DCEU
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Difference is I never seen anyone that shares my opinion in this situation. And I have seen countlest videos on youtube spouting the opposite.BuildsLegos said:
I like Watchmen only for following the book. Sucker Punch I thought was crap. Beautiful effects, but the story and characters were crap. BvS is the worst superhero film ever made imo.PsychedelicDiamond said:I'm actually gonna defend Snyder too. Of course I'd also defend Bay to an extent but that aside, no, I don't think it's fair to call Snyder a bad director. I really liked Watchmen, thought Sucker Punch was alright, didn't really get into Man of Steel and adored Batman v Superman and I thought the direction on all of those was pretty fantastic, even the ones that felt lacking when it came to the actual writing.Natemans said:Samtemdo8 said:No it isn't because you are not alone in your opinion. I am.Natemans said:Samtemdo8 said:Natemans said:Agent_Z said:Films lose directors all the time and Affleck quit directing the Batman movie because of the stress and because he felt someone else was more qualified.Natemans said:Samtemdo8 said:Only the first 2 movies (which are my favorite) Have you seen movies 3 through 7? Its was almost a black and white film?Natemans said:Samtemdo8 said:They know what they are doing, they want to turn all there superheroes movies to look and feel the same as the Dark Knight because that's what made them a billion dollars.Natemans said:Samtemdo8 said:No its that I argued this so many times its like I already know the answer I am gonna get. I haven't stopped talking about Batman v Superman since it came out.Natemans said:Really? You're using blah blah blah as your argument? What are you, 2? No, I've honestly found Zack bad.Samtemdo8 said:All I read from that is Blah Blah Blah Zack is shit nowNatemans said:I don't agree. Zack Snyder's style of filmmaking is kinda lame the more I think about it. His cinematography in 300 and Watchmen was decent even if it was way too forced in places, but around Sucker Punch, he started to really go downhill. I don't get when people tell that BvS is gorgeous in cinematography because honestly its one of the most grey, ugly looking movies I've ever seen.Samtemdo8 said:Shoggoth2588 said:Two things: First I call it the DC Film Universe (DCFU) and the second thing is kind of a 'get out of fuck-up free' card and it's the one that DC has always had up its sleeve:
Just slap that onto every DCFU film (and pre-DCFU film I guess) and push the idea that all of these films are their own things taking place in their own Elseworlds variation of the DCU. This also opens them up to have a film adaptation of Infinite Crisis once they find a writing/directing team that starts making objectively great films again. Nerds like me already assume that the movies are Elseworlds tales already but pushing the Elseworlds brand on the general viewing public could be a great boon for DC and WB if only because it's an easy out to explain why there have been so many Batmen, why there are so many Flashes, etc.
As for actual things that I would do...Zack Snyder and Nolan can be retired from here on out. Batman should also be benched for a few years but that would be unrealistic considering how profitable he is. When it comes to the animated films though, I don't know what to do with those. On paper they seem to be fine but something happens during production that just...screws them up. The most direct thing I could do would be to make them completely sexless since Killing Joke and Judas Contract (mostly Killing Joke) had their weird, weird sex bits that should have just been left out.
I still want Zacky boy to make movies. He has talent.
If you like it, that's cool. This is just how I felt.
But seriously why is being grey conisder bad? Does everything have to be as colorful as a Mario game? And the cinematography in the movie good. Especially the Batman origin scene.
The grey color palette makes the film look bland and uninspiring to look at. You can have dark, but put color as a contrast. Hell, there is no contrast in color between Batman and Superman in this movie. Both are dark and muted colors. I can't even tell the difference between Gotham and Metropolis because both look the same to me. Also I'm fine if you like it, but I find the cinematography very dour and ugly to look at. Even the origin scene. While it was well done and the origin was completely pointless, the deaths were kinda dumb. Thomas Wayne goes charging to punch the guy? No duh he's gonna get shot. As for Martha, (btw screw that moment in the climax) how is her head not wrecked since she got her brains blown out?
And to be frank I have been tired of it ever since...but I keep getting pulled back in.
Well, don't use blah blah blah. Its a lazy excuse for an argument. If you don't like it, then just ignore or don't respond the answer. Sadly it keeps getting brought up because DC doesn't know what they are doing.
Heck Harry Potter got dark and gritty by its 3rd movie and they made billions of dollars.
Not really. DC and WB are acting like a bunch of wild monkeys making promises, but poor decisions. And again they miss this point with the Dark Knight. The Dark Knight wasn't great because it was dark and gritty; it was good because it had a good screenplay, great characters, solid performances, good cinematography and filmmaking.
Harry Potter works differently because they know how to adapt the book and display what makes their films work. Hell, those movies even had color too along with good cinematography.
Even Harry Potter's other movies had more color than just black and white.
