The Official Movie Thread

[Kin]

DCEU doesn't know what each of their movies is for, other than, hey this moment in the comics would look cool on screen, so let's do it.

That's the other thing about this movie that puzzles me. I read comics as a kid(and occasionally still do) and while admittedly I always read much more Marvel than DC I still don't even really know what's going on here. Loki, Ultron, Thanos...those were all the big time Avengers villains. I recently read some "Justice League's 10 best villains" list in the hopes that I'd learn something about the guy they're fighting and he wasn't even on it.

I guess they're working up to Darkseid or Amazo or whatever but "Hey, want to watch a bunch of heroes go after a B level villain" seems like a curious launching point.

 

[herman]

I'm guessing they wanted a big enough reason to gather this much firepower into a team, especially sans Superman (so global level threat). Steppenwolf is like... the Silver Surfer to Galactus of Darkseid, who is the character that Thanos is ripped from. He's powerful enough in his own right, but he's really just there for the implication of more to come.

Marvel has this problem with its villains as well, with Loki being the only standout because he's an actual character (maybe the one good thing to come out of Thor 1). And like you mentioned, Nik, The Dark Knight was really only compelling because of Ledger's turn at the Joker.

 

[Kin]

I'm guessing they wanted a big enough reason to gather this much firepower into a team, especially sans Superman (so global level threat). Steppenwolf is like... the Silver Surfer to Galactus of Darkseid, who is the character that Thanos is ripped from. He's powerful enough in his own right, but he's really just there for the implication of more to come.

Marvel has this problem with its villains as well, with Loki being the only standout because he's an actual character (maybe the one good thing to come out of Thor 1). And like you mentioned, Nik, The Dark Knight was really only compelling because of Ledger's turn at the Joker.

Marvel has a problem with execution, sure, but Loki, Red Skull, Abomination and whoever are still those heroes' respective iconic villains. Outside of someone like Kang I can't think of any big time Avengers villain they haven't used(who they have the film rights to). Not all of them have worked but a lot of that is because what works in comic books comes across as pretty silly with real actors(See Ian MacKellan and Michael Fassbender having to wear silly helmets).

I guess what I'm saying is if I were DC I would at least be trying to hit homeruns now, not try and set the bases for my next at-bat. That this villain may be powerful seems less important than him having a two paragraph wikipedia entry.

 

[herman]

Marvel has a problem with execution, sure, but Loki, Red Skull, Abomination and whoever are still those heroes' respective iconic villains. Outside of someone like Kang I can't think of any big time Avengers villain they haven't used(who they have the film rights to). Not all of them have worked but a lot of that is because what works in comic books comes across as pretty silly with real actors(See Ian MacKellan and Michael Fassbender having to wear silly helmets).

I guess what I'm saying is if I were DC I would at least be trying to hit homeruns now, not try and set the bases for my next at-bat. That this villain may be powerful seems less important than him having a two paragraph wikipedia entry.

Agreed. I think this is sort stems from the DCEU's decision to haphazardly build from the team-up in BvS and out, rather than starting that the near beginning of each character stream and working their way towards the Justice League. We got Superman's motivations and (grim-dark) character established, hints of Batman (but a lot of it is assumed), and now Wonder Woman is better fleshed out after her cameo in BvS, but not much else.

Structurally, JL has to jam a lot of extended vignettes to establish Aquaman, Cyborg, and the Flash (a la Suicide Squad). On the villain front, this means they have to go upper echelon power levels, but you know, more of a swinging bunt than a homerun swing because they don't want to fire things off prematurely.

Anything that comes after this is either going to be a prequel, or have that hangover from the stakes regressing down to solo character levels.

For all its flaws, the Avengers and the phase 1 movies really pulled this off and gave the rest of the MCU enough of a foundation to do more interesting things off of. The Tesseract from Cap, Loki from Thor, and the seeds of the Avengers Initiative and Black Widow from Iron Man(s) made the eventual collaboration a natural fit. What Whedon did really well was reinventing Black Widow in the opening scenes and using her as the fulcrum to integrate Ruffalo's Banner and Renner's Hawkeye, bringing the B-team to prominence with their interactions with her.

