DC Movies- if at first you don't succeed...

[Greywind]

There's Suicide Squad and soon to be The Suicide Squad.

[mattingly]

I'm still hoping for Suicide Squid.

 

[Greywind]

Wasn't that the name of squid that tangled with the Nautilus in 20000 Leagues Under the Sea?

[death tribble]

The only named one was the Despair Squid in Red Dwarf

[zslane]

Leto's Joker is IMO the most "Elseworlds" of all the cinematic Jokers. For me, Elseworlds stories/characters are only one tiny step above fan creations in terms of legitimacy within the canon. They may be entertaining in their own way, but they aren't "the real thing" in my view.

[Sundog]

I kinda disagree. The Joker, even in the comics, has been one of the most moldable, changeable characters in all of mainstream comics history. From psychopathic mass murderer to ineffective clown, and everything in between.

Leto was trying a "street joker", as opposed to Nicholson's "mob joker" or Ledger's agent of chaos. Or even Romero's anything-for-a-laugh japester. And he could have pulled it off - if half of his character development hadn't wound up on the floor of the butchering room. I think it was as valid as any other screen portrayal of the character.

 

[Spence]

5 hours ago, zslane said:

Leto's Joker is IMO the most "Elseworlds" of all the cinematic Jokers. For me, Elseworlds stories/characters are only one tiny step above fan creations in terms of legitimacy within the canon. They may be entertaining in their own way, but they aren't "the real thing" in my view.

 

Bingo.  Though I was never able to make it through any of the weird nevermind remember any of their titles. 

[Spence]

3 hours ago, Sundog said:

I think it was as valid as any other screen portrayal of the character.

 

And that is a great thing.

Everyone's opinion about what they like is equally valid. 

Because it is their personal opinion of what they personally like

[zslane]

22 hours ago, Sundog said:

The Joker, even in the comics, has been one of the most moldable, changeable characters in all of mainstream comics history.

 

Sure, but this whiplash-like variation in his characterization is a relatively modern phenomenon, representing in my judgment an inability on the part of DC to maintain readership without constantly thrusting out a new hot take on the character every few months. More gimmick than organic character development, these takes on the character feel more like random experiments than natural progressions of the original character concept to me.

 

In part this is a natural consequence of having so many writers put in charge of writing stories involving the Joker. However, the fact that the Joker has virtually no core identity anymore, apart from his name and arch-nemesis status to Batman, is a failure of editorial leadership over at DC in the last couple of decades, in my view. Much like there has been zero leadership taking charge of the DCEU, and look at the hot mess that turned out to be.

[Spence]

52 minutes ago, zslane said:

failure of editorial leadership over at DC in the last couple of decades, in my view.

 

The only statement I'd quibble over...

It implies that "editorial leadership" has even existed at DC in the last 20-30 years.

 

[Starlord]

It starts with the writing.  Leto was given crappy dialogue that ruminated within the confines of a crappy movie.  His portrayal never stood a chance anyway. 

[Starlord]

Well, this looked good.

 

 

[Bazza]

That's more hilarious than seriousness. 

 

 

[Bazza]

 

 

 

 

[Bazza]

 

 

 

[Bazza]

 

I still like Ben Affleck as Bruce/Batman. 

 

 

[Bazza]

 

 

 

[archer]

3 hours ago, Bazza said:

 

 

 

 

Suicide Squad 2 has 18 members if you include Amanda Waller. 

 

Somehow I expect them to whittle that down like Deadpool did with his team in Deadpool 2.

[Spence]

The Batman... ?
The scenes with the Bat looked like they had potential.  I hope the kid with the "I don't take showers" vibe isn't supposed to be Bruce.  Except for Batman in costume, I wasn't really able to ID any of the characters except maybe Gorden.  

 

Black Adam.
Looks like it may be interesting.  Is it a period piece?  They say 5000 years but all the shots are not now.

