Ray wrote: Any Superhero universe when you peel back the layers ultimately devolves into either a dystopia (Civil War, Watchmen, Injustice) or an outright nihilistic apocalyptic hellscape (Old Man Logan, Irredeemable)

Well, you could say the same for any number of other genres too. Like mecha anime--that's how we got Evangelion, after all.

El Squibbonator wrote:
Well, you could say the same for any number of other genres too. Like mecha anime--that's how we got Evangelion, after all.

The deconstruction crap has turned into self flaggelation now.

It’s time to reconstruct

The thing is, what has been seen cannot be unseen. And that goes for any genre, whether it's superheroes or giant robot anime or anything else under the sun. Once works have been created that exhibit the "dark underbelly" of these popular genres, those genres in their original forms are inevitably going to look old-fashioned and outdated. I call it "Shrek Syndrome". Remember how in the 1990s pretty much every animated movie was a fairy tale musical? Shrek pretty much put an end to that, but in doing so it made the fairy tale musical genre impossible to take seriously ever again. Even modern films in that genre, like Frozen, need to have some deconstructive elements to them in order to be successful.So what happens when a parody or deconstruction destroys the genre it was based on in the first place? It leaves writers with basically two choices:

They can embrace the ridiculous aspects of their genre un-ironically and have as much fun with them as possible, which is how you get things like Tengen Toppen Gurren Lagann and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Both of those works were intended to harken back to an older period in their respective genres when they were not dominated by dark deconstructive works as was the norm at the time. The risk of doing this is that eventually the works start to seem like caricatures of themselves, exaggerated versions of the genre as it originally existed.

Alternatively, they can just keep doing what the original deconstruction or parody did but distancing it even further from the original genre. That's what DC is doing, and it's also what pretty much every new mecha anime after Evangelion (RahXephon, Bokurano, etc.) tried to do. The risk of doing this is that soon the deconstruction and parody becomes a cliche itself. Think about it: how many gritty superhero reboots and Evangelion-esque dark mecha anime do we actually need? Probably not as many as we're getting.

Part of me wishes Wonder Woman had been an absolute bomb.

Not because I think it's a bad movie. But because it was a good movie, instead of junking the entire DCEU and starting over fresh. They're trying to frankenstein it back together to avoid losing Gal Gadot as Wondy and having to recast everyone. If wonder woman had just failed, the DCEU would be dead and we'd on the road to rebooting or at least getting some half decent standalone films with the characters and DC would be in much better shape with hope in the future instead of the mea culpas as movies that the future films will have no choice but to be .

Considering that it was good in spite of the suits and the people they put in charge of these movies, I don’t understand your sentiment. The people who screwed up all the movies but one would have a better shot at retooling them if they’d managed to mess that one up too?

Not to mention that a flopped Wonder Woman would end any chance of the character being on screen in a solo film again, and be another serious blow to female superheroes until a studio feels like taking a risk on male gazey explpoitation in another ten years or so.

It’s four in the morning so I’ll keep this brief:

Superman has had six theatrical films to his name with appearances in two others, plus several television series and cartoons. Batman has had nine movies just since 1989 with five different actors. Wonder Woman just got her first movie ever.

I’m not accusing you of anything conscious on your part, but blowing that off in Snyder’s and Whedon’s favor (oh and surprise, I was right, they skimpified the Amazon’s armor to ridiculousness when they appeared again) but the attitude of “blah I don’t care about representation” just reinforces that comics are the province of horny thirteen year old boys.

I don’t want to see a good Batman vs Superman movie because the idea is stupid and it’s something that Hollywood suits love because they’re the kind of people who think that Bill’s speech at the end of Kill Bill is totally unironic and fundamentally correct.

(It’s actually not. The point of the characters is opposite: beyond the facile observation about which is closer to their private personality, the contrast of Batman and Superman is that each presents as a public face a private ideal: both me create these true identities worn as masks to present an argument of what lies beneath the public faces we all wear: The argument behind Superman is that people are fundamentally good; the Man of Tomorrow is in all of us, caged by want and fear. Batman offers the opposite argument that man can only be caged by fear. It’s essentially the two aspects of the superhero, the nihilist fascist vs the sunny idealist... if you feel that the “nutty 1%er with daddy issues in a dumb costume who tazes poors” interpretation of Batman is the only valid and correct one, which I do not...)

