Movies based on comic books, which are now called graphic novels, are so common as to be something of a genre of their own, with an increasingly formulaic set of common conventions and devices. These stylistic innovations have invigorated the motion picture industry to a notable extent—as in the Spider-Man and X-Men series and individual pictures such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

These innovations come with a price, however, and nobody but Sam Raimi, director of the series, seems able to solve the problem.

Two recent films exemplify the situation.

300 is certainly watchable and interesting, though I wasn’t as impressed by its historical accuracy as the historian cited by USA TOday was. 300 makes it look as though the Spartans held off the Persians by themselves, whereas they actually led an army of well over a thousand Greeks, although even that total was vastly outnumbered by the Persians. The film was based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller and strongly bears the stamp of Miller’s anti-authority and anti-clerical stances so evident in his works. The story is a very strong one, however, and the film captures the narrative drive of it quite well.

But what it bears most strongly in imitation of the graphic novel is its visual style. Critics love the film because its visuals are quite stunning. They’re very impressive, and some of them are reminiscent of the painterly compositions of great older films such as Adventures of Robin Hood, Gone with the Wind, and Lawrence of Arabia.

Unlike those films, however, 300 makes it difficult for viewers to identify with and hence sympathize strongly with the characters in the film. And that is not because of the narrative being set in ancient Greece, etc. We can easily comprehend and sympathize with the Spartans’ situation as thorough underdogs vastly outnumbered by their enemies.

No, it is for a far simpler and more fundamental reason: we cannot see the characters’ faces very well. Human beings take their cues from facial expressions and vocal inflections of amazing variety and subtlety, and both of these are relatively difficult to discern in 300. The faces are often seen in shadow or otherwise obscured, with most attention lavished on the other visual elements. The subtleties of the voices are often lost in the din of sound effects, and even when the voices are in the foreground we cannot make much of them because they are too low in the sound mix, as the filmmakers leave the volume way down during these scenes, apparently to create a greater contrast for the eardrum-splitting battle scenes.

All of these things reduce a film’s human qualities, distance the audience from the story, and do so quite unnecessarily.

Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City took this stylized, comic-book approach about as far as it can go, and although its visual presentation is impressive, the film is not nearly as involving as most of Rodriguez’s others, even his movies intended for children.

Ghost Rider is likewise based on a graphic novel, but Nicolas Cage and the rest of the crew supply a good many scenes in which we can better see the characters’ faces and hear their voices, and hence makes the characters’ choices much more real to us. This is all to the good, for the film deals with the central theme of choice, specifically regarding the issue of Christian salvation.

Executive producer and lead actor Cage and his associates fill the film with Christian themes and images, and the story, while fanciful and bizarre, hews closely enough to these themes and the characters’ humanity to involve viewers in the protagonist’s situation and enable us to sympathize with him as he deals with the frightful consequences of a choice he never really made, to sell his soul to the Devil.

Although Cage’s face in this film looks even more simian than usual, his expressions and vocal inflections are much clearer than those in 300. In this way the film takes a far less understandable situation than is depicted in 300 and makes it possible for the audience to feel some investment in it. As exemplified by Raimi’s Spider-Man films, it is the human qualities that make these comic book films truly effective, and one hopes that the comic-book film style will evolve to include a greater allowance for facial expressions and vocal inflections.

These are things that the movies do better than other art forms, and it is a mistake to shove them aside.