Marvel Comics – Blood and Porridge

February 28, 2025March 10, 2025

The Moore, the merrier

© Bloomsbury

I first came across the works of Alan Moore in the mid-1980s, while I was a student in Aberdeen. One day, I discovered a ramshackle shop on the city’s King Street selling tatty second-hand paperbacks and comics out of cardboard boxes at ridiculously low prices.

There, I managed to buy most of the 26 issues of a comics anthology called Warrior, which had appeared monthly from 1982 to 1985. Initially, I was attracted to Warrior because its contents included the continuing adventures of Father Shandor, a comic-strip character I’d been obsessed with in my early teens. (Shandor was a 19^th-century Transylvanian monk who fought vampires and demons. He’d actually started as a movie character, played by the gruff, no-nonsense Scottish actor Andrew Keir, who was the foe of Christopher Lee’s Dracula in the 1966 Hammer horror movie Dracula: Prince of Darkness. He became the hero of a comic strip in the late-1970s magazine House of Hammer, whose editor Dez Skinn would later edit Warrior. At an even younger age, I’d been a big fan of Marvel Comics’ Doctor Strange and Shandor seemed a darker, more serious and more violent version of that.) However, it was only one of many serials in Warrior and the most striking of these sprang from the pen of Alan Moore.

These included Marvelman, a revival of a British superhero who’d originally been the lead character in a comic book that’d run from 1953 to 1964, and The Bojeffries Saga, about a family of Munsters-like misfits and monsters living in a council house in Northampton, which incidentally is Moore’s hometown. But it was the dystopian V for Vendetta, penned by Moore and drawn by David Lloyd (with occasional contributions from Tony Weare) that made me re-evaluate what comics were capable of doing.

Set in a neutral Britain that’s managed to avoid destruction in a nuclear war but now, in a dire situation after the subsequent nuclear winter, is under the heel of a fascist, totalitarian government, V for Vendetta was the first comic-book serial I’d encountered that seemed both utterly serious and utterly adult. Yes, this was a time when it was still assumed anything drawn as a series of cartoons, in a series of boxes, with speech bubbles, could never be adult and must always be juvenile. It also made uncomfortable reading – again, ‘uncomfortable’ was an adjective I hadn’t previously associated with comics – because (a) it was inviting its readers to associate with a hero who was, ostensibly, a terrorist, and (2) the authoritarian society depicted in V for Vendetta didn’t seem that far down the road from the one a certain Margaret Thatcher was engineering in Britain in the time.

Ironically, if the world of V for Vendetta was to come about, Thatcher wouldn’t have been in power for most of the 1980s. Presumably the story had been conceived before the 1982 Falklands War, which gave a massive boost to Thatcher’s popularity. Back then, it’d looked possible she’d lose the next British general election and the Labour Party, led by the pacifistic Michael Foot, could win it, which would have set up V for Vendetta’s neutral-Britain-survives-a-nuclear-war scenario.

Anyway, 40 years later, it’s highly unlikely anyone would only find out who Alan Moore is after rooting around in a box of second-hand comics in a shop in Aberdeen. After V for Vendetta (published in its entirety by DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint in 1988-89), The Ballad of Halo Jones (1984-86), Watchmen (1986-87), From Hell (1989-98) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999-2019), and his acclaimed work with established comic-book characters like Batman, Superman and Swamp Thing, and his authorship of the tomes Jerusalem (2016) and The Great When: A Long London Novel (2024), and his reputation as a magician and occultist, and his popularity as an interviewee and a social commentator, and his being garlanded with accolades such as ‘national treasure’, ‘sage’ and ‘world’s greatest living Englishman’, it’s fair to say we’re living in an era of Alan Moore ubiquity. And we’re all the better for it.

From wikipedia.org / © Quality Communications

Anyway, I’ve just read his 2022 collection of short stories, Illuminations. Of the nine pieces it contains, eight are good or great in my opinion. Also, one of the stories, What We Can Know About Thunderman, isn’t a short one but a 240-page novel. It’s about 30 pages longer than the other stories put together.

