Any fellow DCEU fans here?
Let me make clear that I love the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and I'm basically superhero genre film fan in general (or more broadly the entire fantasy-adventure umbrella including sci-fi, high fantasy, sword and sandal, etc.). I'm not into the whole MCU vs. DC Extended Universe fan war. I enjoy both cinematic universes.
However that said, I admit that I do have an affinity for the DCEU--and in particular what Zack Snyder has done with Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. I expect great things from Justice League as well. Basically, as I see it (this is actually formulated from interviews with Snyder, his wife, and screenwriter Chris Terrio) Snyder has placed superheroes in a world resembling the one we actually inhabit to explore what superhero mythology means to us today in our postmodern world versus in the less self-reflecting, simplistic world in which superheroes first arose (1938 through the 1960s, let's say). When one really grasps and appreciates this way of seeing the films, it is impressive as hell. But anyway, I'm mainly a fan of what Snyder has done when it comes to the DCEU. Although I have always also liked the DC Comics characters a little better since childhood also.
As for the other DCEU pictures... Suicide Squad would have been a brilliant movie with just one scene added at the end. (I can elaborate if anyone is interested.) As it stands it's meh story-wise although the characters are enjoyable to watch.
Wonder Woman... I do like it for what it is. But to be totally honest I feel it is overrated. Very good but not great.
I rate them as follows:
BvS - 9.75
MoS - 9.5
WW - 8.5
SS - 7.0
And to place this in context, here is my top 10 favorite superhero film list:
1. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
2. Man of Steel
3. Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2
4. Guardians of the Galaxy
5. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
6. Captain America: The First Avenger
7. Iron Man
8. Thor
9. Wonder Woman
10. X-Men: First Class
Anyway, please weigh in on your thoughts about the DCEU!
However that said, I admit that I do have an affinity for the DCEU--and in particular what Zack Snyder has done with Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. I expect great things from Justice League as well. Basically, as I see it (this is actually formulated from interviews with Snyder, his wife, and screenwriter Chris Terrio) Snyder has placed superheroes in a world resembling the one we actually inhabit to explore what superhero mythology means to us today in our postmodern world versus in the less self-reflecting, simplistic world in which superheroes first arose (1938 through the 1960s, let's say). When one really grasps and appreciates this way of seeing the films, it is impressive as hell. But anyway, I'm mainly a fan of what Snyder has done when it comes to the DCEU. Although I have always also liked the DC Comics characters a little better since childhood also.
As for the other DCEU pictures... Suicide Squad would have been a brilliant movie with just one scene added at the end. (I can elaborate if anyone is interested.) As it stands it's meh story-wise although the characters are enjoyable to watch.
Wonder Woman... I do like it for what it is. But to be totally honest I feel it is overrated. Very good but not great.
I rate them as follows:
BvS - 9.75
MoS - 9.5
WW - 8.5
SS - 7.0
And to place this in context, here is my top 10 favorite superhero film list:
1. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
2. Man of Steel
3. Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2
4. Guardians of the Galaxy
5. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
6. Captain America: The First Avenger
7. Iron Man
8. Thor
9. Wonder Woman
10. X-Men: First Class
Anyway, please weigh in on your thoughts about the DCEU!
Post edited by Lemernis on
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Comments
I may not be a real fan, but I do enjoy and appreciate both DCEU and MCU. If I ever wanted and had time to get into comics, I wouldn't know where to starts. With cinematics universes, all I have to do is to watch a movie once in a while to be up to date.
The Incredibles
Anyway, as a kid, I always felt the DC characters were too one-dimensional. And old. I couldn't relate.
Marvel, on the other hand, had many characters that were young and had to deal with young people problems on top of fighting super villains. I loved that.
Now that I haven't collected comics in 25 years, and my main superhero fix comes from films, I find the DC movies enjoyable. I really liked the Dark Knight reboots. I also really enjoyed Batman v. Superman and thought the Wonder Woman cameo was great.
I'm thrilled with the success of the Wonder Woman feature film. Anything to broaden the appeal of superheroes is a good thing for the genre.
