Postby Chuckman » Mon Nov 27, 2017 12:35 am
Snyder does deserve some credit. His DCU films fail to answer the questions they raise, but at they least raise them. There's a sense that they at least want the audience to feel something, unlike, say, The Dark Knight Rises, which resented the audience for forcing it to exist after the director said everything he felt needed saying in the predecessor. Many of the faults lie with the script.
On some level Snyder needs to be appreciated, especially for Man of Steel, because he was trying to tell an interesting story arc through these movies, but he simply isn't good enough, and didn't have a good enough script, to pull it off.
We already know from Superman Returns that it's very easy to make a weird tone-deaf Superman movie that fits neither our time nor the time it's trying to recreate.
He is not a visionary. He makes things look pretty, when he's properly restrained, but even at his best he suffers from excesses that drag down his work. This is not an appraisal of him as a human being, it's a critique of his work. I think I mentioned earlier in the thread how he only sees the visual aspects of storytelling and reduces his filmmaking efforts to that and that alone. He reduces things to looking cool. He made Leonidas yell when he's supposed to be quiet and restrained.
The Cracked author is right. The Wonder Woman scenes are the only part of BvS that actually gets superheroing and the superhero concept. She's such a breath of fresh air -even though her character in BvS doesn't make much sense- that it elevates the rest of the movie and really pumped people up for her solo run, which delivered.
I get that you, Ray, want superhero movies that are dark and mature, as you define it.I don't get why and I don't want to argue it with you. The problem with these DC movies is that they weren't "dark" out of any kind of artistic sensibility. They were dark because an executive ordered it so, because it would differentiate them from Marvel (which will probably go a darker and more stylish now that Girlpower McFeet is away from its flagship). There was no purpose in it, they weren't trying to say something. They saw that Marvel is one way so they wanted to be the other way, and the hired the guy who directed a mediocre Watchmen adaptation to direct a Superman movie because, hey, that's dark, right? Let's see if we can get some guys from the Nolan Batman movies to put their names on it, people liked those!
They had all kinds of opportunities.
They could have put a 'showrunner' in charge of their development effort.
They could have brought someone over from the comics side of the organization to do it.
They could have shopped around for directors with a vision, rather than picking a vision and selecting a director to execute it.
They could have set their Superman movie in the 1930s as a period piece.
They could have made a Superman movie with no origin story.
They could have made a Superman movie with a 'ground up' view.
They could have introduced a Batman who isn't a mentally ill loner who hates his entire life.
They could have made a fresh start with an existing, popular iteration of Batman; they could have said 'we want to be more grounded and realistic and have a serious, meditative Superman movie; let's introduce him in Nolan's established world with JGL active as Batman and see how a god from the sky fits into that realistic setting.
They could have hired a scriptwriter who loves the characters and wants to do them justice.
They could have done all these things, but they chose a cheap, lazy, thoughtless route. People like to rag on the Marvel movies for having a house style and being a packaged commercial product, but those criticisms mostly come from joyless people who are offended by others having the wrong kind of fun. The Marvel movies take risks. They have color and life and do wild fun things and aren't afraid to show off how crazy comics can be.
After seeing how lifeless and flat they made our first cinematic taste of the Fourth World, would you think that the DCCU would ever do something as bold as make a feature film with Ego the Living Planet?
If you want to understand the DCCU, listen to the JL film score. It's a mishmash of Zimmer's uninspired wall of sound crap, the only DCCU theme that's actually memorable, and constant repetition of Elfman's old Batman theme and Williams' old Superman theme, like the movie is begging you to enjoy it. You love these characters, just give me a pass! isn't this cool like those other times they were cool?
It's a shame, really, because these films have so much going for them. The had great casts (although, thinking on it, I think Ciarin Hinds was wasted on Steppenwolf- he'd be a great Darkseid) and probably the best on-screen Superman ever.
the prophecy is trueStatistical fact: Cops will never pull over a man with a huge bong in his car. Why? They fear this man. They know he sees further than they and he will bind them with ancient logics. —Marty Mikalski