Fortunately, given its length, What We Can Know About Thunderman isn’t the story I consider to be a dud. No, I think the dud is the penultimate one, American Light – An Appreciation, which purports to a poem by an imaginary Beat poet called Harmon Belner, choc-a-bloc with references to the ‘San Franciscan and Beat culture’ and the ‘post-Beat counterculture that prevailed in San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s’, plus an introduction and copious footnotes by an imaginary scholar called C.F. Bird. Connoisseurs of all things Beat may find it a delightful pastiche, snapshot and celebration of the movement, but it simply didn’t appeal to me, someone who finds most Beat writers tedious, pretentious and arsehole-y. (How I cheered when I read what Keith Richards said of Allen Ginsberg in the former’s autobiography: “…Ginsberg was staying at Mick’s place in London once, and I spent an evening listening to the old gasbag pontificating on everything. It was the period when Ginsberg sat around playing a concertina badly and making ommm sounds, pretending he was oblivious to his socialite surroundings.”)

What We Can Know About Thunderman on the other hand is a fictionalized history of the American mainstream comic-book industry where the foundational superhero of that industry isn’t Superman but a Superman-like character called Thunderman. It’s also an indictment of the business, which has inflicted indignities and belittlements on numerous writers and artists, including Moore, over the decades. For instance, Moore is justifiably bitter about losing ownership of V for Vendetta and Watchmen to DC Comics. (When he made a guest appearance in a 2007 episode of The Simpsons, Milhouse Van Houten was shown making a grievous faux pas by asking Moore to autograph a DVD featuring the DC Comics characters, Watchmen Babies in V for Vacation.)

Although the characters in Thunderman have unfamiliar names, comics fans won’t have difficulty linking many of them to real-life publishers, editors, writers and artists. I’m not particularly knowledgeable, though even I recognized one Sam Blatz “…in his tilted hat, his jacket slung over one shoulder like Sinatra…” and wearing ‘snazzy sunglasses’. Blatz’s chief talent is for titling characters: “…at least Sam’s monsters looked great, drawn by Gold or Novak, so that all he had to do was think up whacky names…” Yes, Blatz is Moore’s sour reimagining of Marvel Comics’ head-honcho Stan Lee. That would make the artists ‘Gold’ and ‘Novak’ the more talented, but less financially rewarded, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. There has been writing online, some of it in great detail, about who the cast-members of Thunderman represent in the real comics world. If your expertise in the field is lacking, as mine is, it may be useful to have one of those online pieces handy, for consultation, while you read the story.

Thunderman is impressively bilious as it charts its characters’ progress during the 20^th and early 21^st centuries. They start as young, naïve comic-book enthusiasts, become comic-book creatives, and wind up as middle-aged predators or victims: variously corrupt, grasping, sociopathic, perverted, ridiculous, embittered or crushed. The story is told from a range of perspectives and in a range of styles and formats, including interviews, monologues, reviews, playscripts, internet-forum discussions, psychoanalysis sessions and comic-book panels (described in written form), as well as in conventional prose. If not every part works equally well, the assorted viewpoints and formats keep it fresh. Fear not if something isn’t quite engaging you – something different will be along in another few pages.

My favourite sections were the comic-book panels, which chronicle how the creators of Thunderman, Simon Schuman and David Kessler – thinly-veiled versions of Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster – were conned out of the rights to the lucrative Thunderman franchise by American Comics, the story’s stand-in for DC Comics; and a series of reviews that evaluate how Thunderman has been adapted to the large and small screens. Again, Thunderman’s exploits in the cinema and on TV mirror Superman’s. I particularly enjoyed the review of Thunderman IV: The Search for Love, obviously inspired by 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. However, while Superman IV had the late Chrisopher Reeve in the title role, trying to preserve his dignity in a poor film, Moore brilliantly imagines Thunderman IV featuring Robin Askwith, star of those dire British 1970s sex-comedies, the Confessions films: “…most of the supposed humour rests in the mullet-styled hero using his Thundervision to see through the walls of ladies’ changing rooms, complete with BOI-OI-OING sound effects.”

© Canon Group, Inc. / Warner Bros.

