#Nothing wrong with cgi but there's options...

[numenoria]

Idc about the Disney remakes like that but when my sister told me about the hilarity that is the cgi dwarves in the Snow White movie... (my replies in pink)

Eta: excuse my atrocious spelling errors 😭

[moondvncer]

so, since I got all the achievements, here's how to get all the achievements and endings on "a date with death" under the cut!

ALL ENDINGS:

ending 1, semi bad ending. It's honestly the fastest to get. Choose whatever answer you want for the first two days, but during the soul connection on day 3, choose the panicked options as in: “Grim… ma—maybe this is a bad idea…”, and then “I… I think something’s wrong… this doesn’t feel right…”, then “Please… stop…”. The story will finish and you'll get the achievement.

ending 2, you lose the bet (bad ending). Be distant and dismissive, and pick more negative choices throughout the game, don’t water your plant on any of the days. don't open the window to get the flowers until it's your only choice when he shows up with the bouquet, then on day 6 choose: “Vaguely, yeah.” just before the first call, and “I don’t mind. I’ll take the sickness. The taint.”. The story will go on and you'll get the achievement.

ending 3, you win the bet. Be flirty all the way through, do your worst girlie, on day 6 choose: “You really know how to sweep me off my feet.”, “You’re cute. Cute and stupid.” and “How do I stop? What if I give it all away?!”. Once the story is completed you'll get the achievement and a super cute CGI of Grim.

ending 4, dual reapers. Since it's the DLC ending, it doesn't give you an achievement. If you decide to buy it, just choose DLC choices throughout the game, you'll recognise them immediately because there's a ★ next to them, for example: "Do you like me, Casper? ★"

ending 5, wedding. As soon as you suggest what's going to happen if he loses the bet, choose "Your hand in marriage." Joke about a wedding if given the change within the next day. On day 5, choose: “Want to meet the in-laws, Grim?”, and on day 6, choose: “I feel touched!”, and then, “How about a shotgun wedding?”

ALL ACHIEVEMENTS

First Chance at Death: this achievement will pop up as soon as you are finished creating your MC.

The First Day[...] The Sixth Day: you get these achievement as soon as you complete your day in game.

My Little Baby: interact with the pet you choose.

Serenity: water the plant on your bedtable, once is enough for this achievement.

Blooming Flowers: you'll need to water the plant once every day. It's easier if you do this while following any of the good endings.

Untrustworthy: you'll get this achievement once you get ending 1.

Take My Soul: you'll get this achievement once you get ending 2.

Dead Roots: do ths while going for ending 2, don’t water the plant at all. check on it on day 6 and on the last day before chatting; if you click on it by mistake during the previous days, choose not to water it.

Sealed with a Kiss: you'll get this achievement once you get ending 3.

Our Wedding: you'll get this achievement once you get ending 5.

Eavesdropping Champion: interact with the door every single day, and always choose to eavesdrop.

Patience: wait for the very last day. check your Internet browser in game before starting the chat with Casper, and wait for about a minute with the browser open! you'll see a white screen and the text changing from something like "there's nothing here" to "okay, click here to get your achievement", you click on the text and it's done!!!

I really hope this was helpful!!

↳ ☆  “a date with death: beyond the bet” walkthrough

[fyeaheddiemunson]

As I said, I saw Gladiator 2 again at 9am today. Me and my friend were the only ones there. I don't condone filming in theaters BUT...There has been a scene I can NOT stop thinking about for all the wrong reasons....

DO NOT CONTINUE IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO SEE HEAVY SPOILERS FOR GLADIATOR 2

PLEASE CAN WE DISCUSS THIS

The head. THE HEAD. There was 0 attempt made to make this look remotely like Geta. One of the main villains gets his head severed, that scene btw 🤌...and then his Spirit Halloween prop dome piece, looking nothing like him, is just bounced around like a child's kickball. And this goes on for over a minute. For over a minute there is a spotlight on this thing. How was it not important for the prop to look like the character? As awful as the cgi was in the film, it would have probably been the better option.

It's giving Carly Beth's head on a stick in The Haunted Mask

[abster05]

The Reality War

The floodgates are open now so the next few posts are just going to be rants becasue I've exhausted my options of who to talk to about this IRL, so here we go.

Why the hell did the Doctor not care about the Rani dying? Like yeah they were on opposite sides but that never mattered when it comes to the master. And I know they have a whole other fucked up thing going on with them, but are we really expected to believe that he sees (allegedly) the only other living member of his species, who he also was friends with as a child and just has absolutely no reaction to her death whatsoever? Yeah I don't buy it. I don't buy a lot of the lore they brought in this episode. Like I don't understand if the whole "Time lords are infertile" was just becasue of the Master's blowing up of Gallifrey or if it was supposed to include the Lungbarrow thing with looms and Susan being the last biological born Gallifreyan child? (Forgive me if it's wrong, I have only been able to read extracts because the PDF is hard to source) It just wasn't clear. Again, where the hell was Susan??? If the show goes on hiatus/is cancelled and they fucked what might (hopefully not) the last chance to see her played by Carole Ann Ford I will actually storm the BBC.

Also, Omega's return and defeat 5 minutes later (a generous 5 minutes) actually felt insulting. Like he is such a big deal and they just...wasted him? As well as fucking up the lore for no good reason. Like what actual purpose was served by them saying that he was a mad god who was banished rather than a hero to the, Time Lords who went mad as a result of being stuck alone in a universe of antimatter-the price to pay for giving the Time Lords time travel technology? There wasn't one. Because they did nothing with his chracter. Yeah it explains why he was a big CGI monster. Which they didn't need to do. None of it needed doing. They should have either had the Rani or or Omega as the finale villain. There wasn't enough time for them to do both. Correction, they could ahve gotten away with it if we didn't spend half the episode using Belinda's character to show women how we do really want children if we stop and think about it, and that if we don't then we'll change our minds when we get one and we won't remeber why we didn't in the first place.

After 30 or so years the Rani comes back and they do her SO bad. Like why is she lowkey flirting with Conrad (she said 10 minutes ago that she sees humans as insects, let's be so fr rn) and the Doctor? I had to turn to my family and friends SO fast to clear up the "lovers" comment. Like let's not please. She was a brilliant scientist, and we barely see any proof of it. No she's just evil and insane. Like I think they describe her as ammoral in this episode but she just wasn't? Like to me she just felt evil rather than ammoral. Like her not caring about the opression in Wish World because it doesn't affect her experiments? Fine. But some of the other stuff just felt like a female version of the insane villain we got in the Simm incarnation of the Master. And then she get sliterally eaten. By a fucking CGI skeleton Omega. Sure man.

Let's not forget that it's the South Asian incarnation of the Rani who gets eaten while the older (white regeneration) is the one who survives. Not hating om the actress at all, just on RTD showing of more racism and misogyny in a finale full of it.

It's crazy how in an episode seemingly dedicated to showing why racism, sexism and homophobia and ablism is bad, actually included some examples of all of those things either from the characters or the writers.

What the fuck happened to this show? Genuinely? TV can shape attitudes, especially if you're young and that's what happened to me watching this show (among others) Like of course it was never perfect (ie. Martha's treatment) but to me as a kid it at least got across that bigotry and violence are bad and are never the answer. Like I recognised pretty young some of the problems with Season 3 and more as I got older. And where has that show gone? Everyone says it's gone woke but that finale felt like the opposite. And it's really fucking sad.

[0xjuro]

wot s3e8 melindhra and dark oaths vs soul worldbuilding

I tried searching for it and found nothing at all, so maybe someone can explain to me:

Exactly how / from what did Melindhra die? Was Lan wrong with what he said? It seemed not, because we saw the soul-leaving-cgi with her just like with Moghis Grey Man creation.

Lan said that she dies and infers that her soul will forever be kept outside the pattern / with the dark one / destroyed. But I very much don't understand how this is supposed to work. Because not only does this mean that the whole "noone walks so long in the shadow that they cannot turn back into the light" thing is almost entirely bullshit, unless you count the 5 seconds before their soul is obliterated (or you see it as a general statement of fact which makes it a bit infuriating) and not only odes it beg the question why the hell Elan/Ishy hasn't yet broken his dark oaths. Finally dying and never being reborn is all he wants. If it is that easy: why hasn't he?? (was saying that also bullshit and part of his father of lies persona which he denies?) but also this implies that the dark one has direct influence over the pattern and/or the souls of his sworn even while they're part of the pattern.

Even if she is a channeler and swore an oath: it's almost definitely not on the oath rod, because we saw with Moiraine - and how the modern aes sedai oaths work in general - that they just prevent you from doing / force you to do something straight out; there doesn't seem to be an option to break them in exchange for your soul. So it's not an oath rod. What else is it? Why does it bind so holistically? And how is it supposed to fit into the rest of the worldbuilding? Does the dark one have some kind of sovereignty over the souls of his followers? And if it goes as far as to pluck their souls out, is he not also able to do a D&D god-like and give them more powers? (edit: I meant here besides true power - or also for non-channelers, though that again goes into how channeling works exactly and this is already way too long) Is this some kind of agreement between the creator and the dark one? Are they somehow close to shayol ghul (even then though ... the same questions still remain)?

Don't get me wrong: I'm really really really looking forward to soul worldbuilding - I love ittt!!!! ... but I also really don't understand it atm.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT I DID THIS THE ALTAIR BASIC OF THE GAP

But the next time you need to add. That's what all publishing used to be something a handful of talented colleagues. The iPhone isn't so much at stake, VCs can't resist micromanaging you. It's like the court of Louis XIV. In fact, don't impose any restrictions on the startups they like are the ones that wanted Oracle experience. The x in Ajax is from the sciences. Instead of paying the guy money as a freelance programmer. A symbol type.1

What J. They're happy to invest small amounts of their own people would rebel. History offers some encouragement. It's a little misleading to put it would be a lost cause to try to make you feel bad if they don't want to leave.2 I can usually be replaced by a single, huge pipe. Beginning writers adopt a pompous tone that doesn't sound right.3 They delight in breaking rules, but not meanness.4

I've been wondering about that. What should they do? So if you're the least bit inclined to find an optimal balance between two things he knows nothing whatsoever about technology, and some of the smartest programmers I know, Viaweb was the first Web-based applications.5 The US has less than 5% of the company as a whole is becoming less fragmented, and mostly in good ways. I didn't mean by this that Java programmers are dumb.6 Arguably it's a sign of trouble. This can't be how the big, famous startups got started.7

A from a mediocre VC. This is one of those that exploit an insecure cgi script to send mail to third parties. Html for bright red turns out to be more important than nurture. Jobs did when they got started in 1975. Often, indeed, it is probably not an option for most magazines. Will you have a lot of adults who still react childishly to challenges, of course, is OS X. So I think you ought to use the money to manufacture your own hardware, or use your software for the Mac, or wanted to.

Maybe I got a call from another startup founder considering hiring them to promote his company. So far the experiment seems to be the boss of someone much older. And you have to do something hard, you can in one step enable all your users to page people, or send commands by phone, or process credit cards, etc, and that they were experts in technology. Expose all transactions, and you probably won't need as many hackers, and a few other things most people use computers for, a tenth of a second latency would not be just lying around for anyone to prove what ideas you had when, so the only people who can help you improve your system, even if you do, and the big bang method, is exemplified by the French, did much of his thinking in Holland. If one tries a new programming language. All programmers know it's good to have such a target and to keep it that way. So the point of view: either an IPO, which we then presented to investors at Demo Day, where a lot of that there.