 

[Kin]

Structurally, JL has to jam a lot of extended vignettes to establish Aquaman, Cyborg, and the Flash (a la Suicide Squad). On the villain front, this means they have to go upper echelon power levels, but you know, more of a swinging bunt than a homerun swing because they don't want to fire things off prematurely.

Maybe we remember the books differently but it seems to me like any Justice League villain from the books would, by definition, be powerful enough to give the collected heroes enough trouble. It's not like the comics were the Justice League wailing on a guy for a page before getting bagels.

 

[herman]

Maybe we remember the books differently but it seems to me like any Justice League villain from the books would, by definition, be powerful enough to give the collected heroes enough trouble. It's not like the comics were the Justice League wailing on a guy for a page before getting bagels.

What I remember from DC comics is that there aren't that many compelling villains at the JL level that take place on Earth, other than a Darkseid invasion or maybe Brainiac.

The one super interesting JL story I can recall is the Tower of Babel arc, made into an animated film: Justice League: Doom. Their animation wing is waaaaay better at story telling.

 

[Kin]

What I remember from DC comics is that there aren't that many compelling villains at the JL level that take place on Earth, other than a Darkseid invasion or maybe Brainiac.

The one super interesting JL story I can recall is the Tower of Babel arc, made into an animated film: Justice League: Doom. Their animation wing is waaaaay better at story telling.

Yeah, I was thinking Brainiac was the obvious go-to there. I mean they've done almost 10 Superman movies and he hasn't shown up so you should use him eventually.

But I think the key word you use there is "compelling". DC is working with a lot less good source material than Marvel is.

 

[louisstamos]

What I remember from DC comics is that there aren't that many compelling villains at the JL level that take place on Earth, other than a Darkseid invasion or maybe Brainiac.

The one super interesting JL story I can recall is the Tower of Babel arc, made into an animated film: Justice League: Doom. Their animation wing is waaaaay better at story telling.

Yeah, I was thinking Brainiac was the obvious go-to there. I mean they've done almost 10 Superman movies and he hasn't shown up so you should use him eventually.

But I think the key word you use there is "compelling". DC is working with a lot less good source material than Marvel is.

I could be wrong, since it's been a while, but Brianiac was the principal villain for a season on Smallville, wasn't he?

How accurate the show was to the comics, though, is a completely other story.

 

[Kin]

I could be wrong, since it's been a while, but Brianiac was the principal villain for a season on Smallville, wasn't he?

How accurate the show was to the comics, though, is a completely other story.

You could be right. I haven't watched any of that show.

 

[herman]

Yeah, I was thinking Brainiac was the obvious go-to there. I mean they've done almost 10 Superman movies and he hasn't shown up so you should use him eventually.

But I think the key word you use there is "compelling". DC is working with a lot less good source material than Marvel is.

Name recognition-wise, that's the right level for Brainiac. Story-wise, I'm not sure how this ties the other team members together. At least with Steppenwolf, there's the implication of Darkseid coming, the Motherboxes that he is searching for are integral to Cyborg's existence and contributions to the team. From the trailers, I can see them trying to tie threads to each JL member (the Amazons have history with Steppenwolf's first invasion, one of the boxes is hiding in Atlantis, Batman uh... had a dream... about the Flash?) to make this a more meaningful fight, but at the end of the day, he's a super-powerful middleman nobody.

I could be wrong, since it's been a while, but Brianiac was the principal villain for a season on Smallville, wasn't he?

He was played by James Marsters, who is best known as Spike on Buffy, and was a much more complex villain/anti-hero there than on Smallville.

Supergirl did a Brainiac episode last season, played by the Laura Vandervoort, who played Supergirl on Smallville.

I feel like most DC properties really spend most of their efforts on making call backs and references to esoteric DC universe lore.

Speaking of Smallville, did y'all hear about Allison Mack?

 

[Kin]

Name recognition-wise, that's the right level for Brainiac. Story-wise, I'm not sure how this ties the other team members together. At least with Steppenwolf, there's the implication of Darkseid coming, the Motherboxes that he is searching for are integral to Cyborg's existence and contributions to the team. From the trailers, I can see them trying to tie threads to each JL member (the Amazons have history with Steppenwolf's first invasion, one of the boxes is hiding in Atlantis, Batman uh... had a dream... about the Flash?) to make this a more meaningful fight, but at the end of the day, he's a super-powerful middleman nobody.