Elsewhere in Illuminations, Moore stretches his imagination and writing abilities with The Improbably Complex High-Energy State. This is both a cautionary tale and a riff on the paradox put forward by 19^th-century physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who mused that it was statistically more likely for a self-aware brain, perceiving an infinite universe, to come into being through random fluctuations of particles than it was for an infinite universe itself, as postulated under conventional cosmological theory, to exist. In other words, we’re more likely spontaneously-created entities thinking we see an infinite universe than we’re actual parts of an infinite universe. Moore’s story has such a brain – and a lot of other stuff – appearing soon after the universe does. As it becomes aware of its unique situation, it rapidly develops human, and depressingly familiar, personality traits.

From the birth of the universe in The Improbably Complex High-Energy State, Moore moves to the end of the world in Location, Location, Location. He describes the apocalypse in majestically vivid Book-of-Revelation fashion, but sets the action in the unassuming English market-town of Bedford. This is where the real-life Panacea Society, believers in the teachings of the 19^th-century prophetess Joanna Southcott, believed the site of the original Garden of Eden to be. They also maintained a house on Bedford’s Albany Road as a residence for the Messiah to move into after the Second Coming. In Location, Location, Location, it transpires that, yes, the Panacea Society got it right and Jesus Christ – who’s presented like a well-meaning but slightly embarrassing ‘cool dad’, with a pierced ear and a T-shirt saying ‘I may be old, but at least I got to see all the best bands’ – has just arrived in Bedford to claim the house. The story is told through the eyes of an understandably distracted solicitor called Angie, who’s been given the task of overseeing the handover. This she has to do while images of giant winged beasts with lions’ heads and battling squadrons of angels fill the sky above. Location, Location, Location is an excellent example of Moore’s ability to combine the jaw-droppingly fantastical with the humdrum and mundane.

But the stories I enjoyed most in Illuminations were a trio of tales that struck me as belonging to a school of spooky British fiction that stretches from Arthur Machen, via Robert Aickman, to Ramsey Campbell, in that they present the supernatural in very British settings: everyday, awkward, slightly rundown and tawdry. Not Even Legend features an organization of hapless paranormal investigators called CSICON (the Committee For Surrealist Investigation of Claims Of the Normal), who are trying to get to grips with some cryptid-type beings so adept at hiding themselves that no one, until now, suspects they even exist. Not Even Legend has a complicated structure that rewards the reader’s patience when it becomes clear how clever the story’s premise is. And Moore’s enthusiasm for inventing strange new types of monsters is endearing. He mentions such creatures as Snapjackets, Mormoleens, Jilkies and – most prominently – Whispering Petes.

More conventional is Cold Reading about a phony, but pathetically self-justifying, clairvoyant who spots an opportunity to make easy money when a man asks him if he can contact the spirit of his deceased twin brother. A twist can be seen coming, but the story’s mixture of cynicism and melancholia, and its evocation of a bleak wintry night in Northampton, make it very atmospheric. Finally, I greatly enjoyed the title story, which takes place in a dilapidated, seen-better-days British seaside resort. Moore obviously relishes describing the setting. The tale of a middle-aged man returning to the coastal town in which, during his childhood, he used to holiday with his parents, it reminds me slightly of the Harlan Ellison short story One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty (1970). And there’s something about it that calls to mind the Gerald Kersh story The Brighton Monster (1948) too.

Your enjoyment of Illuminations may depend on your willingness to spend half of it reading a novel that’s a diatribe against the American comic-book industry. I was happy to do so, and I got a lot out of that story and out of the collection generally. Illuminations really did light up my reading life for a few days.

From wikipedia.org / © Matt Biddulph

May 28, 2022June 16, 2022

In the multiverse of Sam-ness

© Marvel Studios / Walt Disney Motion Pictures

Though I’ve enjoyed some of the films produced by the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) in recent years, and though I was a big fan in my youth of the Marvel comics that inspired those films, until now I’ve not been tempted into a cinema to watch one of them. Usually, I’ve caught up with them courtesy of DVDs, streaming services or some airline’s in-flight entertainment system and seen them on a smaller screen. However, the other day, for the first time, I actually got off my backside, left the comfort of my apartment, made my way to the nearest cinema and bought a ticket to see the latest MCU offering, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022).

There were two reasons for this. First, it’s Doctor Strange. And secondly, the film’s directed by Sam Raimi.