The reason I say DC doesn't know what they are doing is because they don't. I mean they hit the panic button and screwed up the production of Suicide Squad, lost 3 or 4 directors for the Flash along with a page one rewrite, Ben Affleck quit directing the Batman movie (I know they got a different guy, but Ben is the only one who felt like he gave a damn), they are letting an immature and incompetent filmmaker like Zack Snyder make these films, these people don't get these characters or this universe.
They have messed up and made 3 bad movies, some of them have underperformed to barely make even, they hit the panic button and made the production of Suicide Squad a complete mess, they keep throwing all of these movie ideas without a single thought or just rushing out to compete with Marvel instead of building a cinematic universe, their characters are completely bland or one dimensional, they lost 4 directors for the Flash and a page one rewrite (dude, that's not a good sign. This feels like their Gambit movie in terms of production problems), Ben Affleck is the only guy with talent and the way this cinematic universe is run, I'd want him to get out of it badly. Zack Snyder is an incompetent filmmaker and BvS is the worst superhero film I've ever seen. And yes, even worse than Fant4stic and I still thought that was garbage too.
STOP PUSHING ME!!!
Zack Snyder is a brilliant director and his movies are aweseom, the action, the visauls, the music.
We're not pushing you. Jeez!
Look its called a subjective opinion. We're not forcing you to dislike his stuff. I'm just saying my thoughts. I think Zack Snyder is a terrible director and you like his stuff. That's fine.
And it pisses me off because I want more movies from this guy, it pisses me off that people also compare him to Michael Bay, because Michael Bay is still making movies where Zacky Boy is now at risk of being kicked off of every project of any movie.
And I much prefer Zack's movies over Bays.
I want more movies or anything from him but EVERYONE now hates him and calls him a hack because of Batman v Superman and now I possibly won't get more movies after Justice League. Basically Fuck Me and what I like and I have to sit down and take it.
Dude, calm down. We're not pushing you because you're alone. Hell, I love the Force Awakens and defend it heavily against some of the criticisms, but I don't care if I'm alone. I like movies or directors most people don't. I like Batman Forever, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Face/Off, Mortal Kombat, Demolition Man, Expendables 2, Stardate.
Michael Bay is a hack too. The reason we compare them is because they have similar filmmaking techniques of style over substance and lack of great storytelling or how they do it. I prefer some elements, but with Bay, at least I know what I'm getting unlike Zack.
I dislike his style of direction. I found BvS insulting. If you didn't, then fine. Just stop whining and hating yourself for liking something people didn't.
I think he's good at directing action and composing visuals, better than most people doing action movies these days and in a time where super hero movies have a tendency of looking like made for tv productions I do believe it's a godsend to have someone like him working on them. But even aside from his movies looking good he's great at communicating things through visuals alone without having to elaborate on them through exposition. I also think that's one of the reasons why so much of Batman v Superman flew over peoples heads, what you see is just as important as what you're being told and I feel like a lot of people are conditioned to only really pay attention to what they're told in movies. He has an understanding of visual storytelling that many others working the genre lack.
Oh don't be one of those "you didn't get it" or "its too smart" people.
"I feel like a lot of people are conditioned to only pay attention to what they're told in movies."
Yet this movie told us constantly instead of showing us. Its not visual in storytelling; its visuals with the lack of story or context.
I disagree heavily. Zack Snyder is not good at storytelling at all even in visuals. Examples of those who are good at this: several Disney movies, Stanley Kubrick, Edgar Wright, George Miller, the original Star Wars trilogy, etc. I find Zack Snyder to be incredibly overrated nor do I think he's a good director at all. I keep getting told that BvS looks beautiful, but to be honest, the film looks so bleak, grey and ugly to look at imo.
I don't think it's a case of how smart you are or aren't; it's just a poorly edited film that made the unfortunate decision of swimming against the trends set by the Marvel films.Natemans said:
It's the kind of superhero film that would've made fans cream their pants back in 2006, but ten years and a dozen Marvel films later...y'know, it's like having steak for dessert. You're at the end of the meal, you want something sweet to have with some coffee or whatever, and a waiter who looks suspiciously like Zack Snyder dumps a one-kilo hunk of rare meat onto your plate. It wasn't what the audience wanted.
I was much more annoyed by the incessant, unkillable debate about how shit Mass Effect 3's ending was than I was by the ending itself.DaCosta said:
I also didn't think it was bad at all. I didn't really like Mass Effect 2 - when you look closely, you realise that there's no actual narrative for most of ME2, just an extended recruitment drive and then the climax - and I felt that Mass Effect 3 took the writing that I liked from the first game with the combat that I liked from the second. And it did a great job of tying together the loose threads of the previous two games in ways that made your previous decisions feel like they were substantially altering the plot.
