Let's cast Nextwave: The Movie

Lisa Bonet - Monica Rambeau
Anna Faris - Tabby Smith
Angelina Jolie - Elsa Bloodstone
Simon Pegg - Aaron Stack
Nick Frost - The Captain
Christian Bale - Dirk Anger
Stephen Colbert - Devil Dinosaur
Neil Patrick Harris - Broccolimen
Jack Black - Captions

I'll admit my choice of Lisa Bonet for the team leader comes mostly from a desire to see her in more and bigger movies than any particular skill I think she may bring to the table. I don't really know what she can do,  which may be because I've only actually ever seen her in Angel Heart, but I know parts of that movie scared me in ways that few movies before or since have done and parts of that is probably due to her skill. There's that psychedelic sex/murder scene where Bonet manages to sell her character's feeling lust and ecstasy and utter terror all at once - with her tits hanging out no less - which haunts me to the point where I've yet to watch the movie twice. And I'm inclined to believe an actor who can do something so hard so well can do anything reasonably well.

Now, Monica I picture as a slightly faded star, trying to act all serious and businesslike to avoid thinking about how easy things used to be back when she was part of a far less ridiculous and more glamorous team. She's having to necessarily reinvent her powers to be an effective fighter rather than the near-superfluous scout/damsel in distress/Captain America's sandwich bringer she was to the Avengers. A lot like a mid-life crisis when you look beyond the superhero stuff, which Bonet - pushing fifty years in a business where so much of what a woman can do depends on her body - may understand better than any of us.

Anna Faris, though, is an easier choice for an easier role. Tabby is dumb as a sack of bricks, and in the Scary Movies we've seen Faris is very very good at being dumb. There's more to it, like every nuance of Tabby's entire being screams Cindy Campbell, from the top of her bleached tops to the roots of her superhero alias. (She doesn't use one because she can't think of a good one.) (Or maybe because she can't remember it.) There's a core of brutality to her, but I like to think she's not really aware of the explosive broccoli murders she commits. There's no killer instinct behind it, just the innocent breathless wide-eyed enthusiasm of a five year old on a constant caffeine high.

And the choice of Angelina Jolie is even simpler. Who better to play a self-aware parody of Lara Croft than Lara Croft, now that we're done laughing at the games and the movies and the comics? The stiffer and more unnatural her body language, the more obvious her cosmetic surgery, the more fake and grating her British accent, the better.

I think I have trouble taking either Elsa or Angelina seriously.

The Simon Pegg/ Nick Frost team may or may not add a dimension of camraderie between Aaron and the Captain, depending on who writes or directs the movie. I thought of them separate from each other myself. Aaron is, of course, funny in a tragic way, pretending to hate humans as a robot pride-thing when he really doesn't feel any different from us than Warren Ellis does; all the painful and smelly things happen to him and we could really feel for him, except he also happens to be the most capable, cool, wisecracking and coldly manipulative guy around. He's everything, in a shocking package of contradiction, and he does everything better than everyone and steals the hearts of the audience, and I can think of no one who perfectly embodies all this than Simon Pegg. Heck, just watch the free-for-all fake firefight in Spaced and tell me Pegg isn't doing a greenscreen fight scene as Aaron.

And as for Nick Frost, I simply thought "Why shouldn't The Captain be a lethargic lardass?" The heroic build may work in a comic, but we've had Batman's nipple armor to teach us how oddly some things translate to the screen. Cap was a dirt poor, semi-literate, unshaved, alcoholic caveman from Bronx who was given cosmic powers by space aliens and then beat them up, puked on them and robbed them; Nick Frost (or the one character he tends to play, at least) would fit these shoes so hard Nike would cry.

And before you think me unkind, remember this is the guy who gets to do unspeakable things to Dormammu with a toilet brush like a big damn hero.

Christian Bale, then, has the difficult job of portraying a Nick Fury in the middle of a complete nervous breakdown - the most powerful man in the world given an unlimited arsenal of surrealistic weapons system, a flying submarine, a life after death and a blank charter to blow up large parts of the country in the war for freedom, financed by the terrorists. So really he'd just have to reprise his role as Batman.

No but seriously, the throaty growling, the forceful movements, the self-assured authority, I can easily see this working. The key element to Dirk Anger I think is the desperate clinging to the transparent delusion that the things he does are right and good; that even injecting himself with liquefied fluffy little birdies is just and necessary. He knows how insane he must be to believe this, but he needs to believe it anyway. And Bale can  obviously do manic obsession. Well, it could work.

Stephen Colbert, meanwhile, has more experience than anyone in the role of an ancient fossil living past his time, who hates people more than anything. Yes, I'd cast him as Devil Dinosaur just as a joke at the expense of the US Republicans.

And Neil Patrick Harris, who is better than you at everything, shall be given a chance to shine as brightly as he ever can by playing roughly five hundred different characters who laugh, cry, sing, love, die and shoot stuff with more heart than anyone would have thought broccoli clone cannon fodder ever had. The Beyond Corporation's "human resources" include broccolimen of all kinds, from the slick corporate execs to the quirky miniboss squads to the lowly grunts with the machineguns. I imagine them all looking and speaking exactly the same, enough that it makes sense to have one actor play them, but with some little differences in their learned mannerisms and vocabulary and such that that one actor would have to be the best. Also this best actor would have to be able to sing. Neil Patrick Harris is basically the only choice.

And the small but crucial part of narrating the self-aware narration could only be self-aware enough to be funny if done by Jack Black playing Jack Black trying to be funny. Obviously.