Admittedly I'm only about 2/3 through the second series of Arrow but I don't see anything particularly grounded about a show where people with super-strength who regenerate virtually instantly when shot at point-blank range fight against Billionaire playboys who survived for five years on a mystery island where people were hunting for a Captain America like super-serum.
The point is that, even with the injection of the occasional sci-fi element,
Arrow is still a different show in tone and emphasis than
The Flash and than the team series is likely to be. The team series will be anchored by Brandon Routh's Atom, and as we've seen this past week or two, he's a much better fit in terms of attitude for
The Flash than he is for
Arrow. So I think that once we have all three shows on the air simultaneously (assuming the Routh spinoff gets past the pilot, which seems a reasonable expectation),
Arrow will feel like the odd one out.
On the comics page, definitely...but at this point I can't blame the filmmakers for not going through the motions of taking several movies setting up the characters and their world in a more traditional superheroic fashion before delving into the meatier possibilities of a world with godlike beings...especially when a more grounded approach to the subject of superheroes lends itself to exploring those possibilities right out of the gate. If a Superman-like being popped up in our world today, I could see it playing out very much as the new trailer suggests. Such a being would have to earn the public's trust and figure out the wisest approach to using his power...not start out as a beloved, perfect figure only to go all dark and morally ambiguous later.
That's a good point, particularly in these cynical times. But I'm just hoping that Superman himself will not be as morally gray as the world he inhabits. Though I'm afraid that line was already crossed with the snap of Zod's neck.
And you can't blame them for wanting to distinguish their approach from Marvel's...Green Lantern was a lesson in their inability to beat the MCU by mimicking that approach.
I didn't see GL as mimicking Marvel's style all that much. I saw it as trying too hard to cram decades of GL continuity into one movie, so I'd call it more DC-focused than Marvel-focused. The one thing that felt to me like an imitation of the MCU was the attempt to position Angela Bassett's "Doctor" Amanda Waller as a Nick Fury-like crossover character.
Man of Steel is not a Superman movie, it's a David Goyer/Zach Snyder Superman movie. The same cannot be said of Iron Man or Captain America, for example. Marvel's edict is to avoid creators "putting a stamp/new spin/version" of their characters into film form and instead, creating stories in on film with the characters. The characters dictate the story and the history of various incarnations of Marvel dictate the tone.
I wouldn't say that, at least not entirely. I just read
a Joss Whedon interview where he was asked about "serving the Marvel vision," and he replied:
“You’re subservient to the process and it can be very gruelling, but we go in with an understanding that this is going to be a ‘Joss Whedon Marvel film’. It’s going to reek of my sweat and my blood by the time it’s done, so it doesn’t feel like it’s in service of anything except the narrative, which is my own creation.”
Although I would agree with you up to a point, in that the directors are able to put their own stamp on the
stories, but the
characters are still pretty faithful to their established versions. (Aside from being a lot more casual about killing, which is the most frustrating part of the MCU for me. Ironic that the "darker"
Daredevil is the one MCU production where the hero is actually unwilling to kill.)
Then again, I'm not sure the WB approach to the DC characters is all that different. Yes, we've gotten Nolan's version of Batman and Snyder's version of Superman, but they're very influenced by past comics. The Nolan films were very much
Batman: Year One and
The Long Halloween and so forth, and BvS is clearly influenced by
The Dark Knight Returns, and
The Old Mixer suggested that there's probably an influence of
Watchmen and
Kingdom Come in Snyder's movies too. So they are drawing on the comics versions of the characters. It's just that DC characters have so
many different versions that it's harder to pick out a clear, definitive version than it is for Marvel characters. If someone turned Spider-Man into a cold, silent, ruthless vigilante or Wolverine into a happy-go-lucky jokester, that would be a radical reinvention of the character. But the campy, silly Batman of Joel Schumacher and the solemn, angsty, naturalistic Batman of Christopher Nolan are both equally rooted in comics precedent, just from different eras. The only screen Batman I've seen that really was the director's wholesale reinvention was Tim Burton's.