Here's my top 10 list (leaving out The Incredibles to remain On Topic):
1. X-Men Days of Future Past
2. Deadpool
3. X-Men 2
4. Superman 2
5. Batman v. Superman
6. X-Men First Class
7. Dark Knight
8. Suicide Squad
9. Wonder Woman
10. Iron Man
But mostly because I find the concept of both superheroes and supervillains supersilly. Superi supermean, superthat "super" superprefix superalone supermakes supereverything superunseriously.
That said, I really enjoyed the Wonder Woman movie, but have low expectation for the Justice League movie, despite having some of my favorite characters, and possibly building up for my favorite bad guy. I don't buy Zac Snyder's vision, but understand completely why others might. What he does, he does very very well.
As for the recent DC reboot, that is trying match Marvel's dominance.....it's ok. I enjoyed both Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman. They both had problems. I don't much care for Zack Snyder as a director. I've heard Suicide Squad is fun, and that Wonder Woman is awesome (which doesn't surprise me based on her small role in Batman v. Superman). On balance, I probably am more into DC than Marvel at the moment just because it hasn't become overly saturated. Whatever I guess. And ANYTHING is better than Superman Returns, which is a piece of hot garbage I wish I could burn from my mind.
Filmmaking is art to me, and the director is an artist working in the medium of cinema. Zack Snyder, for example, is a trained painter (he graduated from art school as a young man). His style is distinctly "painterly." And he is also heavily into Joseph Campbell, consciously drawing from the 'hero's journey' by weaving together visual symbolism. He reminds me of Stanley Kubrick, actually, who is another director that powerfully uses visual imagery to create a kind of gestalt for the viewer.
In a lot of ways BvS is basically an arthouse film that Snyder subversively managed to release as a blockbuster. As one director said "the most expensive indie film ever made."
I think it's crucial to understand the director's vision as an artist for a film like BvS--which, let's not forget, is the dark middle film of a trilogy. Here are three salient quotes from Snyder that I feel sum up what he is doing with this trilogy of MoS, BvS, and JL: Here Snyder establishes that Superman is, in his films, representative of superhero mythology itself in this trilogy. This explains the deconstruction used in BvS. In the space of Snyder's lifetime he watched the cultural force of modernism give way to postmodernism. Modernism is basically like a Newtonian way of understanding truth and meaning. It is scientific and objective. There are absolute truths, and we can uncover them scientifically and all agree upon them. The original Superman character is born from such a cultural consciousness. Postmodernism is more like the physics of Einstein, which notes that the perception of reality is based on the relative position of the observer. This is more of multiverse type of understanding of truth in which are compelled to make an effort to understand how truth and meaning are constructed more relativistically, and to what end politically (whose agenda do society's 'great lies' serve?).
How can superheroes, which arose so innocently to reflect ideals about human character and virtue in a time when there was little self-reflection about what such symbols might mean, "legitimately" exist in this postmodern world in which we are constantly deconstructing myths? So essentially what we have with this trilogy is an examination of what it might look like if these superheroes actually existed in our real world today. And in turn how that reception by the world would shape the superheroes, and how they might choose to act.
This is the same premise of Watchmen, which at its heart poses the question 'would it actually be a good thing if superheroes existed in the real world?' In Watchmen the answer is a resounding no. But Snyder tells us that even though there is deconstruction going on in BvS, he intends to resolve that dramatic tension by reaffirming that we can indeed "love Superman" (i.e., all superheroes, or superhero mythology) in a more innocent way, and superheroes (as archetypes) do serve a sort of valid psychological purpose for us in this more confusing, complex world that we live in currently. So that's what I'm expecting from Justice League.
I mean, yes, perhaps I'm intellectualizing and overthinking it. And I can appreciate if all of this, if accurate, rubs others the wrong way. Best I can see, this trilogy by Snyder was certain to be divisive from the getgo. So if some hate it, that's okay. Sometimes art shakes up the status quo and makes us more aware in ways that aren't always happy. That can be unsettling. So be it.
