DC Movies - To Infinity and Beyond

[Christopher]

Perhaps, but name me ONE example of a movie undergoing substantial thematic & stylistic restructuring on the scale of Justice League and the end result turning out well.

Okay, now you're narrowing the goalposts so tightly that you're basically admitting I was right that you can't make universal generalizations.

Anyway, I'm not going to play cherrypicking games like that. Nobody can remember every movie ever made, so it's illegitimate to use isolated examples to "prove" a broader point. Just because you or I can't remember a specific example doesn't make it impossible for it to exist. Simple rational thinking should be enough to reveal how aburd it is to mistake category for quality, and I've already made that case.

The other characters trust Superman because the audience trusts Superman because the audience knows that Superman is inherently trustworthy.

That is exactly the problem with MoS -- it inserts things into the film's universe that have no justification there, simply because it knows we take them for granted. That's a lazy narrative cheat. Snyder has Jenny say "He saved us!" after seeing him save exactly one person and failing utterly to prevent the devastation of the city, not because it makes a damn bit of sense for that character in that situation to perceive him that way, but just because it's what the audience expects to hear. That's fundamentally incompetent writing. If you want to build to a moment where a character sees Superman as a savior, then set up the situation to justify it rather than doing the exact opposite so it sounds like a sick joke.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

^Admittedly, the fan landscape is far different now than it was in 2006. That was still early days for the modern age of superhero movies. Back then, I think we were more interested in seeing "definitive" interpretations of characters. Now, since superhero movies have been dominating the cinematic landscape for nearly 2 decades, I think we're more open to alternative ideas.

It was bound to happen, as audiences--in the case of Superman Returns--were not and did not live in the past, so it stood to reason (to everyone outside of that production) that copy+pasting a decades old movie very much of its era was not the Superman or superhero in general anyone wanted to see. It the very reason Batman Begins launched a revolution in comic adaptations just one year earlier, while SR did not; one was speaking to the interests of modern audiences, while the other was on a nostalgia trip no on wanted to take.

What I didn't expect was for it to be a $250 million fanfilm.

That's quite the critical and wholly accurate judgement of Superman Returns.

Perhaps, but name me ONE example of a movie undergoing substantial thematic & stylistic restructuring on the scale of Justice League and the end result turning out well.

You're unlikely to get an answer when some are determined to attack Snyder's films, yet are among the same who praise largely terrible, misguided DC adaptations from other producers.

The other characters trust Superman because the audience trusts Superman because the audience knows that Superman is inherently trustworthy.

But to your early observation, that should not be the case when a superpowered alien first appears in public. Realistically, no one is going to look at an alien as their pal, as the mere revelation that a superpowered alien is operating among the population sans any allegiance or control is a rather horrifying thought. It carries with it the potential for harm of a kind humanity has never known nor can it address, so trust has to be earned, which again, should not happen the second Superman first appears. Its the reason why earlier adaptations failed to develop that period of building trust. It was rushing to see Superman as marketing sold him decades ago.

Some (not meaning you) are forever wanting the 1950s to return, wrapping themselves in a Pollyannaish cocoon of their own making where they imagine the rest of the world wants superheroes to be versions of that seen in the decade, when that is not true. It says much that late 60s DC started to move Superman away from that type of characterization, while some seem to think they know better than the editors who understood that Superman 1969 (for one example) could not survive as Superman 1951. That applies to film as much as it did in the comic books.

 

[Anwar]

The problem with Superman Returns was that, as usual, Bryan Singer just isn't a comic book fan. He's a Richard Donner fan. He doesn't care about the Superman character, he just wanted to do a lover letter to movies Donner made.

 

[M'rk son of Mogh]

Realistically,

The moment they say they can't even be bothered to set these stories on our earth because every city is fictional (Metropolis, Gotham, Star, Central), starting any argument with "realistically" already makes it null and void.

 

[Christopher]

The moment they say they can't even be bothered to set these stories on our earth because every city is fictional (Metropolis, Gotham, Star, Central), starting any argument with "realistically" already makes it null and void.

