Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is the best MCU film by quite some margin.
I watched Multiverse of Madness, it was okay. They gave Wanda a lot of good backstory and character in Wandavision then just threw all of that away and made her a generic "I am insane because of le dark powers" villain.
The whole movie is about the scarlet witch wanting children. Seems like a pretty easy problem to solve, really, I could help her solve it and I don't even have any superpowers.
The duality of man. Also, Wanda didn't simply want children in general, she specifically wanted the ones she had in
WandaVision, hence her need to search the multiverse.
Just seen The Flash. It was a bit wonky in a lot of places but I have to say overall it was pretty good. I don't understand the hate it's getting, certainly the most entertaining DC movie I've seen in a while.
And I don't understand the positive reviews it's getting. Maybe if you don't mind the godawful CGI, or the climactic moment of the movie literally being a random montage of former DC actors rather than something that's actually relevant to the film itself, or the bleak, cynical ending that renders the entire movie a shaggy dog story, the movie ends up seeming pretty good? To me, these are all major flaws in the movie, although I'll admit that my aversion to bulletproof all-CGI Batman is more personal than anything else. But, you know, I guess everyone's taste is different. I still think that WW84 is a decent, if flawed, movie, and yet the general consensus on the Internet seems to be that it's one of the worst movies ever made simply because of nitpicks about "plot holes" and an odd body-switch plot point that could arguably be viewed as rape if viewed from a certain (very uncharitable) perspective. Perhaps
The Flash is me simply experiencing this phenomenon from the opposite side.
Anyway, onto the Batshit Odyssey:
I more or less agree with Crudblud's
take on
The Dark Knight Rises. I remember praising it back on the old site when it first came out, with the caveat that it was the weakest of the trilogy, but looking back on it now, it's just not a good movie. There's just too much going on, and most of it is simply dull and/or not worth including in the movie. There are too many side characters, too many subplots, and it's all way, way, way too long. I honestly blame this movie for setting this precedent and undoubtedly inspiring Zack Snyder and Matt Reeves to make their respective Batman movies similarly bloated. No capeshit movie ever needs to be more than two and a half hours long. No exceptions. I am dogmatic about this point.
Let's start with the biggest pointless character, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's random cop. Near the beginning of the movie, he inspires Bruce to take action after deducing that he's Batman with insane troll logic. For the rest of the movie, he fails miserably at everything he tries, doesn't affect the overall story at all, and doesn't have any meaningful interactions with any important character other than Gordon. Despite this, he eats up a huge amount of focus and screen time, and the sole justification for this, the entire reason he's in the movie, is to be dramatically revealed as "Robin" and Bruce's successor at the end. That's it. That's why the movie spends all that time on him. Never mind that Bruce barely knows this guy and that he's spent the entire movie getting his ass kicked and accomplishing precisely nothing - this is Gotham's new protector! That being said, though, even if this character had clearly demonstrated his competence, devoting this much screen time to a character whose sole purpose is to be a (dumb) Easter egg is poor filmmaking.
Ben Mendelssohn and Burn Gorman play a couple of corporate stooges who think they've hired Bane to help them take down their business rival Bruce Wayne, not realizing that Bane has his own considerably more destructive agenda in mind. I like that Nolan adapted a character that first appeared in TAS (although I don't know why he felt the need to change Daggett's first name from Roland to John), but these two characters and their whole subplot go nowhere and are a complete waste of screen time. They just add to the runtime and make an already confusing plot even more complex. And while this is a very minor point, it really bugs me that when Selina delivers Gorman Bruce's fingerprints the characters make a big deal about the fact that she's initially missing the thumbs, and Gorman's insistence that the thumbs be included – along with Selina knowing that he would insist that the thumbs be included – is critical to her escape. You don't need all ten fingerprints to identify someone. You only need one. In fact, you don't even need the whole one.
Tom Hardy's Bane is without a doubt the most memorable part of this movie, and to a degree the most entertaining as well. The problem is that almost none of it works in an unironic sense. As a proper antagonist in a serious movie, he's an absolute disaster. He has almost nothing in common with the character from the source material (including but not limited to his being whitewashed, like Ra's before him), his lack of stature and/or decent action scenes fatally undermine the idea that he's supposed to be a physical threat to Batman, and he looks and sounds absolutely ridiculous. The absurd faux-Scottish accent really is the kiss of death. I don't understand how that made it past the first take, I really don't. Did Nolan actually think it was a good idea? Did Hardy threaten to quit if he wasn't allowed to use the voice? If it was the latter, then they ought to have let him go. Hardy was woefully miscast in the role, and he was nowhere near as well-known (at least to American audiences) back then as he is now, so it's not like he had a lot of star power to swing around.