In the 1970s, when I was a kid and read any Marvel comic I could lay my hands on, I loved Spiderman, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the X-Men and the rest, but Doctor Strange seemed something else. The artwork by artists like Frank Brunner and Gene Colan was fascinatingly weird and psychedelic. The fact that the LSD-fuelled Summer of Love loomed large in recent memory might have had something to do with this. Also, the strip’s premise, whereby Doctor Steven Strange spent his time battling not science-fictional superpowered villains or alien beings but demons, sorcerers and other supernatural agents, gave the comic a special thrill. At the time I was living in Northern Ireland, which was heavily populated with hard-line, Bible-thumping, Christian nutjobs. To them even something as anodyne as the musical Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) was an unspeakable act of blasphemy and a portent of the coming End of Days. Thus, reading a comic strip choc-a-bloc with demons, black magic and occult imagery felt, in that environment, to a nine-year-old kid, like forbidden fruit indeed.

Meanwhile, I’ve been a big fan of Sam Raimi’s work since seeing his horror-comedy movie Evil Dead II in an Aberdeen cinema in 1987. I found Evil Dead II a brilliant mixture of crude, lowbrow slapstick – evidenced by the moment where a female character swallows an eyeball flying from an exploding head – and knowing, highbrow humour – evidenced by the scene where the hero, the ever-beleaguered Ash (played by Raimi’s long-time acting collaborator Bruce Campbell), chainsaws off his own demonically-possessed hand, then traps the severed appendage under a bucket and weighs the bucket down with a hardbacked edition of Ernest Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

© Renaissance Pictures / Rosebud Releasing Corporation

Raimi’s kinetic directing style and love of violent chaos seemed to owe as much to comic books as to anything in the cinema that’d come before him (though he was a big fan of the Columbia Pictures comedy team the Three Stooges). So, it wasn’t altogether a surprise when he directed the first big cinematic comic-book adaptation of the 21^st century, the Spiderman trilogy (2002-07) with Tobey Maguire. Mind you, Raimi had already made a superhero movie, the overlooked but fascinatingly scuzzy Darkman (1990) with Liam Neeson.

Supposedly, Raimi was disappointed by the critical reaction to his third Spiderman film and decided not to make another superhero one, but couldn’t resist the invitation to direct this, the second outing for Doctor Strange – the first was released in 2016. And when Raimi lets his imagination loose on such comic-book material, which had already been pretty out-there, the results are wonderful.

The basic plotline helps too. Doctor Strange, played by the impeccably caped and goatee-ed Benedict Cumberbatch, encounters a young girl (Xochiti Gomez) with the power to travel from one universe to another. Some universes are similar to ours but with a few discombobulating alterations, while others are bizarrely and surreally different. There’s a malevolent force in pursuit of the girl, wanting to drain her of this power, and before long she and Strange are barrelling from one universe to the next with a super-villain hot on their heels. Raimi has a field-day orchestrating the backdrops to their adventures, presenting us with universes that range from one resembling Salvador Dali in a hypothetical gothic phase to one resembling a topsy-turvy Jurassic Park to one where everything comes apart like a collapsing Rubik’s cube. There’s even a gloopy universe where everything is made of paint.

Equally, Raimi is allowed to let his horror sensibilities off the leash, which makes this easily the most macabre movie to come out of the MCU. That said, with Ray Harryhausen-style lumbering trolls and flying ghouls, a partly decayed but nice zombie, and several deaths that are gruesome in a determinedly bloodless way, I doubt if this will induce nightmares in anyone over the age of ten. Actually, as I watched Doctor Strange and his new young friend rush through portals in the fabric of reality, from one universe to another, I was reminded of the climax of Evil Dead II when Bruce Campbell’s Ash gets sucked through a portal, conjured up by black magic, and is thrown back in time to medieval Europe. This sets things up for the third and final film in the series, Army of Darkness (1992), which was also full of Ray Harryhausen-style creations. (I saw Army of Darkness in a cinema too, this time when I was living in the Japanese city of Sapporo. The Japanese, picking up on the fact that Ash, when he wasn’t fighting demonically-possessed zombies, worked in a rather shit-sounding hardware store – “Shop Smart. Shop S-Mart! Got that?” – retitled the movie Captain Supermarket.)

