DC Movies - To Infinity and Beyond
- Thread starter dahj
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You cannot have a present day character winking / grinning and acting like a Weisinger-era camp counselor, or the silly-assed George Reeves interpretation in realistic situations. For an example, the MCU's Captain America is "optimistic" to a point, but he sees the harsh realities of the world, governments, etc., and deals with it accordingly. He is not attempting to Pollyanna his way through life, as if that kind of self-isolating behavior would help and/or inform his actions in the world he lives in. He's quite the realist. The opposite would be completely out of place in-universe and to audiences knowing the Weisinger model bears no resemblance to their world at all.
...which is not among the greatest interpretations of Superman.
Sure, but he's also not going around depressed and brooding all the time. I'm saying Superman should just ignore all of the bad stuff going on, but there are ways to acknowledge all of that kind of stuff without going dark and depressing.
I think you meant to say "I'm not saying" he should ignore that. But yes -- optimistic storytelling is not about pretending nothing bad exists in the world, it's about offering hope that it can be confronted and overcome. It's when things are darkest that Superman's optimism is most needed.
In the early years, Superman confronted darkness all the time. In his first few issues, he went up against war profiteering, spousal abuse, slumlords, and the like. Of course, then WWII came along and there was plenty of darkness there. Postwar on the radio, Superman tackled racism and religious bigotry, American neo-Nazi and fascist movements, and political corruption. But that didn't make the stories depressing, because they showed that it was possible to stand up to these things and strive for something better.
Absolutely right. Season 4 of Supergirl was a great example of how to address topical "real world" subject matter in a fantasy context, without turning the atmosphere relentlessly grimdark, and without making your lead character a miserable mope. All it takes are creators with more than one color in their imaginative palette.
Yeah, that was supposed to be not. My fingers got ahead of my brain, and I forgot to double check before I posted it.
Incredible to think that we live in a time that in so many ways reflects the time when Superman was created and yet WB apparently doesn’t believe that a Superman solo film would be successful right now. https://www.flickeringmyth.com/2020...-superman-film-would-be-successful-right-now/
The old "insider" routine. A web site quoting a youtube channel quoting another source quoting an "insider".
yeah, the source may not be reliable but the fact remains that it’s been 7 years since the last solo Superman film with no sign of a new one being announced. Occam’s razor.
The storyline with Agent Liberty? That wasn't exactly that well thought out...
I thought it was an excellent season. YMMV.
I really enjoyed that season as well.
Oh, it was good. My problem is that I found Agent Liberty not wrong in a lot of what he was saying.
For example, the President being a literal alien...she wasn't born on Earth so she had no real legitimacy to run for Office.
Marsdin was a relatively minor element in the larger season arc, and Lockwood was a murderer and a fanatic long before her deception was revealed. Her exposure was mainly a plot device to help legitimize Lockwood and his Children of Liberty in the eyes of the public, and to install a more hostile and corruptible President in her place.
Lockwood was designed to be an antagonist with intelligence, charisma, and a comprehensible point of view. It's good storytelling to have an adversary with some dimension, and themes that are not purely black-and-white.
None of which justifies embracing anything about Lockwood, or his terroristic mob of "anti-immigration advocates" (as some viewers did at the time).
Lockwood was designed to be an antagonist with intelligence, charisma, and a comprehensible point of view. It's good storytelling to have an adversary with some dimension, and themes that are not purely black-and-white.
None of which justifies embracing anything about Lockwood, or his terroristic mob of "anti-immigration advocates" (as some viewers did at the time).
But it doesn't change that he wasn't wrong to say that she was an unlawful President. She was a perfect example of how anti-alien fear on Earth was justified.
This is Lockwood: He starts off as a powerless innocent bystander. Then his house gets blown up as collateral damage during an invasion by a fleet of superpowered aliens who want to enslave humanity and conquer the earth, his father loses his steelworking job that paid most of his family's bills due to competition with imported alien Nth Metal, he gets stabbed with a six-inch bone stinger by the reflexive action of an alien he was trying to protect from anti-alien bigots and is accused of being the attacker since they ran away, he loses his teaching job for complaining about all this within earshot of an alien student and his father is collateral damage in an alien attempt at terraforming earth, genociding humanity in the process.
So he snaps, puts on a mask and founds guerrilla XCOM.
The series refuses to acknowledge any of these systemic problems that CREATED Agent Liberty in the first place!
If the season had ended with Supergirl or any of the good guys thinking it over and realizing maybe he wasn't 100% wrong and that some things have to be done on their end, it would've been different.
That depends on if she was born in the U.S. and was an American citizen, doesn't it?
The point of this argument was to show that you can't use one example to make a generalization. It is similar to people using looters in the U.S. to criticize the entire BLM movement. The logic doesn't work--it is using one point to defend pre established opinions and prejudices.
And this back story certainly gives the character some dimensionality and creates some empathy for the character. But the point is, that just like in real life, just because you get some bad breaks that may or may not be related to a racial group different than your own doesn't justify criminal and terrorists actions. The whole point of his backstory was to be similar to white supremacy, anit-immigrant, or incel groups that exist today. It is one of the things that made the season so powerful, in my opinon.
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It's difficult to see how the series "refuses to acknowledge any of these systemic problems," when it created the problems, the system, and the entire world in which they exist. They devoted a full episode to establishing Lockwood's history and his motivations, showing enough empathy for his plight that I recall many at the time complaining they were making him too sympathetic. But when his response to his personal difficulties is to become a serial murderer of aliens (which the show established he already was by the time Mercy Graves contacted him), and then to found and lead a masked terrorist organization that assaults people on the street and attacks them in their homes, he's not a character the heroes (or viewers) need to be treating as morally gray or justified in his actions.