Like I said before, we’re on nine movies now where Batman is a clearly mentally ill social pariah (and in one of the campy ones he literally sees a therapist!). How about one where he’s not a lunatic? Where he isn’t reciting Lex Luthor’s talking points while the actual lex character is off in another plot being the embodiment of what scares Hollywood about Silicon Valley and Facebook?

The only good part of the DCCU just ignored all the ponderous pretention (not a word I use lightly) and just made a good movie that was uplifting but didn’t pull any punches.

Wonder Woman has the protagonist fail to save people she’d saved earlier from a poison gas attack, the love interest dies, she’s exiled from her home, and and she learned that war is an intrinsic part of human nature that you can’t just punch until it goes away. It could easily be called dark (and visually it uses the sepia-ish muddy darkness that broody rainstorm movies always adopt and contrasts it against an idyllic paradise to serve that end) but people leave the movie uplifted and in love with the main character.

People like WW and compare the rest of the DCCU to it because WW does all the things Man of Steel and BvS act like they’re doing, but fail to achieve. It has actual substance instead of nihlism and shock value.

(It’s lind of funny; the bit about “mankind is introduced to the Superman” in BvS is the kind of ponderous “let me start my serious story with a serious allusion to serious literature” that Tarantino mocks by attributing a famous aphorism to Klingons, again in Kill Bill)

It is exactly what the DCCU should be. If they don’t do a soft reboot and move forward with Diana as the moral center and give Jenkins a bigger role in the franchise (if she’d take it, anyway) or someone like her and not a hollow suit, visual stylist with no storytelling skill, or a comic book feel who’s too tuned into nerd crap, the movies will continue to suck and gradually stop being made as they can’t eke out a success.

I seriously think you both underestimate and overestimate the the general audience for blockbuster films. The X Men franchise continuity is an utter joke and people love the movies anyway (with exceptions) At the same time, I’ve got friends who need an explanation of why Iron Man wasn’t in BvS.

People care about continuity in television shows because of their serial nature but they go to movies to see a good movie. As soon as continuity starts choking storytelling, to hell with it.

Running around and shouting "Oh, I wish BvS and SSquad succeeded," and then turning around and going "Man, I wish WW bombed," is a very confusing position to take. I, on the other hand, wish they were all good movies that succeeded. But, we can't all get what we want I guess, can we? All but the last 15 or so minutes of WW was really good. (I hated the awful CGI-Nightmare fight scene at the end, stuffed to the neck with stock villain/hero shouting matches that didn't even sound good in context with the rest of the film.)

I hate the fact that the DCCU is feeling over-reliant on continuous super-hero canon fodder. Marvel movies aren't successful because they are building an entire interconnected universe within these films. That's just a fun little background project they seem to have been working with on the side. Their strength is that they can make a good superhero film without the audience feeling the need to watch everything before watching the next movie. I never saw Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, or Ant-Man. None of the other movies made me feel as though I missed out on anything important. None of the Marvel movies I do watch make me feel compelled to watch the other Marvel movies in any way, shape, or form.

The "CU" part of the MCU is strictly a blink-and-you'll-miss-it, just-for-fun side thing. It isn't integral to the story telling of any of these movies. You can start watching right in the middle of these things are still feel caught-up enough to enjoy what it is you're watching. The "CU" part of the DCCU is haphazard and inconsistent. In one scene Snyder will suggest that he's making an entirely new Batman that's never been established before, and in the very next scene he'll reference some obscure part of comic-book specific Batman lore (Robin's death) without establishing it, as if to say "What? Don't you know what Batman is?" And, of course, the audience members who've never read a comic book expect something like that to be explained in the following scene, or even the following film. But instead, suicide Squad shows up and hangs its whole narrative foundation on the fact that Superman is dead and what is something worse than Superman (because even the Pentagon understands the Superman isn't a hero in these movies) shows up and destroys things. If you haven't seen BvS, this part of SSquad is confusing and weird. It's inconsistent world building that places too much emphasis on narrative events that may or may not be explained fully in some film or another... maybe.

Chuckman is right. Consistent narrative continuity is restricting to storytelling. The only way the MCU has gotten away with it for so long is because they literally hold their narrative continuity at arm's length at all times. The DCCU holds it too close to the chest and is very stubborn about letting people see it.

Also, DC's irrefutably failed to have an actual superhero in their superhero franchise until 4 movies in. (Wonder Woman.) That's objectively and inarguably off-message filmmaking, and is inescapably and inherently detrimental to the franchise as a whole. If you want to watch a movie with dark and broody characters in a city crumbling in on itself under the weight of the fight between crime and religious symbolism, might I suggest Angels with Dirty Faces?