That's a non sequitur. Realism isn't about whether you believe the story actually occurs in our world; that would be delusional, no matter what the cities are named. The "-ism" part means it's a literary/artistic style, telling an unreal story in a way that maintains the semblance of reality, that feels as if it could be real. You postulate something that doesn't exist, but you keep everything else around it as grounded and natural as possible.

Plus, there are different kinds of realism. A story can be set in a fanciful universe yet still embrace character realism. If you make the characters feel to the audience like real people, if they behave and react like real people would, then that helps sell the fanciful elements. The same for other kinds of realism -- anything that balances out the fantasy and makes it easier to suspend disbelief. Look at Superman: The Movie. Richard Donner's watchword was "verisimilitude." The script was very fanciful and Silver-Agey, the Krypton scenes felt like pure fantasy and the Smallville scenes were idealized and romanticized, but Donner shot the present-day portions in a very naturalistic, grounded style as a deliberate counterbalance to the fantasy. That's why the film's tagline was "You will believe a man can fly." Realism is not about being real, it's about making the unreal feel real. It's like the old joke about sincerity -- if you can fake that, you've got it made.

 

[JD]

I've been wondering if one of the sons in Superman & Lois might be a version of Conner, although we've already got Conner in Titans, and he's one of the better aspects of the show. (Though Krypto is even better.)

Another possibility occurred to me after my last post, Chris Kent/Lor-Zod, the Pre-New 52 son of General Zod that Clark and Lois took in when he first showed up on Earth.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

Richard Donner's watchword was "verisimilitude." The script was very fanciful and Silver-Agey, the Krypton scenes felt like pure fantasy and the Smallville scenes were idealized and romanticized, but Donner shot the present-day portions in a very naturalistic, grounded style as a deliberate counterbalance to the fantasy.

What always struck me about the Metropolis portions of the movie was how goofy they were. It had these very stiff, stately sequences on Krypton & Smallville but then Metropolis turns into a slapstick screwball comedy half the time. The movie takes Superman very seriously but Clark, Lois, Jimmy, Perry, Lex, Otis, & Miss Tessmacher are all very silly most of the time. (Though I do have to give Gene Hackman credit for being able to absolutely nail the quiet menace when he needs to. The way he just looks at his watch & shakes his head when Miss Tessmacher tells him that her mother lives in Hackensack is a chilling piece of dark humor.)

That's the thing about grimdark. It imagines itself to be sophisticated and adult, but it's really the posturing of intellectual adolescence, the creative equivalent of dressing all in black and worrying your parents. True maturity, thank God, recognizes that life includes beauty and hope, brightness and joy and love and laughter, not just hopelessness and despair. That's shallow nihilistic nonsense. And I'm afraid I can't agree that Snyder's grown beyond it, or is ever likely to.

I didn't say that he's grown beyond it. He's just gotten better at employing it. Outside of the fact that grimdark is a completely inappropriate choice for a Superman movie, I think that Man of Steel & Batman v. Superman are perfectly serviceable movies with a lot of great visual moments. When you compare those to Watchmen, I'd say that he's left his angry teenager phase and entered his arthouse coffeshop goth phase.

Okay, now you're narrowing the goalposts so tightly that you're basically admitting I was right that you can't make universal generalizations.

Anyway, I'm not going to play cherrypicking games like that. Nobody can remember every movie ever made, so it's illegitimate to use isolated examples to "prove" a broader point. Just because you or I can't remember a specific example doesn't make it impossible for it to exist. Simple rational thinking should be enough to reveal how absurd it is to mistake category for quality, and I've already made that case.

My thesis is simple: When you make a piece of art, it's damn near impossible to bring in a different artist with completely different artistic sensibilities and have the final piece turn out to be as coherent or satisfying as the originally intended piece; so it's probably a bad idea (and a waste of money) to even try. I suspect that's why very few movies have tried it.