Notes

The cause may have to say they prefer great markets to great people. If a conversation in which I removed a pair of metaphors that made them register. Incidentally, if we just implemented it ourselves, so if you're not going to drunken parties. Most of the reason the dictionaries are wrong is that the most difficult part for startup founders tend to be at a friend's house for the correction.

They don't make their money if they ultimately succeed. Good news: users don't care about. This includes mere conventions, like arithmetic drills, instead of being interrupted deters hackers from starting hard projects. I hadn't had much success in doing a bad idea.

By this I mean this in terms of the main reason I say the raison d'etre of prep schools do, I'll have people nagging me for features. You can't be hacked, measure the degree to which it is. A great programmer might invent things worth 100x or even 1000x an average programmer's salary.

They have no way to create giant companies not seem formidable early on. The conventional 1 in 10 success rate for startups to have been; a new airport. Type A fundraising is because those are probably not do that?

If language A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B doesn't, that's the situation you find known boring ideas intolerable. It shouldn't be too conspicuous. But a couple hundred years ago they might shy away from large companies, but it doesn't change the world. This trend is one subtle danger you have two choices, choose the harder.

Mayle, Peter, Why Are We Getting a Divorce? Even if the current options suck enough. We don't call it procrastination when someone works hard and doesn't get paid to work on a wall is art.

Most don't try to be younger initially we encouraged undergrads to apply, and all those people show up and you need to be important ones. Corollary: Avoid becoming an administrator, or an acquisition for more of it. Or it may be loud and disorganized, but corrupt practices in finance, healthcare, and b I'm satisfied if I could pick them, maybe you'd start to feel like a conversation reaches a certain city because of the living.

[all-about-the-tea-parties]

House of the Dragon Episode One thoughts as I watch:

I really like the two young girls so far they’ve been captivating and Matt Smith is promising as a creepy grooming uncle

Not sure I enjoy the… visuals?? It’s kind of uncanny valley. It both feels too real (because I can tell it’s a set) and not real enough (because I can tell it’s a set). Nothing wrong with the sets in question, just… disappointingly obvious. GoT had sets too (alongside a plethora of locations which gave it a valuable realism) but all the sets in Game of Thrones weren’t overly noticeable which meant they felt beautifully rich in terms of world building.

Also don’t like the editing style. Early GoT was frugal w/ editing. The dialogue took centre stage and actors were allowed to command a scene from beginning until end (unless there was a poignant reaction). So far the editing feels sporadic and unintentional. And certain camera shots feel a tad ambitious for no particular reason, which makes it seem indulgent. It’s all a little distracting.

The dialogue is actually good! Not word play levels that I expect, but contextually there isn’t much need yet. Not much politicking happening because there’s no real “enemy” whereas in GoT the enemy was everyone, so much politicking all the time. The dialogue, though clever, is very upfront (because the targs are unquestionable in their power). So it’s good. No need to distract ppl with so many cuts and weird shots.

Maybe they’re trying to distract from the sets?

It just feels a bit… modern? Staged?

A quick question: idk if it’s my tv or not, but like is the frame sped up? On my tv it all feels s little too fast in movement (sometimes tv offers a “hyper realism” thing and that might be messing w/ my experience)

There’s def a lack of proper intrigue. But I know that’s to come, so it’s fine.

Really it’s the visual part that bothers me.

Not sure I enjoy seeing Matt smith in a sex scene but alright

The girls are the best part for sure, and I know they’re the point of it all, so I do hope the writers aren’t sacrificing the intrigue of other characters for them.

Like imagine game of thrones if D&D framed Jon Snow as the main character from the beginning. It’d be boring af

I like seeing my guy from outlander here tho. Not enough variety in accents in fantasy and I appreciate it here.

NOT THE HORSE

I HATE JOUSTS

NO MORE HORSE ABUSE

Is it ok? It’s ok?

I wanna be grossed out by siblings being in love but like considering the family they’re in, it’s probably at warped attempt at normalcy. Like at least they were married to each other and not an aunt/uncle (or PARENT)

Ugh the “impossible choice” fucking starting to see this trend in film where men are shown to have to decide women’s lives during childbirth (obviously at sn attempt to humanise them and make them good “but in a bad position”) like honestly it’s the new “turning your wife’s death/trauma into your own for a plot point” like spareeee me the angst most men HISTORICALLY had no issue killing their wives

Oh fuck me he’s gonna kill her

Never mind he’s a bad person

Never mind it was gruesome

They didn’t frame it as a difficult choice or like “he didn’t have any other option” or “he’s still good actually because we cut away from it all”

Holy shit MAJOR trigger warning for a torture scene

Like sure yeah maybe they were both gonna die but the doctor clearly didn’t give af about the queen so I doubt there’s was much investigation for a better option (that saves her)

Wait so he has a son now

Oh the baby’s gone

I LOVE how Valyrian sounds 200 years before Dany

The rolllls

Small touch I really enjoy? The fires give off so much smoke and I’ve never seen it before in a show. Do they normally cgi it away?

Not sure I’m hooked, again, intrigue is missing, character across the board that are all thoroughly interesting, but I DO like our main contenders.

They did NOT just throw the Game of Thrones ending shade like that

They. Did. Not. Just say DANY was meant to get the throne (even if for a short while because I feel she’s only meant to have it to unite the realm for the battle and likely leaves/dies after, as an end to an age of magic).

Like the point of GoT was obvs that the politicking WASNT the point but it’s suchhhh vindication that Daenerys was magically destined to ascend the throne

I don’t care if you think Jon is an option - she was the mother of dragons not him

Doesn’t mean Jon doesn’t do important things during the war to come, or even become a king after Dany, as this show said a Targ w/ dragons is needed to protect the world from a position of monarchy - doesn’t mean that monarchy exists for very much longer after the war ends.

So TECHNICALLY she both WINS the game of thrones AND breaks the wheel

Coupled w/ the fact that they HIGHLIGHTED Dany’s name at the beginning

G RR Martin is practically shouting who becomes the head of Westeros during the winter war. (Again, not necessarily the PTWP, because this is a separate Targ dreaming, not the prophecy that Rhaegar became obsessed w/ but now I see why he became obsessed w/ it if he was given this info by his dad before hearing it).

Ahhhhhhh

V I N D I C A T I O N

[agentnico]

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) Review

MCU isn’t what it used to be. So I mainly went to see the new Ant-Man movie for Paul Rudd. My friend suggested I could simply watch Paul Rudd clips on the internet or print out a really big picture of him and get lost in his eyes. All acceptable options, however nothing beats seeing his cute lil’ face on the big screen. So off I went to watch Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania...

Plot: When Scott Lang and Hope van Dyne, along with Hope's parents, Hank Pym and Janet van Dyne, and Scott's daughter, Cassie, are accidentally sent to the Quantum Realm, they soon find themselves exploring the Realm, interacting with strange new creatures, and coming face to face with a new big threat to the entire multiverse.

Since Avengers: Endgame, Marvel has been desperately trying to reignite the excitement audiences had during the Infinity Saga and the build-up to Thanos. Until now they have been at best mediocre, and all their multiversal shenanigans have come across mostly desperate and eye-rolling. Basically the MCU magic has been lost. Now comes the third Ant-Man with the promise to set a new course direction for the cinematic universe, with the proper introduction of the new Thanos-level Big Bad that will have a ripple effect on the future of the franchise. The result?

Yep, the magic is indeed lost. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is a by-the-numbers superhero blockbuster with a predictable plot, lots of CGI and an abundance of gobbledigook-filler sprinkled throughout. As a third movie in the Ant-Man series it fails, as it loses that self-contained heist thematic that was featured in the previous two. These movies have always felt quite separate from the rest of the MCU and smaller scale. Palette cleansers if you will in between all the major universe shattering threats. With Quantumania this is very much a bigger scale Marvel film, and in fact the Ant-Man characters feel like secondary thought, and instead this plays out as The Kang Movie. But then as the set-up to Phase 5 and the introduction of the new Big Bad of the MCU it doesn’t really work either, as Kang is useless. For someone who’s supposed to be such a big deal and hard to defeat, the fact that Ant-Man even has a fighting chance against him should be ludicrous. Don’t get me wrong, Jonathan Majors provides dramatic heft to the villain, and portrays the character in a stoic Shakespearean way, as he slowly enunciates his devilish schemes, and to be fair he shows that he lacks any mercy to anyone as he blasts down to death many Quantum citizens without a second thought. However that portrayal akums to nothing when, again, a couple of people with shrinking suits manage to take his punches and keep going. Look, we’ll see how they will use Kang further down the line, but this movie very much failed in presenting him as a lasting threat to the MCU. 

The writing is also piss poor. So many dialogue scenes between characters feel unnatural and rushed, as if the screenwriters are in a race against time to finish off the script so that they can quickly on and do the next Marvel project and then the next. And the narrative itself is filled with plot holes and certain things that flat-out don’t make sense. For example, Hope’s mother Janet van Dyne acts as the expositional source in this movie. However for half of the movie Janet refuses to tell our main characters any important information, instead simply leaving them with a “we don’t have time, I’ll tell you later”. But that is only done to give us a pointless bit of suspense before she dishes out the info anyway halfway through the movie. As such she is needlessly leaving out main characters out of the loop, in turn making them unprepared for the incoming threat, whereas if she warned them beforehand, all of it could have been easily  avoided. As for the reasoning behind her being so secretive about the Quantum Realm and not wanting anyone to have anything to do with it - where was all that in the last movie, when she so confidently sent Scott Lang into the Quantum Realm to fetch those special time particles for Ghost? She had no issues then. I get that most likely the Marvel producers and writers had a creative change of course in between these two films, but they should have made the transition more smoother. Instead it’s now inconsistent and blatant lazy writing.

Visually to be fair the movie is done pretty well. Yes, it is a lot of green screen that at times is very obvious, but overall it is a pretty looking movie, and very much came off as Marvel’s version of Star Wars. I’m not even talking narratively with Kang and his forces being like Darth Vader and the Empire, and the rebels being, well, like the rebels! But visually, the various Quantum characters we come across and the general aesthetic plays out like a feature length version of the Mos Eisley cantina from A New Hope. Which I didn’t mind, as I appreciated the creative designs that the visual artists came up with. That being said, and this is a very light spoiler that, if you use the internet in any capacity, would have come across your interface at one point or other. But that being said, a certain comic book character is introduced in this movie, that being MODOK. Yes, MODOK is in this film, and there are some very visually striking choices made with him that are most definitely going to split audiences. His look is very jarring and unnatural, but I myself actually really dug what they did with this character, and it played for some very good laughs.

Quantumania is not inherently a bad movie. There’s plenty of fun moments and visuals, with the usual blockbuster action you come to expect from the Marvel folks. The cast all are lovely to watch. Paul Rudd brings his usual charm and charisma. Michael Douglas is an acting legend and is always great to see him try and act in front of a green screen. Evangeline Lilly as the Wasp - she’s hardly in the film, even though she’s in the title. Go figure. Michelle Pfeiffer and Jonathan Majors try their best in their roles, however the poor writing really damages their characters. Kathryn Newton as Cassie I couldn’t care less about. Bill Murray is just Bill Murray. But overall this movie doesn’t change the fact that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has lost its original spark, and is now milking a dead cow to its last drop. Still looking forward to seeing Guardians Vol. 3 as its James Gunn’s final swan song before moving to DC, but otherwise maybe its time for Marvel to take a break. Which they won’t do, as these movies make so much money for the studio. Again, Disney gets it all.

