Public Servant Lifestyle

Jennifer Garner returns to the role of the crimson-clad ninja Elektra in the long awaited film version of Frank Millers’ 'heroic' assassin.

Elektra

Jennifer Garner (star of TV’s Alias, the Daredevil movie and 13 Going on 30) stars alongside Terence Stamp, Will Yun Lee, Goran Visnjic and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa in the new outing for the crimson-clad assassin, directed by Rob Bowman.

She is shrouded in mystery, tainted by tragedy, trained to kill, and then left for dead. But for Elektra, death was just the beginning - now she is back with a vengeance. Tortured by her past and haunted by her own mysterious death, Elektra finds herself resurrected.

Ninja!

Although her sensei - Stick - has trained her well in the strict discipline of ninjutsu, he cannot begin to tame her burning rage over the brutal murder of her parents. Elektra's need to avenge this untenable crime forces her into exile. She becomes an assassin - the best in the business.

But for a woman like Elektra, killing is no way to make a living. To save herself, she needs something more than a reason to kill...she needs a reason to live. And she finds it in the form of her latest target, Abby, a feisty 13-year-old (in whom Elektra sees so much of herself), and Abby's father, Mark (Goran Visnjic). In her desperate struggle to save them, Elektra finds something she did not even know she was looking for: redemption...

The character of Elektra Natchios first appeared in the Stan Lee created Marvel Comics title Daredevil (Vol. 1) #168 in 1980 - as well as 2003’s film, based on the same character. Introduced by Frank Miller (later to write and draw the genre-defining Batman reinventions The Dark Knight Returns and The Dark Knight Strikes Back) Elektra was initially an assassin in the employ of the criminal overlord of New York, The Kingpin.

A romantic foil for both Matt Murdock (Daredevil’s crusading lawyer alter-ego) and the crimson crime fighter himself, she met a sticky end in the original Daredevil comic continuity, at the hands of the villainous Bullseye. In this case cinema goers who only know the character from her original appearance in the Daredevil film will be as informed as they need be – as this is, of course, precisely what became of the character in her first big screen appearance.

Elektra Assassin

In the films, as in the comics, death was far from being the end for the character, who returns as a force for good in both continuities. Just to complicate matters further there’s a third Elektra continuity – which comes from the ‘Ultimate’ line of Marvel Comics titles. In this ‘re-imagining’ of the Daredevil/Elektra origins readers were treated to the Matt Murdok/Elektra Natchios pair originally meeting (and falling in love) as young college students...

The enduring character - one of the most popular characters in the entire modern Marvel Comics Universe judging from the number of attempts to revive her in her own title – was arguably responsible for inspiring a whole slew of similar characters – not least the sexy schizophrenic assassin Typhoid Mary character in the Daredevil title, who also worked for The Kingpin and acted as a romantic foil for Matt Murdock, while battling Daredevil on the streets. Sound familiar?

Many of the characters’ appearances in comic book form have been collected into graphic novel form, including: Daredevil Vol.1 – drawn by the first class Steve Buccellato - Elektra Assassin, Daredevil-Elektra: Love & War, Elektra Lives Again (all penned by Frank Miller), Elektra Vol.1 (written by Peter Milligan and Larry Hama), Elektra Vol.2 (by writer Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Greg Horn, Chuck Austen, Carlo Pagulayan and Danny Miki) and Elektra & Wolverine: The Redeemer (drawn by Yoshitaka Amano) and Ultimate Daredevil-Elektra, from the pen of Greg Rucka. In addition, an Elektra monthly title is still printed to this day, from Marvel Comics.

Possibly the most celebrated of the Elektra artists has been Bill Sienkiewicz, whose work on Daredevil and a dozen other titles made such an impression on comics in the 1980s. His lush, slightly chaotic, but incredibly distinctive painted work on Daredevil-Elektra: Love & War (and in the collected Elektra Assassin trade paperback) sometimes divided readers, but was arguably responsible for defining the sexy, edgy ‘look’ of Elektra forever.

The man charged with bringing both that ‘look’ and feel to the big screen is Elektra’s director, Rob Bowman. An award-winning TV director of such series as phenomenally successful FBI-investigates-aliens-threats The X-Files, as well as of Star Trek: The Next Generation and McGyver, Bowman made his directorial debut with Airborne (1993). He then brought the acclaimed Mulder and Scully series to the big screen as The X-Files Movie (1998), before going on to make dragons-in-near-future-Britain picture Reign of Fire (2002).

Paul Ross – in the News of the World said of the film: “It’s Elektra-fying! The sexiest superhero film of all time.” While Larushka Ivan-Zadeh, in Metro, found the central character to be “...a seriously conflicted super heroine assassin: persecuted equally by her past...and her wardrobe.” Before going on to describe the outfit the star dons (which, to be fair, will please purists who were dismayed at the uncharacteristic costume she wore in the Daredevil film) as: “...a whore-red catsuit.” Quite. This is much closer to the way the character has almost always been portrayed in the comics however – and certainly by her creator. Perhaps we’ll see Garner adopting the second (this time virginal white!) version of the same costume, which also appears in the comics, for any sequel?

Super Heroine?

Dress-sense aside – and I seriously doubt many fans will object to the central characters’ skimpy attire - with spectacular stunts, electrifying martial arts sequences, a starry cast and a desire to keep the combat sequences physical, rather than achieving them via special effects Elektra looks poised to take both action movies and comic book adaptations to a whole new level. The soundtrack for the new film is provided by composer Christophe Beck.

Recent hit movies based on Marvel characters have included blockbusters like Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, X-Men, X2 and Blade and Blade 2 and The Hulk. In addition, The Fantastic Four (starring TV’s Dark Angel and Honey star Jessica Alba as Invisible Girl) is coming out later this year and characters like Dr. Strange, The Mighty Thor and The Silver Surfer are all currently in development for either motion pictures or TV series.

Elektra is out now on DVD and as a special double disc 'special edition', rated 12A.

More information available in Books, DVD / Home Video