© Dino De Laurentiis Communications / Universal Pictures

Thus, I liked the parts of the movie that show Raimi’s creative stamp, and I liked the parts that share DNA with the original Doctor Strange comic strip… But I could have done without the references to the rest of the MCU. And you get a lot of those. There are call-backs to the last two Avengers films, to the last Spiderman one, and to the Marvel TV series WandaVision (2021). Also, the cast features not only Doctor Strange regulars like Chiwitel Ejiofor’s Mordo and Benedict Wong’s splendidly imperturbable Wong, but also, later, a bunch of characters from the wider Marvel gestalt.

This didn’t mean there was an unnecessarily complicated MCU backstory that made it hard to follow what was going on – I had a working knowledge of the characters from the old comics, rather than the more recent movies, and I managed fine. It’s just that I prefer Doctor Strange, inhabiting his own little world where magic, the supernatural, the occult, demons, ghosts, etc., are realities, to be separate from the more conventional, sci-fi-style super-heroism of the rest of the Marvel canon. That was something that spoiled the first Doctor Strange movie for me too. You can imagine how peeved I was when Chris Hemsworth’s Thor turned up in its end-credits scene.

© Marvel / From previewsworld.com

And I don’t recall the original Doctor Strange comics having much to do with the other Marvel superheroes, though perhaps I just missed reading the ones that did. I do remember, though, Strange having a crossover adventure in which he encounters Dracula, who was also a Marvel character at the time, courtesy of the comics Tomb of Dracula (1972-79) in the USA and Dracula Lives (1974-76) in the UK.

Admittedly, in this new Doctor Strange movie, I enjoyed the presence of Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff / Scarlet Witch character, who in the MCU has chiefly been seen in the Avengers movies and the WandaVision TV show. I knew the Scarlet Witch from the comics of my childhood too and had always found her an enigma, never sure if she was a good ‘un or a bad ’un. One moment she’d be a henchwoman of the villainous Magneto, nemesis of Doctor Xavier in the X-Men; but the next moment, she’d appear as a member of the Avengers and suddenly be a good guy. In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, this moral ambiguity is also evident – though you can probably predict which side, the dark one or light one, she ends up succumbing to. But even at the character’s worst, Olsen makes her a believable and even beguiling character. As she tells Strange, “You break the rules and become a hero. I do it and become the enemy. That doesn’t seem fair.”

To sum up: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is at its best when it’s being Sam Raimi-esque and Doctor Strange-esque. it’s not so marvellous when it’s being Marvel-esque. Incidentally, my happiest moment came when Bruce Campbell appears in a cameo as a belligerent git. Subjected to a spell cast by Strange, and in the great tradition of Evil Dead II, he starts inflicting slapstick violence against his own face. Well, what more can you want from a film?

© Marvel Studios / Walt Disney Motion Pictures

February 4, 2022February 15, 2022

Branagh’s Belfast

Kenneth Branagh has seemed the embodiment of classical, theatrical Englishness for a long time – at least since his 1989 film adaptation of Henry V, in which he raged “Cry ‘God for Harry, England and Saint George!’” Meanwhile, over the years, I’ve enjoyed shocking people by pointing out to them that Branagh isn’t actually English. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1960. He and his family left there for England in 1969, shortly after the outbreak of the Troubles. He ended up in Berkshire, where he dropped his Belfast accent and ‘acquired received pronunciation to avoid bullying.’ Thus began the plummy-voiced Branagh we know today.

In fact, Branagh’s early life wasn’t dissimilar to mine, for I was born and brought up in Northern Ireland until the age of 11, when my family moved to the town of Peebles, in the Borders region of Scotland. I was a couple of years older than Branagh was at the time of moving and couldn’t shed my accent so easily – not that I needed to, because although my new classmates in Peebles sometimes took the piss out of the way I spoke, I was never bullied. Come to think of it, acquiring ‘received pronunciation to avoid bullying’ probably wouldn’t have been a good policy at Peebles High School. Folk would have picked on you more for sounding like a posh tosser.