Overall score: 5/10

[jupitermelichios]

Okay I am going to need you all to repeat after me:

"The MCU is a symptom, not the disease"

Hollywood in general has some massive problems right now, and some of them are genuinely new and unique problems (not as many as people on tumblr seem to think, but definitely not 0), and the Marvel Movies are the cause of exactly none of them

The MCU has a lot of these problems, there are MCU movies that exemplify most of the problems with modern hollywood movies, (are also MCU movies that exemplify most of the good points of modern hollywood movies, but that's a different argument), but they are not the cause of those problems. The MCU going away would not fix any of those problems.

The MCU is not the reason vfx and CGI artists are not uninionised, that's the fault of union busting efforts by AAA games companies and media conglomerates like Disney, AND it's an effect of modern global communications meaning that the work can be outsourced to teams overseas if artists within the USA demand better pay. This is a new and unique problem to this moment in time, because you can't outsource work on physical sets overseas without moving the entire movie production, but CGI artists do not need to be on set, so it's easy to hire teams in China or Vietnam to do the work for less than teams in the USA in a way that's simply never been true before.

The MCU is not the reason studios no longer invest in mid-budget films, that is the fault of falling cinema ticket sales scaring investors, and the late-stage capitalism obsession with growth at any cost leading studios to reinvent the road-show era mentality, when the entire studio's survival rests on the success of failure of one or two movies. Yes the runaway success of the Avengers played a part in investors deciding that $300,000,000 film budgets were a viable option, but a) it was that successful because it's a pretty perfect summer blockbuster, not flawless by any means, but a solid action movie that a lot of people genuinely enjoyed, b) there's nothing inherently wrong with movies that expensive existing, as long as less expensive movies also exist (a budget like that pays the wages for a fuck tonne of people), and c) so was the success of the Bayformers movies, and y'all aren't sending death threats to people online for liking the Last Knight or whatever the fuck the King Arthur one was called

The MCU is not the reason Disney is obsessed with plot twists to the point of hiding information from their actors, that's a combination of Disney has honestly always been pretty awful about IP protection, a handful of high profile leaks that made studios jumpy, and the fact that in the age of streaming and reduced cinema attendance, the easiest way to ensure people watch a movie when it releases is to make them think there's something about the movie which will be ruined if they wait a week. Short of selling film canisters with built in self-destruct mechanisms, 'this movie has a big twist and it won't be as good if you already know it going in' is the quickest and easiest way to do this, and crucially, it doesn't cost anything extra because it can be written into the movie at the scripting stage. Also a weird number of cinema-goers actually do care about spoilers, and twitter has meant that avoiding spoilers is basically impossible. There's a reason kids movies are largely exempt from the twists for the sake of twists mentality and it's that kids aren't (theoretically) on twitter.

(Also people stopped buying DVDs, so that's no longer a significant revenue stream for studios, so they don't care if people want to rewatch a movie or not, so it doesn't matter if the twist doesn't actually make sense and makes people not want to rewatch the movie because it's not like they were going to buy the DVD anyway).

Pretty much the only problem in modern Hollywood that can be traced solely to the MCU is the fixation on shared universes (and they're not actually bad in isolation as long as studios remember not everything needs to be a shared universe), but even that's just investors doing what they always do and trying to predict what made a movie successful without taking into account that it might just have been a good movie. Shared universe movies themselves can be traced to the MCU, but the phenomenon of studios just copying whatever the last thing to be success was absolutely cannot.

And the MCU not properly crediting and compensating the comics writers and artists? That's not even a Disney problem (although they have made it worse), that is a Marvel Comics problem and always has been (hey look, a thing you can actually blame Stan Lee for without needing to make up weird conspiracy theories about unsuccessful spider-man movies!). Disney is absolutely making it worse, but the Sam Raimi spider-man movies had the same problem, and so did the 1979 Captain America movie, and so did the unreleased 1994 Fantastic 4 movie. Marvel are real shitty about paying royalties, and this has been a known issue since the 60s.

You do no have to like the MCU, no one has to like any piece of media, but people liking and paying to see MCU movies is not the reason Hollywood is shit right now. The MCU is a product of the studio system, not the cause of it.

Block MCU related tags if you want to. Unfollow MCU fans. Don't go to see the movies. Advocate for a CGI union or better conditions for actors. But please stop pretending that disliking some movies is some kind of activism, or that the movies are somehow uniquely flawed, because that's not how any of this works.

(And as always, Martin Scorsesee has a standing invitation to fight me in the basement of any comic book store on earth)

[shut-up-danny-kun]

Magnus Archives - theoretical film adaptation

Okay, let me begin by admitting that it's probably a bad idea. MAG was made specifically for a podcast format - some things wouldn't even work if we could see what's happening. For example, it would've been practically impossible not to notice that Sasha has been replaced.

But let's say, *Ben Shapiro voice* let's say, for the sake of argument, that Magnus Archives became as popular as Harry Potter and people were demanding a film adaptation. How should one even approach the task?

I’d say the two most crucial elements of the podcast are its horror and its characters (yeah, there’s pretty much nothing else). The characters, if cast well, would not suffer from the visual format at all, so we’re fine on that front. The horror, however...

See, MAG is based on “cosmic horror” or “Lovecraftian horror”  - fear of the unknowable, incomprehensible, something that contradicts reality itself. Sure, some of the episodes are about beetle sex, but those aren’t the most plot-relevant or impactful ones. When giving statements, people often struggle to describe what they experienced, resorting to metaphors or analogies, because language doesn’t even have the terms needed to explain the Dread Powers.

The question is - how do you film something you can’t understand by definition? Like, “the sky ate my son”. Sure, CGI is amazing, but don’t you think it would be kind of underwhelming if, like, a giant mouth opened in the sky and ate a dude? Okay, actually, it would be kind of hilarious ngl.

But you get it. No visual tool is better than imagination, and Jonny Sims knows that very well - that’s why he made a podcast, not a show. 

If the whole event was shown using special effects, it would be disturbing - but not as scary as the podcast. Remember, the fear comes from not knowing how it could possibly be. Cutting away at the most important moment would not only be disappointing, but also undermine the whole purpose of a film adaptation. 

I have two potential solutions to this problem (I have no idea what I’m doing I'm trying to have fun please don’t harass me):

Go full arthouse.

Lighten the tone.

By the first point I mean reject all cinematic norms. I think that in that case, the visuals should only be used to enhance the effect of the narration, sort of like a music video instead of a film. I think it would work if normal life was animated and supernatural stuff would be live action, stop motion or something like that, just to enhance how wrong it all is. A good director could make it really scary, and it would preserve the vibe of the source material, however, most people don't like arthouse - there's a reason why it's not mainstream.

The other option would certainly be more popular. I say if we can see the monster, we can fight the monster! Then we don't need the supernatural elements to be so scary and incomprehensible. MAG could be something more akin to...well, uh, Scooby Doo, where there's an option to actually do something instead of just hoping you get lucky. Yeah, that would kind of undermine one of the main themes of the podcast, but consider how fun it would be. Also, it doesn't mean that it wouldn't be scary, and the beloved characters would still be there.

So, once again - MAG is a podcast and should prooobably stay that way, but we could turn into arthouse or make a monster hunting show)))

Anyway I'm not a director or anything

[the-lightning-strikes-again]

Yeah the Loki finale was meh/disappointing it doesn’t even feel like a Loki show anymore. I swear you could swap him with another character and the story would barely change.

Hi, anon! I'll put thoughts under a cut since idk who all has seen the Loki show yet.

Tbh, Loki is my favorite character from the MCU. I have waited for YEARS for this character to have an actual spotlight...

And I really wanted to like this show, I really did. Like, I legit wanted to just turn off my brain and enjoy everything?

But yeah, your message resonates with me. There were things I liked about the show, but once I got over the cool CGI and angst and female gaze, it just...feels like Loki got sidelined in his own story? The focus hadn't been about him specifically since episode 1. It instead shifted to Sylvie, who is different enough from Loki that she might as well have been Hawkeye still on his Endgame rampage for justice. And it was Sylvie's problems and Sylvie's motivations that drove the story. Which, you know, were interesting in their own way but not what I was expecting from a Loki show. A lot of scenes were just Sylvie running around and Loki somewhat helplessly following along in a daze that this is what his life has become. He was just ultimately a very passive character in someone else's story...because as the finale clearly showed, his core issues that needed to be worked out weren't in alignment with her own.

So it's sad to me that the show opened up by saying that Loki's destiny was always to function as a dead-end catalyst for other people's character development/journeys. And in the end, that's...exactly what Loki became for all the other characters in this show. ;A; And I'm not sure what they have going on for s2, but I fear he'll just play second-fiddle to Dr. Strange at this point.

I have other issues with the show as well....

___

I felt like they also massively declawed him? Ignoring the comics entirely (where he's even more badass) and looking just at the movies: He survived a Hulk smack-down, could toss humans like they were nothing, could travel between worlds through a variety of means, could already see into people's minds/memories and cast illusions and even change his form, and yet somehow all of this got retconned to make him a less powerful sorcerer compared to his Variants.

I remember this guy being actually dangerous and physically capable, which is why they locked him up. Loki used to have Avenger-level capabilities and strength. But now, he can't hardly fight off a human, and his defense skills are relegated to basic hand-to-hand combat and a dagger. The show even makes fun of his abilities and calls him a pussycat and turns him into a tie-wearing analyst...But I suppose that's in line with the general downgrade of his abilities in recent MCU movies...

___

And if being a sidekick in his own show and having his abilities retconned wasn't enough, I feel like the show failed to convince me that it really understood and is working to grow Loki's character.

The underlying issue that the show calls out as Loki's ultimate weakness is that he's "afraid of being alone," and that this feeds a narcissism complex. But this doesn't really make sense to me? Because he didn't grow up alone or unwanted. He had a mother (Frigga) who loved him deeply and taught him magic. He clearly made it into adulthood believing that Odin was his father, who certainly wasn't absent. He was always on adventures with his brother. He had clearly tried to build a reputation for himself that was differentiated from his brother's (the Silvertongue). This goes against how narcissists don't really have a personality of their own because they just absorb other people's mannerisms to fit in...So like, idk about parsing out the details of narcissism as a clinical diagnosis because I'm not a psychologist, but something feels a little odd here to me? Like, it's more than just...fear of being alone that drives Loki to be destructive? The loneliness is only a symptom??

The problem based off the early movies, providing that I'm not entirely an idiot in listening (which I suppose I could be), was that he was always in Thor's shadow and was never considered an equal, someone worthy of respect despite their differences. Even in the 2009 movie, his peers belittled his title as a Silvertongue and his love for magic. Discovering that he was actually an unwanted frost giant just twisted that knife in deeper and set him on a self-destruct path, once and for all. And it's really interesting to me that throughout this show, people are still constantly trying to establish themselves as alpha over Loki and make jabs about him as worthless and weak. And he's just desperate enough for validation to still try bonding with them the instant anyone tosses a bone of mild curiosity at him.

The fact that he's still positioned as less valuable and less respected than Sylvie, and that even Sylvie herself ultimately usurps equality in their relationship/partnership to enforce her will is just...depressing.

And for all this discussion about Loki changing/redeeming himself, at the end of the day, his perspective hasn't really changed? He still identifies himself as untrustworthy, even though he careens as a desperate lap dog for Mobius' approval and then Sylvie's once she gives him an ounce of attention. He has difficulty with accepting the value of a life, especially in regard to his own life. For example, he was still willing to consider upholding the death of future untold numbers via pruning despite being such a victim himself. And that's not a slam to his worry about a worse alternative, which is probably valid, but it's still weird that he does not believe he could contribute to a powerful resistance group capable of taking out multiple variations of one human man.