 

Suicide Squad
SS1 was crap
SS2 was craptacular crap
With the entire trailer being people praising boom boom it doesn't look good.

 

Wonder Woman 1984.
I really enjoyed the first movie and all the WW appearances in the other shows, no matter how those movies under performed.  
But I really hope that out of the MANY great WW story arcs they didn't pick yet again the "hero is branded the villain and hunted buy everybody" one again.  Really high hopes that I bet will lead to major disappointment.

[archer]

WW84 - The movie clips were good. Trevor having trouble adjusting to "modern" times. Good choice of villains. Passable (perhaps good) actor choice for at least one of the villains, not at all familiar with the other actor.

 

Suicide Squad 2 looks like a straight up war movie (Like Private Ryan on D-Day) and was hyped as such. Not the environment where I'd want to send in a lot of non-bulletproof supers so I'm wondering what the justification is for using the team (reducing prison population not being a valid motivation for using the Suicide Squad in the DC universe).

 

Black Adam looked good but more concept art was seen than clips. I didn't like the proposed Atom Smasher costume which looked like a straight up comics "The Atom" (Ray Palmer) blue and red bodysuit. With both The Adam and Superman already being blue/red bodysuits, I think they'd be better off going with one of the other Atom Smasher costumes which had either yellow or black panels. But very happy they're introducing Atom Smasher. That makes me suspect the storyline is that they'll be freeing Khandaq in some form or another. They strongly hinted that Black Adam is going to become a major player in the DCU who other supers will be unable to ignore.

 

"The Batman" movie looked tedious and boring. I don't want to see another Batman origin story which the director and producer keep trying to tell me isn't a Batman origin story because they don't start it EXACTLY at the death of Bruce's parents but rather slightly afterward. I can't imagine any circumstances where they could convince me to leave my couch and go to the theater to see the movie which they pitched me in their very long presentation.

 

 

DC showed previews of two games which will be out in 2021.

 

"Suicide Squad assigned to kill the Justice League". Looked exciting with good possibilities. An underpowered 4 person Suicide Squad team of Harley Quinn, Deadshot, King Shark, and Captain Boomerang (all DCU versions) having to take on a Justice League which has apparently gone rogue. Don't know exactly which JLA members the Squad will have to take on but most Justice Leaguers grossly out-power that Squad team. The game can play as a solo game with three bot players or up to 4 people playing co-op. Don't know which platforms are supported but the visuals were beautiful and the character movements didn't seem stilted like a typical console game.

 

"Batman Died, The Game". Batman kicks the bucket, blows up the Batcave by remote detonation for some unknown reason even though his secret ID hadn't been revealed, and in a video will asks several of his former partners to protect Gotham for him (Red Hood, Robin, Nightwing, and Bat-Girl, I think). Um, I'm not trying to give the idea that blowing up the Bat-Cave is some mystery to be solved, it's just something Batman did because the designers of the game apparently didn't want to give the players access to the Bat-Cave. Got to see some of the early part of the game from a pre-alpha playtest. It looked like the gameplay was just a railroad to get the player from point A to point B but that could have been because it was tutorial footage or something.  Definitely looked like a console game rather than something for a PC. The visuals were very good for a console game.

1 hour ago, Spence said:

The Batman... ?
The scenes with the Bat looked like they had potential.  I hope the kid with the "I don't take showers" vibe isn't supposed to be Bruce.  Except for Batman in costume, I wasn't really able to ID any of the characters except maybe Gorden.  

 

 

I think that the kid who looks like a meth addict and who looked scrawier than the DCU Flash really IS supposed to be the Batman of this movie from what I could see.

[death tribble]

For the Batman movie we have Jeffrey Wright as Commissioner Gordon. This is a good sign. We clearly see Catwoman but we have The Penguin and The Riddler in the cast played by Colin Farrell and Paul Dano respectively. Dano did strike me as a one note actor after There Will be Blood and Cowboys vs Aliens. However I then saw his turn in War and Peace so this should be ok. Colin on the other hand has been in good films and tripe. It's 50/50 how this will go.

