And yet we have…
Marvel's Doctor Strange: 90% fresh tomatometer
Marvel's Ant-Man: 81% fresh tomatometer
DC's Suicide Squad: 26% rotten tomatometer
As you can see, what follows after the logo is pretty much irrelevant. It's the logo that counts.
Spoilers Suicide Squad - Grading & Discussion
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
And yet we have…
Marvel's Doctor Strange: 90% fresh tomatometer
Marvel's Ant-Man: 81% fresh tomatometer
DC's Suicide Squad: 26% rotten tomatometer
As you can see, what follows after the logo is pretty much irrelevant. It's the logo that counts.
Bullshit. Ant-Man and Doctor Strange are just better movies.
I'm sorry, but neither Doctor Strange nor Ant-Man are on anyone's "Best Of 2016" lists. They were solid three-star movies worth watching but not able to compete with giants of their genres like The Avengers or the original Sam Raimi Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2.
But they were solid, three-star movies that were competently told and enjoyable to watch. Which is more than Suicide Squad, with its mess of poor editing, randomly-dropped story arcs, and incomprehensible character arcs, can say for itself.
And if the logo is more important than the content, why were so many people so disappointed with Avengers: Age of Ultron last year?
Touche!
The only quality of the film that matters in this conversation, as it's how I approached my post, is whether it's an enjoyable movie, to which end a film has three draws: plot, characters, or technical achievements. This film fails at all three. And throwing around claims of objectivity to make yourself sound superior while trying to demean me and my opinions doesn't make you sound authoritative, it makes you sound like a dick. Go ahead and enjoy the movie if it was more to your taste, I'm not saying you shouldn't. But guess what, I disagree with you. This was a terrible film, and it's one of only a few where I can say that I genuinely regret spending the time to watch it, which I'll never get back. Perhaps it's a well executed film, it terms of craft. I won't bother watching it again to judge it on those merits.
No, it doesn't. The DCEU Harley Quinn has entered the cultural zeitgeist in a major way, to the point that she's getting her own movie, and somebody at DC believes the same of Deadshot since there are discussions going on about giving him a solo film as well.
We're also likely to see Katana, Killer Croc, and The Joker again in future DCEU projects.
The idea that the film failed to connect in term of its plot and characters is also contradicted by the fact that it was clearly a financial success for Warner Bros., showing that general audiences connected with the film enough to make it profitable.
Like Set Harth already said, that would have been weird since Ant-Man is a 2015 movie.
As for Doctor Strange not on anyone's best-of-2016 lists… yeah, time for you to reconsider. Check out #6 (and #10 BTW)…
You (and others replying to me) keep talking about people. I never said anything about people, only about critics (or those who think they're critics in YouTube). Again let's see what critics gave to that disappointment…
Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron: 75% fresh tomatometer
I don't think so. Then again, I stopped allowing film critics to dictate my opinion of a movie, a long time ago.
Deadpool wasn't a Marvel movie, either. It was a Fox movie.
Marvel is lucky. Then again . . . there was "Captain America: Civil War". I know a lot of people and critics loved it. I didn't.
Yes, clearly the only reason one would read or view film criticism is to be told what opinion to have.
I will certainly agree that Margot Robbie's Harley has entered the cultural zeitgeist; I think this has happened on the strength of Robbie's talents as an actor, on the bold outlines of the character as set out by Paul Dini on The Animated Series back in the day, and on the strength of the costume design (which is both memorable and sexually charged). But I would still contend that Suicide Squad failed her as a character: her emotional journey is utter nonsense. She goes from maliciously trying to manipulate and harm everyone around her, to being willing to abandon everyone for the Joker, to bonding with the team and with Deadshot in particular, to running back to the Joker, all prompted by... not much, really. Whatever arc she has in learning to care about others is nullified by the film's ending, and there wasn't even much of a rhyme or reason to why she started to bond with the team.
David Ayers was only given six weeks to write the thing, and it shows.
Deadshot? Was just Will Smith Will-Smithing.