It's even weirder that he still seems to be caught in a tailspin regarding "necessary dictatorship," even though Loki is supposed to be a Silvertongue and could have won He Who Remains over as an ally against the other Variants of He Who Remains, thereby dismantling the TVA and freeing the multiverse. But unfortunately, he still can't see beyond two binary roads (mass chaos vs. subjugation). He has totally lost his confidence and identity as a Silvertongue. He can't see an alternative option despite supposedly being a Master Strategist, and that's echoed in how his initial thought to defeat Alioth was to kill it in a very Thor-ish, Asgardian way.

And because he has accepted the show's narrative that he is not capable or worthy of respect for his own unique talents, he openly just..accepts the concept that he's not meant to mean anything to anyone but himself ("I just want you to be okay") or do actually anything meaningful with his abilities. This probably underscores why he is so incapable of using his full powers for a Chaotic Good.

And for one final jab of hopelessness, the show immediately reverses the one (1) other mildly positive relationship he had just started to build via Mobius, solidifying that once again, Loki is not allowed to have friends. Loki is not allowed to have equals. Loki is not allowed to be respected. Which is probably why even when he's surrounded by other people, that's why he still feels alone.

I'm just sort of dead that for all the time the show spent on diagnosing Loki, it never got deep enough to ask why he feels alone.

Conclusion

So idk, the show just kinda depressed me tbh. I don't want to be this critical??? They have really great actors, interesting concepts, and clearly a strong CGI department. Again, not sure I could do better, so I recognize I'm playing armchair critic here. Maybe it'll get better in s2. I really want this show to prove me wrong and move Loki into a level of character development where he can like, actually have purpose in his own title show beyond serving as second-fiddle to other people in other people's self-discovery journeys.

Like please, just let him realize that he can have a positive, meaningful purpose. And that whatever his purpose is, that he is Enough just as he is, and that he can contribute meaningful things to others and be fully worthy of respect. And I think once that clicks with Loki, we'll see him really grow into something phenomenal. Something truly formidable, even if that character doesn't sit on a throne....

It's possible the show could go there? But I'm just a little leery that it's not really a show about Loki....

[barzombi-shitpost]

Okay, so I watched the Eternals.

It was good. Very good, honestly.

The only real problem for me, though? Is that it's part of the MCU. Like, no offense, but it REALLY shouldn't, because it had to incorporate elements of the MCU in its world, which was just tiring. Everytime I heard someone talk about the Avengers, or when the movie tries to tease a new character for a future movie, I would roll my eyes a little and be taken out of the story for a brief moment (even if I admit the Thor line was cute).

I see the movie getting a lot of shit from a lot of people (even sometimes people I like), and I hear things like "it's boring" or "the characters have no personality", or "The CGI is awful", or "They talk like they have a choice but no, they don't, so the pseudo-philosophy bullshit means nothing".

And I think these critics are wrong.

(I'm not even considering people crying that "waaaah waaaah why u do representation, it doesn't make ur movie good, wAaaaah!"

Doesn't make the movie bad either, buddy. Stop crying, blow your nose.)

So, point by point.

"It's boring" : I think it's a question of taste, here. The action scenes are very reminiscent of DC-styled movies, with bigger than life, godlike-heroes, but there's maybe less than 10 action sequences (if you count the finale as only one sequence with stopping points). But every single of them was very good, IMO. And the story tries to take some time to flesh out each of the 10 characters, and how they relate to each other.

Some people have pointed out that there was no need for such a large cast to make the story work. And I agree. But the real take of the film isn't "bim-boom big fighting against X", or at least it's not JUST that. It's also the study of "How a group of Immortals who personnally knows God and are on a mission will live said mission". And on that point, I think the movie succeeds.

"The characters have no personality" : they are archetypes, true, but that fits with the fact that they inspired mythological archetypes on our world, which makes sense. As a myth and legends nerd, I felt right at home.

"But that doesn't mean they're interesting!" Indeed. I personally find Iron Man boring and the new Spider-Man makes no sense to me, yet people praise them. I could just say it's a matter of taste again, but honestly I think you see enough of them to know more or less who they are. Because we are not just told who they are, we are shown, by belief and actions. And that's where they get interesting. But because the movie doesn't spoon-feed you everything, and have to ask of you to project yourself into the mindset of an immortal, to try and imagine what it must be like to live their dilemma, it might not be for everyone (especially if you went into the theater expecting mindless fun, which the movie is, but not as much as other MCU movies).

"The CGI is awful" : now, THIS is a matter of taste. Because I personally really liked how the powers were used and presented, and I think that filming on location during most scenes make the sometimes bad CGI bearable. But the Eternals, with their golden aura energy beams and power-rangers suits, can just look a bit... Too much. And I get that.

And finally...

"They talk like they have a choice but no, they don't, so the pseudo-philosophy bullshit means nothing" : So, without entering Big Spoilers, the Eternals need to make a Big Choice in the movie. A philosophical one, for them, but a very real choice for a lot of people. It's one of those "even if they choose right, they chose poorly" type of moral and philosophical choices.

If you can't project yourself into the shoes of the characters, the choice isn't a choice : they have to do A). Like, why would they do B) ? It's the Objectively Immoral Option. But if you try to look at the question from their point of view, you can see the conundrum.

It's the biggest choice of their 7000 years existence. And the whole movie has to prepare both the spectators and the characters for their choice. Which is WHY it's so "slow" and take so much time on presenting and showing everyone's point of view.

If you want to talk about it with spoilers, I'm all ears. But please, be respectful.

Thanks.

[otakween]

Digimon World (1999) - First Impressions

Wow! I'm already completely lost! :D

This game sure doesn't hold your hand at all. They really just said "figure it out, kid." Well, I'm just going to take things slow and hope for the best. This first impression is only based on about an hour of gameplay because my attention span is very short.

Notes:

-I thought I would be fine going into this game with no context, but it ended up being jarring from the start. They ask you at the beginning if you have a digivice and if you have friends. I'm not sure what the purpose of those questions was. I guess maybe this game had some integration with the virtual pet? I said no to the digivice and yes to friends. This didn't seem to affect anything. Was Jijimon just curious?

-The opening sequence mostly held up except for the terrifying faces on the CGI character models. The mouths especially look really bad.

-I like the design of the player character. I feel like it's just androgynous enough to be male or female (although they do call you "he").

-Really stupid that they have you name your digimon before you even see what it is. I tend to name things based on how they look, so I literally just I had no idea what name to use. I wonder if your initial digimon is randomized...

-The sound effects in the game are grating. Footsteps are very loud and stompy and your digimon whines at you constantly. I'll probably just listen to stuff as I play this since it's not very dialogue heavy.

-The general UI is very cute. I like looking at my digimon/player's info and the clock in the corner is a nice touch. I love it when games have day/night cycles.

-Just like the anime, the goal here is kept extremely vague. After I was set free to explore I was kinda like "...and? What do I do?" I guess the goal is to just recruit as many digimon as possible.

-So far I'm finding the pet sim features very limiting to exploration. I feel like I can't fully enjoy looking around the map when I need to worry about having a toilet nearby. Hopefully I get the hang of it.

-So the battle system is...nothing? You just watch your digimon fight and toss healing items at them? Seems pretty limiting and boring

-Why does Agumon turn into a little pixelated Agumon when he loses HP? Wouldn't he turn into Koromon? Oh well. It's a cool visual.

-A lot of the menu options are very vague and possibly poorly translated. When my digimon sleeps why are my options "Sleep" and "Save and Go." Save and go where? Why is there a weird "Save battle registration" tool in Jijimon's home? I honestly can't tell if that's a save point or something else.

-I wish it were more obvious how to trigger the next day. It seems like sometimes I would sleep and it wouldn't move onto the next day and other times it would.

-Not sure when the heck I would scold my digimon. It seems like if anything bad happened it would be my fault, right?

-I wonder how big the map gets. As in the anime, the world seems pretty empty and vague. I hope the game throws me something more interesting to look at.

I'm sure everything I'm confused about will click eventually, I just have a vague anxiety that I'm doing something wrong. Oh well. What's the worst that could happen?

[mst3kproject]

Planet of Dinosaurs

This movie is blessed with some pretty cool stop-motion dinosaurs and absolutely nothing else, and it’s got a Rifftrack.  That’s… that’s it, really.  Press play.

The spaceship Odyssey suffers a reactor meltdown and blows up with only just enough warning for the crew to launch a single lifeboat shuttle.  Luckily, there’s a life-bearing planet nearby where the spandex-suited survivors can land, but unluckily, it turns out to be inhabited by giant reptiles, not unlike the prehistoric fauna of Earth!  There’s also a spider the size of a Yorkshire terrier, for no particular reason.

There’s not really any plot from there, it’s just bad actors shooting toy laser guns at plastic dinosaurs, interspersed with Rock Climbing. At last the characters manage to kill the inevitable T-rex that’s been threatening them, whereupon they declare themselves to have conquered this planet.

There are a few attempts at human conflict but they’re pretty watery.  The first possible b-plot has to do with the vice president of the space-shipping company, Mr. Baylor, who was along on this trip for some reason and is among the survivors. So they’re not just stranded on Dinosaur Planet, they’re stranded on Dinosaur Planet with their boss.  He’s a jackass and his secretary quickly gets fed up with him and quits, which doesn’t do her a whole lot of good since they are, as I mentioned, stranded on Dinosaur Planet.  The writers run out of things to do with Baylor about halfway through the movie and kill him off, to everybody’s relief.

The second involves the bearded guy, Jim, who’s starting to take issue with Captain Lee’s command style.  Lee is trying to keep them all alive and uninjured until help can arrive.  Jim doesn’t think help is coming and wants to go full caveman and start slaughtering things. It starts to look like he’s gonna foment a mutiny, but eventually he and Lee overcome their differences and come up with a plan to kill the T-rex.

Finally, of course, the survivors inevitably pair off in heterosexual couples.  Sure is lucky there weren’t more men than women or vice-versa.  Very fortunate nobody’s left with no-one to bone but someone they’ve never gotten along with.  Quite improbable that nobody on the entire command crew was gay.  When one member of one of these couples becomes a dinosaur victim, the other thoughtfully dies a few scenes later, not because he commits suicide out of guilt or something, but just by coincidence.

One thing the movie actually does pretty well is day-for-night.  It’s not great, in that you can still tell it was shot in the daytime through a filter, but they chose the right filter to cool down the warm tones of the sunlight, and had the sense to keep the sky out of shot.  It never looks like somebody just turned the brightness on your screen way down and called it ‘night’, and I’ve seen so much worse that I want to at least acknowledge their competence.

The other thing Planet of Dinosaurs does well is the actual dinosaurs, which are a lot of fun. They’re lumpy and out of date, but some real care seems to have gone into building the detailed puppets and their movements are fluid and sometimes very lifelike.  There’s a nice variety of them, too.  As well as the T-rex there’s a smaller therapod that might be intended to be an Allosaurus, a couple of little Ornithomimus­-like animals, a Brontosaurus complete with the wrong head, a Stegosaurus, a Centrosaurus, and some kind of ankylosaur.  In real life these are a jumble of Hell Creek and Morrison dinosaurs who never met each other, but eh, it’s supposed to be another planet, it’s cool.

Unfortunately, there are several points where the effects people try to show us something they probably should have implied instead.  I commend their ambition, but knowing your limits is a big part of making special effects work.  In the first episode of Walking with Dinosaurs, the Postosuchus attacks a Placerias… but we don’t see as much of this as we think we do because our view is blocked by the body of the prey animal.  They knew their CGI wasn’t up to making the attack look good, so they tricked us into thinking we saw more than we did.  In Planet of Dinosaurs, a character stabs an injured Ornithomimus with a spear, and it’s painfully obvious that the stop-motion creature was just superimposed on top.  They could easily have set up the shot so we didn’t have to actually see it go in, but they didn’t.

