Movie: Man Of Steel (06-14-13)

[stip]

I think basically all the movies will be guilty of what you're talking about to a greater or lesser degree based on the absurdity of the medium. You CAN get around it, but you need a special kind of storytelling to do it, and then you can just ask the question 'why tell that story with a superhero movie in the first place'. The biggest complaint some of my friends had about DKR was that there wasn't enough batman in it. Who is gonna pay to watch a superman movie that is just about how much it sucks to be superman?

The Batman trilogy was an excellent exception to this, and the films raise all sorts of questions about the place for exceptional people in civil society, whether they offer benefits or pose threats, and lots of cool stuff. But Batman's primary super power is privilege, and so you can escape the problems that would come with Superman.


As an aside, I remember watching X-Men 3 and during the whole mutant registration bit I was thinking that the government was right to register mutants, and would probably be right to forcibly cure them. And you could tell an interesting story with that since you could line up mutant against mutant, or just give the government enough super special weapons to enable them to fight. But who is gonna fight Superman?

[McParadigm]

It doesn't take "special" storytelling, or dark storytelling or whatever, to imbue those moments with something more. It just takes storytelling. Just…storytelling.

I think the light saber fights in the Star Wars movies do a good job of representing how action sequences have changed over the years. The fights in the original trilogy are imperfect, and almost serve more as physical representations of the building emotional weight of the scene than anything else. The characters are sparring with their dialogue as much as with swords, and they have all these emotions and uncertainty and ulterior motives. In Empire, Vader is really just toying with Luke, and the big climax isn't that Luke pulls off some flashy "whoa dude did you see that" move...it's that he, in the moment he realizes who and what he is and what might be, takes the chance on sacrificing himself to escape from it. In Jedi, there's this much heavier story conflict weighing over the fight, and it is that part of it that leads to the climax which, again, doesn't feature some sort of clever maneuvering but consists of Luke abandoning all skill and craft in his rage and frustration as he just hammers away at Vader, taking a piece of him before realizing that he is becoming more like his father and stopping.

Then you get to the new movies, in the CGI age, and its just fight after meaningless fight. The fight in Menace goes on for like 10 minutes before anything happens to even establish anything other than just "we are fighting because you're a bad guy and we're the good guys so okay I guess." The second film is just full of the most meaningless, plot-pausing saberflash. The only fight that has any story or weight behind it is the very last one, and the most powerful moments of that one are at the start when they're talking and at the end when it's just the two of them and a small hill. These two moments tie the fight to some larger emotional setting. Unfortunately, in between them are like 15 minutes of show-off set changes, Tarzan-like antics, and I seem to remember them climbing a hell of a lot. But all those showy, heartless, very nice looking fights are forgettable, while the fight in Empire is not.
Looking even more recently, the first big fight between Batman and Bane was not super CGI'd but it was really intense, because the story had so thoroughly fed that moment and throughout the fight, in both image and dialogue, we are reminded of that story. The last fight, on the other hand, tends to be just "now it's time to save the day" and, because it's no longer tied to something deeper, you can almost see them not thinking as hard about it as you watch the screen. Suddenly this guy who we were flinching for when he got punched 60 minutes ago is getting knifed in the guts and then just going about his business.

It wasn't the use or lack of CGI in these scenes that made them good or bad, it was the way the story fed (or failed to feed) the action.

Man of Steel really wanted to benefit from strong narrative, but when it came to the action sequences it always fell back on the modern "you're a bad guy and I'm the good guy so there you go" disconnect from larger emotional settings.

It also tried to turn Lois Lane into a superhero or something. She goes into space and takes part in military grade operations and pretty much showed up whenever it worked for the scriptwriters. So that was weird.

[B]

Cavill's out. Michael B. Jordan is the new Superman.

[McParadigm]

What a magnificent choice and also prepare yourselves for the great internet race war

[tree_]

yeah good choice but they'd never hire a white man to play a well-known black character just sayin

[lennytheweedwhacker]

Ashton Kutcher to play shaft

[McParadigm]

yeah good choice but they'd never hire a white man to play a well-known black character just sayin

I’m still willing to die on the “Judi Dench should be Bond, and all those Chris Hemsworthy dudes who get lucrative caped character contracts can be her slut of the week Bond girls” hill, so what do I know....but, I mean, so?

Also Gary Oldman played a dwarf by sticking cheap muppet legs out of a couch in a movie that gave real dwarf actors crummy oddball supporting roles and also where his brother Matthew McConaughey is scared of his own unborn baby because dwarfs. So literally anything is possible.

[tree_]

ya i know jus sayin

[VinylGuy]

Its not official.

I don't like Jordan as Superman. Nop.

[tree_]

racist

[BurtReynolds]

wtf did they even consider a woman for the role?

[tree_]

what about the asians

[VinylGuy]

Seems there is no room for SUPERWOMAN.

[VinylGuy]

what about the asians

There is actually a asian superman in the comics, so thats ok.

[tree_]

o good

[VinylGuy]

SUPERWOMAN starring Mila Kunis as the hero and Kate mckinnon as her wacky Australian companion with Kitten Wiig as Alexa Luthor, written and directed by Joey.

[McParadigm]

This is going well

[BurtReynolds]

SUPERWOMAN starring Mila Kunis as the hero and Kate mckinnon as her wacky Australian companion with Kitten Wiig as Alexa Luthor, written and directed by Joey.

no Melissa McCarthy? are you some kind of fatphobe?

[tree_]

how come there are no middle-eastern superheros

[McParadigm]

Is this the bargaining stage, or still just anger?