zslane

The first Suicide Squad movie was, at least in my view, an exercise in lazy, uninspired, amateurish writing. The second one was outright unpleasant to sit through; I was so utterly put off by the beach landing and subsequent jungle infiltration scenes that I hated myself for watching even that much.

I'm sure it is to those who enjoy its style of storytelling. I am not among them, however.

Verhoeven's movie is about as accurate an adaptation of Heinlein's book as Cameron's Aliens movie is. That is to say they all have "marines" fighting aggressive aliens with a hive-like organization. And that's pretty much it. A (more) faithful adaptation of the book--and I'm not just talking about the powered armor, but also the political and social philosophy behind it all--would have far more interesting things to say and questions to pose (to audiences) than Verhoeven's movie, IMO. But somebody would have to pry the IP rights from Sony's death grip first.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer carried this problem into the tv space in the late 1990s. Every season had to have a bigger bad with the whole world in jeopardy again. It became a joke between the characters that they actually had to use the plural of apocalypse. It probably helped that the show was part comedy and that you weren't expected to take it all that seriously in the first place. Agents of SHIELD followed in these footsteps for sure. But the Netflix Marvel shows did not, and I think there was something really refreshing about that. As for Peacemaker, well, I couldn't get past the first 20 or so minutes of Gunn's Suicide Squad movie, so Cena's show will pretty much sit at the bottom of my tv watching priority list. Somewhere below catching up on the third seasons of Titans and Doom Patrol, neither of which I intend to watch at all, so there you go.

My preferred edition is what I call 4e+. It is 4e with stuff cherry picked from 5eR.

Apparently early test screenings of Dr. Strange 2 did not fare well. Between that and the No Way Home stuff, there was a desperate need to retool that movie a bit.

I thought the 6e Vehicle core book was mostly written, and just needed editing, layout, and funds to publish. Am I wrong about that?

The amount of work performed for a given amount of input energy is dependent on many factors, including the efficiency of the mechanism doing the work. A robot is going to achieve a different result than a human or a pack animal. A low-efficiency engine will do a lot less work than a high-efficiency engine. There is no single conversion metric that would work realistically for all applications and contexts.

Would still love to see the 6e Vehicles core book that never got published.

Andrew Garfield wasn't very convincing; we all knew he was lying. Is that really an Oscar-worthy performance, even in meme-space?

Well, we know that Michael Keaton's Batman is training his replacement, Batgirl, in Flashpoint; sort of a riff on Batman Beyond. And we also know that a Latino Supergirl has been cast, though I'm not sure where she is supposed to first appear. After all, we're not going to see Cavill or Affleck in their roles ever again, so they have to fill the "Supes" and "Bats" roles with other actors in any event. Mat Reeve's Batman isn't part of any cinematic universe, and Gadot's Wonder Woman is on the verge of irrelevance. That leaves Aquaman and the Flash barely holding what remains of the so-called DCEU together, so I'm not even sure there is a cinematic universe left to decanonize.

I've never heard of that novel. Nor, do I suspect, has anyone else who watches stuff like The Witcher. And while I appreciate that little bit of literary history, I don't think it is even remotely comparable to how close Geralt of Rivia is to Elric of Melnibone.

An Elric series would look too much like a rip-off of The Witcher even though in reality it is the other way around. The Witcher got there first with its Elric clone and so it is unlikely we'll see the original White Wolf on tv (or in movies) any time soon.

I have to believe that due to the success of The Witcher on Netflix, we'll never see Elric become a movie or streaming series franchise. Which is a darn shame.

Also, isn't Superman referenced in the dialog of Eternals? I'm pretty sure that the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies are considered MCU canon. However, even though Charlie and Vincent are being brought over to the MCU from Netflix, I don't believe that any of the events of the Netflix shows are considered MCU canon. As far as I'm aware, we don't have any unambiguous statements about these issues of canonicity from Kevin Feige, but this is what I get from reading between all the lines of what he has said (and done) over the years.

The recent Doctor Strange 2 teaser shows the MCU version of America Chavez. Unfortunately, she's not the America Chavez any comic book reader will recognize. The MCU version is too young, too fully clothed, and apparently in need of protecting. And given her age, it strikes me as highly unlikely that she will be portrayed as a lesbian, as in the comics. In my view, she is America Chavez in name--and possibly power set--only. Oh, they did get the denim jacket right at least.

You have to bear in mind that "the story" I refer to (in the first book) is many hundreds of pages long, with a great many plot branches that the show mashes together--or ignores entirely--into the space of only a few episodes. The show may be very poor at pacing each episode's content such that it feels slow and boring, but compared to the length and breadth of the original material it is based on, the show is positively blazing through the book's events with only a passing resemblance to the original plot.

I think my biggest issue with this Wheel of Time show is that they are in too much of a rush to get through the story, collapsing entire sections of the first book into "plot soup" that barely resembles the source material. Too much is cut out or drastically changed to call it a satisfying adaptation, in my view.

Spider-Man: No Way Home ticket pre-sales suggest that audiences are anything but tired of superhero movies.

Alternate timelines were used heavily in the plot structure of Avengers: Endgame. The Ancient One even had a fancy graphics presentation to explain it.

It was at first. But by the end of season 2 it was pretty clear that the Cylons, like the showrunners, did not really have a plan after all. The problem wasn't that the new tone and direction was a mistake, or even poorly executed. The problem was that they didn't know where to take it after the initial premise had played out. Lost suffered similarly, IMO, though it nevertheless remained a pop culture sensation right up to the bitter end.

I agree that it would have made DS9 feel like a very different kind of Star Trek show. For a bit. But I feel that is what the franchise needed. It had so thoroughly departed from most of the things that made the original series so great (in my eyes) that it sorely needed an overhaul from the pabulum that was Next Generation. Shows like Star Trek Discovery are what you get when you are desperate enough to dare to take the franchise in a different direction, but have no clue how to do it. A season of DS9 where a misguided faction within the Federation forged an alliance with the Dominion, only to find out how horrible that decision was and then had fight to reverse the consequences of that decision (with the help of Our Heroes, of course) would have been gripping to watch, at least for me. It would have been kinda like taking the OS "Mirror, Mirror" episode (which is a fan favorite, and for good reason) and extending into a season-long story arc. You talk about departures from basic themes as if that is universally bad or necessarily permanent. The 2004 Battlestar Galactica series was quite different in tone and themes from the original, but was arguably superior to it in nearly every way thanks to those differences. DS9 was presented as the "darker Star Trek" series pretty much from the first episode, and by the end of the first season, I think audiences were ready for some new ideas, new themes, and a journey though darkness that would make the re-emergence into the light that much more satisfying. In the hands of the right people, the creative potential of the "evil Federation" scenario could have been gloriously realized, while in the hands of Berman, Piller, and everyone who thinks just like them, those ideas are viewed as wrong-minded and antithetical to Star Trek.

Yeah, I remember a standout DS9 episode (end of season 1, I think?) that turned out to be a total fake-out and completely discarded what I thought was a fantastic premise (the Federation turning heel and allying with the Dominion). That proved to me that Berman and Piller had no intention whatsoever of being innovative and ground-breaking with the franchise, and instead preferred to play it safe (and boring) as usual. Babylon 5, on the other hand, followed a far more ambitious creative vision and was superior for it, even if it stumbled here and there in the execution. If B5 had been a high-budget streaming series, I think it would have become more iconic and less of a niche cult classic. Interestingly, that is exactly what it sounds like is happening with it now.