It's theoretically possible that such an attempt could be successful. We have a lot more information about movie production now, so we're more aware of it when stuff like this happens. So it could be that this happened a lot more often in the olden days and we just never heard about it. However, we've yet to be presented with even ONE successful example of this happening but we have multiple examples of it going poorly.

So while my thesis, as a generalization, may not be absolute, it's certainly accurate often enough for it to be a useful generalization.

All things being equal, I would rather watch a Joss Whedon movie than a Zack Snyder one. What I don't want is to see Whedon making a hash out of Snyder's leftovers. Even if Snyder was unavailable to finish the film, what it needed was someone whose style is similar enough to Snyder's to create a finished work that felt like it was all made by the same person. Now, if they massaged some of the details to correct some of the missteps that the previous films made with Superman, I wouldn't complain. But Snyder & Whedon are 2 directors whose work should never be combined like that.

QUOTE="Christopher, post: 13477927, member: 295"]That is exactly the problem with MoS -- it inserts things into the film's universe that have no justification there, simply because it knows we take them for granted. That's a lazy narrative cheat. Snyder has Jenny say "He saved us!" after seeing him save exactly one person and failing utterly to prevent the devastation of the city, not because it makes a damn bit of sense for that character in that situation to perceive him that way, but just because it's what the audience expects to hear. That's fundamentally incompetent writing. If you want to build to a moment where a character sees Superman as a savior, then set up the situation to justify it rather than doing the exact opposite so it sounds like a sick joke.[/QUOTE]

That's certainly my biggest problem with Man of Steel. All the other fanboys seemed to be fixated on Superman killing General Zod or the collateral damage from their fight. Those parts never bothered me. Meanwhile, I just can't get over the fact that the World Engine has already devastated downtown Metropolis to the point where most of it doesn't even qualify as "rubble" but instead as a fine powder. It's rare that a movie can present me with a 6-digit bodycount and still feel like the hero won at the end. (I suppose Independence Day and Star Trek (2009) were able to achieve that for me with even higher casualties. But it's rare.)

 

[Christopher]

What always struck me about the Metropolis portions of the movie was how goofy they were. It had these very stiff, stately sequences on Krypton & Smallville but then Metropolis turns into a slapstick screwball comedy half the time. The movie takes Superman very seriously but Clark, Lois, Jimmy, Perry, Lex, Otis, & Miss Tessmacher are all very silly most of the time. (Though I do have to give Gene Hackman credit for being able to absolutely nail the quiet menace when he needs to. The way he just looks at his watch & shakes his head when Miss Tessmacher tells him that her mother lives in Hackensack is a chilling piece of dark humor.)

That was pretty much in keeping with the tone of the comics for most of their history at that point. Not just in the Silver Age, but even pre-Code, in the mid-'40s Superman comics I've been reading in reprint collections and on DC Universe, the stories were often quite goofy and comical. By '78, the comics had started to get a little more serious under Denny O'Neil's editorship and Elliott S! Maggin's writing, but they still had a lot of humor and weirdness. If anything, it was the earlier sequences of the film that were more of a departure from the tone of the comics the film was based on (keeping in mind that screen adaptations of comics tend to be based on earlier, established versions more than the most recent stuff).

My thesis is simple: When you make a piece of art, it's damn near impossible to bring in a different artist with completely different artistic sensibilities and have the final piece turn out to be as coherent or satisfying as the originally intended piece; so it's probably a bad idea (and a waste of money) to even try. I suspect that's why very few movies have tried it.

The flaw in that thesis is that it doesn't make sense for movies, all of which are collaborations between numerous creators. It is facile and objectively wrong to mistake the director of a motion picture for an exclusive creator like the author of a novel. Yes, typically the director's decisions are the final ones that shape the finished product, for better or worse, but the reality is more complicated than that, and there have been many successful films over the years where the director was simply part of a larger team. Sometimes the creative vision most closely associated with a film is that of someone other than the director. People don't think of The Empire Strikes Back as an Irvin Kershner movie but a George Lucas movie. They don't think of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad as a Nathan Juran movie or even a Charles H. Schnell movie, but a Ray Harryhausen movie.

