For me it was Guardians of the Galaxy. I had only seen The Avengers and liked it at the time, and I was hyped for this new weird space movie. But all I got was The Avengers in space and it sucked.
I was already getting tired of it towards the end, but End Game really put the nail in the coffin. Thanos was the most developed villain the show had (still pretty generic though), with motivations and emotions and everything. It almost seemed like they were setting it up to be a critique of his worldview, and the final film would show the deep flaws in ideology.
But it just goes: What do you mean, ‘faulty premise’? Thanos was right, the world is better for genociding half of humanity. Anyway, now we’re gonna do time-travel fan-service, and then undo everything that just happened.
Like, any child can tell you killing 3.5 billion people is bad – give me a goddamn critique of Thomas Malthus.
Same. I wasn’t leftist at the time, but I was interested in Infinity War because of what happened; big bad guy wipes out half of the universe (and a good chunk of the heroes). So what now? Do we move on, hold him accountable, how do we deal with this?
Time travel. No stakes whatsoever, we can just use time travel now. Fuck off. Any time a show/movie opens that can, I just immediately lose interest because there are no longer any real stakes; it serves to undermine anything and everything that happens from then on out.
They’ve always been a heartless, soulless husk of a film series. None of the higher-ups in the studio, cast or crew actually gives a shit or has a story they feel they have to tell the world, they’re in the money-making business, baby. The ones who actually salvage the films are the underpaid and overworked FX crews who never get any recognition. What’s worse is Hollywood is just going to keep funnelling billions into this insipid, bland schlock and still say that hiring diverse filmmakers who are actually passionate about cinema is “too risky”.
I fully blame the MCU for the fact that every major film now is a prequel or sequel that nobody asked for. Also their “Be a #Girlboss in the US Military this International Women’s Day” campaign for Captain Marvel was fucking heinous.
If I’m being honest I still enjoy the MCU in a lot of ways. If nothing else it really is a pretty insane achievement of production logistics the likes of which would have been inconceivable decades ago…but after the first Avenger film and the subtle shift to action comedy I distinctly remembered having a conversation with some friends that I find it a bit unnerving how good disney’s marvel algorithm is that they can basically make the same movie again and again and still have it be entertaining and emotionally engaging even if you are aware of said algorithm playing out.
Its like that performance adjustment and blending software tech I saw on youtube a few years ago. Hard to argue with the results…but just the knowledge that you’re seeing some form of automated and augmented reality on something as basic as an actors face is…a bit terrifying in its artificialness.
All that being sad: I do think the MCU and the rise of superhero media general will not and probably should not be looked back on kindly by history due to how intractable it is from 9/11 and the rise of hypermilitarism. I still think its funny that people shit on “GI JOE” for basically being “Team America: World Police” played straight…but can’t see that’s also exactly what all the Avenger films are.
Sidenote: seriously though fuck Zack Snyder. The DCEU could have at least attempted to be some kind of antithesis to all this but he’s an even more hypermasculine obsessed manchild then I was at my cringiest of comic nerd cringe. The fact that people still defend his adaptation of watchmen is mind blowing to me.
His adaptation is great, in the sense it was the exact opposite of what Moore was trying to say. It’s like Marx filtered through Elon Musk, wrong, completely ass backwards, and somehow popular.
after the first couple of DCEU failed, i thought the perfect solution was to just give the IP to whoever wanted to make a cool, stand alone movie. Remember they gave Batman to Tim Burton back in the day? Make the Red Son superman movie, or a black and white batman steampunk, or just a play it straight, but don’t worry about the DCEU (basically the first wonder woman).
Genuine Q- I read and saw Watchmen and apart from squid I can’t remember any differences. What do you think were the issues of his adaptation?
As an adaptation Watchmen is actually a good study in how subtext and framming can make a huge difference in execution. On the surface the screenplay follows the comic to a T (ending deviations aside) but when filtered through ‘snyder-vision’ it comes out reading very different.
The entire core them of Watchmen is to dissect and critique superheroes and show how they would be in the real world…but everything about how Zack Snyder approaches the cinematography, lighting, and choreography from fight scenes to even simple dialogue leans more into the hyper stylized comic book visuals of something like sin city. It’d be like if Full Metal Jacket was directed by an MCU director or something. Yeah there’s action and even comedy…but you’re waaaaay off the mark. Basically a guarantee that Snyder thinks Rorschach is the hero of the story.
The Dark Knight and The Boys are both much better adaptations at least spiritually of Watchmen then anything Zack Snyder has been a part of.
that’s interesting. So you’re suggesting tone is the issue rather than anything Snyder and script added. I guess that’s true. Rorschach did seem pretty cool to me when I first watched it. I can see what you mean but I think presenting the story mostly as is kinda prevents me from going too hard against the movie. But yeah his filmography post clearly shows he may not have fully ‘gotten’ what he was adapting.
For me it was when they fired Edgar Wright from Ant Man for being too creative
For me it’s an end of trying to watch them all to keep up with the MCU. Now I’ll watch individual movies if I think they’ll be good. Like, I’m always a sucker for Spider Man, and Ragnarok was really funny. But yeah, I don’t think post-pandemic, superhero movies are gonna make as much as they were before. I can already see the future video essays and blog pieces analyzing how much changed because of Covid-19, like we do for Great Depression.
