I wonder how, in many, many years from now, people will interpret this whole thing. It is a huge mess.
Everyone I know whose opinions I respect hated this movie. I don't get it. I don't know why. I have these movies in 4k so I dig the s**t out of them but I feel like I'm missing something when no one I know does, like I'm getting it wrong. I know when I like bad movies, I know what my guilty pleasures are, this isn't that. I sincerely thought this was one of, if not, the best superhero movie I've ever seen and I feel like I'm going crazy for thinking that.
Can they actually articulate what they don't like about the movie, or do they disagree with Zack Snyder on unrelated perceived political leanings (a.k.a. calling him "right-wing", "objectivist", etc) and regurgitate talking points that mysteriously appeared after March 2016? Serious question.
Because what I've found is that people who don't like this movie, or *any* of Zack Snyder's movies, when told to describe them, will reveal to you that they've either seen a different movie than you did, have poor media literacy and let the "cool" aesthetics cloud what the story was actually saying, or they're sourcing their arguments straight from YouTube.
See: "Clark doesn't smile", "Clark doesn't save anyone", "Cyborg helping a single mother was bad, actually, why didn't he think of the Economy and let her be poor", "slow motion is half of the movie", etc.
They're still probably mad about Batman vs Superman. Its whole underpinning is "two billionaires are upset that an honest, blue-collar worker is a better human being than they are and are afraid of him wielding power", "the USA doesn't approve of Superman getting in the way of their own state-sponsored attempts at destabilizing third world countries (see: CIA)", and "Fake News and tech CEOs having the government in their back pocket is a global catastrophe in itself", just couched in dudes dressed in tights and having a punch-up. But ask anyone why it's bad and they'll vomit up "MARTHAAAAAAA" and "their moms have the same name and they became friends LOL".
Can they actually articulate what they don't like about the movie, or do they disagree with Zack Snyder on unrelated perceived political leanings (a.k.a. calling him "right-wing", "objectivist", etc) and regurgitate talking points that mysteriously appeared after March 2016? Serious question.
Well, I can tell you that I don't hang with people like that. I am not so young that I still want to be around that BS. No. I wouldn't respect opinions like that.
The people I've talked to just didn't like the experience. They didn't mind the length, oddly enough, it was the story, the events, the characters, the filmmaking itself. They just didn't see what I liked about it.
Well, I can tell you that I don't hang with people like that. I am not so young that I still want to be around that BS. No. I wouldn't respect opinions like that.
The people I've talked to just didn't like the experience. They didn't mind the length, oddly enough, it was the story, the events, the characters, the filmmaking itself. They just didn't see what I liked about it.
.... I find it hard to believe they didn't like *all those aspects* and somehow didn't find the length objectionable. So they sat around for a 4 hour movie and thought "Yeah, the fact that I'm spending half of an entire work shift to watch this is cool, but everything else is bad"?
What did they think the movie was four hours long *for*, then?
Probably. I know more than a few of them are huge on a hand full of the MCU movies but I've also heard them come down pretty hard on the ones they didn't like so it's not as though they let biases slow them down.
I wonder how, in many, many years from now, people will interpret this whole thing. It is a huge mess.
Everyone I know whose opinions I respect hated this movie. I don't get it. I don't know why. I have these movies in 4k so I dig the s**t out of them but I feel like I'm missing something when no one I know does, like I'm getting it wrong. I know when I like bad movies, I know what my guilty pleasures are, this isn't that. I sincerely thought this was one of, if not, the best superhero movie I've ever seen and I feel like I'm going crazy for thinking that.
I guess people might reassess them like the Star Wars prequels.
Most of the hate I've seen comes from diehard DC fans in the States. That's anecdotal evidence more than statistics but it's an odd trend I've noticed.
I guess people might reassess them like the Star Wars prequels.
Most of the hate I've seen comes from diehard DC fans in the States. That's anecdotal evidence more than statistics but it's an odd trend I've noticed.
