DCEU (now "Worlds of DC")
So what do folks think of this franchise?
It doesn't follow the mainstream taste, but personally I loved Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. I think BvS is one of the most remarkable films ever made, honestly. Both those films challenged assumptions. They followed the same project as Watchmen of asking the following: if superheroes actually existed in the real world that you an I inhabit, would that truly be a good thing? Is that something we would actually even want?
In traditonal superhero mythology (both comics and film) the automatic assumption is yes, of course. We would want for superheroes to be real. But in the real world it would not play out that way so clearly and cleanly. It would be as divisive an issue as BvS is as a film, actually,
And yes, of course there are fantastic elements to such a grounded and realistic approach that we would also have to willingly suspend disbelief for. But for example, with Superman being an extraterrestrial with godlike powers, that is something we can conceive of as existing in our real world without tremendous mental gymnastics. At least I believe most people can.
Suicide Squad might have been a lot better as originally conceived and filmed during principal photography. (With just one scene added at the end of the film I think it could even have been a great movie, if anyone is interested I will gladly explain.) This film suffered from studio intervention, as BvS did with the truncated theater release.
The debacle that was Justice League... I don't even now where to begin. But I do believe that we'll get the recently confirmed (by Zack Snyder himself) 3:34 Snyder cut eventually.
The films that are just safe, mainstream lighthearted fun, don't appeal to me as much. I liked Aquaman well enough for the visual spectacle and likability of Mamoa's burly take on the character. But as a story in itself Aquaman just didn't stick with me the way that MoS and BvS do. It was more like fast food empty calories versus a meal that stuck to my ribs and had a unique, memorable flavor profile.
Wonder Woman was very good but I think a bit overrated, honestly. Final battle was a bit of a disappointment. But overall it's well made and engaging.
I appreciate why Shazam was made. It's part of a 'big tent' strategy to make a wide variety of different styles within the 'Worlds of DC'. I am not Shazam's target audience to begin with, etc. But I really didn't enjoy it that much. Movies that 'wear the fact that it's a comic book movie on their sleeve', as I has seen Shazam accurately described, I don't really get into.
I'm looking forward to Joker and Birds of Prey because they're more clearly arthouse films, and that's the sort of thing I like best for this genre.
My personal ranking (just my own personal taste, not objectively):
1. BvS (UE)
2. MoS
3. Aquaman
4. Wonder Woman
5. Suicide Squad
6. Shazam
7. Justice League (theater release)
It doesn't follow the mainstream taste, but personally I loved Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. I think BvS is one of the most remarkable films ever made, honestly. Both those films challenged assumptions. They followed the same project as Watchmen of asking the following: if superheroes actually existed in the real world that you an I inhabit, would that truly be a good thing? Is that something we would actually even want?
In traditonal superhero mythology (both comics and film) the automatic assumption is yes, of course. We would want for superheroes to be real. But in the real world it would not play out that way so clearly and cleanly. It would be as divisive an issue as BvS is as a film, actually,
And yes, of course there are fantastic elements to such a grounded and realistic approach that we would also have to willingly suspend disbelief for. But for example, with Superman being an extraterrestrial with godlike powers, that is something we can conceive of as existing in our real world without tremendous mental gymnastics. At least I believe most people can.
Suicide Squad might have been a lot better as originally conceived and filmed during principal photography. (With just one scene added at the end of the film I think it could even have been a great movie, if anyone is interested I will gladly explain.) This film suffered from studio intervention, as BvS did with the truncated theater release.
The debacle that was Justice League... I don't even now where to begin. But I do believe that we'll get the recently confirmed (by Zack Snyder himself) 3:34 Snyder cut eventually.
The films that are just safe, mainstream lighthearted fun, don't appeal to me as much. I liked Aquaman well enough for the visual spectacle and likability of Mamoa's burly take on the character. But as a story in itself Aquaman just didn't stick with me the way that MoS and BvS do. It was more like fast food empty calories versus a meal that stuck to my ribs and had a unique, memorable flavor profile.
