 5: Master Of Destiny — Featuring Piranha 3D’s Kelly Brook and no one else I was familiar with, this episode is adapted from an Alejandro Jodorowsky-penned story from the original comics. Filled with humanoid turtles that have a mastery of time and space and live on a planet that is entirely made of a computer, the sheer ridiculousness and fun practical puppet work done here, combined with the simple pleasure of a beautiful woman being badass, made this a standout episode in this season.
Season 1 Lowlights
Episode 2: Shelter Me — Features James Marsters (Buffy The Vampire Slayer), but has an obvious set up with a weak twist ending. A nuclear fallout shelter story that simply doesn’t land.
Episode 6: Pledge Of Anya — While this episode features Rutger Hauer, and a completely zany premise of some galactic warrior being chosen to travel to a planet to destroy a “dragon”, the twist ending is practically announced and is very cliche. One example of the show swinging for totally bizarre but falling short.
Season 2 Highlights
Episode 2: The Endomorphe — A balls-out sci-fi action story featuring Michael Jai White and Darren Shahlavi, this is a futuristic trench war with a cool, practically designed monster chasing our heroes through the trenches before they can get their “endomorphe” into some kind of energy light beam thing which will turn him into a golem and give them an edge in their battle. It is a quick, tough war story with enough wholly ridiculous elements to work. The twist is hilarious and glorious, not to mention more successfully rendered as a work of CGI than anything in the first season.
Episode 3: Loyal Khondor — Featuring John Rhys-Davies, this space opera action episode is once again adapted from an Alejandro Jodorowsky story and is a more straightforward and idealistic space-action-tragedy with a cool-looking alien protagonist.
Episode 4: Second Chance — Neatly interconnected to Loyal Khondor in that there is a scene which overlaps and is shown from different perspectives, this is the Scott Adkins-starring episode from Season 2. Obviously I’m going to note the Scott Adkins episode as a highlight, but in all honesty here he plays a Jack Burton-like swaggering hero who bumbles and fails his way through the whole story and I just loved seeing Adkins play against type in one of the most lighthearted and silly episodes of the entire series. (Though it should be noted that some of the most egregiously budget cut CGI in the whole series is found in this episode).
Episode 6: Back To Reality — Featuring a number of actors from previous episodes including Dominique Pinon, this final episode of the series retroactively connects many of the previous stories in a Total Recall-esque dream simulation mind bender that just about makes you reevaluate the whole series. Just about.
Season 2 Lowlight
Episode 1: Whiskey In The Jar — A western tale featuring Michael Biehn and James Marsters, and involving a doctor who is magically able to heal all wounds to catastrophic results, the sloppy writing and extraneous narration all lead up to a limp twist. Biehn is sadly wasted.
The Package
As I mentioned before, I feel like folks who are already fans of this series or are just too excited about the names in this cast or the original magazine will really find the Blu-ray release to be a solid investment. You get each season on its own disc with behind the scenes featurettes for a few episodes each. And on a third disc there are all the episodes in their original French language version (apparently each episode was shot in both French and English and the acting certainly suffers for it) as well as motion comics of each story. Normally I am not a fan of motion comics but in this case I watched every single one in order to get a feel for the original artwork featured in Heavy Metal. It is through watching these (most of which are under 5 minutes each) that I really realized how much punchier these tales were as hand drawn artwork told over just a few pages.
As mid-to-low budget French live-action sci-fi television series’ go, I guess Metal Hurlant Chronicles is a real accomplishment, but it has to be viewed through that type of lens in order to fully see it as such. International audiences won’t be able to help but note the routinely dodgy visual effects, clunky writing, and often stilted performances. Come for the stars and unabashed genre nature of it all, but decide for yourself if you want to stay and work your way through all of the Metal Hurlant Chronicles.
And I’m Out.