It is an observable trend, though. ZSJL has tons of international fans and the intl. market outnumbers the US one. It was at Number 1 on UK's Official Film Chart for at least 3 weeks in a row, and Chinese audiences racked up absurd streaming numbers in different platforms; on Bilibili they left annotations of "Thank You, Zack Snyder!" on that stream of the movie (rated 9.8 where Josstice league was 3.3 at the time).
It turns out people love a movie that doesn't pretend to pander to them the way Disney does. For example: Disney is totally ready to accuse Chinese audiences of racism and blame them for Disney itself making John Boyega smaller on a Star Wars poster or not showing Chadwick Boseman's actual face on a Black Panther poster. They'll roll with sensational headlines of "Chinese viewers thought Black Panther was 'too dark'" when the complaint was about the lighting of the movie. But they still want that country's money, so they'll remake Mulan no problem. Chinese audiences had no actual issue with ZSJL holding Cyborg as the heart of its story or the fact that it's as much an origin film for him as it is a team-up movie for the rest of the League, given his character development.
I insist that "diehard DC fans" in the States have a primary grievance over Snyder's portrayal of Superman, and everything else stems from there. Especially where MoS and BvS show no grand reverence for the US's way of doing things the way Marvel gives lip service to American heroes and politics. The military-entertainment complex is real, but where Iron Man was tooled to promote the US-Afghanistan war and sell it to a public that was losing trust in the US over it (so this rich American guy in a suit of armor flies over to some "Middle East" country and shoots ALL the bad guys! and that country is never mentioned again in the continuity because who cares?), something like Man of Steel blatantly shows the military making things worse at critical moments (jets spiraling into buildings when they get too close to the World Engine, etc.) and the best they do is a plan that results in more than a few of them dying in the attempt (phantom zone, etc). Clark flew to the Indian Ocean to disable that World Engine rather than the one in Metropolis entirely on purpose. One of the movie's final scenes is Clark showing disapproval of the surveillance state by spiking a surveillance drone in front of Swanwick.
BvS doubles down on the criticism as I described a few posts ago. Despite the fact that Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos exist and Zuckerberg is barely considered a human being as-is (and Elon is continually proving himself to be an idiot-- he bought Twitter just to be popular in the internet equivalent of a sewer, after all), people are still salty about Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of Lex Luthor Jr because somewhere in their mind they're still invested in the idea that a rich billionaire who doesn't care about human lives is still inherently *better* than a normal person in some way shape or form. They want to believe that the billionaire has something to aspire to aside from their riches, so it makes them upset to see a dweeb who can't articulate a story about Prometheus when he takes the microphone to talk, whose plan revolves around bribing US senators where he can, leading the other billionaire by his Dick Cheney-style xenophobia, and blatantly denying a disabled person his compensation and exploiting his resulting destitute status; they want someone who has muscles, who "is" intelligent, who is in some way "right" about Superman, anything they can justify, whatever. And then fancast Bryan Cranston like a bunch of basic b*tches and revert to when they were young and can't let go of Clancy Brown.
ZSJL is less critical on the Overt American Values from what I remember, but "real DC fans" still swear Clark needed to spout something about "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" because he just has to and cling to the fact that some recent animated movie for literal children said it, because they're more concerned about a hero spouting off a catchphrase rather than the hero actually standing for something and being cognizant of the power he and his home country wields and how it behaves at the detriment of the rest of the globe. Clark saves those in need no matter where they are in the world. "DC fans" are still mad he's not wearing his underwear on the outside. They have their panties in a twist that his character was ever tested at any point and shown to be imperfect, they're mad that the type of power he wields is shown to actually mess up a city (the same way they do in the animated shows), they're mad that he isn't all powerful all of the time and unassailably right. They want comfort, not hope. Superman being confronted with terrible situations and handling them the best he can despite his own imperfections is offensive to them, but also him T-posing is bad, because something-something Jesus Christ, as if Jesus Christ is bad. As if Superman shouldn't be Christ-like.