Wonder Woman was very good but I think a bit overrated, honestly. Final battle was a bit of a disappointment. But overall it's well made and engaging.
I appreciate why Shazam was made. It's part of a 'big tent' strategy to make a wide variety of different styles within the 'Worlds of DC'. I am not Shazam's target audience to begin with, etc. But I really didn't enjoy it that much. Movies that 'wear the fact that it's a comic book movie on their sleeve', as I has seen Shazam accurately described, I don't really get into.
I'm looking forward to Joker and Birds of Prey because they're more clearly arthouse films, and that's the sort of thing I like best for this genre.
My personal ranking (just my own personal taste, not objectively):
1. BvS (UE)
2. MoS
3. Aquaman
4. Wonder Woman
5. Suicide Squad
6. Shazam
7. Justice League (theater release)
Post edited by Lemernis on
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Comments
I absolutely adore Gal Gadot, and think her and Cavill were superb casting choices, and I actually didn't mind Affleck. I am going to watch Aquaman, so I'll have more to say later!
Edit: Watched Aquaman, and if I hadn't heard about his book hating ways, I'd probably like Momoa more. He's a strange choice for Aquaman imho, but he doesn't screw things up. Overall had a good time watching it, but it certainly had some absurdity, and the traditional DC strange directorial decisions. The human villain was pretty lame, but the gigantic fire-crab/shrimp was fun, though what moron thinks living things can rapidly move from extreme depth to the bloody surface and not explode should clearly do more research. There is the very rare creature able to dive deeply, then quickly surface, but they are designed around this. Most stuff will kinda explode. Maybe I'm crazy and totally wrong??
In the same way that the MCU takes artistic liberties with the comic book canon, so does the DCEU. The films adapt the source material to blockbuster cinema. They are not direct translations of comic book source material. Neither was Burton's or Nolan's Batman. (Actually the only example of a direct translation I can think of is Zack Snyder's 300, which is taken panel-for-panel from the Frank Miller graphic novel.)
They evidently made a very deliberate decision to change WW2 to WW1 for the Wonder Woman origin. I think it was due to wanting to avoid similarities to Captain America: The First Avenger, and perhaps also because WW2 is getting the point of feeling overdone in cinema. WW1 was in some ways more interesting to see, arguably. WW1 was an utterly horrific war, and at the time was actually named as "the war to end all wars." As we know not long after we had WW2. So much for the notion of a war to end all wars. This makes a deeper statement about Ares, I think.
Batman's mech suit is inspired by Frank Miller's masterpiece, landmark graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, as are certain elements of the portrayal of Batman. It is not a 1:1 translation by any means. Just in the sense of an older, jaded version of the character who is going through a kind of existential crisis about who he is later in life, and what his crime fighting career has meant. And of course TDKR also features an epic fight between Batman and Superman in which Batman wears the mech suit.
Superman is pulling is punches throughout the fight with Batman in BvS because he doesn't want to kill Batman. He even tells Bruce to stay down because "if I wanted it you'd be dead already." Everyone knows Superman can defeat Batman six ways to Sunday. Superman disapproves of what Batman is doing at that stage of his career, but he doesn't want to rub him out. Batman has become almost as morally bad as the criminals he now hunts as prey. Batman now has little compunction about killing to survive real world deadly combat, and he tortures and Bat-brands the worst of the criminals (thus giving them a death sentence in prison). Superman just wants to try to wait until he can talk some sense into Bruce, after Bruce exhausts himself and Superman can reign him in a bit. But Batman disrupts that by using kryptonite gas grenades which weaken Superman, thus leveling the playing field.
I also liked BvS a lot. I did have several issues with it like how they portrayed Batman as a brutal killer though. I also was annoyed that he wasn’t more of a crime fighter vs the brute force brawler in the movie. He is one of the smartest people on the planet and he should have known Lex was playing him. He would have gone after Superman anyway because of his paranoia/fear of Superman becoming evil (something his Knightmare dream would have amplified). He was almost totally absent in the fight with Doomsday. He wouldn’t last long going toe-to-toe with him but that isn’t how he fights. He uses his intelligence, agility, and tech. He would have been able to get some licks in while Superman & WW were beating on him.