See, I feel like that's the sort of worrying about the garnish, figuring out the steak later sort of thinking that's really bogging down these movies. Brainiac is an Alien. He's attacking the Earth. Batman rounds up superdudes and dudettes to punch him in the face. I don't remember spending too much time in the Avengers worrying about The Hulk's personal investment in beating up Loki.

(Which sort of brings to mind X-Men: Apocalypse, which I watched 15 minutes of a few nights ago. They worried about things like Apocalypse looking like he does in the books and Jean Grey being American and worry less about Oscar Isaac looking ridiculous for the whole movie or the fact that Sophie Turner can't do the accent.)

Loki doesn't naturally set up Thanos or Ultron either. In those cases they worried about making a fun movie first, allegiance to comic stuff later.

 

[louisstamos]

Speaking of Smallville, did y'all hear about Allison Mack?

I didn't, so I did a quick Google search, and....wow.  Wow.

 

[rdowdall]

DCEU doesn't know what each of their movies is for, other than, hey this moment in the comics would look cool on screen, so let's do it.

I agree and I think this is their biggest problem.  BvS was a perfect example of it.  They could have done two movies that would have had a chance to be way better if they had chosen to do one storyline or the other.  Now I don't think they could have done the Doomsday story line at this point, because I think you need the audience to have a feel for how important Superman is in order to have a sense of loss.  So you build that up over a series of movies, and then crank out that one near the end.  That to me would make for compelling stuff.  And as we have talked before, definitely the Injustice story line at some point, which appears to be what they are trying to setup right now.

X-Men suffered from it as well, what with X-Men 3 being a hodge-podge of story lines, none of them coming across well.  Sometimes these studios need to take a less is more approach. 

 

[herman]

See, I feel like that's the sort of worrying about the garnish, figuring out the steak later sort of thinking that's really bogging down these movies. Brainiac is an Alien. He's attacking the Earth. Batman rounds up superdudes and dudettes to punch him in the face. I don't remember spending too much time in the Avengers worrying about The Hulk's personal investment in beating up Loki.

(Which sort of brings to mind X-Men: Apocalypse, which I watched 15 minutes of a few nights ago. They worried about things like Apocalypse looking like he does in the books and Jean Grey being American and worry less about Oscar Isaac looking ridiculous for the whole movie or the fact that Sophie Turner can't do the accent.)

Loki doesn't naturally set up Thanos or Ultron either. In those cases they worried about making a fun movie first, allegiance to comic stuff later.

What I liked about The Avengers was that every character had a reason for being there, save for Hawkeye, who was immediately 'turned' to kind of get him out of the way. The Hulk wasn't personally invested in the threat of Loki, per se, but Bruce Banner's gamma radiation expertise was used to locate the Tesseract.

What I want them to focus on is not necessarily allegiance to the comic storylines, but on the characterization of the players involved. An afterthought of a villain has no stakes and no personal connection to the ones who are trying to stop them. The DCEU films largely run on reverse engineering visual comic book moments, instead of generating organic conflict. I think lower-tier villains can work as long as the effort to shape them into multi-dimensional characters is there.

Sometimes these studios need to take a less is more approach. 

This is why Deadpool and Logan were hits. It's not the R-rated fluff, but the tight story and character development that makes it memorable.

 

[rdowdall]

This is why Deadpool and Logan were hits. It's not the R-rated fluff, but the tight story and character development that makes it memorable.

Yeah, I really liked what they did in Logan.  I liked what they did in the movie a whole lot better than what they did in the comic in fact.  It was even worse when they reversed it and went the Old Man Logan route.  I think this is a problem that comics have in general.  They don't know how to move on from characters.  They need to lock Kirkman, Gimple and Martin in a room and have them revamp some of the titles for the other comic vendors, with no coming back from it.  None of this resetting the universe stuff. 

 

[Kin]

What I liked about The Avengers was that every character had a reason for being there, save for Hawkeye, who was immediately 'turned' to kind of get him out of the way. The Hulk wasn't personally invested in the threat of Loki, per se, but Bruce Banner's gamma radiation expertise was used to locate the Tesseract.