The fact that it ended with a trippy conversation with a poorly-voiced ghost kid who tells you what colour of computer terminal you want to stick your dick into was underwhelming, but it came at the end of a complex and very meaty narrative.
Maybe there's a correlation here? Like, maybe there's something in mine and Samtendo's brain chemistry that makes us fall in love with memetic punching bags like BvS and ME3. It's as if we see the entire world united in condemnation of That Shit Thing, and we go "hey, wait, it wasn't that bad," and then through the process of extended debate that sentiment somehow transmutes into "it was the best thing ever and you're all just stupid butts with butts for a face!"
(I also hated DA2, by the way.)
Calling BvS the worst superhero film ever made is pretty harsh. I mean, let's be honest here, the genre had some real stinkers. Wouldn't even call it the worst super hero movie the year it came out, that goes to Suicide Squad, which, to be fair, actually is in my opinion one of the worst ones ever made. But still... Batman and Robin. Catwoman. About half of the X-Men movies. But, okay, you're entitled to your opinion.Natemans said:
No, I'm not saying it's too smart by any means, it's no... Inland Empire or anything comparatively abstract and obtuse. I think the genre overall has become too dumb or, if you find that too cynical a statement to make, I think it has made such a habit of interpreting the subject matter in the form of samey, formulaic action comedies that it led people to approach movie's that try for something more experimental with the wrong mindset and walk away from them dissapointed. Sure, there are movies that break that mold and succeed nonetheless, Nolan's Batman trilogy was one of them, Logan seems to be another, though I haven't seen it yet, but generally speaking, say, Raimi's Spiderman movies, pretty much the entire MCU as well as, say, Deadpool, are essentially the same type of movie. But even the Dark Knight movies and, I presume, Logan are quite a bit less experimental than BvS. Or rather, the Dark Knight trilogy establishes a groundwork of relatively unflinching realism (Well, you know, for an action movie with an inherently pulpy premise) that makes it's themes a lot more obvious because you can easily relate them to the real world which rules it mostly tries to follow. Batman v Superman is set in what is much more blatantly a fantasy world, a world with superpowered aliens and magical amazons and whatnot but the movie still plays it completely straight and tries to convey some pretty serious themes through these elements. I believe that's where it lost many people.
I think there are a lot of things people have missed because it's not explicitly spelled out in dialogue even though they are conclusions that, to me, seemed rather natural to make. One of the most obvious ones of course being that Batman's last Robin was murdered by the Joker which is what drove him over the edge. It's never spelled out, we just see Robin's costume and hear Bruce and Alfred talk about loss and it's a natural conclusion to make. Just like people pointing out that Batman acted highly immorally and accusing the movie of promoting fascist ideology when, to me, it was blatantly obvious that up to the last thirty minutes the movie obviously treated Batman as a, however somewhat sympathetic, bad guy. Or that whole theme about xenophobia that flew past some people even though it literally had a major plotthread about an evil capitalist summoning an uncontrollable monster because he hates an immigrant. And there are a lot of these elements that noone ever seems to bring up even though they are obviously there and there are so many complaints that I read in some of the negative reviews that made me just want to grab the author and yell "That was the whole point, man!" into his ears. Which isn't to say that there aren't a lot of legitimate grievances to have but... you know, I feel with a lot of them people just didn't pay enough attention.
It does have a very bleak and muted style, that's absolutely true, but so does... you know, Denis Villeneuve's Enemy, in fact even more so, but that doesn't mean it isn't a visually beautiful movie. Don't get me wrong, I like bright colours, some of my favourite action movies are Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Mad Max: Fury Road and Speed Racer but two of those are comedies and the other one is basically a heavy metal album cover come to life. Batman v Superman had a fairly serious and somewhat melancholic tone and therefore went for subdued colours. I mean, it both starts and ends with a funeral. A movie that had no excuse to look as dull as it did and where the production design clashed with the tone were Suicide Squad or Deadpool.You can't have a bunch of dull, grey, oppressive cityscapes and then have Margot Robbie or Ryan Reynolds do their most obnoxious *holds up spork*, I don't think I ever hated a character in an action movie as much as I hated Harley Quinn. But I digress.
The SHIELD that Rogers uncovered was deeply corrupt. And had been actively working on a project that would use those Helicarriers to kill every person on Earth who could be a threat to Hydra's plans.Agent_Z said:
It's also worth noting that S.H.I.E.L.D. stands for "Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division"- given the "Homeland" part of that equation, in most places that SHIELD has agents working undercover in a way that they might be endangered by having their cover might blown by Rogers' reveal, they're likely already working outside their purview (and much more likely not to be working for the right side.)
There is no good place to crash-land a vehicle the size of a Helicarrier. It's somewhat disbelief-baiting that there's a place to safely land such a vehicle. Landing it in the river is probably better than most, as several real-life plane crashes would imply.
