There are many ways to describe a good movie. Good movies capture the audience with action, special effects, emotions, plot twists, and keep the viewers discussing the movie long after the final credits have rolled. Hero Tomorrow isn’t a “big budget studio film,” so it is understandable that the special effects and action would not be the strengths of this independent movie. Instead, Hero Tomorrow features well developed characters, a roller-coaster ride of emotions, a plot twist you would never expect, and it does not spoon feed the details to the viewers, creating discussions of different interpretations that last for days. A good analogy would be to envision a Grant Morrison written and directed movie. Maybe Ted Sikora (the director of Hero Tomorrow) will one day be the Grant Morrison of movies.
From the Hero Tomorrow website:
David, a struggling comic book creator from Cleveland, spends his days cutting grass and his night smoking it while desperately trying to keep his superhero fantasies alive. When Robyn, his aspiring fashion designer girlfriend, makes him a Halloween costume of his original character Apama, it doesn’t take David long to hit the streets and begin blundering towards disaster. Can Robyn rescue David and save their relationship before his vigilante dreams become a four color nightmare? Does the comfort and security of her own desire offer a trap just as deadly to this comic book Don Quixote?
I already made the Grant Morrison reference, so I might as well stick with it for a moment. Like Morrison’s Final Crisis, I was confused and felt lost at first when Hero Tomorrow started. I had no problem understanding that the main character, David, was an aspiring comic book creator who was down on his luck. I also had no problem figuring out that like his comic book career, his life was going nowhere. The complication of David’s relationship with his girlfriend, Robyn was also easy to pick up on. On the outside the story seemed simple: a man who hits rock bottom in life hits rock bottom mentally too. As David removed himself from reality to become his comic book creation Apama, I knew something else was going on deeper than that but I just couldn’t figure it out. In Final Crisis it was easy to see the “good vs evil” part of the story, but there was a deeper meaning that could only be found by paying attention to the details and making inferences a similarity shared with Hero Tomorrow.
Hero Tomorrow tells a story about a man, his downfall, and his happy ending, but it also tells a few other stories. I want to go into more detail about the complex subplots, but I cannot without spoiling the movie. Hero Tomorrow is a movie where the settings and characters feel real, making you forget that it is an independent, low budget film, until the end where the plot twists in the same manner as the blockbuster film “The Sixth Sense.” The ending proposes two situations for the viewer – either interpret subtle clues to explain the “hows” and “whys” of the ending, or re-watch the movie knowing what details you should be looking for. Either option leaves the viewer captivated by the detail put into this movie about two interesting people rather than a movie about a down-and-out comic book creator it’s disguised as.
When I started this movie, I was excited because the comic shop scenes were filmed five minutes away from my former apartment, but after I got past the “novelty” of this being a local movie, I found myself captivated by the characters. Almost all of the characters in this film, minus the spandex clad Apama, seemed as if they were real local Clevelanders. Not only did the characters seem real, their problems did too. Hero Tomorrow may be a movie that looks to be “another comic book movie”, but instead Hero Tomorrow is a movie that asks the viewers to pay attention and infer. Any movie or comic book that keeps me questioning, analyzing, and talking about long after it’s finished is always worth more than the original entry fee.
