Sarah and I went to see Sin City tonight with my brother and his new wife. I thought the movie was worth a review.

First of all, the movie is extremely violent. What amazed me was a lot of the cinematic tricks director Robert Rodriguez uses to make the violence more palatable. With all the gallons of blood spilled throughout the film, to my recollection, only one drop was red. The rest was an array of hues, from bright white, to yellow, and even black. There must be something ingrained in the color of blood that makes it repulsive. Otherwise, the effect can be quite mundane… even humorous.

One example of color affecting the impact of the violence is in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1. There is a scene in that movie where the Bride dispatches about eighty people with a rather sharp sword. The scene could easily turn the stomach of the hardest of viewers, but since Tarantino filmed the scene in black and white, it tones down the violence of the scene considerably.

For me, though, the movie ended up being a disappointment. Like the prostitutes throughout the movie, even though the film seems beautiful on the surface, deeper examination revealed many major flaws and very little content.

Like Pulp Fiction, Sin City was a collection of mostly unrelated mini-stories. All the stories centered around morality in an immoral city. All the authorities in the movie whom we would hope would be moral pillars end up being the most immoral, be it senator, policeman, or priest. The heroes of the movie are all imperfect men who decide that their line has been crossed… in all cases, the line is the abuse or murder of females. These imperfect men find in themselves the moral indignation to right the wrongs committed against their various women.

While watching the film, I couldn’t help by think of the contrast between the honor of these heroes, and the honor of Rob Roy. Both films present honorable heroes out of place in a dishonorable society. The contrast, however, is that Rob Roy understood that honor and right existed as a moral absolute outside himself, and fought for that honor because it was the right thing to do. The men in Sin City fight for what is right simply because they’re pissed off. Their own autonomous moral compass was violated, and since it made them mad, it had to be revenged until they felt better about it.

In every story in this film, after the “wrong was righted”, I still felt empty. There was nothing left. The stage felt like the end of Hamlet, with everyone dead.

Sin City is a tragedy, but unlike a good tragedy, there is nothing for us to learn. I walked away impressed with the skill that the director had to transfer the graphic novel to the screen, but I don’t think this film had much more to offer than that.