It hasn't been ignored that super-powered conflicts involve costs. But there has been a better than decent case made that those conflicts were better than the events they set out to prevent. Ross conveniently forgets that the contingency plan the Avengers' fight against the Chitauri managed to prevent involved dropping a nuclear warhead on New York.
Which at least showed some willingness to contemplate the question of whether Rogers' unswerving loyalty was a good thing.Callate said:
Civil War is consistent in the view that putting revenge over all other considerations is not a good thing.Callate said:
Falcon isn't an Avenger when Rogers encounters him. Neither is Peggy, or Sharon Carter. He's a man who came of age in the 1940s and a soldier who was pulled directly out of armed conflict into another era; for all that, he handles himself pretty well.
Trusting his moral compass brought him out of being a war bond poster boy into making a significant impact on the war, led the remnants of SHIELD to fight against the conspiracy that had sprung up in their midst, and saved his best friend's life. There's a more than slight suggestion it's the reason the Super Soldier serum worked on him in the first place. He isn't without reason to trust it, nor have the consequences suggested otherwise.
...And then she gets blown up, and the next official response we get on the subject is, "I know, let's use supervillains!"Callate said:
No, but it does take the wind right out of a "noble sacrifice" when there are other options at hand. There's supposed to be more daylight between "tragic act of heroism" and "death wish".
Because the only things that can present credible relationships are romantic comedies, sitcoms, and tween movies?
Maybe there's a difference between "getting bogged down" and going beyond "remind the audience that they're there just enough that they can be used as a hostage"?
There have been a tremendous number of movies about people who try to leave violence behind, only for circumstances to force it back into their lives. Just off the top of my head, Unforgiven, A History of Violence, and John Wick come to mind. If I could believe for one moment that El Diablo's return to aggression actually cost him something, or that he made an active choice to give up pacifism to protect people that he cared about, it would make a world of difference- and possibly even make me care when he gets killed in the final conflict.
Instead, it feels like his "arc", such as it is, drums along to a perfunctory set of beats that have as much to do with setting up special effect shots as anything resembling motivation. His emotional range goes all the way from "slightly pissed off" to "totally pissed off"; I can't believe his guilt or his affection when we're told that he's showing either.
By comparison, an example from Netflix's take on the Marvel Universe- Luke Cage. Mid-way through the series, the villain "Cottonmouth" is replaced with another, "Diamondback"- and as I commented to a friend, "crazy train" describes 100% of the latter's emotional range and 90% of his motivation. He wasn't nearly as interesting as what he supplanted. "Cottonmouth" was a better character because he could display calm, happiness, creative impulses- and terrifying, violent, impulsive rage.
Much like I said of the movies over-all, you have to have some valleys as well as some peaks. And you have to treat the valleys as seriously as you do the peaks, not just as filler or set-up for the next bout of thunder.
I hope their assessment of it matches my own, then.
I am someone who is constantly calling for DC to get rid of Snyder and Co and reboot the whole thing. That being said, Zach Snyder has some upside. Taking storyboarding from something like a comic book and translating it to screen, he's pretty good at that. Its just that his awful movies took from awful comics. Snyder didn't do anything wrong with 300, its just awful because any story that lionizes freaking Spartans of all people... doesn't deserve to exist at all. BvS, let's take an awful and hated comic story and smash it into an overrated only enjoyed by the teen "don't call me a teen, look how dark and edgy I am" emo set. In those movies the source material was terrible. If he has good source material, he turns out Watchmen... a well translated comic book movie and very enjoyable.
The main problem with the DCEU is Zack Snyder. Some say David Goyer as well, but remember he wrote the Nolan trilogy (obviously with help and supervision from Nolan). But Snyder is the guy responsible for this debacle. It's his vision, his execution, his story and ultimately, his films. You can blame WB for that.circularlogic88 said:
I know that Chris Nolan built a completely different universe for his stand-alone films, but nonetheless, the foundation was still there. The studio could have simply brought in someone else who shared Chris' vision and continued to build on what was a financially successful/critically acclaimed universe. Instead they went into the complete opposite direction with Snyder.
And by the way, being dark is fine. I personally find that more interesting. Being dark is not the problem, the director is. Logan was dark as fuck. But it worked on several levels because of James Mangold, Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart and that little girl. Tone is important but story and character development are infinitely more important. And so far Snyder has shown that he really doesn't get the characters. For example, Superman is not dark. When writers try to make him dark to be "more relatable and interesting" it doesn't work and they've already failed. Captain America is a far better example of a modern day Superman than Superman is.
I am hoping beyond all hope that Wonder Woman will get it right. Not just because I'm a fan of the genre, but because I also really want to see a strong female superhero. If WW is a hit, then there's hope for the DCEU. If not, then call in the Anti-Monitor.