Quote:Now most of all what annoyed me about this film was that there was not a single drop of hope in it at all. No real hope for a better world, no sense of accomplishment by the protagonists, nothing is made better be their actions. If this was Inside Out, Sadness would have capped Joy in the face with a .32 leaving, Anger, Disgust and Fear to clean up what is left behind (and for the record, the wall behind Joy would be brainier than the Lex Luthor of this film). I can't recall smiling in this film or laughing. At all.When I was growing up in the sixties and seventies, and on through college, I came to view DC as the "happy" superhero universe and Marvel as the "depressing" one. I think part of what is going on here is a reaction by DC to Marvel now being the definitive cinematic superhero verse. Like many other works which try to duplicate the success of a trendsetter, it attempted to render the MCU down to its component parts and find the one(s) responsible for its success -- and I think it took the "darker than DC" part and said "THIS! THIS IS THE IMPORTANT THING!" and then slammed it into the side of the DCU like a handful of modelling clay.
I agree it was too dark. That was my big complaint with Man of Steel -- the world is too dark now for Superman as he has always been to be a realistic part of it. He's pre-9/11 and sadly the world isn't, and the script reflected that.
It also had one other major failing, which I mentioned in my own short thread on the film a couple weeks back -- they were impatient. They wanted The Avengers without doing the five or six other films leading up to it first, and tried to cram all the important bits of world-building and mythology into the cracks around the edges of the main storyline. I honestly believe that the people behind the movie thought that if they took the time to build a foundation for a DC Cinematic Universe to rest on that it took to build the MCU, they would somehow miss some critical window. Maybe they thought huge integrated cinematic superhero universes were some kind of fad that they had to get in on now before movie-goers moved on to something else. I don't know. Whatever the reason, they shortchanged the audience in that regard.
More and more, I'm thinking that maybe the people behind DC just don't get it. With they way they're explicitly keeping the TV universe separate from the movie verse, unlike Marvel, they're losing out on a lot of profitable (in both money and viewer loyalty) synergy.
All that said, I liked the movie. Not a lot, but I liked it. I just wish they had done it right.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.