Before Branagh made a name for himself as the star, director and adaptor of Henry V, I’d known of his Northern Irish connections because I’d seen him appear in a quartet of TV plays written by the Northern Irish dramatist Graham Reid. These were Too Late to Talk to Billy (1982), A Matter of Choice for Billy (1983), A Coming to Terms for Billy (1984) and Lorna (1987), and were about the tribulations of a working-class Protestant family in Belfast, the Martins. The Martins’ problems aren’t caused by the Troubles but by their own flawed, damaged and abrasive personalities. The widowed father Norman (James Ellis) is an unrepentant hard man, incapable of showing his gentler feelings, while his eldest child and only son Billy (Branagh) is embittered about how Norman treated his late mother. It’s left to the eldest daughter, the mild-mannered Lorna (Brid Brennan), to act as a surrogate mother to the family’s younger children. During the plays, unexpected things happen – Norman mellows under the influence of a woman he forms a relationship with while working in England, Lorna develops some unexpected steel and Billy, dismayingly, begins to show some of the worst traits of his dad. In the four plays Branagh had no problem readopting his old Belfast accent, so I was surprised when a few years later I went to the cinema and heard him speaking fluent Shakespeare in Henry V.

Branagh has revisited his Belfast roots with his latest movie Belfast, which was released in the USA last year and has just been released in Britain. Inspired by Branagh’s experiences during the late 1960s, it tells the story of another working-class Protestant family, one less dysfunctional than the Martins in the Billy plays: a couple simply entitled ‘Ma’ (Catriona Balfe) and ‘Pa’ (Jamie Dornan), and their older son Will (Lewis McAskie) and younger son Buddy (Jude Hill). Pa spends his working life in England and is considering moving his family over to live with him, something that doesn’t appeal to Ma and the boys. “I know nothing else but Belfast,” she protests. For one thing, they have strong family ties in the city, most notably Pa’s parents, the droll Pop (Ciaran Hines) and stern but kindly Granny (Judi Dench). Then the Troubles erupt and Protestant paramilitaries led by local thug Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan) chase the Catholic families out of their neighbourhood. As the paramilitaries’ grip on the area tightens, Pa falls foul of Clanton and it becomes clear that, like it or not, his family will have to leave too.

This basic plot could have made Belfast a grim film, but it’s a funny, good-natured one because these events are seen through the eyes of little Buddy. They have to compete for attention with all the things that matter to a normal nine-year-old boy – things ranging from pursuing your first love to getting initiated into the local kids’ gang, from making trips to the cinema to bonding with your granddad.

Belfast left me with mixed emotions. On one hand, I found it annoyingly overstated in places. On the other, I generally found it rather moving. I’ll explain my conflicting reactions in detail, starting with the negative ones.

I have to admit that until now Henry V is the only film by Branagh that I’ve enjoyed. I wasn’t impressed by his later adaptations of Shakespeare, like Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000), and I hated his version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994). They seemed shrill and over-the-top in both their acting and their visuals. Originally, I thought this was because Branagh didn’t have confidence in the original texts by Shakespeare and Shelley to capture the attention of modern film audiences. He felt obliged to make them as bombastic as possible, pumping them up with the cinematic equivalent of steroids – operatic performances, hammy humour, fast-moving camerawork and so on. Nowadays, though, I just think the problem is that Branagh, basically, is a theatrical man. When you’re on a stage, performing for a live audience, everything has to be big – the voice projection, the gestures, the general drama – in order to be seen and heard. But what’s effective from a distant stage often seems unsubtle when it’s projected in fine detail onto a large movie screen. And that’s the impression I sometimes got with Belfast.

In its plot machinations, visuals and soundtrack, there are some broad brushstrokes indeed. You get heavy-handed pieces of comedy, such as when Buddy cheats at his homework in order to get placed at the desk beside the girl he fancies at school – their teacher positions the pupils from the front to the back of the classroom according to how good or bad their marks are, and Buddy’s sweetheart, the brightest kid in class, is right at the front. (From a teaching point of view, wouldn’t it be sensible to have the less able kids at the front, so you can keep a close eye on them, and the smart ones at the back?)