The dinosaurs are clearly what they spent their budget on, which was wise – as I said in my review of Twelve to the Moon, if you can only afford to show us one cool thing, best make it the one in the title. Sadly, when I say spent the budget I mean the entire budget.  The rest of Planet of Dinosaurs looks like it was made in somebody’s backyard using stuff from the garden shed.  The spaceship that briefly appears in the opening had a previous career as a vacuum cleaner.  When it ‘explodes’ it just flickers red and vanishes with no further attempt at an effect.

The costumes look kind of like if they made the original Star Trek series ten years later but on the same budget, with producers who didn’t think they wanted this to be a porno but preferred to keep the option open.  The designated Himbo, Chuck, doffs his shirt within the first few minutes of the film and never gets it back.  The blonde who goes for a swim and is eaten by some water monster was wearing a bikini under her uniform for some reason.  By the end, they’re all dressed in cartoon caveman garb and Chuck is still shirtless.

Besides the dinosaurs, the main effect we see is the laser guns, which are among the most ineffective sci-fi weapons ever committed to screen.  They fire a beam of very slow red light which does absolutely nothing to any of the dinosaurs, even when the characters observe that one has been injured.  I think this is supposed to show us that the animals are tougher than the technology, but for that to work we would have needed to see a laser used effectively, perhaps to destroy something blocking the path. Without that, we have no basis for comparison.

If this were all Planet of Dinosaurs did wrong, it would be a bad movie classic.  Even the abysmally bad acting has its funny moments. What ruins the enjoyment is the movie’s lack of a proper story.

Planet of Dinosaurs is supposed to be a Cast Away or Robinson Crusoe sort of a film, about unprepared people thrust into the wilderness and forced to survive as best they can.  Such a narrative doesn’t need an overarching conflict per se.  It can be a series of smaller survival stories strung together, but Planet of Dinosaurs doesn’t manage to do that.  The ‘plot’ with Baylor depends on him being a petulant fool, and the characters are not sufficiently well-developed for us to have any interest in the ‘love stories’ that don’t affect the overall course of events.

The rivalry between Captain Lee and Bearded Guy Jim turns on how to keep the rest of the survivors safe from the large predators in the area, particularly the T-rex.  Lee wants everybody to hole up on a rocky plateau behind a ridiculously flimsy stockade to keep the animals out, while Jim wants to hunt down and kill the dinosaurs, to teach them to fear humans as wolves do on Earth.  The main problem with this is that we just don’t see enough of the predatory dinosaurs to justify this treatment of them.

We see the T-rex fairly early in the film, and it fuels the humans’ decision to see high ground where they hope such a large animal will not go. The much smaller Allosaurus shows up at one point to make a woman scream, is ‘injured’ with a laser, and the T-rex then eats it.  And just before the climax, the T-rex breaks through the stockade to chow down on Baylor’s secretary.  In between these incidents, we do not see and rarely even hear about these animals.  If we’re supposed to imagine them constantly lurking around outside, the movie makes no effort to reinforce that impression.  The T-rex is treated as the Final Boss, but the movie just hasn’t earned that.

At the end we see the survivors a few years later.  They’re building a farm, making their own clothes, living off the land, and raising their children.  One of the women asks the other if she thinks they’re ever going to be rescued, and the other replies that she doesn’t think it matters anymore. The implication is that they’re now happy here.  This is really not a bad little denouement, and ends the movie on a warm, optimistic note.

If you want to see some ridiculous 70s mustaches and ugly 70s dinosaurs, you’ll probably have fun with Planet of Dinosaurs.  Unfortunately, the movie was a little too ambitious in some places and not ambitious enough in others.  If I’d seen it at the age of six I probably would have become immediately obsessed with it for the dinosaurs alone, but as an adult I’m afraid my standards are just a little too high.  Unable to afford to be good, and unable to commit to being bad, it’s just another meh.

[omercifulheaves]

Favorite Monsters: The T-800

So back in October, I did a post a day about different monster that were favorites of mine on Facebook just for fun. Now, with enough time passed that I can look back at them without the frustration of how long they took to write, what I forgot to include etc. hanging over it, I a.) actually like how some of them turned out b.) figured I should fix some of those up and make the available to people outside of my facebook followers.  And with that, let’s kick things off with...

From: The Terminator (1984), directed by James Cameron, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger

"It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear. And it absolutely will not stop -- EVER -- until you are dead." -Kyle Reese explains to Sarah Connor just how royally screwed she is. Unstoppable killers weren't anything new by the 1980's but I think we can all agree that decade produced the standard by which all such things are measured against. One part Yul Brenner in Westworld, one part Michael Myers and several parts our collective fears of urban violence, nuclear annihilation and the dehumanization of an increasingly mechanized future. The moment that makes the character for me comes during the Tech Noir club shoot out. After a slow, dream-like build up, things erupt in chaos and gunfire. (Can I tell you how differently the scene feels to me after years of mass shootings?)  The Terminator has Sarah Connor dead to rights and it's only at the last second that Kyle's able to leap in and open fire, blowing him backwards through a plate glass window. Then, as that eerie mechanical drone plays over the soundtrack, the guy who just took a half-dozen shotgun blasts to the chest slowly stands up like it was nothing as the camera zooms in on a terrified Sarah Connor's face. You can feel a chill go through the movie itself at that moment, as if it's telling you: "Whatever you thought this guy was, rest assured...what he is is a hundred times worse." Then, as Kyle and Sarah flee, the Terminator, shot from a low angle so that it looms over the audience, charges after them. It won't stop. It won't stop. That's such a simple concept and that's what makes it so terrifying. Sure, you can damage it enough that it'll back off for a stretch but as the man himself is fond of saying, he'll be back. Blow up that car and set him on fire? Not even going to slow him down as he jumps on your getaway car and punches through the windshield. Hide in a police station with a few dozen heavily armed cops? He'll come crashing through the front door and slaughter them all. Burn his flesh off and the mechanical skeleton underneath will rise out of the flames and keep on coming. (Legit love how bloody terrified Kyle is when he sees that mother.)  Blow that up? As long as there's enough pieces of it still functioning, those'll come after you too. Your only options are to find a way to destroy this thing completely or die tired. People like to joke at how Arnold's best performance is portraying an emotionless robot. Well, screw those people, he's great in this. He truly does present himself as something inhuman wearing a human skin. The all too efficient to be human way of moving, that creepy way of scanning things with his eyes before moving his head. (In interviews, Arnie mentions that he took cues from stuff like great white sharks and security cameras to develop the way the Terminator looks at things.) And it isn't emotionless that he's portraying here, with the way the Terminator never reacts to anything, but soullessness. Part of me wonders how differently things would have played had Cameron went with his original choice for the role, buddy Lance Henriksen who ended up playing Detective Vukovich in the film. Don't get me wrong, Henriksen would have been *great* in the role , dude was seriously creeping people by showing up in character to meetings about the film. But would The Terminator have gone on to be the career making film for both lead actor and director? Or would it have ended up a discovered on video curio like The Hitcher, another movie about an implacable stalker starring  Rutger Hauer, a similarly creepy charismatic actor? As much as I like Lance, all I can say he's a presence in a movie while Arnold is a Presence. Can you picture Lance wearing a pair of mirror shades and holding a .45 Hardballer working as well as an image to sell your movie on as the one we got? Sure, a 6'3" Austrian Killdozer isn't the most subtle of infiltrators but that looming physicality sells the danger of this thing. You don't need state of the art CGI to get across how dangerous this thing is. (Even though T2's great. Don't @ me) Just look at it! It's called a Terminator, huh? I believe it. And of course, I can't end this without talking about how freaking great the design of the Terminator's endoskeleton is, courtesy of Cameron and Stan Winston's special effects crew. A malicious nightmare hybrid of an engine and a human skeleton, there's a reason shots of this thing stepping out of the flaming wreckage or its foot coming down to crush a human skull are etched in viewers memories. There's a reason why you can see blatant knock offs of this in anime like Bubblegum Crisis and Dirty Pair, video games like Kojima's Snatcher, and too many crappy direct to video movies to count. Between this and Robocop's ED-209, "ROBOT HATES YOU" design really peaked in the 80's and hasn't been bettered since.

[popculturebuffet]

Wonder Woman 1984 Review “The Monkey’s Paw Wish of Superhero Movies”

Before we dig in,  I just want to properly frame how much of a fucking disapointment this film was to me. It was thanks to the first film that I became the massive Wonder Woman fan I am today. Thanks to that movie and it’s accompanying sale, as Comixology likes to put sales on to tie into things as you’d expect, I tried Greg Rucka’s run on the title.. and quickly bought the second volume and will buy the third which didn’t exist yet at some point, as it’s easily one of my faviorite comics of all time, one i’ll undoubtly cover, and one that throughly sold me on the amazon princess, and throughly defined what she is to me: a compasionate warrior. Someone who WILL fight, who will take on the bad guys without hesitation, and who WILL kill if she has to.. but also someone whose compationate. Who will genuinely try to reform foes, who only kills as a last resort and not as a first option like some adaptations and the new 52 seem to think. She’s someone who in said run went out of her way to help her old friend and currently brainwashed foe Vanessa Kapetlis get cured of being the silver swan. She’s someone whose wholhe purpose for writing a book wasn’t money but simply to spread her people and her gods teachings. Someone whose , kind, noble, badass, smart and easily every bit the pure soul superman is. The run sold me on the character throughly and made me a fan to this day, one currently pouring thorugh both Rucka’s second run, and George Perez’ equally good run and one who hopes the upcoming dc relaunch means she’ll stop swapping writers every few months and get the run she deserves.  I just wanted to sell how much I treasured the character now thanks to the first movie and thus how hyped beyond hype I was for this movie. It had a great cast, a great setting, cool trailers.. sure they didn’t show off the plot but it had to be good right? This couldn’t be say.. a giant, overly long mess of tangled plots, padding, terrible pacing, unfortunate implications and pedro pascal devouring the scenery in a manner galactus would be proud of right? 

Well that’s what we got. After a year of hoping it’d come out some way this year, after having it delayed and after a year where MANY projects I loved were necessarily delayed due to covid... I got what I wanted. I got the movie i’d been hoping to see for months and months and months... and just like the wishes in the movie itself... it went horribly, horribly wrong. What I expected was something great as the other recent DC Movies.. what I got was a huge disapointing mess capping off a huge disapointing mess of a year. So while i’m a bit late due to contracting Covid and all the “FUN” that comes with that, I still felt like tearing into this film to figure out why I didn’t like it, what good parts it did have, and what the hell went wrong here. Spoilers and full review after the cut. 

The Plot:  Unlike my usual summaries I do, i’m keeping this one short and susicnt for those who haven’t seen the film: After a cold open flashback to diana’s childhood that was an omen of the boring padding to come, we get our main plot: It’s 1984 and Diana is acting in semi secret and helping out where she can. After some artifact thefts she takes a job at a museum and meets meek nerdy nerdy and office punching bag Barbra Minerva. The two strike up a kind of friendship, with Barbra wishing she could be as cool as diana especially after Diana saves her from being assaulted by a creepy random asshole. 