 

For Wonder Woman 84 we have the Mandalorian as Maxwell Lord. Kristen Wiig is an odd choice for the Cheetah so again we'll see. But the visuals look really good for this.

 

For The Suicide Squad we can have a game of who is going to die. Not Margot Robbie obviously. And I don't think that Rick Flagg, Captain Boomerang and Bloodsport will perish. However in the cast are Polka Dot Man, The Thinker and The Weasel so don't expect all of these to survive especially if you are aware of Suicide Squad history. John Cena is playing The Peacemaker so I think he'll live as well.

[Bazza]

1 hour ago, death tribble said:

For the Batman movie we have Jeffrey Wright as Commissioner Gordon. This is a good sign. We clearly see Catwoman but we have The Penguin and The Riddler in the cast played by Colin Farrell and Paul Dano respectively. Dano did strike me as a one note actor after There Will be Blood and Cowboys vs Aliens. However I then saw his turn in War and Peace so this should be ok. Colin on the other hand has been in good films and tripe. It's 50/50 how this will go.

 

For Wonder Woman 84 we have the Mandalorian as Maxwell Lord. Kristen Wiig is an odd choice for the Cheetah so again we'll see. But the visuals look really good for this.

 

For The Suicide Squad we can have a game of who is going to die. Not Margot Robbie obviously. And I don't think that Rick Flagg, Captain Boomerang and Bloodsport will perish. However in the cast are Polka Dot Man, The Thinker and The Weasel so don't expect all of these to survive especially if you are aware of Suicide Squad history. John Cena is playing The Peacemaker so I think he'll live as well.

 

Dano was good in Love & Mercy. 

[Grailknight]

7 hours ago, Spence said:

The Batman... ?
The scenes with the Bat looked like they had potential.  I hope the kid with the "I don't take showers" vibe isn't supposed to be Bruce.  Except for Batman in costume, I wasn't really able to ID any of the characters except maybe Gorden.  

 

Black Adam.
Looks like it may be interesting.  Is it a period piece?  They say 5000 years but all the shots are not now.

 

Suicide Squad
SS1 was crap
SS2 was craptacular crap
With the entire trailer being people praising boom boom it doesn't look good.

 

Wonder Woman 1984.
I really enjoyed the first movie and all the WW appearances in the other shows, no matter how those movies under performed.  
But I really hope that out of the MANY great WW story arcs they didn't pick yet again the "hero is branded the villain and hunted buy everybody" one again.  Really high hopes that I bet will lead to major disappointment.

 

The Wonder Woman story seems to be an adaptation on the White Magician arc in Perez's reboot. Maxwell Lord seems to be morphed into the role and I think that Steve Trevor will end up being the thing Diana wishes for most in the world and not a real boy.

[Spence]

14 minutes ago, Grailknight said:

 

The Wonder Woman story seems to be an adaptation on the White Magician arc in Perez's reboot. Maxwell Lord seems to be morphed into the role and I think that Steve Trevor will end up being the thing Diana wishes for most in the world and not a real boy.

 

Thanks for the info. 

 

I really have no idea about the various "reboots".  I pretty much stopped reading comics when they started circling the rewrite/reboot/re-imagined toilet years ago.  Heck, maybe they will decide to make Wonder Woman a full modern conversion and have her go full murder-hobo

 

I'd like to see the quality we saw in the first movie carried on, but then, more I see the more I doubt it. 

[slikmar]

6 hours ago, archer said:

That makes me suspect the storyline is that they'll be freeing Khandaq in some form or another. They strongly hinted that Black Adam is going to become a major player in the DCU who other supers will be unable to ignore.

Wouldn't it be sad if DCU were the ones to create a viable "Doctor Doom" type villain.