But there's no depth there. You're talking about a line or two of expository sci-fi babble that's clearly a contrivance for getting him involved. Doing that with any villain and or hero is elementary stuff. Steppenwolf is after some powerful macguffins? Have Brainiac be after those same macguffins instead. Or say his collecting machine is polluting the oceans or whatever.

What I want them to focus on is not necessarily allegiance to the comic storylines, but on the characterization of the players involved. An afterthought of a villain has no stakes and no personal connection to the ones who are trying to stop them. The DCEU films largely run on reverse engineering visual comic book moments, instead of generating organic conflict. I think lower-tier villains can work as long as the effort to shape them into multi-dimensional characters is there.

I don't know. I think about the Nicholson vs. Ledger Jokers and think that, by far, the character worked better without retconning him to have killed Batman's parents but instead simply being an embodiment of random criminality. In fact, they almost riffed on the notion. Making a joke of the idea that he has some tragic backstory that explains him. Batman didn't need a personal beef to want to stop him.

I think one of the reasons Marvel's movies have been so successful of late is that we're now comfortable enough with the characters that they don't need to spoonfeed us personal backstories and origins. That streamlines things like Civil War but it really streamlines something like the most recent Spider-Man where they figured out we kind of know who Spider-Man is so we don't need to see him learning all of his lessons. He could pretty much just get to swinging around on webs.

 

[herman]

But there's no depth there. You're talking about a line or two of expository sci-fi babble that's clearly a contrivance for getting him involved. Doing that with any villain and or hero is elementary stuff.

I agree a simple line or two would have been a contrivance, but in the case of Bruce Banner's presence in the Avengers, they organically established the rules of his dissociative identity disorder where every transformation became launch points for character-developing set-pieces.

I don't know. I think about the Nicholson vs. Ledger Jokers and think that, by far, the character worked better without retconning him to have killed Batman's parents but instead simply being an embodiment of random criminality. In fact, they almost riffed on the notion. Making a joke of the idea that he has some tragic backstory that explains him. Batman didn't need a personal beef to want to stop him.

I think one of the reasons Marvel's movies have been so successful of late is that we're now comfortable enough with the characters that they don't need to spoonfeed us personal backstories and origins. That streamlines things like Civil War but it really streamlines something like the most recent Spider-Man where they figured out we kind of know who Spider-Man is so we don't need to see him learning all of his lessons. He could pretty much just get to swinging around on webs.

Yeah, Marvel has definitely reached that maturity; I credit the first phase of movies with the smaller scope stories of characters learning to become heroes against their archnemeses (Stane, Red Skull, Loki) and coming together to form the basis of a team.

The DCEU doesn't really have that story maturity (technically they do, but refuse to use it). There were many aspects of Man of Steel that I really liked, and I also liked how BvS riffed on those themes and plot points. They're unfortunately buried and not fully explored under explosions and slow-mos. Nolan's Batmans anchored the character first in a personal battle (Ra's, who taught him to harness his trauma and darkness) before moving to an ideological one (Joker, Dent duality questions). I don't know what the heck Bane was supposed to represent and it was a mess.

 

[Kin]

I agree a simple line or two would have been a contrivance, but in the case of Bruce Banner's presence in the Avengers, they organically established the rules of his dissociative identity disorder where every transformation became launch points for character-developing set-pieces.

Right. But what you just said about his reason to be involved was one or two lines about how the macguffin they were chasing just happened to emit the radiation he's an expert in. Loki's cosmically powered space cube emitting Gamma radiation isn't organic in any sense of the word.

 

[CarltonTheBear]

In slightly less contentious movie news, Rotten Tomatoes has announced they won't be releasing the Justice League score until the day before the film:

http://www.slashfilm.com/justice-league-rotten-tomatoes-score/

I've never heard of this before. I know it's a big thing in Hollywood these days to blame Rotten Tomatoes' scores for being too influential but this seems like overkill even if it isn't unduly influenced by Warner Brothers having a stake in the site.

So as planned, RT revealed Justice Leagues score at 12:01am today on their new Facebook show.... 43%!

Problem is, we're almost 12 hours past that and their actual website still doesn't have the score posted or a single review linked either.

 

[L K]

Seems like the criticisms of the film are things you could pick up on from the trailers:

- Bad CGI
- Dark brooding tone that creates a bit of a lifeless effect
- Bad script
- Weak plot/villain