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batman v. superman: dawn of justice

Movies

So about that new Batman v. Superman movie…

… I haven’t actually seen it yet, and at this point, chances are pretty high that I won’t. If you pay regular attention to the Internet at all, you’re probably already aware that reviews of this thing are not good. It’s clocking in at 28% on Rotten Tomatoes right now, and on the various major blogs that I follow, even the kinder reviews, the ones where people are saying that they did enjoy the viewing experience for various reasons, are acknowledging that the movie isn’t particularly coherent.

Here’s a roundup of those reviews:

I’ve been reading a lot of reviews all over the place, with a bit of a sinking heart. Because here’s the thing: I like superheroes. Even though a lot of the movie world is complaining about superhero fatigue in cinemas in general, me, I’m still 100 percent on board. I loves me some Marvel Cinematic Universe.

And I want to be on board for the DC Cinematic Universe, too. Christopher Reeve’s Superman was, after all, one of the formative movies of my childhood. And I fangirled the hell out of the first season of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman in the 90’s. My household adores the DC Animated Universe, which gave me my first real exposure to a lot of the other heroes in the DC canon–notably, the John Stewart Green Lantern. (I would pay serious ticket money to see Idris Elba play John Stewart, just so I can hear him deliver the IN BRIGHTEST DAY speech. 😀 )

And I really want to be excited for Wonder Woman’s first major cinematic appearance. Wonder Woman all by herself was one of the reasons I wanted to keep half an eye on this movie and see if it was worth it for me to show up in the theaters for it.

But I still haven’t seen Man of Steel, and I backed off hard on wanting to see BvS as well, mainly for one big reason: the almost universal description of this film as just not fun. “Grimdark” is not what I want in my entertainment. Intellectually I get the idea of wanting to see how superheroes would really be received in our modern world, and the distinct likelihood that their presence in society would be received with much more suspicion than in eras past.

On the other hand, I find the real world way too grim and dark as it is. At the end of the day, I want my superheroes to be figures of hope. To be heroic. (C.f., my earlier post about this movie pulling a 7-Zark-7.) To have added a bit more color and brightness to the world.

I mean honestly, DC, what’s up with the color palette in your movie universe? You guys don’t seem allergic to color in the TV shows you’re putting out! (And please to note that yeah, I’m on board with The Flash and Supergirl!) I’m not asking you to make your movies look just like Marvel’s, but y’know, some occasional brightness would do wonders. Not to mention better treatment of the supporting characters. And a bit less wholesale death and destruction.

So yeah. I’ll be over here waiting for Wonder Woman’s solo outing next year, and getting my DC on with the TV shows in the meantime. And maybe watching some of the excellent animated stories again. I particularly recommend “World’s Finest”, the three-parter they did with Bats and Supes going at it, which for my money was a way more entertaining version of this story.

(I’ll say this though, for a movie I haven’t even seen, BvS sure is doing a good job of making me talk about it! So there’s that!)

March 29, 2016 by
Movies

Batman v. Superman is pulling a 7-Zark-7? SERIOUSLY?

Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice is upon us. I’ve been reading over a lot of the reviews, with a sinking heart; I’ve really wanted to be happy about Wonder Woman’s first major cinematic appearance, but all signs indicate that she’s been shoehorned into a plot that the kinder reviews are still calling incoherent and overstuffed, and the less kind reviews are calling “an unholy mess”, which “feels like Zack Snyder hobbling the entire upcoming DC Movieverse before it gets started”.

(Sources: here and here.)

All of which makes me sad. Most of all I’m seeing a lot of reviews that are calling the movie a “joyless slog” and that it’s just not fun. And I have to boggle. Because the DC I see delivering us The Flash and Supergirl on TV is getting the fun part right. I enjoy watching both of those shows, and while they’ve gotten serious in some episodes I’ve seen, they still wholeheartedly embrace the fact that they’re telling freggin’ comic book stories, and don’t seem to feel compelled to make everything colorless and dark and grim and OH SO VERY SERIOUS.

But y’know what’s really making me facepalm?

How a bunch of reviews are also calling this film out for its response to what a lot of people complained about with Man of Steel: i.e., that Supes and Zod ripped up Metropolis without Superman giving the slightest hint of a shit that he might be endangering innocent bystanders in the battle. To all reports, BvS’s way of addressing this problem is to wedge in little bits of dialogue here and there to try to reassure the viewer that oh my no, bystanders aren’t getting harmed! Like, say, a newscaster who reports that it’s after business hours so downtown is practically deserted! As opposed to, oh, I dunno, having the heroes spend camera time making a point of getting civilians out of the goddamned way. Like heroes should be doing.

And while I am indeed making inevitable comparisons to the Avengers–I’ll be the first to acknowledge that Age of Ultron was a mess in many ways, but by gods, the Avengers spent camera time in it acting to save civilians–my actual main reaction here is, “Really, movie? You’re pulling a 7-Zark-7 here?!”

Context, for those of you who aren’t in my age bracket and/or don’t have any familiarity with 70’s-era anime: go look up Science Ninja Team Gatchaman. Gatchaman was one of the formative animes of the 70’s, really raising the bar for what anime could do. And a guy named Sandy Frank looked at that and went, “Hey, y’know what would be cool? If I translated this thing and brought it over for the US market!”

All very well and good, except for one thing: Gatchaman pulls no punches whatsoever when it comes to violence in its plots. Watch Gatchaman, and you can expect to see a lot of trains exploding, planes crashing, ships sinking, and in general, civilians being killed right and left because of the evil rampages of Galactor. Mr. Frank looked at this and apparently decided that he couldn’t POSSIBLY show such violence to children. So he took 85 of the 110 Gatchaman episodes, and in a lot of those, cut out all the most violent parts. To fill the storylines back out to half an hour, he created a bunch of new footage starring a character called 7-Zark-7, a robot intended to serve as a communications hub and overseer for G-Force, what the English version of the story called the Gatchaman team.

Zark spends a lot of his time telling the viewer about how all those planes we’re seeing are “remote controlled robot planes” and such–thereby handily skirting the entire question of whether any innocent lives might have just been lost in all those explosions.

Don’t get me wrong. I grew up loving Battle of the Planets. But once I discovered Gatchaman, and especially once I started watching BotP episodes back to back with the Gatchaman originals, it very quickly became evident how much of a hack job Sandy Frank did on the storyline.

And pro tip: if your new superhero movie is going to make me think of the hack job version of a storyline rather than the infinitely superior original, maybe, just maybe, you’re doing your movie wrong.

Oh well. I’ll be skipping seeing BvS in the theaters, I think. I’ll hold out a tiny crumb of hope that maybe Wonder Woman’s solo movie next year won’t suck. But that crumb of hope is pretty small. And with all due respect to Condor Joe, I don’t think this is a problem that can be solved with Bird Missiles.

March 23, 2016 by