There are actually a lot of movies that have changed directors midway through filming, though going back and reshooting large parts of the film with a new director is less common. The Wizard of Oz went through three directors -- technically four counting George Cukor, who didn't actually shoot anything but made some major creative changes during the transition between other directors. Spartacus was originally being shot by Anthony Mann before the studio let him go after a few weeks and brought in Kubrick. Clint Eastwood kicked Philip Kaufman out of the director's chair of The Outlaw Josey Wales and took over filming himself -- leading to a rule preventing a star from doing that again.

So while my thesis, as a generalization, may not be absolute, it's certainly accurate often enough for it to be a useful generalization.

I've tried to explain to you why that's a nonsensical way of looking at it, like saying "Most baseball teams don't win the World Series, therefore there's no point in playing baseball." Of course the successes are in the minority. That's why they're worth striving for. That's how any competitive endeavor works. The word "excel" literally means to rise above the pack. Excellence is synonymous with being an exception to the rule, so insisting fanatically on the rule is blinding yourself to the existence of excellence altogether. That's the point of Sturgeon's Law. Dismissing a given thing because 90% of it is bad makes no sense, because 90% of everything is bad. It's the other 10% that makes it worthwhile, so it's foolish to ignore it just because it's not in the majority.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

What always struck me about the Metropolis portions of the movie was how goofy they were. It had these very stiff, stately sequences on Krypton & Smallville but then Metropolis turns into a slapstick screwball comedy half the time. The movie takes Superman very seriously but Clark, Lois, Jimmy, Perry, Lex, Otis, & Miss Tessmacher are all very silly most of the time.

..which flew in the face of Donner's initial reservations about directing the film; he did not want it to come off like the 1966 Batman TV series, but those Metropolis scenes were moving in that misguided direction.

(Though I do have to give Gene Hackman credit for being able to absolutely nail the quiet menace when he needs to. The way he just looks at his watch & shakes his head when Miss Tessmacher tells him that her mother lives in Hackensack is a chilling piece of dark humor.)

Hackman was fine, as he was not a buffoon, or the butt of a joke. Though not the most menacing live action Luthor, he was abusive (Otis' black eye), and as you point out, his exchange with Tessmacher about her mother's location.

I think that Man of Steel & Batman v. Superman are perfectly serviceable movies with a lot of great visual moments. When you compare those to Watchmen, I'd say that he's left his angry teenager phase and entered his arthouse coffeshop goth phase.

Snyder's consistent vision for the DCEU formed a universe that actually works, and it not tonally dissimilar like the majority of CW-DC TV series (with Black Lightning and Batwoman being exceptions to a TV franchise that is often mishandled and about as childish as an Afterschool Special from the 80s), and with that, you have a very fractured "universe" where some of its parts will never fit with the rest.

My thesis is simple: When you make a piece of art, it's damn near impossible to bring in a different artist with completely different artistic sensibilities and have the final piece turn out to be as coherent or satisfying as the originally intended piece; so it's probably a bad idea (and a waste of money) to even try. I suspect that's why very few movies have tried it.

Your thesis is correct, but it will not be understood by those with an irrational hatred of Synder and his approach (while some have a history of showing praise on crap like the worst of the aforementioned CW-DC TV), or others who want to see the MCU style forced into all comic adaptations when the Whedon/Justice League experiment's spectacular failure proved that kind of vision stood on the polar opposite side of what the DCEU needed and how it works best. This is the reason they are now going overboard trying to damn the Snyder version of JL; they have not seen one frame of it, but they're desperately trying to convince the world that its already a "disaster", and for some, becasue Whedon's MCU-izing of JL failed, then any version of the film--specifically the true vision of its creator--has to be condemned in some bizarre, Whedon-protective behavior.

All the other fanboys seemed to be fixated on Superman killing General Zod or the collateral damage from their fight. Those parts never bothered me.

Ah--the whiners who thought a raw, still emotionally growing Superman should not have engaged in a struggle to save humankind by the only means necessary, and winked and grinned a victory over the Zod and his plan as presented in Man of Steel. No audience member would have accepted the film world operating anything remotely close to that silly, very unrealistic Weisinger/Swan/Plastino version of the character today.

