The film Sin City is based upon a comic and was directed by Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller and the guest director Quentin Terentino who is a good friend of Robert Rodriguez.
A very famous film by Robert Rodriguez is El Mariachi. The budget for this film was only 7000$ and it was filmed in 2 weeks as far as I know. Another well know film made by him is From Dusk Till Dawn which he also made together with Quentin Terentino. The most time his films are full of action, brutality and corruption. But he also directed a comedy for children called Spy Kids.
Frank Miller is a writer, artist and the inventor of Sin City. He is also well known for a lot of comics. For example he was involved in Daredevil and Batman. He did not invent them but he tried to redefine those characters and he also wrote scripts for Robo Cop 2 & 3. After this he promised not to do any deals with Hollywood again because they hindered him a lot when he wrote the scripts for both films. He only changed his opinion because Robert Rodriguez convinced him to make a film adaptation of Sin City.
Another aspect to mention is that there are many famous actors in this film like Bruce Willis, Josh Hartnett, Jessica Alba and Elijah wood. By the way the directors also appear in the film playing unimportant roles.
Because Sin City is an adaptation of the comic with the same name the two directors were not able to film every episode. So they decided to convert four episodes into one film. The episodes are called Sin City (The Hard Goodbye), The Customer Is Always Right, The Big Fat Kill and The Yellow Bastard. But I should say that The Customer Is Always Right is only the prolog and the epilog and it is very short. The different stories are not directly connected with each other but sometimes the same persons occur during the stories.
Here is a summary of the main strands. I will not spoil any endings so that you have to watch the movie if you want to know them.
The Main Strands:
The Yellow Bastard:
The leading character of this strand is Officer Hartigan who seems to be the only cop that is not corrupt in the whole town. In the beginning he says that this is his last day before retirement and that he has to rescue the eleven year old Nancy Callahan who got kidnapped by a lunatic. After a few minutes you see that Hartigan has a heart condition and is probably going to die in a short time. Although he is very ill he is able to get the rapist who is the son of Senator Roark. So his partner Bob tries to convince him to ignore what Roark Junior has done and act as if nothing has happened. Even if Hartigan knows that it would be his end if he does not agree with Bob he decides to help Nancy and gets shot in the back by his partner.
In the next scene you see Hartigan lying in a hospital bed with the Senator standing in front of him. The senator tells him that he will pay for his heart surgery so that he can stay in prison for a long time and regret what he has done to his son because Hartigan shot into Roark Juniors privates. Hartigan gets convicted for raping Nancy Callahan although she tells the corrupt police that it was not Hartigan who kidnapped her.
So he gets arrested for eight years. During this time Nancy writes him a letter every week using a fake name. But he will only get out of prison if he confesses that he is the rapist. To make him do it Roark Junior (who is now called Creep because he looks like a monster because of side effects of medicines to make him potent again) gives him a cut off finger to make Hartigan think that he kidnapped Nancy again. When he gets out of prison he realizes that it was only a bluff and that Roark Junior only wants Hartigan to lead him to Nancy so that he can end what has began eight years before. The only thing I tell you about the end is that the last scene plays at the same place as a scene in the second strand.
Sin City (Hard To Say Goodbye):
This episodes starts with the main character Marv having sex with Goldie who is a high class prostitute. Goldie went with him because she knows that somebody wants kill her. So she chooses Marv to protect her because he is a strong giant. Marv is very happy because Goldie is the only person that ever gave something like love to him. But when he wakes up Goldie is lying dead right next to him. So Marv decides to seek and kill her murderer.
To find out who Goldie is and who could have killed her he visits the quarter where she worked and gets pieces of information about it. But he has to use violence to make people talk and he also gets attacked by hit-men who were hired by Goldies twin sister. She thinks that Marv killed her sister. But he explains everything to her to make her fight with him.
Marv finds out that also Patrick Henry Roark who is the cardinal, the brother of Senator Roark and the most powerful man in town is involved in the murders.
But he decides to kill the murderer first and to eliminate the cardinal later because he found out where the murderer lives. He goes there and gets beaten by the murderer who is called Kevin because he is to quiet and fast for Marv. He imprisons him in his cellar where Marv meets his parole officier. She tells him that Kevin is a cannibal and that they have to get out of the cellar. Marve finds a way out and decides to come back. And this time he knows how to kill Kevin.
The Big Fat Kill:
In this strand Shelly gets threatened by his ex-boyfriend who is standing in front of the door with a few friends. But her new boyfriend called Dwight is also in her apartment and tells her to let Jack Rafferty in. He convinces Jack that it is better to leave with using some violence.
So Jack goes but Dwight decides that it is better to stop him because he is drunk and might kill someone. He follows him to the red light district. After arriving there Jack tries to force a prostitute into his car. But it is not Dwight who stops him. It is Mikho who is a prostitute. But the prostitutes are like valkyries. The prostitutes made a deal with the cops. The cops get some profit and free entertainment and therefore the prostitues can do whatever they want in there quarter and protect it from criminals on there own.
But after Mikho killed Jack they notice that he is a cop. That means that they have to hide the corpse somewhere where nobody would find it because it would start a war if the policemen find out that Mikho killed a cop. Dwight decides to do it because the head of the prostitutes is his former girlfriend. But on his way to the place where he wants to hide the corpse he gets attacked by another gang which wants to reign the red light district. They try to get the head of the dead cop to prove that the prostitutes killed a cop because they hope that the police will make a deal with them too. Now they have to get the head back if they dont want the war to begin.
Stylistic Devices:
The directors did not only want the film to be based upon the comic. They also wanted it to look like the comic That means to make a comic with human actors. So the film is black/white like the comic excepting special things like Goldies golden hair or the skin of the creep (Roark Junior). That makes the film look very original because every person that is important has a different color at a different part of the body, clothes or somewhere else.
In the film they also use less tracking shots or zooms because static cams make it look more like comic. Aside from this you always here the thoughts of every person that is the center of the scene. That is used to replace the thought bubbles which you see in every comic.
My Opinion:
In my opinion the film does not have any philosophical value or message the author wants the viewer to notice. That means that the film does not have any real intention. The only thing in the film that caused me to think was that it often reflects reality because there is corruption everywhere. For example politicians can do everything they want without getting punished. They do not have to stick to their own rules. As you see there is a lot of double morality in the world of Sin City. For example the deputies of the clergy are involved in killing prostitutes because in their opinion it does not interest anybody if they are alive or not. The cardinal also says that they are not worth living. But a cardinal normally preaches that every human being is made by god and that you not ought to kill.