Diana hasn’t moved on from Steve Trevor’s death in the previous film, and thus when encountering a mysterious stone wishes for him to come back. Barbra likewise wishes fto be just like diana. Meanwhile Maxwell Lord, a conman who has sold a bunch of bogus oil plots, plots to steal the stone himself and does so by seducing Barbra, and instead of wishing for more wishes, wishes to GRANT THEM instead, thus overnight making his buisness a sucess and using the inevitible monkey’s paw consequences of said wishes to benifit himself.  Meanwhile Diana is reunited with Steve who for some reason has hyjacked someone elses body, and even has sex with Diana in it which is all kinds of creepy and wrong that we’ll get into soon enough. Meanwhile everyone now notices Barbara.. and she’s also gaining Diana’s powers but slowly loosing her empathy.  Diana eventually finds out with Barba’s help that the stone is dangerous and it’s wishes backfire horribly, while Max continues to gain power with his as Diana chases after him, slowly loosing her own power as her consequence for the wish. You know instead of the fact her lover took someone elses body and life and they have to live with that. Eventually Max gets the power of a soverign nation and the satilte codes off the president, and plans to broadcast himslef the the world to offset his own wish consequence, his body slowly failing, by taking other people’s health.  Steve urges Diana to renounce her wish and give him up to get her power back, she reluctnantly and painfully does so, and then goes after Max. Barbra however has sided with max and has him give her even more power turning her into a cat person as you’d expect. Wonder woman and the now fully cat Cheetah battle, it’s really cool looking, but Diana barely wins. We do get a decent climax with Diana not fighting max, not that she can with how powerful she’s become, but using the lasso of truth to get him to see the damage he’s done, give up and go back to his son. The world is saved Diana is moving on and also Linda Carter is there for some reason. 

So now you have  general idea of what happens, I can dig into the films faults, and it’s one or two strengths, one at a time, ONE AT A TIME. First off the film’s biggest issue by far and one that wouldn’t come through in the recap Padding and Pacing: THIS FILM DID NOT NEED TO BE 2 hrs 41 min

I said it once before but it bears repeating now:

THIS FILM DID NOT NEED TO BE 2 HOURS AND 41 MINUTES LONG

I am a firm belivier a film should be as long or short as it needs to be. If it’s under the standard 90 minutes, that’s cool, if it’s say three hours like avengers endgame that’s cool too. After the theater it’s easy enough to watch it in chunks, and sometimes a film just NEEDS that space and scope. 

This film.. did not need that. This is not the cumilation of 10 years of storytelling, as slapdashidly planned as it was till phase 3, this is a film that feels painfully long to watch due to how padded it is. You could’ve cut those 40 mintues from this film EASILY and while you wouldn’t of had a good film, sadly, you would’ve had a way more enjoyable cheesy superhero movie. I”m tackling this one first because it just.. oozes all over the film. For every great and memorable bit in the movie and every questionable one we’ll get to, for every gloriously so bad it’s good moment... there’s about 10 minutes of scene that did not need to be there. It slows down the film to a crawl and given the original had pitch perfect pacing I do not get how Patty Jenkins screwed this up. 

I do think Patty Jenkins is a good director. I did like the first movie, I do think a lions share of the credit goes to her writing and direction for that one. And a LOT of the sequences in this film are utterly goregously shot and fun to watch. I also, even if I don’t like this film, am extastic she forced the stuido to pay her more money to work on the film, as she deserves as much as any male director, it’s bullshit they tried to short change her, and again she was the reason the first film was so good. She deserved equal fucking pay for making Warner money hand over fist. 

But I also say this because i’m disapointed in HER. She CAN do better, she already did the first time and the only real down spot, the spotty cgi climax, was not her fault. And hell here she did get the climax she wanted, and wrote one hell of one. I”ll go into it more later but the finale of this movie from the pitch perfect fight with cheetah, dodgy face work nonwithstanding, to the final speech to the world is just gorgeous to watch. Even in this mess of a film there are some really good really tightly shot sequences that i’ll get to.. but their broken up by padding and padding nad more padding. This film is bloated, it needed to be edited down but she clearly REFUSED TO, gunshy after the whole Ares thing last time... and thus shot herself in the foot repeadtly. I sitll have some hope for the next movie and Rogue Squadron, but Jenkins rightfully lost any blind faith I had in her this film would be good just as the directors of it chapter 2 lost it by.. making a terrible sequel to a great movie. Given this happened in the span of a year you’d THINK i’d of prepared myself for that.. but no. Sadly.. no. 

But back to the point of this section: the film is just really padded. A lot of it is just scenes going on longer than they need to but there are some specific bits, some recurring others all in one go, that just really get tedious and pad things out. Let’s rattle em off shall we? The Opening: Now the opening is gorgeously shot, and it is nice to see Thymesicra again.. but the sequence is twiece as long as it needed to be, often just devolves into frantic shots of running.. and really dosen’t need to be here. I love Thymesicra, I love Hipolita, I love this damn beautiful island.. but we did not need it for this one. I THOUGHT it was there because the climax would be Max and Barbra invading the island or something.. but no. It has nothing to do with the main plot other than selling the film’s message “Nothing good comes from lies and shortcuts” which is a good message.. but the film already conveys that well. For all it’s flaws it well conveys the fact that the easy way to get what you want ALWAYS comes with a cost. That you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need. So we didn’t need 10 minutes of amazons running around just to make a point that the film already makes and it wreaks of Warner wanting to put the amazons in the film because “that’s what people expect.” 

Steve Trevor Dinking Around for 20 Minutes: I will admit as dumb as it was.. I really loved the Steve Trevor 80′s fashion show. Oh it was dumb.. beyond belieif.. but it’s REALLY hard to hate a good 5 minutes of chris pine putting on stupid 80′s outfits. I do think like a lot of this film it was longer than it needed to be and it defintely needed a good catchy 80′s tune alongside it, just go full bollocks if your doing this, but otherwise it’s just hard not to joy, even if in a so bad it’s good kind of way, this kind of lunacy in a major stuido film

That goodwill died quckily as the next 15 goddamn minutes, 5 for the fashion show which while i liked it did not need to be in the film as long as it was, were just steve getting used to the new world of the 80′s. While I like the idea of Steve now in Diana’s roll as stranger in a strange land, instead of using it cleverly or having him ruminate over all his friends being dead Captain America style or .. a billion other things we could’ve used this time for if you really needed it, we instead just get Steve and Diana farting around for 20 minutes and Chris Pine making stupid faces. Chris Pine deserved better than this. He seems to be a steerling person in his personal life and I seriously doubt he’s done any movie bad enough to have earned this.. I mean he did do Star Trek: Into Darkness but NONE of those films problems were his fault. It’s just really, REALLY terrible, and even more boring in padded in places than this film but without the good bits or the haminess of pedro pascal to make it even remotely watchable. Point is i’m doing a blind look, and this is blind I just came up with tihs bit while I was writing and have not looked at chris pine’s filmography before, to see if there’s anything really bad enough to justify him being put through this buffonery. 

Turns out .. yeah yeah he did. Two films in fact are just bad enough that he did in fact sign on to something bad enough to justify this. There were one or two other contenders but Princess Diaries 2 was earlier in his career, Into The Woods much like Into Darkness was not his fault and honestly if I were offered a part in a glitzy hollywood adaptation of a beloved musical i’d sign on too without heistation, and while Wrinke in Time is kind of a mess, Chris Pine is easily one of the best parts of it.  No the two films that make him DESERVE the goofy terrible fish out of water stuff are this means war, a film I saw throughly savaged by Matthew “Film Brain” Buck, which is about two douchey cia agents competing over a woman without thinking that MAYBE the choice is hers, and also setting up CONSTNAT SURVILENCE over her and basically stalking her to sabatoge each others dates. And while I did mention that review, because it did give context.. even from the trailer I could tell this was sexist, bro douchey, and stupid and wanted no part of it. So yeah signing on this this, post star trek’s success where he had his pick of projects and was at the hight of his fame.. is inexcusable.  The other is just... the kind of embarassing dtv film a person does before they get famous but is so horrendously premised that I still can’t give it to him. Like I get needing work, I do comissions 10 for movies now and 5 for tv show episodes and issues of comics if you were curious, so I understand that.. but even at his most desperate... why would you possibly take... this?

.. wait is that Stephen Tobowsky in the credits? Good god his career is depressing some time.. but at least unlike chris I GET him being in this as he needs money and despite his long and storied career, has to take what he can get. Wheras Chris was a promsing young star who while needing a break, CAN’T of thought this would be remotely sucessful and can’t of paid that well. But since the poster might not convey the premise.. the premise is Chris is a Blind Man looking for love set up on BLIND DATES. 

It sounds like a fucking Adam Sandler film premise. I’m honestly suprised he hasn’t remade this film with himself, david spade, or rob schinder, whose apparently on good terms with him again, god help us all. And DON’T. TELL. HIM. He still hasn’t made that worst film imaginable he promised for getting Snubbed for Uncut Gems. Yes I know, Hubie Halloween came out but that was in production long before the promise and not that bad. Not great, pretty average, but not terrible. Point is do not tempt Adam Sandler to remake this film. He still owes us the worst film he can muster INTENTIONALLY, as Pixels, Rediculous Six, That’s My Boy? That was all him trying to make  GOOD movie. Be afraid be VERY afraid. The other point is this premise is just really bad, REALLY offensive to blind people to make being blind into a stupid punchline, and I.. will probably watch this at some point because i’m bafflingly curious about this terrible terrible thing Chris Pine probably wanted us all to forget about, but will now never have that luxury as long as I live. The Fireworks Scene: This one is just..really dumb. Like really dumb. Every bit of this scene was dumb and we could’ve just.. had them get on a plane to egypt like normal people or steal a jet off screen. So to get to Egypt, Diana and Steve steal a jet which Steve can somehow fly despite decades of progress in how planes work at this point and him not knowing what radar is. He also gets shot ot at because Diana FORGOT, somehow, that radar exists and didn’t tell him. They also steal a jet instead of just taking an airliner or her calling in a favor since while it’s been a good few decades and Etta is sadly long dead, the candy family probably knows and loves her well enough and probably still has some military personal who could pull some strings and bring a jet over from london. It’s a stretch.. but not much more than “let’s steal a plane and hope we don’t die. “

Why this is in the padding section is because we then get a way too long bit of the two flying through a field of fireworks.. which also apparently existed LONG before steve was even born, so I donn’t quite get why he’s so shocked. And while i’ts not a bad CONCEPT for a scene the fact the two are being persued by the military for stealing a jet AND have to get to egypt so urgently they had to steal the jet in the first place lest Max do something horrible, which he ends up doing anyway... to take 10 minutes to gaze at the pretty fireworks. It’s just.. a waste of time in a movie that wasted already too much time. 

Some of the barbra scenes: We’ll dive more into Barbra in a bit, and this is easily the least offesnive on this list, but a lot of the scnees of her discovering her new power could’ve been compressed. There are seperate scenes of her discovering she dosen’t need glasses anymore and picking up a ton of weight at the gym, while in 80′s workout clothes because of course she is. Both of those could’ve been one, either having her pick up something heavy like nothing casually or just having her glasses fall and break at the gym, have some cute guy help her up to help sell the wish making her feel noticed, and realize she don’t need em. It’s minor in comparison, but a good chunk of her plot badly needed to be streamlined. 