Meanwhile, Branagh shoots the film in black and white but inserts colour at certain moments. These are when Buddy’s family go to the cinema. Although the auditorium is filmed in monochrome, what’s happening on the screen – action from Hammer’s One Million Years BC (1966) and the movie version of Roald Dahl’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) – appears in its original, glorious technicolour. As a metaphor for how the cinema transports Buddy out of his black-and-white everyday existence and into the colourful dreamworld of the movies, this is pretty clunking.

By far the worst offender, though, is a scene where Pa confronts Billy Clanton on a street. Clanton is holding his family at gunpoint and there’s a squad of British Army soldiers looking on, pointing weapons at everybody. I know we’re meant to be viewing this through Buddy’s eyes. But still, it seems crass and cheesy that at this deadly-serious moment Tex Ritter starts singing Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling from the classic 1952 western High Noon – which Buddy has recently watched on TV – on the soundtrack. Billy Clanton, incidentally, was the name of one of the villainous Clanton Gang who took on the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday during the gunfight at the OK Corral, another touch that’s a bit too obvious.

All that aside, however, I have to say I enjoyed Belfast. It’s nice to see a film about Northern Ireland that isn’t primarily about terrorism, extreme religion or extreme politics, and that focuses on believable, relatable people who are just trying to get on with their lives. It also contains a lot of humour, something that’s usually in short supply in movies about Northern Ireland, even though I remember knowing many funny, witty characters when I lived there. (Ciaran Hines’ genial, good-hearted Pop, who manages to be on Buddy’s wavelength without ever patronising him, initially seemed too good to be true – but again, I realised, I’d known several old guys like him during my childhood.)

Branagh conveys the idea that, as a kid in Northern Ireland, the popular culture of the time enthused you just as it enthused kids in more ‘normal’ societies, and influenced you as much as (if not more than) the riots and bombings that were happening not far from your doorstep. Thus, we see Buddy dressing up like a cast-member of Thunderbirds (1965-66), watching Star Trek (1966-69), playing with Subbuteo and James Bond toy cars, and reading the Marvel comic The Mighty Thor, which allows Branagh to sneakily reference the 2011 movie Thor, which he directed. (I don’t know how easy it was to access Marvel comics in Belfast in 1969, especially as Marvel’s British subsidiary Marvel UK didn’t begin operating until 1972. Still, I remember finding an American edition of The Avengers in Enniskillen in the early 1970s, so I guess it was possible.)

If there’s one thing I find unconvincing about the characters, it’s that the tribal symbols that existed in Northern Ireland’s Protestant and Catholic communities, even in 1969 before the Troubles hardened people’s senses of identity, are absent. There’s little said or shown about being British or Irish, about Union Jacks or tricolours, about the Orange Order or Gaelic Athletics Association. Actually, at a few points Buddy’s relatives describe themselves as ‘Irish’ (“The Irish were born for leaving – otherwise, the rest of the world would have no pubs…” “All the Irish need to survive is a phone, a Guinness and the sheet music to Danny Boy…”), although I expect most Belfast Protestants would call themselves ‘British’. Compare this with a scene in Graham Reid’s A Coming to Terms for Billy when Norman Martin’s two youngest daughters discuss, unenthusiastically, the prospect of their dad taking them to England. When one points out how disliked the Irish are in England, the other retorts, “We’re not Irish. We’re Protestants!”

Still, Belfast definitely shows that Branagh’s heart is in the right place even if, occasionally, his plotting and filmmaking instincts aren’t. The black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous and his use of classic Van Morrison songs on the soundtrack – Warm Love, Jackie Wilson Said, Bright Side of the Road, Days Like This, Carrickfergus and, inevitably at the end, The Healing has Begun – is a reminder that however much Van the Man has degenerated these days into a curmudgeonly, whinging old fart who’d pick a fight with his own shadow, he did, once upon a time, record some wonderful music.

And, ultimately, Branagh shows that despite the terrible things that have gone on there, Northern Ireland is a place that exerts a powerful hold on your affections. This is illustrated in the scene where Ma and Pa break the news to Buddy that they’re all going to leave Belfast and move to England. Poor Buddy promptly bursts into tears.

I remember when my mother took me aside in 1976 and told me that we were going to move to Scotland. I reacted in exactly the same way.