Joker: 10 1970s Comic Book Movies DC Should Make Next
7. The Question As The Parallax View
Declining trust in institutions like government and corporations during the era of Vietnam and Watergate made the cinema of the 1970s rife with paranoia, plots and conspiracies. It's part of the era's signature style and was rarely better exemplified than in the "Political Paranoia" trilogy of director Alan J. Pakula.
Marvel have already taken influence from these movies in making Captain America: The Winter Soldier into the image of a seventies conspiracy-driven political thriller (including a bit of stunt casting of the genre's iconic leading man Robert Redford), resulting in one of the MCU's undoubted high points.
Ultimately, though, Winter Soldier didn't entirely stick the landing, reverting to a more classic superhero blockbuster good-versus-evil action showdown in its final act, the suspicion of authority largely resolved. A Joker-style version of the same thing could really commit to a conspiracy story about how our institutions really are rotten to the core.
And DC Comics have the perfect character to spiral into a paranoid conspiracy investigation: erstwhile Charlton Comics star (and Rorschach inspiration) The Question.
Just like Warren Beatty's Joseph Frady in Pakula's The Parallax View, Vic Sage is a dogged investigative reporter increasingly suspicious of vested corporate interests and government agendas as he uncovers a political assassination plot with ties that go all the way to the top.
DC also has loads of shady big corporations who could serve as an equivalent to the movie's Parallax (The Lexcorp View, anyone?), but perhaps this could take a leaf out of the animated Justice League's book and see Sage investigating a version of Cadmus with ties to government black-ops and secret fringe science.