• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

DC Cinematic Universe ( The James Gunn era)

Movie gets a harsher rap than it deserves. I caught a large chunk of it recently when I ran across it on TV in progress, and really enjoyed it. It's hardly perfect, but I've seen worse Superman movies. (And how.) The common "deadbeat dad" complaint is lazy and stupid, since Clark didn't know Lois was pregnant when he left Earth. If you're gonna attack the movie, at least attack it for something it actually does. (The "stalker" thing has more validity, though I don't really have much problem with it in the film's context.)

Performances are generally solid, with Routh doing a fine job of doing what he was cast to do (channel Reeve), and Spacey being a fun, and occasionally strikingly vicious, version of Luthor. And yeah, those scenes above are great, as is the bit where Superman takes a point-blank bullet to his open eye. I don't know that his invulnerability has ever been portrayed onscreen as cleverly and effectively as that scene.
My problems with it had to do with it copying S:TM down to specific scenes and dialogue.
 
. Robocop and Starship Troopers, with similar violence, at least felt like a satire. This didn't. This just felt like James Gunn murder and sex fantasies that he could get away with someone else paying for

Now, i SAY i am for a spectrum of different types of things for a subgenre....so i appreciate for example , the serious to silly range (Captain America/Black Panther down to Guardians of the Galaxy), but ...... kind of a yuk for me. I want to have something I can share with my kids and grandkids...this sure ain't it, and not seeing a whole lot of that in the future

----

I dunno...all this stuff is soooooo not for children. Now i feel like I am slipping into Trek_God's stereotype of people wanting the Superfriends.... but that stuff has a huge place that would be good for little kids to teens to get into.... not seeing that here.
I'm sure the movies will be more along the lines of the typical big PG-13 summer movies like that other comic book company's movies and the Star Wars movies. Even the MCU had the Netflix series, and now Deadpool, and the X-Men had Logan, so it's pretty standard for these franchises to have a mix of adult stuff and more family friendly (although personally I hesitate to call anything PG-13 family friendly) stuff.
This is just the beginning of the DCU and there's going to be a big variety of projects coming out, so it's a bit early to be writing the whole thing off.
I guess Clark and Jean-Luc can form a support group. Maybe Jim Kirk, too.
I'm not sure if I'd count Kirk in that group since he knew about David and either he chose to not be a regular part of his life or Carole wouldn't let him. I can't remember exactly what Wrath of Kahn established because I haven't watched it in a while, but Strange New Worlds and pretty much all of the books I've read have at least had Kirk aware that she was pregnant.
 
Last edited:
I also saw this thing called "Suicide Squad Isekai" -- looks like Japanese anime.... is that at all connected ot anything? It looks like the Gunn Suicide Squad, but maybe I am wrong? ANd what is Kite Man??? How is that conenectes?

I dunno...all this stuff is soooooo not for children. Now i feel like I am slipping into Trek_God's stereotype of people wanting the Superfriends.... but that stuff has a huge place that would be good for little kids to teens to get into.... not seeing that here.

This is not my specialty so take what I say with a grain of salt but as I understand it an isekai is an anime/manga where a character(s) from the ordinary world are transported/awaken to a fanstastic one and have to adapt and survive there. It is apparently a recently popular subgenre. Suicide Squad Isekai would be a non-canon such story and that more than likely is the property that was meant to have crossover appeal to and pull in the teen audience.
 
This is not my specialty so take what I say with a grain of salt but as I understand it an isekai is an anime/manga where a character(s) from the ordinary world are transported/awaken to a fanstastic one and have to adapt and survive there. It is apparently a recently popular subgenre. Suicide Squad Isekai would be a non-canon such story and that more than likely is the property that was meant to have crossover appeal to and pull in the teen audience.

Yes. Isekai is Japanese for "different world" or "strange world" (i + sekai, pronounced "ee-seh-kye"). It's basically the equivalent of what's known in English as portal fantasy, like Narnia, Oz, Flash Gordon, even Farscape if you stretch it a bit.
 
That's a good explanation. Someone from the modern world gets hit by a truck and they wake up in an alternate world, living a different life.
 
My problems with it had to do with it copying S:TM down to specific scenes and dialogue.