Snyder recently commented about some of this but I really don’t buy his argument. He thought the world would have made him the killer he was protrayed as.
I also had issues with Jesse E. as Lex Luthor. Every time I saw him I was distracted by the annoying way he played Lex. I just didn’t see him as Lex - he played him like every other character he’s played.. Totally miscast IMHO.
I am also extremely mad about this. Having the JL characters in one movie should have been a guaranteed success. WB screwed up royally. I don’t think they know what the hell they are doing. Plus they didn’t even bring in Green Lantern (my favorite DC character) because they screwed up the character so badly in that movie he/she is now toxic.
I would love to see the Snyder Cut of JL because I think it will be far superior than the Frankenstein piece of garbage we actually got. I don’t believe it will ever happen though. WB is going to bury that thing so deep it will never see the light of day again. They know it is a lot better and would only show how incompetent they are.
When Snyder and writer Chris Terrio pondered Batman in this way (i.e., what if he really existed in the world that we actually inhabit), evidently they concluded that a character such as Batman was doomed to 'fall' over time. Myself, I think of it as similar in spirit to a fallen paladin in D&D! Batman has lost his faith, broken his oath.
But even just within BvS his arc is a path of redemption. I think Superman deliberately says Martha (instead of "my mother") in order to elicit the psychological effect that we see it have on Bruce. It jars him into awareness that the real monster he has been hunting by chasing down and punishing criminals is his own rage at himself for being helpless to prevent his parents death (and possibly feeling responsible because young Bruce insisted that they go to see that Zorro movie that night as we have seen in the comics). Bruce's inability to deal with that truth has taken him down a very dark road. But Superman was willing to risk letting himself be killed by Bruce in order to bring Bruce back to his best inner self. Superman gives Bruce one of the most powerful gifts possible by doing that. It's all unspoken, but Bruce is obviously deeply grateful for it. That's why he says "Martha won't die tonight." He is conveying that he gets what Superman did for him.
This flips our expectations. Who would have dreamed that Batman would defeat Superman physically (again, granted, Superman pulls his punches, but Bruce the master strategist exploits that vulnerability). And Superman bests Batman psychologically.
I have more to say about their fight but I'll stop there. :-)
I don't think that Lex's attempted manipulations to try to pit Batman and Superman against one another (other than getting them to meet in their pedestrian identities) work at all. They fail pathetically actually.
Lex has to resort to kidnapping Martha to get Superman to fight.
Bruce decides that Superman must be killed because of the Knightmare vision, and a time traveler appearing in the Batcave essentially confirming that in that vision Bruce was witnessing the future in which an alien civilization has decimated earth, and Superman has allied with them! Just after that Bruce delivers the "one percent chance" speech to Alfred.
When Bruce looks enraged when as is holding the newspaper on which Lex scribbled "you let your family die" (in an attempt to make it seem that Wallace Keefe had done so), I think Bruce realizes that Lex Luthor is the one responsible for the Capitol Building bombing... and ironically, same as Superman he is upset with himself for not seeing Lex's plan in time to prevent that crime. But nevertheless, he still has to take out Superman because after having witnessed the future he realizes that if Superman is Darkseid's general on earth it is game over. I think Barry opening the spacetime portal actually gives Bruce a 'memory of the future', if that makes sense.
We now know that Snyder and Terrio wrote BvS and Justice League as part of a planned five film saga that was to be MoS, BvS, JL, JL 2, and JL 3. In JL 2 the Justice League would ally with the Green Lantern Corps and go to the Fourth World to take on Darkseid--and they get their asses handed to them. JL 3 is the realization of the Knightmare vision--it comes to pass. However, in JL 3 Batman, through Barry Allen's help, dies sacrificially by going back in time to kill Darkseid and prevent Lois Lane's death.