 

[JD]

My thesis is simple: When you make a piece of art, it's damn near impossible to bring in a different artist with completely different artistic sensibilities and have the final piece turn out to be as coherent or satisfying as the originally intended piece; so it's probably a bad idea (and a waste of money) to even try. I suspect that's why very few movies have tried it.

It's theoretically possible that such an attempt could be successful. We have a lot more information about movie production now, so we're more aware of it when stuff like this happens. So it could be that this happened a lot more often in the olden days and we just never heard about it. However, we've yet to be presented with even ONE successful example of this happening but we have multiple examples of it going poorly.

So while my thesis, as a generalization, may not be absolute, it's certainly accurate often enough for it to be a useful generalization.

All things being equal, I would rather watch a Joss Whedon movie than a Zack Snyder one. What I don't want is to see Whedon making a hash out of Snyder's leftovers. Even if Snyder was unavailable to finish the film, what it needed was someone whose style is similar enough to Snyder's to create a finished work that felt like it was all made by the same person. Now, if they massaged some of the details to correct some of the missteps that the previous films made with Superman, I wouldn't complain. But Snyder & Whedon are 2 directors whose work should never be combined like that.

There is another example of a movie where a new director came took over for reshoots, and it still turned really good, Rogue One. I'm not sure how much of an impact he had on the final film, but Tony Gilroy came in to do reshoots after Gareth Edwards shot most of the movie and I believe he was in charge of post production after that.

 

[Tosk]

..which flew in the face of Donner's initial reservations about directing the film; he did not want it to come off like the 1966 Batman TV series, but those Metropolis scenes were moving in that misguided direction.

I disagree. There was humor aplenty, but nothing moving towards the ridiculous...not until Superman II, at least. For my money, the comedy in Superman: The Movie stays well and truly on the right side of silly. Characters may act a little goofy, but no moreso than a real person does. Otis being a bumbling idiot is fine, Superman mistaking Telly Savalas for Lex Luthor is not.

 

[Christopher]

Otis being a bumbling idiot is fine

Is it? My problem is that we're supposed to take Lex seriously as a criminal mastermind, yet he can't seem to recruit any competent help or build a larger organization than one moll and one imbecile. Wouldn't a more credible Lex Luthor have killed Otis the first time his bumbling compromised a plan? If he were really the Public Enemy Number One the movie pretended he was, wouldn't there be lots of criminals clamoring to work for him? Wouldn't he even be able, like the Luthor in Elliott S! Maggin's Last Son of Krypton novel based on his rejected script for the movie, to build a successful reputable business as a cover for his criminal activities? Superman III's Ross Webster was a far better Lex Luthor than Hackman's Luthor ever was.

On the other hand, I just finished a rewatch of the '88-'92 syndicated Superboy series, which had one of the best screen Luthors ever in Sherman Howard (although that was only after they replaced their incredibly terrible first-season Luthor, Scott Wells, through a plastic-surgery gimmick and then retroactively pretended he'd never existed). Howard's Luthor had a recurring, Teschmacher-esque moll called Darla (Tracy Roberts), and it became evident that the reason Luthor kept her around was because he needed someone he could talk down to, insult, and feel intellectually superior to. So we can assume that explains why Hackman-Lex keeps Otis and Eve around.

 

[Kirk Prime]

That is exactly the problem with MoS -- it inserts things into the film's universe that have no justification there, simply because it knows we take them for granted. That's a lazy narrative cheat. Snyder has Jenny say "He saved us!" after seeing him save exactly one person and failing utterly to prevent the devastation of the city, not because it makes a damn bit of sense for that character in that situation to perceive him that way, but just because it's what the audience expects to hear. That's fundamentally incompetent writing. If you want to build to a moment where a character sees Superman as a savior, then set up the situation to justify it rather than doing the exact opposite so it sounds like a sick joke.