And those are just the main offenders. The film’s pacing in general is just attrocious. It takes half an hour for the plot to move along most of the time.. there’ ssome good character stufff but they could’ve better weaved it into the plot and in some Barbra scenes and most of Max’s they DID. It’s just for the most part there’s a lot of repttition of stuff we already knew and figured out and it takes forever for the plot to move to the next phase until the last half hour. And by then my niece was already in the kitchen playing with her new slime having enitrely checked out, my mom was asleep and my brother just wanted this film over already and both of us were only hanging in out of obligation. This film blows most of what little potetial it has taking too damn long to get to the point. As I said it’s fine for a film to be long.. but while Endgame had laggy sections and some of it’s own problems.. it USED the huge runtime effectivey, using the first hour to both show our heroes had truly lost, then to set up the post-time skip world and just what had become of our heroes and their arcs for the movies. The second hour is mostly the time heist, a fun tour through the mcu’s history that also helps progress arcs and the final act is basically one MASSIVE glorious battle featuring every single hero who hadn’t suffered a non-snap related death in one of the best big action scnenes i’ve ever seen. It was well crafted and it’s slower moments were for character stuff and not because they felt the film needed to feel as long as the rest of the year had felt.  But while it was the film’s main flaw and the main reason i’ts bad instead of mediocre..there’s one other massive flaw that utterly sinks the damn film and robs of it of a lot of it’s emotional weight The Character Assassination of Diana Prince:

Now we get to the part that really pisses me off one that was already kinda bad while watching but just got worse the more I thought about it: Diana’s Charcterization here. Despite being flawless in the first film.. here it’s just bad. It’s bad and it should feel bad. I can’t fathom how Jenkins lost touch so badly with the character, and I don’t think the Co-Writer Remotley helped.  The Co-Writer for this film was Geoff Johns, a dc wunderkind whose reinvented the flash, green lantern, the justice society of america and aquaman, all brilliantly. The last one was even largely the basis for his damn fun movie. I have a lot of respect for the man... but like a lot of creators he’s not immune to screwing up and has made a LOT of mistakes, the biggest being forcing Cyborg away from the titans and into the justice league not for diversity’s sake like he probably claims.. but really because he didn’t want to use John Stewart instead of Hal Jordan, who he has an odd obession with i’ve never gotten, something the incoming writer of Green Lantern, Geoffry Throne, turns out to have complained about for years, as well as apparnetly giving out about Jordan SO MANY TIMES, that an entire artcle was made revealing this... and I’m perfectly fine with that as it should be clear I don’t like Hal Jordan all that much and while he’s been in some good runs, the other earth lanterns are FAR more intersting than him and far more unique. Thankfully the new series seems to be focusing on multiple of them and while hal seems to be getting some focus, Simon and Jessica are the main stars of modern day. So hell yeah to that. Let’s get back to the actual point. 

The point being that one of his weaknesses as a writer.. is he really dosen’t get Wonder Woman. He just dosen’t. During Justice League he wrote her as a violent warrior and during Infinite Crisis, as expertly pointed out by LInkara during his review of it a few years back, he had her “not understand what being human is” .. despite this being at the SAME TIME as that Greg Rucka run I mentioned, meaning at the time of Inifnite Crisis, she had her own embassy for her people set up, had written a book, and had just spent a good chunk of that run trying to free an old friend who’d been brainwashed into a psychotic killing machine from her mechanical inhancments killing her and driving her insane. She willingly blinded herself with fucking snake venom to save the world from Medusa’s gaze and avenge a child THEN went on a long and arduous quest for the gods simiply to ressurect said child, with no intent of getting her sight back and only getting it back because Athena willingly gave hers up for being so noble. She is someone who is compatsionate, empathetic and noble. Not a kill happy warrior who loves fighting and blood. She fights because she has to, she does not hesitate and she does kill when needed.. but she is not some weird enigma to humanity. She’s throughly human despite being made of clay and not raised among regular humans. She’s a person, and Geoff just dosen’t get that. He get Superman, the flash, batman, other heroes just fine. He redefined aquaman well like I said. But for some damn reason he just dosen’t get Diana and can’t get a good grasp on her and while a good choice of co writer for practically any other dc movie and a good choice to right the ship for the dceu, he was the second possible worst choice to handle this character and likely is at least partially responsible for her character taking such a nosedive. By the way just in case you think better of him for only being second worst.. this is the worst. 

Yes that actually happened.. thankfully not in the main canon and likely because Frank Miller really REALLY needs to get some help. 

Point is he was a bad choice and while I still give Patty Jenkins some discredit for helping with this, I do feel Geoff easily could’ve agreed with or came up with some of the worse ideas here without really thinking them through because this simply isn’t a character he cares about what happens to her or knows that well.  Things START fine: in present day we get a pretty fun action sequence in a mall with what my brother called Dollar Store Micheal Keaton.. but because Max was already perfectly cast, there wasn’t room for this screen legend. Plus he was probably busy shooting Morbius for.. whatever his role is there. I hope it’s the vulture. My point is DSMK is delightfully hammy and weird and helps kick up an already fun mall sequence.. while I was apparnetly the ONLY one who enjoyed this cheesy but awesome sequence in my family aside from my niece, she hadn’t rightfully checked out at this point, I still love it. It does bring up the slight problem of Diana being active years before... but given The Suicide Squad with it’s vast colorful cast of supervillians and the fact the freaking Justice Society are getting introdcued and given their gimmick even if WWII isn’t involed this time they had to have been active for some time before they presumibly vanished. My point is the whole Zack Snyder thing of “Metahumans are new and you should fear them” has been quitely retconned out and this will all likely be explained with the whole flashpoint thing... (Shudders).. not the retcon the DCEU needs a good coat of paint and unlike the XCU I dont think their going to waste a second chance, I just want a flash film that’s actually about barry and not another adaptation of a storyline few people liked ot start with. Point is that’s not really a huge issue and I prefer DIana being active than the implication she did nothing and her doing small bits of heroisim, like saving a woman from getting hit by a car or resucing pets and bigger ones like the mall just .. fell like Diana. It’s all downhill from there though. For starters there’s Barbra. It starts well: Diana is the only person to not only notice Barbra but treat her nice, and the two strike up a friendship.. which I honeslty wish was more as there was a lot of potetial there and both have great chemistry, not to mention showing Diana’s bisexuality on screen would be a really damn good move forward for representation, but that’s more on me and given how homophobic big companies can be, i’m unsuprised Warner wouldn’t let Patty take that route. 

Point is it starts well enough.. but instead of the two actually having a deep freindship and possible relationship that is heartbreaking when it’s broken.. Diana just sort of forgets about her except when she needs her for the plot, and thus what should’ve been an emotionally breaking subplot leading to an utterly heartbreaking fight at the climax.. was just Diana being a dick, taking advantage of someone, and then getting a bit self righteous when the person you basically abandoned and didn’t notice made a wish till it was too late wants to keep the one thing that’s ever made her feel special. 

It dosen’t help the comics did this whole thing better and is likely where Jenkins got the inspiration: During Rebirth Barbara Minvera was converted from a vicious ruthless bitch and a half, if still a brilliant character, to a tragic figure: one who while a bit cold and standofish, was genuinely diana’s friend, tricked into thinking she was abandoned, then became the bride of a horrifying god who punsiheed her for the “crime”.. of not being a virgin. While removing the whole cat god thing is understandable.. they removed pretty much everything that made that intresting and Rucka worked hard to make for a cliche “Nerd becomes evil” plot that’s been done a milion times nad makes dsiana look horrible.  But while this is bad.. it PALES in comparisoin to the elephant in the room here. 

No no elephant sweetie not wild pig. No.. it’s once Diana makes her wish on the magical wishing stone form the trickster god.. and brings steve back. See her bringing him back only for her to have to give him up to save the world.. that’s not bad. It’s a great way to bring chris pine back, ratchet up tension and ultimately give her proper closure for steve so she can move on.  The problem.. is HOW steve comes back and how the movie handles that. Steve comes back.. by possesing some random guy. That itself is not a bad idea, as while it’s weird, A) I’m a weirdo and proud of it so i’mf ine with weird and B) it gives us a price to the wish like the other wishes: steve comes back.. but he has to take someone else’s life to do so. Diana has to sacrifice an innocent man she dosen’t know anything about in order to get her happy ending. That could’ve lead to some great drama, with Diana realizing how wrong this is and forcing herself to give him up with Steve’s blessing, as Steve would likewise not feel right about this. He could’ve had family or a girlfriend or something that were jeaporadzied if Diana kept Steve.  The problem.. is they handled it horribly. really horribly. Diana and Steve.. almost NEVER mention the fact that he’s basically taken a life. They don’t ask if the guy is dead, they don’t ask who he was and they don’t try to find a way to get him a new body or a dying one or some other ghost can’t do it style shenanigan. And the fact i’m comparing this subplot to ghost can’t do it should tell you this is very bad. And it gets worse as the two have sex.. and whiel I dind’t think about it while watching the movie... afterwords? Yeah.. that’s.. that’s rape. The guy didn’t consent to letting them use his body. Now granted if Steve could leave the body at willand the guy was like “Sure why not” then that’d be fine.. but he has no way of consenting. Sure STEVE did.. but this ain’t his property. This isn’t his body to decide who he fucks. It’s random guy whose body he stole. Hell they didn’t even stop to consider if this guy might be gay which given Diana is bisexual makes no goddamn sense. So that’s another possible layer of wrong on this sundae of what the actual hell. I mean.. how do you bungle writing so bad your main character ends up as a rapist? That’s a special kind of incompetence in 2020 I tell you. 

It just turns Diana from a kind noble woman who looks out for everyone.. into a creepy asshole who willingly sacrifices some guy she dosen’t know, something a well written Diana would NEVER do, to get what she wants. This is not diana prince. This is “out of the way sperm bank” levels of charactera assasination” and the fact steve has to talk her into letting him go just makes it worst. Diana here is selifhs, unsympathetic and terrible and it brings the whole film down despite Gal Godot’s best efforts to try and make this work. She fails.. but it’s not on her as an actress, she’s terrific, but on the writing for Diana being so bad. She just comes off as selfish and irredemible and i’ts horrifying to see. As one last note Steve is reduced to more of a cutout this time, so any possible emotinal weight not already destroyed by the rape is entirley missing. Just good god they did Diana dirty for this one. And it dosen’t help her villians.. are done much better. Speaking of..

Barbra: A Mixed Cat Out of a Mixed Bag As the title should make clear Barbra is kind of a mixed bag. On the one hand.. Kristin Wiig is fantastic. Like holy crap I had some small doubts about her being cast in the role but she nailed both the sweet put upon nerd at the start and the ruthless individual desperate to stay special at the end really well and the reason her scenes aren’t as draggy despite a lot being padding are Wiig just really sells the transformation, going from being giddy at a sudden influx of attention to feeling powerful.. to feeling dangerous and being deseprate to do whatever it takes to hold onto her power and being furious when she looses it.  The problem is.. it’s all in the acting. Writing wise the story is horribly cliche. It’s why her having feelings for Diana was a suggestion that popped into my head: that’s actually intresting. A put upon nerd who envy’s a hero but ends up instead resenting them and wanting to kill them isn’t new. Amazing Spider-Man 2, which I thankfully haven’t seen but has that plot, Incredibles, and the one that the movie steals from the most.. Batman Returns. While wanting to kill the hero wasn’t part of that one, the whole “blonde whose still attractive even before the makeover has some supernatural thing happen to her and turns into an extrovert with a cat motif who is determined to take what she wants despite the cost.” While i’ts not 1 for 1, mostly becasue Catwoman actually had a romantic relationship with the hero, it’s REALLY hard to ignore just how much it seems to curb from Returns. And I haven’t even seen the movie the whole way through, just about half, really need to, not the point. Point is, it just feels like a rehash of a better done version of the plot.  And the sad part is the comics GAVE Patty and Geoff two much better versions that could’ve followed the same path. Pre-Rebirth/Flashpoint, she was a ruthless woman from the getgo and simply could’ve been that, being friends with Diana.. but being too selfish and envious to truly let her in and thus relishing in her new power and showing off who she really was. The other, and better option for the narrative is the previously mentioned rebirth one: A sarcastic and hard but likeable woman who has had to scrape and claw to do what she loves, which is archelogy, despite her father being vastly against it because he’s a dick. Someone who through tragic misunderstanding becomes a tragic monster. That latter version would’ve fit in perfectly, having her like diana and just want to be her.. but a combination of her own inseucrites and the stone strip away her empathy and increase her jealousy and Diana neglecting her could’ve been a concious choice: Diana being too busy with steve and stopping max to see what was happening and thus be heartbroken to fight her true friend. Instead we just get.. catwoman but less good. Wiig tries her best and often succeeds but even she can’t really fix this.  It also dosen’t help that selfishness aside.. Barbra is far more sympathetic. She’s contantly put upon and ignored by her cowowkres nad even her boss, who oftne forgets she works there, and finally meets someone who seems to care.. onlyf or that person to ignore her and go off and have adventures and really horribly implicated sex. So she wishes to be like this person, to be confident and loved and able to walk in heels and strong and gets it and slowly looses who she was to it. Hell the moment where she apparently CROSSES THE LINE by possibly killing some guy.. is entirely ruined by picking the wrong target. Instead of it being her boss or one of her co workers who mockeda nd humilated her.. i’ts the same guy who tried to assault her out for revenge. She’s beating up.. a bad person. She’s doing what Diana would do in a good way..