At the conclusion of the saga Clark and Lois have a son and name him Bruce. It sounds epic AF. And WB killed it. JL had to be rewritten to try to finish the story, which Snyder did but he reportedly kept it closer to his original vision, and filmed a cliffhanger at the end of his version of JL in which Darkseid appears and kills Steppenwolf for failing. Also, the 'history lesson' scene of Darkseid's invasion features the men of Mu and Lemuria, Amazonians, Atlanteans, Thangarians, Lanterns, and Olympian gods battling Darkseid.
Btw, Ben Affleck left in part because he wanted that five film arc. They were going to kill Batman off, which is what he wanted. When WB changed direction on it Affleck decided to bail. Also, Geoff Johns kept messing with his script for The Batman. Who can blame him for leaving?
Sorry to digress, but it is just painful to me how WB got feet of clay with the original Snyder vision.
There is a lot purposefully unspoken in BvS. The viewer is forced to cipher things out. This is similar in my opinion to Stanley Kubrick's best films. I even think that Snyder and Terrio are even making a statement about postmodernism colliding with traditional superhero mythology. I know that sounds pretentious, but I can back it up concretely. Anyway, I think BvS is one of the ballsiest films ever made. I absolutely love it's spirit and what it attempts. But one has to do a fair bit of work to grok what's going on in it.
If they wanted to avoid parallels with Captain America, they kinda goofed, but as noted, the movie was still valid. If Wonder Woman predated Cap's release date, it might have helped DC a bit. The two have way too many commonalities.
The kyrptonite weapons are not too annoying, but if Batman is being babied, that mostly makes sense. I mean, even the face was partially exposed! I felt any par of BvS suffered from insufficient Gal Gadot, but I'm a fan. If they could have snuck her into that 'fight', it might have made more sense for Superman to never kill Batman, but even Wonder Woman is pretty much a speed bump for Superman.
I'm pretty curious if the Suicide Squad reboot with such a trendy director will be good. Guardians was truly fantastic, so I have high hopes, but it might not be the freshest thing around, if he does a reboot so soon and is too similar to Guardians.
I love GotG--it's about tied with BvS for my favorite superhero film. I enjoyed GotG Vol. 2 a lot as well because it develops the characters and their interpersonal relationships--the main plot is just a vehicle for that, which is the real content of the movie imo. Not as strong overall as the first film, although I admit I was brought to tears by the funeral scene. Beautifully done!
The thing that now concerns me about it is that Gunn was rehired back to make GotG 3. He had in mind something before that that was like a soft reboot that keeps Harley and Amanda Waller and replaces most of the other former members. Dave Bautista was going to play a character I'm not familiar with, but who sounds wonderfully offbeat.
But now we're hearing that Jai Courtney will return as Capt. Boomerang, and Joel Kinneman will return as Rick Flagg. And Idris Elba will play another character other than Deadshot, which to me suggests that they may still bring back Will Smith as Deadshot at some point--or it leaves that option open, at any rate.
So it's looking more like SS2 now than a soft reboot. Which is fine, I guess, as long as it's a good story that is well told. For me the main draws for SS are Margot Robbie as Harley and Viola Davis as Amanda Waller. Just as long as they're in it I'm satisfied.
Yeah this is a superpower thing that calls for willing suspension of disbelief. They adapted to withstand enormous water pressure at the greatest ocean depths which is why they are so strong. Their skin is basically impregnable to bullets for example.
Part of the mythos for DC's Atlantis is that they are descended from metahumans that were hybrids of native homo sapiens and an extraterrestrial humanoid species that used both high technology and magic. In the comics Aquaman loses a hand at one point, and it is eventually replaced with a magical hand made of water which has the power to open portals to other dimensions. Aquaman eventually develops arcane powers.
Interesting take. Thanks for explaining. I guess I agree with the whole Batman falling thing the tried to do there. They were trying to do something different but that rubbed some of the die-hard Batman fans the wrong way. I know a ton of people who actually hated the movie because of it. Like I said I loved the movie even though I had issues with Batman. I only wish more people liked it and then maybe we would have see JL as it was intended plus the rest of the 5-story arc.
