There are no cherry blossoms hinting at the first flush of spring, the nights are creeping in rather than drawing out, and there are scant few leaves left on the trees on my street. And yet, were it not obvious from the freezing temperatures that we in the UK are now in the dog days of November, one might think it were April Fools’ Day. For what’s this? Reports in the Hollywood press suggest that Daniel Craig and Luca Guadagnino are teaming up for – really? – the DC Comics adaptation Sgt Rock?
For those of you unacquainted with the gruff second world war infantryman … well, let’s just say if there were two characters more fundamentally different than Sgt Rock and the gay desperado and William S Burroughs cipher played recently by Craig in Guadagnino’s acclaimed Queer, they’d need to rewrite the laws of physics just to exchange a polite wave across the multiverse. So far apart in tone are these two worlds that it’s almost impossible to imagine the same team working on both projects.
Rock, who might politely be described as a bit like Captain America’s grumpier uncle, is hardly your typical DC character. He doesn’t wear a cape, or have a tragic origin story involving alien planets or dead parents. In fact, he isn’t really even a superhero (unless you count being able to shout “Hold the line!” while shrugging off bullets like they’re mosquito bites.) Created in 1959 (though prefaced by earlier iterations), Sgt Rock and his “Easy Company” embodied the kind of no-nonsense heroism that made postwar readers nod solemnly and light another Lucky Strike. He’s the kind of guy who can turn a stick of chewing gum into a victory strategy, and would barely complain of a flesh wound if somebody stuck him with a bayonet.
If the reports are true – Deadline does suggest this one is at the earliest stage of development – they also say something about DC’s current path. We already knew that the James Gunn-led studio has no interest in shoehorning all its movies into a single, Marvel-style universe where Superman, Batman and Condiment King could battle it out for supremacy. But this latest rumour suggests the studio is opting for the superhero equivalent of jazz improvisation, in which its characters will only occasionally meet, like mismatched Tinder dates at the multiverse’s weirdest coffee shop.
Sgt Rock has sometimes bumped into the Man of Steel in the comics. But it was weird when he did. One example is a 1979 issue of DC Comics Presents that saw the last son of Krypton travelling to accept an award in Paris and getting sent back in time by an explosion caused by the booby-trapped trophy. Suffice to say, that particular issue featured a whole lot of the down-to-earth and curmudgeonly Rock being almost completely unaware of Superman’s godlike invincibility – but secretly quite liking his cosmic counterpart’s willingness to knuckle down and do the dirty work. It’s like watching Kelly’s Heroes interrupted by a celestial laser show.
One imagines a Sgt Rock movie will eventually emerge under the DC Elseworlds banner that Gunn has cooked up (or borrowed from the comics) to give him an excuse when fans complain that Robert Pattinson’s Batman will never meet Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn. And here it’s just possible to imagine Guadagnino being given licence to bring his own particular brand of existential poetry to the comic-book world. The Italian’s genius lies in his ability to find depth and humanity in unexpected places, and it’s possible he sees Sgt Rock as a canvas for exploring themes of masculinity, sacrifice, and the bonds forged in the crucible of conflict, rather than as a straightforward war movie.
If so, he hasn’t found a bad place to start, as the Rock comics always offered a more nuanced take on the popular 1940s and 50s war comic genre than many of their forerunners. A good parallel is perhaps the “acid western” films of the 1960s and 1970s, which spun that well-worn genre into new areas of offbeat introspection, after the more homespun and hokey fare of the previous decades. It’s possible to imagine Craig bringing emotional scar tissue to the role, in much the way he transformed James Bond from a pun-wielding joker into a flawed and vulnerable antihero.
If we’re completely honest, this project feels like it could easily implode, like a submarine crafted from Swiss cheese and held together with wishful thinking and duct tape. But if DC really could pull it off, it might just represent a new type of comic-book movie – or at least the kind of raw, humanistic cinema we haven’t really seen in the genre since James Mangold’s Logan. And, who knows, maybe Guadagnino’s Sgt Rock could finally answer the age-old question: when push comes to shove, can heartfelt vulnerability (and incredible lighting) lead a bayonet charge?
