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


Cassandra

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What I'm hoping is that Superman's next movie appearance will use his experience of, essentially, dying, as the excuse and basis to bring him back with heightened clarity of identity and purpose, so he can be more like the the movie Captain America we've gotten recently, and thus more like the Superman we all know.

 

As much as I despise reboots, the SUperman universe really, really needs one. They should pretend the last 3 movies were just some crappy what if universe and restart.

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As much as I despise reboots, the SUperman universe really, really needs one. They should pretend the last 3 movies were just some crappy what if universe and restart.

 

The idea you quoted really isn't bad though.  He could even have a costume change.  His Kryptonian suit was all messed up from the battle with Doomsday, so he gets a new, brighter costume.  He wakes up with a renewed sense of purpose in life.  I mean, Batman seems to have calmed the hell down since the first part of the movie.  "Oh yeah, maybe I shouldn't kill people..."

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As much as I despise reboots, the SUperman universe really, really needs one. They should pretend the last 3 movies were just some crappy what if universe and restart.

 

 

heh.  And while I used to love continuity, the way it now twists and distorts movies gives me the heebie-jeebies.

 

I want every movie to be a story in its own right, I dont want to have to see all of the movies to 'properly' understand what is going on and I dont want what happened in one particular movie to make another cool movie impossible to make.

 

Continuity drove me out of a monthly comic habit (to the gratitude of my wife and wallet) and it has just about done the same with superhero movies...

 

</GrumpyOldMan>

 

 

Doc

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After the Ang Lee Hulk... something, I really enjoyed the The Incredible Hulk. I thought that it worked. I often wonder how it would have turned out if Ruffalo had played the lead.

 

I liked Hulk.  I liked the focus on the characters yet with more than enough Hulk action (throwing tanks hundreds of feet, the super leaps).  I liked the comic book feel of it as well - very creatively shot.

 

Even the silliest components (hulked out poodles) could have been lifted directly from the source material.  Hulks opponents are always over the top or silly looking. Making him 15 feet tall sometimes also a little odd but not without precident in the comics (I remember Grey Hulk during the Spider Man as Captain Universe run being drawn to be easily 12 feet tall in a panel facing Spidey).

 

I liked the Incredible Hulk as well for what it was ... a standard fare action film.

 

My best Hulk movie would be somewhere in the middle - the character pieces and sheer power of Ang Lee's version of the character combined with the art consistency and appearance of the Incredible Hulk / Avengers Hulk.

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I can't say I liked the Ang Lee Hulk exactly, but I respected what it was trying to do. Peter David's run on Hulk was always my favorite take on the characters, so it was neat to see Lee explore some of those themes rather than just Hulk Smash All The Things. Even if it didn't quite come off. And I loved the way he used split screen. An interesting movie, but not necessarily a particularly good movie.

 

By contrast, I thought Incredible Hulk was a decent-enough movie, but not a particularly interesting one.

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heh.  And while I used to love continuity, the way it now twists and distorts movies gives me the heebie-jeebies.

 

I want every movie to be a story in its own right, I dont want to have to see all of the movies to 'properly' understand what is going on and I dont want what happened in one particular movie to make another cool movie impossible to make.

 

Continuity drove me out of a monthly comic habit (to the gratitude of my wife and wallet) and it has just about done the same with superhero movies...

 

</GrumpyOldMan>

 

 

Doc

 

Continuity should be a bonus for viewers/readers, not a requirement to understand what is happening.

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Come on man, they're already struggling to write a decent story that doesn't involve Hydra brainwashing, now you want standalone stories that also fit in an arc? ;)

 

Who says I want originality??  There are scads of excellent stories in a multitude of comic books, written by folk who understand (and love) the caracters and comic book tropes, begging to be adapted for a different medium....

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Suicide Squad shows why Marvel’s movie universe works and DC’s does not

http://www.vox.com/2016/8/10/12389740/suicide-squad-dc-movie-universe-problems

 

...In other words, these movies [DCEU] are literally driven by fear and terror of superheroes.

 

That echoes some of my reaction to BvS. On BvS I liked it overall but despised the Rand & Nietzsche elements/tropes.

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I liked Hulk by Ang Lee too, it was a better film - in terms of film making - than the Incredible Hulk which was more just basic superhero fare.  I didn't care for the hulk dogs and the weird shots of lichen spliced in for no apparent reason, but there was a lot right about Ang Lee's version.  People really hated it though.

 

I will give the second Hulk film this though: great job with the Abomination story arc.  It would be good to see him come back, I agree.

 

The problems with having Superman come back all nice and good and stuff from the dead are manifold.  