But it's okay for Tony to T-pose on an Infinity War poster in a way that clearly signposts his importance to the MCU because IDK he's just that awesome. He's a rich billionaire who's good-looking and f*cks, so it doesn't matter if his character development behind the scenes and on screen feature him pushing Patriot Act-type inventions, inventing autonomous drones capable of deploying from orbit to strike highschoolers on a bus, or him spouting HYDRA rhetoric (see: him delusionally ranting about "precious freedoms" getting in the way of his plan). It's Marvel and they can get away with it. Just ignore where Infinity War admitted that the only good future without Thanos is the one where Tony also dies, not one where he lives. People don't actually care about what that means.
Anyway, Aquaman 2's post-credit has Ocean Master eating a burger, watching a massive roach crawl by on the table, and sticking the roach on top of his burger and biting into it.
The new Superman movie has a rumored plot leak involving
Drunk Sorority Supergirl who left Krypto in Clark's care for the week, Superman and Lois playacting a discussion that turns into an argument about politics, Jimmy Olsen rizzing up Lex's henchwoman, Lex decoding a Jor-El message that portrays Superman as a conqueror and turning the public against Supes, and Lex having a dimensional portal where he locks away people he doesn't like including his exes. Lex reportedly takes Krypto (a dog whose behavior and appearance is now modeled after James Gunn's own dog) to this dimension and has the dog beaten up.
The latest rumor involves Superman being exposed to Cancel Culture when the internet blows up with the #SuperSh!t hastag and makes him sad, but the hashtag is being boosted by Lex's mutant monkeys all typing up manufactured hate.
It all sounds ridiculous, but this is the exact kind of silly Silver Age nonsense people are claiming to love, fueled by nostalgia and the image of Superman as hopeful and invulnerable to the world's problems—even though the teasers and footage the new Superman has been in have all featured him frowning, scowling, and hurt.
It all sounds ridiculous, but this is the exact kind of silly Silver Age nonsense people are claiming to love, fueled by nostalgia and the image of Superman as hopeful and invulnerable to the world's problems—even though the teasers and footage the new Superman has been in have all featured him frowning, scowling, and hurt.
Yeah, silly is a word. It's good word. A word that describes this pretty well.
Still, I'm a big advocate of presentation. I really think that you can take something preposterous and, if done right, you can make something great out of it. It's all in the execution. I'm not big on James Gunn. His humor isn't to my taste, but I'm willing to give him a chance... On matinee... or whatever cheapest thing the theatre offers. It's just really expensive to go to the movies these days.
Yeah, silly is a word. It's good word. A word that describes this pretty well.
Still, I'm a big advocate of presentation. I really think that you can take something preposterous and, if done right, you can make something great out of it. It's all in the execution. I'm not big on James Gunn. His humor isn't to my taste, but I'm willing to give him a chance... On matinee... or whatever cheapest thing the theatre offers. It's just really expensive to go to the movies these days.
You are way more generous than me. I'm not planning on paying any money to watch this movie, if I ever see it at all. I just don't trust James Gunn.
The preposterousness of this that can't be escaped is that modern fandom is currently pretending to be "Atheist" (as well as "apolitical") but they don't recognize that a conception of God who placidly reinforces an existing status quo is what they're clamoring for every time they want to see a Superman that smiles at everything, always has a way out from hard decisions, and no one needs to question his actions because he exists and works in mysterious ways and is thus unassailable, like a concept of their daddy from when they were five years old.