I'm just making the case that we have a way of understanding what the director is attempting directly from his own interviews. And if you can sit back and appreciate it in that way, it is actually astonishingly good. But in contrast if you are approaching these films with a more traditional set of sensibilities and expectations about the genre, then of course you're probably going to be troubled by what you see.
Opening up this can of worms for how Batman has been portrayed in (live action) film...
My own personal feelings of course, this is just me. Just talking about the live action films (versus animated or LEGO):
As a child I remember being excited as could be the 1940s Batman movie serials even as primitive as it was. The costuming and visual effects were terrible, but it had a sort of crime drama and high adventure/swashbuckler vibe to it that came through despite all the shortcomings. It actually took the characters seriously.
I hate the 1966 Adam West Batman comedy/parody approach. They're making light of Batman! Gah! I can appreciate that others are able to allow that humor along with the more serious versions. But I just can't. I was a kid when that series hit the television airwaves and I was hugely let down by it. I guess I've never gotten over that early disappointment, lol!
Burton's Batman is still just too camp for my taste. I have almost zero tolerance for campiness in superhero films. Keaton was an interesting offbeat choice and he managed to pull it off surprisingly well. But it is hard for me to regard him as a "definitive" Batman. Keaton's a good actor so he made it work well enough, but for me that's about where my appreciation ends.
Schumacher's Batman is again waaaay too camp for me. Batman and Robin is just incredibly not what I want to see. Although Val Kilmer was actually not bad as Bruce Wayne in the first of those two films.
I really liked Nolan's/Bale's Bruce Wayne but was never a fan of that Batman (i.e., in costume). I didn't care for the suit (too modular). I don't like the guttural, overdrawn Bat-voice. And re: fight choreography there is an almost complete lack of fighting style finesse.
Snyder and Affleck got it just right for me. Affleck is outstanding as Bruce Wayne. And in terms of costume and fighting style they absolutely crushed any previous film iteration. The digital distortion of the voice via the high tech Bat-cowl solves the problem of disguising the voice, and is perfectly sensible.
See my comments above about the deconstruction of BvS for the whole kerfuffle about an older, jaded Batman that is not only indifferent to hostiles' death, but actually sets some of the worst offenders up for execution in prison. Snyder takes Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns a step further in terms of disillusionment and loss of sense of purpose for the character. In a nutshell, here we have a Batman that has been subsumed by his Jungian 'Shadow'. That is just way more interesting to me than a traditional take on the character. Again, if these characters were real there would be consequences to living in the real world. BvS explores what might reasonably be expected to happen to an individual with Bruce's unresolved issues (which ultimately requires him to face his own 'Shadow' a la Jungian theory). And so it is a Batman who by the end is set on a path of redemption. And I like that arc.
BvS does have a lot of structural problems though and I've only watched the ultimate edition, so I don't really know how the cinematic version felt.
Ah and the Arkham asylum video game series is really fun for me.
After the first couple of viewings I would have agreed that there were structural problems, but having watched BvS carefully now at least half a dozen times, I mostly agree with the decisions Snyder made in telling the story the way that he did. Understanding the film in the way that I do now, I don't find the narrative to be muddled or overstuffed (to use Jeremy Irons' description).
However there are some things I would like to have seen done differently:
The subplot of Lex Luthor setting up Superman to look bad when he rescued Lois in Africa is a bit hard to follow. All the stuff about the bullet, and so on. I can accept it at face value as simply part of the story to show what a devious puppet-master Lex Luthor is. But was it really needed? For me it would have been enough for Superman simply to show up and save Lois. Have that set off the warring chieftains, one of whom goes on a killing spree in a village. At the end of the day all we really need is for Senator Finch (Holly Hunter) to simply try to hold Superman more accountable for his unilateral actions around the world, i.e., his interventions have political ramifications and fallout for governments (especially intelligence operations), local populations, etc. Lex didn't really need to be the mastermind of all that, in my opinion.
I still don't quite get the part about the psychological impact upon Bruce Wayne of discovering that checks Wayne Corps sent to former employee Wallace Keefe (the guy who lost his legs at the Black Zero incident) were returned uncashed. Bruce is angry but it seems to be more than that, and I'm not sure what he is supposed to be feeling and why.