Well, we're running into some mutual misunderstandings about people vs. critics, then, because I was talking about critics when I talked about Doctor Strange and Ant-Man not being on anyone's Top Ten list. They're both competent but middling films.
Okay, first off, you do understand that Rotten Tomatoes is an aggregate of how many critics gave a movie a score that was on balance positive, rather than an ordinal measurement of a film's quality, right?
Secondly -- yeah, 75% of critics gave Avengers: Age of Ultron a positive score vs. only like 55% of critics giving Man of Steel a positive score. Because Avengers: Age of Ultron, even with its structural problems, is a better movie than Man of Steel.
It is not that the logo determines whether or not critics like a given movie. X-Men: Apocalypse wasn't from Marvel Studios, but it had the Marvel logo up front just like the generally well-regarded X-Men: First Class (86%) and X-Men: Days of Future Past (91%), and it only got a 48% on RT -- lower than Man of Steel, I might add. Meanwhile, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has a low score at 52%, lower than Man of Steel.
And for that matter, Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight films are of course more highly-regarded than the DCEU that followed them, and have higher scores than roughly half the MCU films.
To allege that a film's branding as either a "Marvel" film or not is what determines its critical appraisal is just silly, especially since your preferred metric does not measure relative quality but rather the aggregate of positive vs. negative reviews. It also requires you to ignore several instances in which "Marvel"-branded films have scored lower than non-Marvel branded movies, including one DCEU film.
Meanwhile, every time I and others point out objective problems with the structure, editing, and writing of DCEU films, we're ignored or the flaws are excused away. It's like being on a message board in the early 2000s dedicated to trying to prove that shows like Mutant X and Relic Hunter were not mediocre.
Sorry, but the three DCEU films so far have gotten lower scores than MCU films because Marvel Studios is better at the nuts and bolts of basic writing and editing. Their films are structurally more competent than Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad, and they have a greater understanding of and affection for their source material than Snyder has for Superman in Man of Steel. They get better scores because they are better movies. It's that simple.
Seems a strange thing to freak out over, especially since that metric doesn't measure how positive a given film's evaluation is.
I mean, I haven't seen The Incredible Hulk, so I suppose it could be a film that exists in tonal opposition to its source material (Man of Steel) or full of fundamental structural problems to the point where its third act is a bolted on second act from what ought to be an entirely different movie (Batman v. Superman), or an editing mess full of nonsensical cuts, over-developed characters in the first act that go nowhere, underdeveloped characters in later acts that ought to go somewhere, and a manic desire to create the energy of a trailer in spite of that decision's inability to maintain a film's natural pace (Suicide Squad). Seems unlikely, but it might.
But apart from that one? Yeah, Iron Man 2, Thor: The Dark World, Iron Man 3, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Ant-Man are all better films than Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad. Man of Steel, I'll at least grant doesn't have the fundamental structural problems that the other two have, but its tonal opposition to and relative contempt for its source material is quite noticeable; I would at best put it on par with Iron Man 2 and Thor: The Dark World. Iron Man 3, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Ant-Man are all still better.
Finally got round to seeing Suicide Squad. Gave it a middle of the road C+.
It's not a terrible film. All the elements are there, castings good, Will Smith gets to be Will Smith, Robie got to play around....the down side to that is that it felt like everyoone else was just 'there', and didn't quite match up to the MCU style ensemble we're used to. But they still gave everyone enough of a highlight to be completely forgettable (more like 2009 Trek in that regard).
All the elements were thee but it felt like a gentle stroll more than a fast paced action movie, and the conclusion in the final act was typically underwhelming. But so was the finish to Guardians and no one seems to moan about that.
It was good enough, but not brilliant. I left curious about seeing more Battfleck (not seen BVS yet), liked the touches to Deadshot and Harley, and eager to see more Harley down the line. Muddled, confused, but not a total waste of time. Good way to pass some time, but not something I'll rush to repeat.
It's not a terrible film. All the elements are there, castings good, Will Smith gets to be Will Smith, Robie got to play around....the down side to that is that it felt like everyoone else was just 'there', and didn't quite match up to the MCU style ensemble we're used to. But they still gave everyone enough of a highlight to be completely forgettable (more like 2009 Trek in that regard).
