Rama Set's account suicide has led to this thread growing drastically lonelier.
But I'll still post here from time to time, even if I'm just talking to myself. Zack Snyder has once more popped up in capeshit news by talking about his vision of the DCEU, and he's as dumb and pretentious as ever:
https://thedirect.com/article/zack-snyder-batman-v-superman-negative-receptionI think, and maybe I’m wrong. but I feel like a lot of people went into the movies for going like, ‘Oh, it’s the superhero romp, right? Let’s have fun with it.’ And we gave them this sort of hardcore deconstructivist, heavily layered, experiential modern mythological superhero movie that needs…that you really need to pay attention to. That was not cool [for them]. That’s not something anyone wanted to do. They were like, ‘What? No! That’s exhausting. How about, why do they fight at night?’ I hate that.
To hear Snyder and his fans talk, you would think that nobody other than him has ever tried to make a capeshit movie that had some ambition behind it and wasn't pure escapism.
The Dark Knight did pretty well at that, didn't it? So did
Logan, released just a year after BvS, and most recently, we've had
The Batman. It's almost as if audiences
aren't automatically hostile towards ambitious and thoughtful capeshit, but simply dislike movies that are poorly written and directed.
Also, I watched
Shazam! Fury of the Gods. It's not great. It's hard to put my finger on what it is exactly about it that falls short of the first one, but it feels kind of generic in comparison. One of the biggest strengths of the first movie was that the emphasis was on the characters and the personal stakes of how a teenager who's had a rough life finally finds a home and a family where he belongs. That's a hard act to follow, and the movie does at least try to keep us invested in this family and their bond, but this is fatally undermined by the fact that in stark contrast to the first one, this movie is very heavily plot-driven. We're very quickly introduced to our antagonists, and they very quickly plunge the world into great danger. There are not one, but two MacGuffins the antagonists are after, and they largely drive the plot. The movie even indulges in the cliché of capeshit/genre movies that I hate the most - the villain who gets captured and then reveals that it was part of their plan all along. I couldn't believe it when I saw that they were dusting that old trick off yet again.
Another issue with the movie is the clash between Zachary Levi as Shazam and Asher Angel as Billy. This was already kind of an issue with the first movie, but in this one, with Asher so much visibly older, it's far worse. Levi plays the character as if he's a twelve year-old kid in the body of an adult, but Billy is supposed to be turning eighteen, and Asher (in his limited screen time) both looks and acts like he's eighteen. It's not a good look for the character. A child behaving in a childish way can be charming, but an adult behaving in a childish way is just obnoxious. Also, I don't think it's spoiling anything to say that Gal Gadot cameos in this movie, and her role is to be nothing less than a figurative and literal
deus ex machina. It's surreal, like a
How It Should Have Ended video playing out at the end of an actual movie. It's not helped by the fact that Gadot sounds like she's bored out of her mind.
Finally, while
The Flash has yet to come out, the review embargo has ended, and
here it is on RT. Astonishingly, this movie appears to
not have been rapturously acclaimed as one of the greatest capeshit films of all time. Go figure.