Sure she does take a turn for the evil, after hearing about the wishing stone destroying civilizations.. she sides with max.. but she’s still more sympathetic. Her resintment of Diana which should just be the meta commentary Jenkins intended on relationships between women where it becomes competitive due to societal bullshit, instead comes off justifed. Diana abandoned her, Diana is also being selfish with her wish, diana raped a man, Diana wants Max to stop.. but has to be TALKED into letting her wish go. While Diana is trying to save the world you can’t fault Barbra for not trusting her. For someone who preaches honesty, all Diana is to Barbra is a liar. While she does side with Max who earlier manipualted her by seducing her and stealing the stone... she KNOWS he’s not a great person, and this time instead of being the used, she’s the user. She knows he can make her even STRONGER, knows he can let her keep being who she wants to be if not BETTER, and knows he needs someone on his side.. and knows he won’t screw her over with her wish since he needs Diana off his back to become powerful enough to face her. Barbra comes off as cunning, manipulative and way more likeable than the hero, instead of the tragic villian she was inteded as. If nothing else, if she shows up in the sequel I will watch it even after this one was pretty damn bad and hopefully sh’ell be better written next time to match Wiig’s hard work. Now.. i’ve saved the best for last as while i’ve compalined a lot.. there is ONE aspect of the film that is genuinely good and while I get not everyone liked it.. Is urea s hell did

Maxwell Lord: Perdo Pascal Saves this film by eating the set whole like galactus. 

Maxwell Lord.. is the best part of this movie. Easily. Unlike the other main characters, he’s written well, acted well if hammy as all hell, and is true to the comics. Part of this I freely admit is that when I heard Max was a villian here I expected none of his JLI version to survivie. I should explain.. in the comics Max is defined by two diffrent phases of how he was written; The first was in Giffen and Demattis run on justice league, which was more of an action comedy with emphasis on the comedy> There was still serious stuff and villians to face, it’s just our heroes were a bunch of likeable misfits and b-list heroes doing their best while cracking jokes and disfunctionally clashing with one another. It’s good stuff.  Max was the heart of that: a selfish manipulative buisness man who grew to like the league and rebelled against the robot intellegence that got him that far, earning him a fair spot on the team. Sure he was a sleazy, shady 80′s buisness man, but he has a good heart underneath the opprotunsitic nature. 

Come the run up to infinite crisis despite being a metahuman, he started irationally hating metahumans, claimed to have always hated them, and set up a vast conspriacty to kill em all. He also hyjacked superman, which lead to Wonder Woman being forced to snap his neck and being booed for it by superman despite the fact you know.. she was trying to stop him from killing batman and had no other cohice. The rest of the world got the clip out of context.. but even then she’d already killed months ago for the medusa thing I mentioned before, and despite Medusa only speeking ancient greek, the world, which tihs was broadcast too hence the danger of medusa killing trillions of viewers watching at home, they got the context that Wonder Woman was the good guy and was killing for good reason. It was just.. kind of stupid even if Rucka did his best with it is what i’m saying. 

Point is there were two maxes: the sleazy and manipulative but well meaning buisness man and semi-con man and the manipulative but well intentioned master mind. So the movie.. combined both beautifully. He’s a manipulator as always, having set up a ponzi scheme and getitng called out on it by what turned out to be Simon Stagg.. who for some reason is the virtious if assholish buisness man here despite in the comcis being an utterly corrupt asshole constnatly ttrying to prevent his daughter from marrying this guy

This is Metamorpho, the element man, archelogist Rex Mason who thanks to the orb of Ra turned into this guy, an embodiment of the elments who can transmute his body into anything on the perodic table. Why HE hasn’t been in a movie yet his nemisis now has been is beyond me and there are better dc businessmen to have used. 

Point is this Max is shady, ambitious and sleazy.. and badly failing his scheme falling around him. But his reason for wanting to be a rich, powerful man after growing up a poor immigrant.. is utterly symapthetic. He has a son in this adaptation and wants to make him proud. I’ts CLEARLY not his only motivation, he also just wants to be proud and the finale reveals hsi father was abusive, and his classmmates alienated him for being an immigrant. He has a chip on his shoulder due to having a rough life and just wanting his moment in the sun. It makes Max relatable: His actions are NOT okay but we get why he merges with the wishing stone: because this is his shot. And most of the people he fucks over with his wishes.. are bad people. he cons some good people sure but Stagg is an asshole and the prince he cons wants to kick foreigners out of his homeland. Max, like Barbra, while not a GOOD person still is more likeable than diana.  He just.. feels like Max. He’s what Max could’ve been if he gave into the power instead of fighting against it. If he'd teamed up with the alien robot thing to take over the world instead of resiting it. So while he’s a bad guy like he’s been sadly turned into in the comics.. he feels like a CONVINCING version of Max as a bad guy. Like he genuinely turned evil of his own will and his own ambition. 

It also helps he’s written compitently. Unlike Diana, whose entirely miswritten to a point NO amount of good acting and no amount of Gal Godot’s talents could save, and Barbra, whose great but only because her character had too little to be great but just enough to give Kristin Wiig room to work with Gal simply did not have. Seriously I feel terrible for Gal Godot, she’s a genuinely talented actress and a genuinely kind and great person whose a LOT like Diana herself when written properly.  But Pedro Pascal? Since his character isn’t too badly written, and he has room to work.. he’s allowed to just be awesome. Since I haven’t watched the Mandolorian yet, I know, I KNOW, trust me.. I KNOWWW. But since I hadn’t this was my first proper exposure to Pedro Pascal..and his talent speaks for himself. In a weak movie, he is the shining star.  He’s also hammy as shit, but it WORKS because the film is redicouls. The Wishin Rock plot line and Max merging with it.. it’s bonkers. But he has just the right mix of bonkers hammy acting that’s fun to watch, and actual character work in the ham. He’s eating the scenery hand over fist, utterly devouring it.. but it fits the character as while Max was more of a subtle ham, a guy who just radiated smug and who more got into histornics when things went tits up like the time Blue Beetle and Booster Gold took the JLU’s funds to build an island resort on an island that turned out to be sentient and didn’t like that much and yes, all of that happened and it was as funny as it sounds. Point is being a showman whose always on, always talking and always got a plan.. that’s Maxwell Fucking Lord, and Pascal’s over the top acting fits that kind of character like a glove. 

It also fits the film well: the film comes off more like a 2000′s superhero film, one that takes itself super seriously.. but is really, REALLY goofy in places. It honest to god feels like one of the Sam rami spider-man films, ones I REALLY need to revisit and the results of that you’ll likely see, but without the self awarness rami had.. for the first two I mean by the third with the whole saturday night fever sequence, he’d really lost it. Love the guy though, still need to watch Army of Darkness and yes you may boo me.  Point is the film is bonkers and cheesy and dosne’t realize it but Pascal does so he just.. has fun with it. His haminess when asking someone for a wish, his great ways of reversing those wishes so he benifits from the consequences, taking them off the board while furthring his own goals. Max is just.. awesome, and so is pascal. He got a life long fan in me from this performance. And of all people he took his inspriation from Nick Cage which is a perfect fit as Cage is fucking great at acting absolutely batshit while still acting his ass off. Pascal really deserves full credit for this film for more than just being lovingly over the top. He’s genuinely good.

And that shines through greatly in the climax. First off the final fight between Cheetah and Wonder Woman is awesome.. just one of the best superhero fights i’ve seen on film and i’ve seen some whoppers. Great back and forth, great coreography and brutal intensitiy the whole way through with Diana being forced to possibly kill Barbra despite not wanting to hurt her. Just a hell of one. But the real centerpice is the wish vortex. Pascal just drops all pretense and goes ultra instinct ham, just letting it all hang out as he ascneds to god hood... but how he’s beaten.. is easily the most brilliant part of the film and one of the few times Gal Godot genuinely gets to show off her talent in this one: Wonder Woman defeats the bad guy not with brute force, not that she can, or some cool fight.. though we did get the cool fight too so that’s nice.. she simply uses her head and her heart. She uses her head by taking advantage of the fact max is broadcasting to the world, as villians tend to, and giving his bogus offers to whoevers listneting. So Diana counters this.. by simply speakking from the heart, enrouging those watching not to give in and to renounce the wish.. so the consequences can be renounced too. Even if it’s hard, even if it costs you.. what your doing will cost others so much more. And she finsihses this by using the Lasso of Truth on max, making him tear down his delusions about himself and see that his actions, which have caused world war III by the way as he maniupated the president.. who for some reason was not Regan. While Regan was a bastard.. that’s exactly the reason I wanted hi mthere as this film would’ve been better had one of the parts of the climax been Diana fighting a 50 foot tall rouge ronald regan. Admit it you’d see that in theaters if it was safe to go. 

POint is max sees he’s only HURTING his son, that this is for HIM not for his boy.. and that if he dosen’t let this power go, if he dosen’t just accept a peaceful life and let the world spin the way it’s supposed to and not emplode jus tso he can be a god... his son will be gone. So he gives it up and goes back to his boy in a touching moment. Though for some reason his son somehow got from Max’s office to the middle of a fucking highway. How is he not dead? I dunno we’re almost done here. Point is max is easily the highlight of the film and the reason it’s not ALL horrible along with Barbra.  Final Thoughts: Wonder Woman 1984.. is a disapointment. What I thought would be an easy film of the year contender.. instead ended up being an ungodly mess with unfortunate implications, a messy slapped together plot and WAYYYYY too much filler. As I said it had it’ sbright spots especially max and barbra.. but hte ultimate product is WAYYYY less than Patty Jenkins is capable of and since a third film is apparently inevitible, I can only hope next time she learns from this and does better. Also get Pedro Pascal his own Justice League international series as Max’s grandson or something YESTERDAY. Seriously even people who didn’t like this film would love it and it’s not like he can’t do this between seasons of Mando. He did We Can Be Heroes for god’s sake.. which was somehow a better film than this one. I guess 2020 had to disapoint me one last time huh? Well we’re in a new year now... and hopefully the Suicide Squad won’t also be a huge diapointment. If you enjoyed this lnog rant on a movie from a week or two ago, follow me for more. I’m currently doing retrospectives on the life and times of scrooge mcduck, scott pilgrim, grant morrisons new x-men, and i’m soon going to finish up a Darkwing Duck one focusing on Just us Justice ducks. And once they come back this year I plan on reguarlly covering Ducktales, Loud House, Owl House, Amphibia, and Final Space. So keep an eye out for that and until then, Goodbye Goodbye Goodbye.