Justice League was just plain.
Suicide Squad at least had fun parts even if it had no direction and was put together like a colour blind 2-year-old assembles lego.
Wonder Woman is the best of the DC movies. Yes, it's overrated by any other measure, because it's not a great movie by any means. It's badly paced, makes strange and out-of-place character (and plot) choices and wavers all over. But at least it's got a structure, progression, and a point. And most importantly, a story that doesn't hinge on the most stupid plot point of all time.
I think Robbie being in the sequel would be the most important thing, as people that overlooked very real problems in the first SS did so due to how much they liked Harley Quinn, or due to the movie's fun factor, and it was kinda fun.
I don't think DC should embrace comedy the way Marvel clearly has, but they could be a bit more zippy. I'm quite sure the emphasis on fun that SS/WW/Aquaman embraced will ultimately play better than the overly serious stuff, but I think 'serious' and 'mature' (not as in rude/gorey/smutty, but as in grown up) may be better than the slightly forced zanyness of Justice League (do we really need to use Wonder Woman as a cushion?? And very gratuitous leg/butt shots? I know she's considered about the best looking celeb in the world and all, but ffs she's playing a fictional but beloved feminist icon, can we show some respect?), but it could be argued the light-hearted stuff was more a badly handled idea than a truly bad idea.
I kinda agree that DC overpowers their heros like Superman and maybe Wonder Woman that we've seen, but Batman is pretty much a mortal with no superpowers. I know that tons of the comic stuff not used featured more Superman level stuff than Batman level, with most DC analogues having way more power. Iirc, even baseline non-angry Hulk or Thing could be man-handled by quite a range of characters. I read at least one crossover comic, and though I didn't agree, Hulk was definitely and solidly bested by Superman, and iirc, somehow Captain America, was even with Batman. I would say present MCU Captain America is way overpowered (he's wildly stronger than he should be, and more durable) but Batman is again, pretty much a mortal. I totally agree making a Superman story interesting is hard due to his limitless power, but he has at least more potential thsn a stand alone Hulk movie, because those are apparently very tough to make interesting, even with good effects. Hulk is too strong and too simple, at least Superman has potential for nuance. I think the DCEU has done a decent job of making their heros other than Superman, well, kinda balanced.
I just read about Shazam a bit, and apparently he has the powers of Solomon?? Does this mean he can have hundreds of wives and can command an army of demons, cuz I would like to see that movie. A lot. I look forward to seeing Shazam, sounds like if anything it was a bit under rated, even if he doesn't have +500 weddings and command said fiends.
Has anybody heard anything about a Blue Beetle movie? I fell in love with his Overpower card (I was the guy who localky figured out how to abuse those piddly venture bonus' to reliably win with a cool team), and though I know next to nothing about him, I very much want to see him in a movie. Because reasons! If Marvel can get away with making Black Panther, a very much unknown IP, a mega hit, Blue Beetle can be justified. Heck, most people couldn't have told you Thor was a superhero before the movies, yet these do very well. Blue Beetle is just the right kind of weird to work in a big way!
For recasting Batman, I wonder if Hollywood will take a risk, because playing it overly safe with Affleck proved really unpopular. I don't care for the man much, but he didn't embarrass himself as Batman. I'm a bit SJWish, but I'd love to see a non-white Batman, and would see a gender flipped or queer Batman in the theatres, and I rarely see movies in theatre, because I am the cheap Dutch stereotype made man. In fact, I usually just use the free local library to watch movies, but holy crap if you are down the list a bit, because I think I waited +6 months for Wonder Woman.
Edit: I think its very apt to point out that SS felt a lot like a movie a committee of 13 year old boys produced by trying to fit things that are cool together, regardless of any of it making sense or fitting together. Random 'cool' songs? Check. Gratuitous sexy from gorgeous Margot Robbie? Check. Everything is handwavey to strictly follow the Rule of Cool? Checkaroo! It was still fun, but even drunk that movie was a bit too random, and I loved Paprika.