Wonder Woman being a flop would have also been a huge blow to female filmmakers, particularly in the action genre. Fun fact: my mother runs a small film festival out of Hollywood which is dedicated to highlighting female filmmakers, which usually features indendent filmmakers, but she was able to get the rights to a prescreen of WW. Because the studios didn't have confidence in it at first, she even had Patty Jenkins scheduled to be at the festival to premiere it. That is, until the hype train started gaining speed, and the studios realized they had a success on their hands, and so Patty Jenkins got bumped up to higher-status premieres. The studios had so little faith in Wonder Woman at first that they weren't even trying to market the film to bigger premieres, and my mother's tiny festival was going to be the primary one at some point. They were trying to bury it before they had even seen it.

Wonder Woman's success is a good thing for equality in Hollywood and the continued success of female filmmakers. Patty Jenkins will continue to get prominent work, and she'll be a role model for women in the film industry. Studios will hopefully be more willing to put faith in their films, and we can hopefully have more of them in general. For Wonder Woman to have failed would be for these goals to have failed as well.

Wonder Woman is the future of the film industry. Hopefully going forward, Hollywood will have some diversity and won’t just be a giant circle jerk of men who pressure women to have sex with them making movies about how fuckable those women are.

DC actually has Marvel beat. While Joss Whedon and Favteau couldn’t resist fetishizing her, Black Widow is a great example of representation in the Cap movies- but she hasn’t gotten her own yet. We’re still waiting on what they do with Captain Marvel.

Wonder Woman being the only successful film in the DCCU really makes it difficult for Warner Brothers to bury the women's successes in the film industry, as many studios have done in the past. Many films directed by women have made a lot of money, won a lot of awards, and then were forced out of the industry because of non-disclosure agreements about sexual harassment and the like.

Despite the success of Wonder Woman, you'll never see Warner Brothers give the DCCU to Patty Jenkins. They'll simply replace Snyder with an equally trite, fumbling, basic director. (Who knows? They might even break new ground and get someone entirely forgettable this time around too. Can't have audience backlash if they can't remember half the move when the credits roll.)

The "casting couch" (i.e. Hollywood being a drunken jockocracy where the merely perverted close ranks to protect the maliciously rapacious) doesn't stop with screen talent. Women who work in Hollywood in any capacity are, if not expected to be willing to be exploited sexually to advance in their careers, are expected to keep silent about it and a pervasive culture of sexual harassment and toxic masculinity.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018 ... e-its-ways

One of the best ways to combat that is with wildly successful female-helmed movies like Wonder Woman.

I just realized -- has anyone else noticed that Man of Steel is basically the exact same movie as The Powerpuff Girls Movie within terms of overarching story, themes, morality conflicts, and messaging? The only real difference is that Powerpuff Girls has better tonal consistency and smarter execution, thereby avoiding a lot of the narrative faux pas of the Snyderverse.

Let me explain by just hitting the plot highlights of each film while taking note of the story elements they were meant to convey in each film:

They both explore characters who are special via the possession of superpowers.

They both explore the harsh cultural and social reactions to these super-powerful characters had by the average civilians.

While nothing is explicitly shown, it is suggested in both films that a massive amount of human lives were accidentally taken by the reckless use of the main characters' super powers.
(Actually, The Powerpuff Girls Movie did explicitly show people drowning to death. MoS didn't even go that far.)

They both have the father-figures in each movie warn the main characters against using their super-powers in public, telling them that the world isn't ready for their existence.

The super-powered characters agree to lay low for a while.

They both have an equally as powered super villain who tries to take over the world and invade it with his own kind.

The super villain attempts to build a strong emotional connection with he super-powered main characters by drawing attention to their super-powerful similarities, and how they are all objectively more powerful and evolutionally more fit for survival than the native and natural humans.

In the end, the super-powered characters finally decide to use their special super powers to save the day against the super villain.

The only difference is that, after their devastating mistakes and being rightfully vilified by the people, the Powerpuff Girls actually learn how to use their specialness to become superheroes. Superman, on the other hand, did not.

There's more I can unpack when I get the time, but in short, The Powerpuff Girls Movie does a better job at exploring Plato's "Form of the Good" ideas (as described in The Republic) through a unique lens than Zack Snyder's Man of Steel film. What's more is that The Powerpuff Girls Movie accomplished all of this while still being true to the Superhero genre, which is something that Man of Steel objectively failed at. It takes some real smart and clever writing and filming sensibilities in order to pull that off.

