Gordon_4 said:
I have an awful feeling that if DC cock that movie up, I'm going to find myself at the bottom of a very cheap bottle of Drambuie and wondering why I'm no longer welcome at the local cinema
Wonder Woman is basically my last hope for a unambiguously good DC film. If they fuck it up, then....pfffft.
Zontar said:
Didn't the villain win in Civil War?
I guess so? I mean, his plan was kinda ridiculous in retrospect, and at the end of the film Cap sends Tony a message along the lines of "We're cool for when Thanos shows up, right?"
It kinda feels like no lasting damage was done. Even Rhodes getting crippled is like...he'll still
walk, albeit with an exoskeleton, and it was a member of his
own side who lasered him in the first place.
Zontar said:
Doing things differently isn't the same as doing them well. Lucas tried to do things differently with the prequels and look how that turned out (though in fairness Disney's tried making generic carbon copies of things for the sequel trilogy and the spinoffs and that's turned out equally bad so far).
The whole "Give us something new!" versus "Give us something old!" conflict is a really weird one. Critics often make novelty or lack thereof the deciding factor in their appraisal of a film. But when you get down to it? It's more about the film's quality and execution. And the result of that means that audiences and critics look incredibly fickle and difficult to please in their desires. Do something old? "We've seen this before!" Do something new? "This sucks!"
For example, compare
Superman Returns to
Man of Steel. The first, directed by Bryan Singer, is basically a love letter to the Reeve films. It's a classic Superman film - he flies around saving everybody, and the conflict comes from natural disasters and interpersonal relationship drama. There's no moral ambiguity and no hard questions, nobody dies (except for a few of Luthor's henchpersons), and Superman saves the day by lifting something really heavy. People saw that and went "This is boring! It's just like the Reeve films. There's no fighting, and it's just retreading old ground."
So with
Man of Steel, they swing in the polar opposite direction. Now Superman is a lot more fallible and a lot less powerful - he's basically a super-strong flying brick, as opposed to a godlike guardian angel. The conflict comes from an evil villain wearing black who wants to destroy the world. Superman spends a lot of time moping and wondering what he's even doing, and when Zod shows up, he starts questioning whether he should be supporting Earth or the remnants of Krypton. When he finally acts, he demolishes most of Smallville and Metropolis in two frenetic action sequences that look like a boxing match between cruise missiles, and when confronted with a revenge-mad Zod who can't be pacified, he has to kill him, thus crossing a major Superman line. By the end of the film, the city looks like a nuke hit it, tens of thousands of people are dead, and we leave thinking "Did Superman even save anyone?"
It was the exact opposite of a "Superman movie," and that's the most cutting criticism I've seen made of the film; it's dark, depressing, cynical, and it directly questions the viability of qualities that are fundamental to the Superman myth - that he saves people and spreads hope. That's something that's
never been done in a Superman film, and I can't recall any instance of it being done in a Superman
comic, though it's probably out there.
And we fucking hated it! People reacted as if Snyder had stolen their firstborn child and raised him as a neo-Nazi. So we get something old (
Superman Returns) and our response is "This is old and boring! Nobody fights and nobody dies!" Then we get something new (
Man of Steel) and our response is "This is weird and depressing! It's 60% fight scenes and nobody gets saved!"
I can imagine some executive at WB looking at reviews for both films, shaking his head and saying "You can't fucking please these people." And he's kinda right. As an audience, we are very bad at clearly expressing what we want. And I think it's because we're focussing on the wrong stuff.
Man of Steel wasn't bad because it was a new and depressing take on the Superman idea. It was bad because it had a shitty script with a bunch of plot holes. Same for the later DC films. We're going "Make it funnier and less depressing!" when what we really want is answers to questions like "Why didn't they just hit Enchantress with a cruise missile? Why are people blaming Superman for terrorist attacks? Why can't Zod just terraform Mars?"