That's fair, although those moments were clearly intended more as loving, nostalgic homage than "copying" per se. There's certainly a case to made that the film depended too much on nostalgia, however, and suffered for it.
That's the big problem with Returns. It's thin story is not supported by it's epic length. SR is 2 hours and 35 minutes long. The same run time as BvS. And next to nothing happens. Take out the nostalgia shot-for-shot, line-for-line elements out of the film and what are you left with?

I'm honestly still dumbfounded Bryan Singer thought this was a good idea. Granted, we are supersaturated (no pun intended) with a plurality of copycat movies nowadays. Best I can come up with is that the audience were supposed to be enamored with the idea of seeing a remake of a film they've already seen. But with better special effects.

Personally, SR would've been "okay" if it was 90-100 minutes long. Summer 2006 had X-Men 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean 2 (Dead Man's Chest) and Superman Returns. The slow burn of Returns just didn't appeal over the competition.


I recently tried to give Superman Returns and Star Trek Insurrection (two films that just don't do it for me, but I don't find offensive) a fresh prospective rewatch. My opinions of both sadly didn't change.
 
I think it's a stretch to say SR is a "remake." It parrots a few lines of dialogue from the Reeve films, but there are few real repeats in the narrative. Luthor's scheme is once again "land"-based, but one could say that's simply consistency in the priorities of this version of the character. The dynamic between Clark and Lois, which is really the center of the film (as with most good Superman stories), is completely changed, which gives even their shared flight scene an entirely different and more poignant tone than the similar scenes in the Reeve movies.
 
Andy Muschietti, director of The Flash movie thinks it failed because not enough people, especially women, care about the character. I find this a little hard to believe since the character just stared in a TV series that ran for 9 seasons, and has been a part of lots of other major DC adaptations, and has been a fairly consistent part of DC's comics since 1939. I think any problems lie with the movie and the people involved, not with the character.
https://www.ign.com/articles/the-fl...just-dont-care-about-the-flash-as-a-character
 
Andy Muschietti, director of The Flash movie thinks it failed because not enough people, especially women, care about the character. I find this a little hard to believe since the character just stared in a TV series that ran for 9 seasons, and has been a part of lots of other major DC adaptations, and has been a fairly consistent part of DC's comics since 1939. I think any problems lie with the movie and the people involved, not with the character.
https://www.ign.com/articles/the-fl...just-dont-care-about-the-flash-as-a-character

What number of viewers did the show have on average? One to two million a week? The Flash probably had to sell 50 million tickets to break even.
 
Andy Muschietti, director of The Flash movie thinks it failed because not enough people, especially women, care about the character.
Let's not be unfair, he did not blame it solely on that.

"The Flash failed, among all the other reasons, because it wasn’t a movie that appealed to all four quadrants."
 
Sure, but it still seems like strange thing to say about a character who's as popular as The Flash seems to be.
What number of viewers did the show have on average? One to two million a week? The Flash probably had to sell 50 million tickets to break even.
According to Wikipedia, the pilot was watched by 6.8 million people in the US, 3.11 million in Canada, 1.3 million people live with another 82,000 time shifted viewers in the UK, and 129,000 viewers in Australia. Almost every one of those was the top show when it aired, and it was the 5th most popular show in the world in 2016.
 
Andy Muschietti, director of The Flash movie thinks it failed because not enough people, especially women, care about the character. I find this a little hard to believe since the character just stared in a TV series that ran for 9 seasons, and has been a part of lots of other major DC adaptations, and has been a fairly consistent part of DC's comics since 1939. I think any problems lie with the movie and the people involved, not with the character.
https://www.ign.com/articles/the-fl...just-dont-care-about-the-flash-as-a-character
He can kiss my female ass. I can pull out my 70s Flash comics. I also watched every episode of both Flash TV shows.
 
Andy Muschietti, director of The Flash movie thinks it failed because not enough people, especially women, care about the character. I find this a little hard to believe since the character just stared in a TV series that ran for 9 seasons, and has been a part of lots of other major DC adaptations, and has been a fairly consistent part of DC's comics since 1939. I think any problems lie with the movie and the people involved, not with the character.
https://www.ign.com/articles/the-fl...just-dont-care-about-the-flash-as-a-character

I didn't read that article, but I think it may be more that people didn't care about that Flash character.
 
It may be more true that most people have never watched the CW and have no idea who the Flash is.

His only set-up in movies was as a supporting character in a couple of unpopular films.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top