That's fair, and that's also a huge flaw in MOS. Ultimately, Superman earned his moniker as a hero by doing big things in a way that helped people. This kind of a debut goes against all of that. In the Reeve movie, he saved Lois by catching a helicopter.

One of the best lines was a live newsfeed that captured Superman catching Lois and the helicopter and there's a reporter saying, "Oh my God he got her. I don't know how but he got her." Then he went on to do so much more and become the inspiration we knew him to be. So when Zod invaded, Superman had the world behind him.

To me, the battle with Zod in Superman II was far superior because it was so well built up. Despite the better effects, it just wasn't as good. Sometimes slower is better too, but a lot of it was just the story the fight told.

The problem with Superman Returns was that, as usual, Bryan Singer just isn't a comic book fan. He's a Richard Donner fan. He doesn't care about the Superman character, he just wanted to do a lover letter to movies Donner made.

And it was a terrible job. Donner got the character much better. He knew what made Superman tick, where Singer did not, which was odd since Singer was allegedly a fan.

The moment they say they can't even be bothered to set these stories on our earth because every city is fictional (Metropolis, Gotham, Star, Central), starting any argument with "realistically" already makes it null and void.

Another fair point--the first thing I think they need to do is realize that this isn't the real world. There aren't super strong flying aliens that shoot heat out of their eyes that is as hot as the sun. Putting Superman in the real world with humans acting like they might in the real world takes away from the story. If I want real, I'll go outside.

Realism is not about being real, it's about making the unreal feel real. It's like the old joke about sincerity -- if you can fake that, you've got it made.

I don't think Snyder was going for that.

 

[Anwar]

Is it? My problem is that we're supposed to take Lex seriously as a criminal mastermind, yet he can't seem to recruit any competent help or build a larger organization than one moll and one imbecile.

Luthor really brings the first movie down a lot. He's just too damn ridiculous, although Hackman was doing his best to make him enjoyable. The film devolves into full on camp whenever Luthor was on-screen.

I get that Donner was going for a sort of fairy-tale style thing but he could've pulled it off better.

 

[theenglish]

Luthor really brings the first movie down a lot. He's just too damn ridiculous, although Hackman was doing his best to make him enjoyable. The film devolves into full on camp whenever Luthor was on-screen.

I get that Donner was going for a sort of fairy-tale style thing but he could've pulled it off better.

Hackman was responsible for the way he portrayed Luthor. IIRC he thought that Luthor was too dry and dull as written so he proposed the new take on the character's attitude to make it more entertaining. I don't think that explains the level of "camp" in the movie, but it certainly explains Hackman's take on the character. Hell, when I was a child I knew that the movie didn't portray Luthor as he was supposed to be.

 

[The Realist]

Hackman’s Luthor works beautifully in the context of the films in which he appears, which is all that really matters.

 

[Christopher]

Hackman was responsible for the way he portrayed Luthor. IIRC he thought that Luthor was too dry and dull as written so he proposed the new take on the character's attitude to make it more entertaining. I don't think that explains the level of "camp" in the movie, but it certainly explains Hackman's take on the character. Hell, when I was a child I knew that the movie didn't portray Luthor as he was supposed to be.

Hackman's performance is the part I liked. He was terrific. Not one bit of what I complained about above had anything to do with his acting. It was about the writing and concepts.

 

[JD]

Glad to know I'm not the only one who didn't like Hackman's Luthor. Everything around him was just so goofy it was hard to take him seriously as a real threat to anybody.

 

[theenglish]

Hackman's performance is the part I liked. He was terrific. Not one bit of what I complained about above had anything to do with his acting. It was about the writing and concepts.

Umm, I was replying to Anwar. not your post--Hackman's a great actor--I have never liked his Luthor.

 

[Anwar]

Hackman’s Luthor works beautifully in the context of the films in which he appears, which is all that really matters.

Not especially. Explain how he fits in the context.

Of course, I've stated before that I never like Margot Kidder's take on Lois. After seeing Lana in 3 and Lacy in 4 I wondered why Clark was so attracted to her.