Superhero Films: Will They Ever Take Off? - The Bear and Badger

g.man

I'd like to see a crossover with Captain String and Flying Black Man.
That being said, I think that Marvel's biggest problem is their extended universe and this daffy idea of tying every bloody film together into this infinity stones nonsense that no one in their right mind gives a flying fuck about.
Let's face it, Infinity War is just going to be five hours of everyone in the universe punching everyone else while you sit and think "who the fuck is that?"

Dinostar77

http://screenrant.com/best-marvel-comics-stories-storylines-ever-all-time/?view=all

No surprise at no1 - infinity gaunlet

JonB

The thing is I've seen a lot of these films and had no idea they were supposed to be building towards anything. Lots of crossover stuff, sure, and padding to explain why the guy from one film is too busy to appear in this one, but it's the first I've heard of infinity stones or anything like that.

I think you can pretty much divide the audience in two for these films - the people who've followed the comics and already know the characters and stories, and want to see it all come together, and the people who are just up for seeing a decent action film and couldn't give a toss about how it all connects. The more they please the first crowd the more they bore the second (well me, anyway).

djchump

I like them and think they're doing them very well.

Dinostar77

I like them as well, but I'm not the target audience, the kids are. These movies will be the equivalent to the ghostbusters, raiders of the lost ark, star wars (old trilogy) etc of my childhood for kids nowadays.

tin_robot

Tempy wrote:

tin_robot wrote:

Me waffling on about Marvel/DC.

Iron Man is the lynchpin for the whole thing. RDJ was an inspired choice (though like all of this MCU stuff you've perhaps got Millar's Ultimates to thank). Given you have the same propensity for higher level wankery that I have, you would probably enjoy the transhumansit reading that my girlfriend threaded through the whole MCU witch characters like Stark, Ultron and The Vision. The bottom line: Marvel are still quite conservative and always resolve their posthuman crisises by shielding human values. But erm yeah what about those DC films eh lol

Yep, that sounds like the sort of reading I'd enjoy (and I can certainly see the sense in the conclusion). Marvel are, in a lot of ways, incredibly conservative anyway - though they're savvy enough to try and conceal it. (Well, barring when the Vice President blamed declining comic book sales on diversity.)

JRPC

JonB wrote:

The thing is I've seen a lot of these films and had no idea they were supposed to be building towards anything. Lots of crossover stuff, sure, and padding to explain why the guy from one film is too busy to appear in this one, but it's the first I've heard of infinity stones or anything like that. I think you can pretty much divide the audience in two for these films - the people who've followed the comics and already know the characters and stories, and want to see it all come together, and the people who are just up for seeing a decent action film and couldn't give a toss about how it all connects. The more they please the first crowd the more they bore the second (well me, anyway).

Are you sure you've actually seen any of them? You can hardly move in this universe without bumping into one of those stones. Since Cap 1 at least. They've been explicitly referred to as "infinity stones" for several movies now.

g.man wrote:

Let's face it, Infinity War is just going to be five hours of everyone in the universe punching everyone else while you sit and think "who the fuck is that?"

Not sure what you're basing that on, but the previous team up movies have been far more about character then fist fights, or at the very least equal parts. Can you give me any examples of a recent comparable film with the cleverness and wit of CW or the 1st Avengers?

No you can't.

It does sometimes seem that like the qualities and subtleties of these films are actually going over peoples head here.

tin_robot

Meanwhile, I've just seen Guardians of the Galaxy 2. It is, in many ways, a mess. Gunn seems overly dependent upon his musical set pieces - I think there were fewer in La La Land - and leans heavily on these and the gags to paper over gaps in the plot. There is no real clear protagonist for much of the movie, and much of the film contains massive lumps of exposition, and none too subtle discussions about family.

Yet I absolutely loved it. Maybe it was all the bad press I'd read before hand giving me low expectations, but I had a great time. The first thing that struck me, following turgid grey trailers for WonderWoman and King Arthur before hand was the sheer array of colour. Just like the first movie, Gunn has remembered there are more colours available to the human eye than grey, brown and blue.