The entire villainous scheme - the overall plot of the movie - is also stupid. It rehashes
Batman Begins rather than present Batman and Gotham with a new kind of ideological struggle, it's overly complicated seemingly for the sake of it, and too much of it is implausibly all designed for the benefit of Bruce. I talked before about the influence of TDK on creating a number of villains that (among other things) are more concerned with proving some kind of weird kind of philosophical point or "breaking the spirit" of the hero than accomplishing their actual goals.
Rises is an especially infuriating example of this. Talia and Bane's loyalty to Ra's makes very little sense on the face of it, but even setting that aside, there's no good reason why they don't simply destroy Gotham and move on. Instead, they imprison Bruce in a faraway prison, give him a TV, and let him watch as they pretend to spare Gotham and simply rule over it in a lawless state for several months until they finally destroy it. I can't stress enough how absurd it is that this whole scheme is being done entirely to fuck with Bruce. Talia and Bane are willing to trap themselves in Gotham, sacrifice their lives and the lives of everyone in their organization, abandon their goal of purifying the world, and spend several months ruling a lawless city all just to draw out the suffering of one man they hate. There is nothing in this entire trilogy that strains my suspension of disbelief as badly as this.
And then there's the political angle. Yes, of course we're going there. To be clear, I think that a lot of the general political/social criticism aimed at Batman as a character is misguided, especially the tiresome idea that Bruce Wayne could save Gotham through investing and donating his wealth, but instead chooses to be Batman because he'd rather beat people up than create real change. I'd recommend reading
this excellent article for the best response to that line of reasoning. I also want to stress that I'm not criticizing this film simply for being political, as all art is political to varying degrees of explicitness. I am, however, going to criticize this film for having really shitty, reactionary politics. This movie seems to rather aggressively argue that the natural order of things is for the wealthy to occupy the highest place in society and for the people below them to know their place. When the wealthy lose their way, as shown by Wayne Industries stagnating, society goes downhill, poor people get dangerous ideas about equality, and the stage is set for a destructive revolution that can only end in nothing less than literally everyone being killed and the city being destroyed. The only thing that can stop chaos unfolding is the physical presence of police, and once they're all trapped, the villains are free to turn Gotham into a lawless wasteland. You see, this is all a lot like the French Revolution, you know?
One element that I do think works out, more or less, is Bruce and Alfred's relationship. There's always a fine line when it comes to the character of Alfred - he's as much Bruce's adoptive father as he is his butler, and what father would want their son to lead a lonely and dangerous life as Batman? But we, the audience, of course want to see Batman in action, so an Alfred who tries to stop Bruce from being Batman would no doubt be extremely unpopular. Most Batman stories just ignore this odd little contradiction in his character. But this trilogy gives us an Alfred who clearly disapproves of Bruce's Batman tomfoolery, brings their relationship to its logical conclusion, and makes it work. Bale and Caine give strong performances, both characters are sympathetic, and the poignancy of Alfred being unable to do anything for Bruce but mourn for him hits hard. That is, until the movie pisses all over the sentiment with its fucking joke of an ending, but discounting that, it's handled very well. I said before that Caine plays the best Alfred of any adaptation, despite the numerous changes from the source material, and I stand by it.
And, you know, it's a minor point all things considered - but how in God's name did Bruce return to Gotham? They went to such lengths to establish how locked-down Gotham is. Nobody gets in or out. And then Bruce, who by this point has been stripped of all his usual resources, apparently just teleports there between scenes. It's so sloppy.
On to
Man of Steel. This movie is bad. I almost don't know where to start with this one. I feel like Snyder and Goyer really wanted to make this big, grand, ambitious movie that would be a milestone in capeshit and make people think that the genre could lend itself to deep and intelligent storytelling, but at its core, there is nothing deep or intelligent about this movie. It's a basic Superman origin story where he comes to Earth, discovers his heritage, and saves the day against alien invaders through a big punch-up. There's nothing to work with here, and rather than make a different kind of movie altogether, Snyder and Goyer apparently just decided to fill the intellectual empty spaces with constant Christ imagery and solemn monologues from the characters about how important the stakes are for humankind and how unprecedented the situation they've found themselves in is. This pervading element of faux-intellectualism is a disaster for both the characters and story, and ensures that nobody in this movie talks or acts like an actual person.