There is reportedly a scene, confirmed by Zack Snyder, that was left out showing Superman using his super hearing to try to locate his mother after she was kidnapped by Luthor's operatives. Snyder said he hears all the cries of distress and evil-doing within his hearing range, and its disturbing. They felt it was too dark. But it actually sets up the strange scene of Clark's imagined conversation with his adoptive father Jonathan at the mountaintop. The theme for both scenes is that in the real world at any given moment Superman must decide when and where to intervene. And that there can be unintended negative consequences to any well meaning act. Which belongs to the theme of what if these characters actually existed in our real world? What would that look like? Etc.
And finally, the "Martha" scene I now suspect Snyder may have deliberately chosen to present as ambiguous in order to create what is called in film the 'Rashomon effect'. The scene is possibly left deliberately vague in terms of what Superman is thinking, and we are free to figure it out for ourselves and come up with an interpretation individually. That would fit the theme of Superman's struggle to exist in this postmodern world that Snyder places him in. Bear in mind that all throughout the film we see Superman being defined by others. But he himself is inwardly struggling to define himself (mainly in terms of how and when to use his powers). It has been so deeply ingrained into Clark how gigantic his impact will be on the world by both Jonathan Kent and Jor-El, that I believe the 'Shadow' that Superman must face is his inclination to constantly live for others versus himself. He's tentative and self-doubting because he's too much of a people-pleaser.
But anyway... I would have prefered something else. Using "Martha" is okay, and I'll explain why. But I think that we should have been shown a scene of Clark Kent researching Bruce Wayne (shortly after Clark's interest is piqued by their initial charity ball meeting) and reading the story of the Thomas and Martha Wayne murders as a rather obvious shaping experience in Bruce's childhood and personality development. In DC canon Superman has always had a genius level intellect. After using his super hearing to monitor Bruce Wayne for a day or two he would confirm that he is Batman. I think by the time he shows up to try to intimidate Batman into retiring ("The Bat is dead" warning) he already knows that Batman is Bruce Wayne (and unless Batman has a lead lined cowl--and we have no reason to believe so--he can easily see that with his x-ray vision). In my mind, there is no way that Superman has not figured out who Batman is not long after they first met.
So when Superman says "Martha" he does so deliberately to put Batman into touch with the fact the the great threat that he is out to destroy in Superman as a potential evil overlord of earth is actually the dude that killed his parents as a kid. Superman has pulled his punches throughout the fight because he has sympathy for Bruce, basically by then having deduced what makes him tick psychologically.
This also explains why Batman suddenly makes an about-face to become Superman's friend. Superman basically just gave him a powerful insight into himself, and helped Bruce regain his sanity. It was a great gift, when understood that way. Superman gave Bruce back his entire self, allowing him to incorporate the split off parts of himself that he was unconsciously acting out so negatively.
And there is a beautiful symmetry then to Batman defeating Superman physically, and Superman outsmarting Batman psychologically! This flips our expectations for the outcome of the battle.
It is possible to 'read in' what I just outlined. But I think we should have been given more clues with which to confidently surmise that is what's going on. Even just a six second scene showing Clark reading a headline like "Thomas and Martha Wayne murdered outside theater" would be enough to say, yes, I am sure that Superman says Martha deliberately to elicit the effect it has on Batman.
My wife watches all these fantasy-adventure movies with me and she was late to the party with GotG on home theater, watching it with me a day before we saw GotG 2 in the theater. For her it was love at first site for both films. She adores them.
That initial discovery of such an amazing assortment of characters is something that only happens with the first film. So it will always have that special status for me, that will be hard to top. But in certain respects I'm just as impressed by vol. 2 because it develops the family bonds that the team has. GotG 2 is about emotional connection triumphing within a dysfunctional family. And the farewell scene at the end (set to Cat Stevens' Father and Son) is one of the most genuinely moving I have ever experienced in any genre! Simply amazingly powerful emotional stuff.