The film actually has the sense not to be a tired retread of the first (indeed, its at its weakest when it does), and yes, it may end with the Galaxy being saved, but the beats up to that point felt fairly significantly different.

Equally, for the benefit of G, there's no need to recognise anyone from the rest of the Marvel universe (though watch this without seeing the first and you won't have such a good time). Having said that, there are a lot of nods to Other Marvel stuff for the likes of me - it's just none of them are going to alienate those who aren't in the know. Hell, even the Stan Lee cameo's pretty good.

Finally, it's a film that, whilst following a lot of convention, still manages to mess with the rules to a surprising degree. There's some incredibly dark stuff, and some of our heroes are guilty of some remarkably dodgy behaviour. People still shoot pew pew lasers, and hit each other, but there are at least a few occasions where Gunn finds interesting ways to present, or subvert, the carnage.

It's not a masterpiece, and I suspect enjoyment depends at least in part on your sense of humour, but the bottom line is that for me at least, it was a damn good time.

(Edit - the "meanwhile" was supposed to be directed at my own post, not a dismissal of JRPCs...)

JRPC

Well, glad you enjoyed it but it was a very decent swing and a miss for me.

Having read a bunch of reviews now I've seen it, I'm surprised nobody's mentioning...

Spoiler:

Very clear inspiration, no?

g.man

JRPC wrote:

It does sometimes seem that like the qualities and subtleties of these films are actually going over peoples head here.

O-K

JonB

JRPC wrote:

It does sometimes seem that like the qualities and subtleties of these films are actually going over peoples head here.

Yeah, I'm probably just not clever enough.

It may also be that it comes across as a lot of waffle to some of us, while it all makes sense to you. Maybe if someone mentioned an infinity stone at some point, that didn't mean anything to me so I forgot all about it, and then it was mentioned again in a different film two years later and I didn't make the connection. Now someone mentions it again and I'm still none the wiser.

As for cleverness and wit, as I recall it Civil War was the one where the spent an hour and a half trying to contrive a big fight in an airport. The first Avengers was the one where they spent the last 20 minuted punching non-descript looking aliens about the place (in the second Avengers they changed it to robots).

There's the odd good gag, the odd imaginative action sequence (Dr. Strange stood out here, GotG had some nice bits, and even the end of Thor 2 was actually pretty good as I recall), but there's also a lot that's simply uninspired and falls flat. And what appears as subtleties to you may be tedious padding to someone else.

tin_robot

JRPC wrote:

Well, glad you enjoyed it but it was a very decent swing and a miss for me. Having read a bunch of reviews now I've seen it, I'm surprised nobody's mentioning...

Spoiler:

Forbidden Planet.
Very clear inspiration, no?

It certainly has some similarities yes, though to be fair that movie was the result of a fair amount of pilfering itself. In any case I suspect Gunn would be delighted with the comparison.

As for a swing and miss, I suspect that will be the view of a lot of people, and as I said, it's a pretty messy film. I just happened to enjoy it a hell of a lot regardless. (It probably also helped that everyone else in the cinema seemed to be having much the same experience. There's nothing quite like being in a room full of people who are laughing.)

Dinostar77

Has anyone read Alien:river of blood or Alien: out of shadows?

Wrong thread: oops.

g.man

Is Flying Black Man in either of those?

JRPC

@Tin

Yeah, that's a fair point. I saw it in a quarter full room and nobody was really biting.

If I'm completely honest I never loved the first one quite as much as most. It just didn't quite live up to that first amazing trailer for me.

I'm bang up for Vol 3 mind.

monkey

Those infinity stones aren't well-used. They're just anonymous space magic maggufins. The casual viewer isn't going to pick up on the fact that blue macguffin from Captain America which they saw 6 years ago is the same type of macguffin as Yellow Macguffin in Avengers 2 and a blue space baddie has a magic glove and wants all the mcguffins for himself.

Edit:- I couldnt decide how to spell McGuffin there so went for a scattershot approach.

WorKid

I can't wait for the Danny The Street film.

He's a superhero. He's also a street.

g.man

EVERYONE PUNCHING EVERYONE ELSE

JRPC

JonB wrote:

It does sometimes seem that like the qualities and subtleties of these films are actually going over peoples head here.