Let's look at one major casualty of this tendency - the character of Jonathan Kent. A lot of people hated this version of him for his ambivalence on whether or not Clark should save lives and his pointless death. I'm actually willing to cut the movie a little bit of slack there (although I don't necessarily think it was a great decision to go down that road to begin with), because there is a certain true-to-life resonance with his priorities. What loving parent wouldn't value the life of their own child over the lives of thirty unrelated children? What loving parent wouldn't lay down their own life for their child if the situation were drastic enough? But Jonathan doesn't come across as a loving parent to begin with. His interest in Clark doesn't feel fatherly or even personal at all - instead, it's the impersonal stewardship of a very important person who is destined to one day become a very important figure to mankind. I think that's the real reason why his character was so despised, even if a lot of people didn't quite grasp what it was that they hated about him.
It's not just Jonathan who's like this, of course. Why is Lois Lane eagerly chasing the Superman story down? Maybe she wants the fame and glory, maybe her ego won't let it slip away - nope, it's because she knows that Superman is a very important person who is destined to one day become a very important figure to mankind, and therefore she has a very important job to find him and urge him to fulfill his destiny. Perry White at first seems promising, and it's a sensible updating of his character to turn him into a grumpy cynic who's all too aware of the declining relevance of newspapers in the modern world, but before long, he too ends up preaching the Word of the Superman, this very important person who is destined to one day become a very important figure to mankind. This is just shitty character work. Characters need to be rounded. They need to have some sort of personality, some sort of grounding in the world that's been created, and something that makes them recognizable to the audience as people. But in this movie, the characters one by one turn into modern-day prophets whose main purpose is to preach both to each other and the audience about the sheer importance of everything that's currently happening.
A lot of people really like the opening act in Krypton, but I don't. It goes on for way too long and is overall just pointless. The whole civil war thing is pointless. Making a big deal out of Kal-El being born naturally is pointless. Sending Zod and his minions to the Phantom Zone moments before the planet is destroyed makes Jor-El and the Kryptonians look like they were deliberately trying to save their lives. Speaking of which, I also don't like Zod, and I'm really just bemused by the people who talk about what a deep and compelling villain he is. I really don't see what they're seeing there. Michael Shannon gives a very silly, very hammy performance as a capeshit villain who's every bit as one-dimensional and cartoonishly evil as you'd expect it to be. There's no nuance to him, and he's too tightly-wound and humorless to even be fun or entertaining to watch in a lighter sense. I will credit the movie for giving him more screen time than most capeshit movies (especially in the MCU) usually give their villains, but I don't find him an interesting antagonist at all. Shannon is a decent actor who's perfectly capable of giving good performances, but I'd never guess it from watching him in this movie.
If I had to pin down the source of this movie's failures as succinctly as I could, I'd point to two elements. One is the fact that a major priority for everyone during production was to avoid being like 2006's
Superman Returns, the commercial underperformance of which had been blamed on an overemphasis of nostalgia and a comparative lack of action.
Superman Returns has plenty of flaws, but this kind of reactionary, what-not-to-do mode of thinking has never been an ideal filmmaking method, and undoubtedly led to MoS putting such a focus on lengthy, destructive battles, an emphasis on grim and gritty "realism," and probably even Snyder being chosen as director due to his action chops. The other element is the focus on Superman primarily in abstract terms, as a powerful idea and a momentous occasion for humankind rather than a three-dimensional character with a personality and a worldview of his own. Yes, the real-world implications of a figure like Superman appearing are intriguing, but they can't be the main focus of the character. We have to care about a character as a person before we can get invested in them, and Snyder and Goyer were too busy playing up the awe and momentum of Superman to make him a strong and likable character in his own right.
I agree with pretty much everything else Crudblud has said. I don't blame WB for taking a chance on Snyder and letting him direct MoS, but it was dumb of them to stick with him in the wake of its deeply-polarized reaction, and even more so to double down by offering him even more creative control and access to their most valuable character for the sequel. I firmly believe that WB entrusting this franchise to Snyder will go down in Hollywood history as one of the most costly blunders a film studio has ever made. But that's a discussion for next time.
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