They're clamoring for this, but they complained that Henry Cavill's Superman T-posed too many times and so Zack Snyder made him too much like God (but also they hate Cavill Supes because he has flaws) and Snyder is a terrible man and needs to be deplatformed because of his Christianity; his Christianity combined with control over the fictional character of Superman is what "corrupts" some imagined "true essence" of what Superman is meant to be in nerds' minds. (somehow he's also a "Randian" "fascist" "objectivist" all at the same time). He "doesn't get" Superman, he "has bad politics", he has an "evil essence" to him that permeates every single work he touches. And the people claiming to know and see that his "bad politics" are obvious in his movies turn around and watch films made or funded by known pedophiles and perverts.
Don't pay attention to how Creature Commandos has James Gunn's Superman shown actually crucified.
James Gunn gives them what they think they want; every tweet that mentions Superman: Legacy (now just "Superman") at one point in time used the same exact All-Star Superman picture that made Supes look like he's peeking at you naked.
And that story (All-Star Superman) is just self-congratulatory nonsense that relies on being different from the other Superman stories at the time and having a definitive ending while hearkening back to the 1960s (currently 60+ years removed from the current time) where Superman is basically God and can do no wrong, ever. But people call it the best Superman story ever so it must be the best and copying it transfers its bestness over into the movie.
In no specific order,
Clark pretends to be unable to see without his glasses and intimates to Lex that he can escape jail and avoid execution while Clark isn't watching (even though Lex is rightly charged with crimes against humanity and has refused to be good), then at Lex's refusal to escape and insistence on going to the electric chair, Clark is more upset that Lex Luthor won't be Superman's friend than he is about the number of times Luthor has murdered people (and again, Lex was already convicted and sentenced to electrocution). Like, Clark literally says, "I can't believe you're getting ready to die like this. You and Superman could have been friends!" and Lex rightly points out, "Are you insane? I'm a born dictator!". Clark is willing to aid and abet an unrepentant and convicted criminal because he's smart and could've been friends. This charity is not extended to any other convicted criminal.
Superman's comfort to a depressed girl about to commit suicide is "you misunderstood your therapist, he really did get held up in traffic, life isn't as bad as you think it is" which relies wholly on Superman being able to hear the therapist struggling to reach the girl via phone in the first place, otherwise he'd have nothing to say to her and reassure her with. His reassurance ignores that maybe life is that bad for that one girl, has he actually asked her what her life is like? What if she's being ritualistically abused at home? Superman just talks at her and she has no dialogue of her own (also no reason to actually believe him but whatever). It also implies that the girl would be entirely correct to kill herself if her therapist did hate her and didn't want to have this session, and it doesn't address that she's still not getting adequate mental/health care if this is her tipping point, all in favor of the comics equivalent of "I see you and you're valid"/"thoughts and prayers".
He can lecture Lex about how "You could've saved the world if you cared" and the fans turn a blind eye to the fact that this all-powerful, all-good Superman can get miniature Kandorians to cure an entire cancer ward full of children, but he never tried that at any time before he contracted super sun poisoning. So please ignore that this Superman with all his power has allowed people to suffer and die from what are now preventable conditions. Also why doesn't he just cure that suicidal girl's depression the same way? F depressed people, I suppose! Also, does he intervene on every other suicide or was that a special case?
Superman hits Luthor with a gravity gun, which forces Luthor to see everything the way Superman sees it and for a moment Lex experiences ego death as he sees how alone we are in the universe, and within that realization is a brief brush with Superman's inherent goodness and why Supes acts the way he does (goodly). We know in reality that isn't how things work, because Jeff Bezos went to space to experience the same thing and is still a terrible human being. Also, this suggests that Goodness is an ontological property that can be mechanically adjusted (via gravity gun).
Lois Lane, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is told straight-up by Superman that he's Clark Kent but she just doesn't believe him, because it's "more fun" (i.e. less threatening to their sensibilities) that Superman doesn't lose his secret identity, because secret identities were just a thing back in the Silver Age and there were funny comics covers about how far Superman would go to pretend he and Clark were two different people. She's so skeptical of the truth that she thinks Superman has some ulterior motive for doing this and then tries to kill him. (Remember, people were mad Lois Lane learned Clark and Superman were the same person back in Man of Steel. She's not allowed to be intelligent or investigative if it gets in the way of nerd fantasy.)