All the elements were thee but it felt like a gentle stroll more than a fast paced action movie, and the conclusion in the final act was typically underwhelming. But so was the finish to Guardians and no one seems to moan about that.
It was good enough, but not brilliant. I left curious about seeing more Battfleck (not seen BVS yet), liked the touches to Deadshot and Harley, and eager to see more Harley down the line. Muddled, confused, but not a total waste of time. Good way to pass some time, but not something I'll rush to repeat.
Nope, they're better for you.
I'd put BvS miles ahead of all those, because it's more thematically rich and visually impressive than all those other movies combined.
You keep trying to call on arguments of "objectivity", there's no such thing.
Different people have different viewpoints, and yours is not more valid than anyone elses, deal with it.
Who's freaking out?
Your mileage may vary of course.
But please remind me what other great movies those visionary directors have made? Besides the Disney/Marvel movies what other masterpieces have you seen that were directed by Louis Leterrier, Alan Taylor, James Gunn, the Russo brothers, Peyton Reed and Scott Derrickson? If they're so talented they must have directed other great movies right?
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A broken plot structure in which the second half of one story is bolted onto the back third of another after that story has reached its natural catharsis is objectively inferior to a functional story structure in which all acts flow naturally from the events of the prior acts. A plot structure in which the introduction takes up nearly a full 50% of the story, in which numerous Chekov's Guns are introduced without being fired or then noted as existing again even though ignoring them raises really important questions about what the hell is going on, and in which the story is stopped numerous times to explain and then re-explain and then re-explain -- in the middle of the climax -- what the characters' goals are, is objectively inferior to a story in which events flow smoothly from one-another.
This does not mean that other elements are not present or even high-quality per se. But if these other issues are present, they objectively bring down the quality of a film. You can have the highest-quality ingredients possible, but your pizza is not going to be an objectively good pizza if you have failed to cook it properly and it's all doughy.
This is a straw man argument. I very specifically used language that described most of those films as functional and competent, not masterpieces. My argument, in other words, was that two of the three DCEU films are just fundamentally broken due to poor structure and editing, but that the MCU films were competently made.
To continue the comparison: Nobody is going to pretend that 7-Eleven pizza is the greatest pizza in the world, but it is objectively better pizza than something that never finished cooking so the dough never becomes a real crust.
Look at Batman v. Superman and how it reached its natural catharsis when Batman and Superman reconcile; that's it, the fundamental tension of the movie is over. And yet they have an entirely new villain to introduce in Doomsday yet, and the movie keeps going for -- I don't remember, was it another 45 minutes or an hour? To say nothing of how nonsensical Lex's reasons for creating Doomsday are; creating Doomsday is fundamentally incompatible with his larger goals.
Look at Suicide Squad. Notice how the decision to use movie trailer-style intros for the main characters instead of more conventional character introductions eats up almost half of the run-time, preventing them from developing character arcs except in the most perfunctory of ways, and forcing them to go back and introduce elements and characters again and again and again -- and how it means that, for instance, when there's a character who does not get a movie-trailer intro (Slipknot), we know right away he's going to die and doesn't matter and we shouldn't emotionally invest in him. Notice how the script is full of things that make no intuitive sense, such as an over-developed antagonist in Griggs, who dominates much of the first act and then basically disappears. Notice how many character arcs go nowhere and do nothing -- for example, the Joker's impending arrival serving as a ticking time-bomb for most of the first two acts, only for him to show up and then disappear, prompting absolutely no change in either himself or in Harley.
These are objective flaws in the films' structures. They're not just matters of opinion; this is not "brick fire-cooked Neapolitan pizza is better than greasy 7-Eleven pizza," this is, "Pizza that was fully cooked is better than dough that never formed a crust."
So what? Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West takes more than an hour to just show us the 3 main characters! It's still acknowledged as a masterpiece and one of the greatest films ever made!
You make it sound like that there's a rulebook in filmmaking and movies that don't tick all the boxes are automatic failures. That's not art.
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