 

First, he's been raised to fear and despise human beings, not love and respect and protect them.  He didn't get country home spun values from his Ma and Pa Kent, he got paranoia and weirdness.  So there's no grounding for him to be a better person, other than 'well he died so now he's nice'

Second, he's been a marauding, city-leveling monster alien whose every fight ends up destroying a billion dollars worth of property and causing massive casualties.  That's his reputation, that's his background.  After 10 or so movies of him being good guy leader who always does right, maybe he can erase that, but leader of the Justice League right away? Not so much. He has no moral leadership, he has no strength of character.  In his first really big fight he murdered his opponent to save people apparently so retarded they couldn't walk slowly away from the laser beam.

Third, the guys in charge of the DCU don't want bright, heroic Superman.  They're fans of their work.  They don't like Superman at all, they like their movie version of kickass marauding alien Superman who breaks buildings in half.  But then a reboot would be by the same idiots so that doesn't really matter.

 

Continuity should be a bonus for viewers/readers, not a requirement to understand what is happening.

 

Yes, this is a key that nobody apparently gets.  Its part of the fun, a feature.  I could read Spider-Man in the 80s without having read every issue before.  They'd recap something in a panel or 2 or just a little *note at the bottom of a panel if needed, and that was enough.

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I can only say again, Suicide Squad is not the horrible movie you keep hearing it is. It is very much a Suicide Squad movie. I keep having this "what do people expect?" thought in my head. Everytime I read a review/downfall of WB/DC that talks about SS being another in their line of bad movies, it annoys the hell out of me. SS is very close to on a level with Guardians in the sense of unknown characters in a movie that actually works for them.

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Well, I assume that the folks who witnessed severe tonal inconsistency aren't just making that up. Which means that everyone else is either just tone deaf, so to speak, or don't care about such things. Which review one takes to heart very much depends on which group one falls into, I imagine.

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Yesterday a friend passes this tweet on to me with the comment "very interesting":

 

Zac Cichy: Fan theory: Snyder's WATCHMEN will eventually be retroactively named the first in the DCEU film lineup.

 

My reply back to my friend:

 

Not really. But helpful in identifying why the DCEU is faltering in comparison to MCU. DCEU is supposed to be a genre series featuring heroism and Watchman is a deconstruction of that genre (so thesis and antithesis). Thus in a warped way, Zac is right, the DCEU is a sequel to Snyder's Watchmen -- which is to say the antithesis (deconstruction) of what it should be.

 

 

Later clarified to my friend that "not really" was directed at his "very interesting". 

 

In other words, DC hired the guy who deconstructed the comics genre and used this film a model for the DCEU—Hope, optimism and heroism are replaced with fear, nihilism and pessimism. 

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The DCEU is in the tradition of every super/natural/hero movie or tv show in recent years (and there are many) that stuffs the hero into the narrative box of "you must hide yourself and your powers because the government (and the world) will hunt you down, imprison you, experiment on you, and then turn you into a mindless weapon under their control, and will kill everyone you love if you don't comply." Our heroes aren't allowed to be heroes without fear, paranoia, and cynical pessimism hovering over them their entire lives.

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I agree with Lord Liaden. Superhero comics are, or were, primarily vehicles for wish fulfilment. Giving us stories of heroes who fight for justice and law and what is right, without irony or cynicism or moral ambiguity.

 

But then culturally toxic events like the Viet Nam war and 9/11 made traditional superhero storytelling unhip and "irrelevant". For many today, superhero stories aren't aspirational, they are cautionary tales of how power corrupts, even for the the Good Guys.

 

I'm grateful that the MCU unapologetically delivers a (comparatively) brighter view of superheroes, while the DCEU intransigently wades into grimdark waters with perverse relish.

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In general I agree, but I really think it's a bit more specific to the character in question.  Batman is unusually well suited to grimdark, though it's not a requirement.  Indeed you'd have to dial it back a notch if he was working with Superman.  Supes, of course, is (or ought to be) almost exactly the opposite, a superior godlike being constrained only by American values and occasional Kryptonite.  He has to be a goody two shoes or his character doesn't work.  This is what the MCU realizes--the story is driven by the inevitable conflicts between the characters, but those conflicts generally don't overcome the basic optimism and goodness that they all share.  The DCU's fundamental problem is that they're getting the characters' personalities wrong, and the personalities are what's supposed to drive the plot, so the plot is all wrong too. 

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I find wish fulfillment to often become ugly without the need for deconstruction. That said, the darkness of Watchmen(the comic) was extremely well done and had a point. In the end, the grimdark of many comic book movies is more akin to Spawn(the comic or the movie), more about the style of the darkness, but empty of anything else.

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