Superman is good, so ignore the part where even when he intervenes from the future, he is occupied with the Chronovore and trying to contain the Chronovore takes away three minutes. Within those three minute, Jonathan Kent dies of the fated heart attack and Superman can't save him. But actually it's a good thing that Pa Kent dies, because if he hadn't died, Superman simply wouldn't move to Metropolis at all and the legion of Supermen from the future would never come to be, implying that Superman's goodness is contingent on where he lives and he could ever be complacent in Smallville at the farm with his superpowers just to fix a tractor while the world around him goes to sh!t.
But like, Superman smiles a bunch in the comic and tells people everything will be okay if they just believe in it hard enough (and he takes on fantastical challenges that have nothing to do with the real world so the people reading don't have to interrogate their own beliefs), so fans love it.
James Gunn is said to "understand" the comics, but he simply mimics the aesthetics, so people can watch a whole trailer and sneak peeks of his Superman frowning all the time, being hurt, getting cans thrown at his head because people hate him, but the colors are saturated (but somehow muted, in that Joss Whedon way), a pretend-Middle Eastern boy implores for Superman while raising a flag with the S logo, Supes saves some girl from some pipes that she somehow wasn't aware were exploding behind her, and the trailer used a cover of John Williams' Superman theme from the 1978 movie, so by transitive property it means this Superman is "Hopeful" because Christopher Reeve made people feel a certain way.
None of the trailers shown has Superman actually talk outside of "Krypto, take me home" (or whatever he said) and we have no idea what Lois or Lex sound like. (Compare the teaser for this movie to the teaser for Superman Returns, they have a vastly different use of their runtime) And there are like a dozen other characters to keep track of, but movie casts being loaded was a problem only when Batman v Superman did it for a few minutes.
A man who auto-deletes his tweets every 6 months so that he can't be referenced or called out on a lie is somehow the person to trust with Superman. He's incapable of posting photos of the characters he's bringing to screen without having himself also be part of the photos, and also every character he talks about is his favorite superhero ever. The Behind the Scenes look has the actors going "In James Gunn we trust" (like "In God We Trust") and he sets up a photoshoot where they're all "reading" an old comic, so certainly he "understands comics".
The same guy that called The Flash the greatest superhero movie ever is the guy we should trust with Superman. His go-to in most of his comics movies is having a cute animal (bonus if the animal gets hurt), and none of his characters think in anything but personal feelings and don't believe in big picture heroism, "[I wanna save the galaxy] because I'm one of the idiots that lives in it!". His Suicide Squad lost $100M in the box office and the extent of his politics is that the Squad killing a bunch of freedom fighters is a funny scene that he enjoyed, because he's a mushy centrist that thinks being a freedom fighter from Fake-Venezuela is the same thing as being a fascist, and helping the CIA stage a right-wing coup is how his Squad gains approval from people. He tries to pretend every date he posts things in or sets things to release in is serendipitous as if God smiles on him and guides him to specific dates, but in his pretense he casually admitted he didn't know his own dad's birthday until his brother told him, but he swears he and his dad are super close and they specifically bonded over comics.
But like, yeah, he's not Snyder so people really wanna see this movie.
On today, Henry Cavill's birthday, Zack Snyder posts about Henry Cavill and shows Twitter a picture of Henry, because it's his birthday.
James Gunn posts about his goddamn dog.
A lot of Gunn's time on Twitter is spent pretending he posts things coincidentally, but it's always self-promotional bullshit on other people's important dates or cheap copies of things Zack is posting about (Zack promotes a ZSJL shirt? Gunn posts his cast wearing shirts with his face on it).
Don't forget the time he linked directly to a crypto scam while alleging that he wasn't affiliated with it, when the site is freely using his and his dog's likeness.
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