HERO OF THE WEEK: DOMINO (Marvel)Real Name: Neena Thurman
First Appearance: X-Force #8 (March, 1992)
Fight Club Ranking: #299
Featured Fights:
- vs IRON MAN: Contest of Champions II #1 (Sep 1999)
The world was shown the first official glimpse of Josh Brolin as Cable last week, and for the most part, it was pretty good! We've already featured Cable as Hero of the Week a few months ago, though, so we double-back to another character set to appear in 2018's Deadpool sequel: Domino.
FOX's early entry into the superhero movie biz with 2000's X-Men meant they had a significant aesthetic deficit moving into the next decade. Spider-man's vivid, iconic palette had arguably outclassed them as a contemporary. 2008's Iron Man proved definitively that four-colour characters could come to life without missing a beat. Matrix black: a thing of the past.
They finally caught-up in a big way with 2011's franchise peak X-Men: First Class, but in terms of costume design, there have been few triumphs in superhero movies as grand and literal as Deadpool!
The accuracy of the Ryan Reynolds worn design was so literal, it was an easy sales point, but it makes everything inaccurate around it a fresh disappointment. Brolin's Cable risks veering into the generic, off-the-shelf designs of earlier X-films, but it's Zazie Beetz as Domino who drops the ball.
Ironically, this is one time an X-Men movie might've been better off adopting a simple black bodysuit. There's a risk it might cause confusion with earlier uniforms of the cinematic X-Men, but it's a small risk. Especially if they explored with a minimalist design and less textured materials.
Although Beetz will retain the character's trademark eye-spot, its been tonally inverted to be a white spot on unaltered skin tone. Which really robs the character of her most defining attribute: deathly chalk white skin with a black spot.
Beetz may look good -- but she doesn't look like Domino in a movie where the lead character has been sold on accuracy. The design sensibility of this Domino seems more in keeping with X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Brolin gets away looking a little more like something out of one of the later X-Men sequels, like Days of Future Past. None of the glorious excesses of the comics, but not terrible.
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