Ray wrote:Also powerpuff girls is a comedy. It's not meant to be taken Seriously.

Like I said, Snyder could have built upon that with Man Of Steel 2 and from what I read that's what he was planning. But the studio mandated he make a BVS movie instead. He made the best movie he could under the circumstances with what he was given.

Man of Steel doesn't need to be a comedy in order for Superman to learn how to be a superhero. That can happen in a completely serious movie. In fact, all of the things I listed above -- overarching story, themes, morality conflicts, messaging, tonal consistency, and smart execution -- can all happen in a completely serious film such as Man of Steel. All of the installments in The Dark Knight Trilogy nailed these aspects of storytelling more or less in a competent way, and it was also completely serious. The issue refers somewhat to your second statement.

Man of Steel shouldn't need a sequel in order for Superman to learn how to be a superhero. That's a film that lacks resolution on any level. See, The Powerpuff Girls Movie has a resolution because it features an entire narrative that builds up the issues of the girls not learning how to be superheroes, and then resolves this conflicts by having the girls learn how to be superheroes. If The Powerpuff Girls Movie didn't have the girls learning to become superheroes by the end of the movie, then the type of narrative that the movie was building would lack any real resolution of any kind. Man of Steel, on the other hand uses a similar narrative, where its entire existence is used to build the morality conflicts of Superman using his powers for good. Basically, like the Powerpuff Girls, the issues arise when he doesn't learn how to be a superhero. When he does decide to use his superpowers for good by defeating Zod and his army, he makes huge mistakes that keep him from being the superhero that he wants to be. And then the movie just stops...?

Man of Steel just didn't have Superman learn from his mistakes in a movie that seems to try to build its morality conflicts all around making those mistakes. Was it a mistake to save all of the kids on the bus? Maybe. Was it a mistake to wreck the dude's truck after getting beer spilled on him? Perhaps. Was it a mistake to save everyone on the oil rig, thereby revealing his true powers to the world around him? Who knows? Was it a mistake to accidentally wreck half of Metropolis and kill Zod? Roll credits.

This is an issue I have with Hollywood in general these days. Every movie is so focused on having a sequel that they forget their their first film still needs a narrative resolution of some kind. It became a noticeable issue starting with The Amazing Spider-Man movies. The Amazing Spider-Man started rather inoffensively, but shoved a lot of Peter Parker's backstory to the sequel. Then The Amazing Spider-Man 2 happens, and Peter Parker's backstory is shoved to the sequel yet again. This wouldn't be such an issue of these movies didn't rest the entire weight of their story on this element of Peter Parker-'s character, forcing it to become the core of his entire character. Because the movies constantly shove it into the following film, we the audience never get to see the core of Peter Parker's character, therefore we have nothing with which to empathize. The whole movie sales flat. (The Force Awakens did this too, to some degree. And rewatching it now that The Last Jedi has turned over every stone and found out that half of the things that TFA thought was important really wasn't important at all makes TFA really tedious to watch now.)

It's just poor writing to have the main character not learn from his mistakes in a movie that is all about learning from those mistakes. In fact, a movie like this would have probably played better if it was a comedic satirical and deconstructionist farce on the superhero genre. It would be the Blazing Saddles of superhero movies.

Mel Brooks' Man of Steel. I like that idea... The entire movie could possible be retooled to work in that fashion without sacrificing any major plot or story point in the entire movie.

The core problem with the DCCU is that the movies have all the negatives of comics (ponderous self importance, weird views about women, an emphasis on continuity over storytelling, nothing is self contained, etc) with none of the positives.

^ I half expected The Justice League to feature mostly The Flash or Cyborg standing in front of a chalkboard while illustrating all of the yet-unexplored events that connect all of the DCCU together to bored-looking Batman and Wonder Woman. He'll catch us up on how The Joker killed Robin and explain why The Flash's cameo in BvS was super important, you guys. (Aquaman will humorously play against type and take detailed notes the whole time.) Giant expository scenes with a classroom aesthetic are, after all, huge staples in the "major event" best-selling comic books towards their limited and niche audiences.

Maybe this scene will be in the "Hardcore Unrated" extended cut of the movie on Blu-ray, or at least in the "Deleted Scenes" section of disc 2.

Since Cyborg is connected to a motherbox, they missed an opportunity for something like this

https://youtu.be/8z4kGzOSgoY?t=25s