Yeah, I'm probably just not clever enough. It may also be that it comes across as a lot of waffle to some of us, while it all makes sense to you. Maybe if someone mentioned an infinity stone at some point, that didn't mean anything to me so I forgot all about it, and then it was mentioned again in a different film two years later and I didn't make the connection. Now someone mentions it again and I'm still none the wiser. As for cleverness and wit, as I recall it Civil War was the one where the spent an hour and a half trying to contrive a big fight in an airport. The first Avengers was the one where they spent the last 20 minuted punching non-descript looking aliens about the place (in the second Avengers they changed it to robots). There's the odd good gag, the odd imaginative action sequence (Dr. Strange stood out here, GotG had some nice bits, and even the end of Thor 2 was actually pretty good as I recall), but there's also a lot that's simply uninspired and falls flat. And what appears as subtleties to you may be tedious padding to someone else.

Now I'm not trying to say that anybody here isn't "cleaver enough" to get Captain America or anything like that, but there are things in some of these films I consider to be proper bloody brilliant and either those things aren't really there or some people just aren't seeing them.

I will fully accept that these films are very much my thing and I'm inclined towards them, but no more than the DC stuff and I think they've all so far been genuinely terrible.

WorKid

After the first Danny the Street Movie he's going to appear in more DC films.

It'll be a crossover.

Yossarian

monkey wrote:

Those infinity stones aren't well-used. They're just anonymous space magic maggufins. The casual viewer isn't going to pick up on the fact that blue macguffin from Captain America which they saw 6 years ago is the same type of macguffin as Yellow Macguffin in Avengers 2 and a blue space baddie has a magic glove and wants all the mcguffins for himself. Edit:- I couldnt decide how to spell McGuffin there so went for a scattershot approach.

I'd say that these infinity wotsits are probably one of the better ways that the cinematic universe can work, myself. Presumably, during whichever film it is where all of this is going to come together, the provenance of the individual wotsits won't matter one jot, they'll just exist as a set in this film that provides massive power to the baddie. If you've been paying attention, then you can see how they've been woven through the films so far, if you haven't (but have watched some of the previous films), then if nothing else a glowing wotsit should seem thematically coherent with what you've seen before, and you then have the possibility of going back to one of the earlier films and realising that MacGuffin wasn't actually a MacGuffin, but was actually laying the wotsit groundwork, giving a moment of recognition.

Dark Soldier

I like the one were superhero dude is doing well and its all good but then it goes all wrong, probably due to Bad Guys Inc. and he has a bit of a bad time and stuff but then there's a revelation that Bad Guys Inc ran a train on his mam and his dad is a cuck wizard and then he gets proper tasty and fucks Bad Guy Inc up but then in the final shot it shows there is a Badder Guys Inc and it makes a gajillion dollars.

[Deleted User]

monkey wrote:

Those infinity stones aren't well-used. They're just anonymous space magic maggufins. The casual viewer isn't going to pick up on the fact that blue macguffin from Captain America which they saw 6 years ago is the same type of macguffin as Yellow Macguffin in Avengers 2 and a blue space baddie has a magic glove and wants all the mcguffins for himself. Edit:- I couldnt decide how to spell McGuffin there so went for a scattershot approach.

This is on the nose. I'm more familiar with a lot of the characters than many viewers, but I've read very few of the comics or graphic novels. I was totally unaware that infinity stones had been featuring in the films for so long. Even being told that, I can't think of what part they've played in any of the films. If we're supposed to have noticed and retained this information, they've done a fuck-awful job of it.

I doubt the kids in the audience have picked up on it, either.

Dinostar77

Infinity stones will look a walk in park if DC go down the Crisis on infinite earth's route for their multi movie story arc (now that would be complicated). Also I can see justice league comic tower of babel being one of the later justice league movies. It's a no brainer.

Kow

I still say the original Fantastic Four movie is the most entertaining of all. Proper laugh out loud stuff.

[Deleted User]

Have we made g.man watch the latest F4 yet?

g.man

I haven't see that one yet, no.

[Deleted User]

I look forward to the review.

g.man

I'm in no hurry to see that one!

Kow

Best trailer.

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