[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by pepper_green

so what. does it matter?

I don't know — you're the one who brought him up, asshole.

[Rob Instigator]

I don't like mopey Superman.

do they make these comic book films visually dark because they are afraid of the bright colors of the comic books themselves?

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

do they make these comic book films visually dark because they are afraid of the bright colors of the comic books themselves?

That's a very good point, actually, especially if you're talking about the customes. I think they believe Batman's light grey and yellow and Superman's pale red and blue would take you back to the Adam West series and the late Christopher Reeve movies and, well, look silly. From Batman Begins on, the DC films have gone out of their way to tell the audience, "LOOK, this is a clean slate, no 'Kneel before Zod' nonsense, we MEAN IT, this is REAL...".

[LifeDistortion]

DC comics seem very afraid of the audience mocking their characters, its why I've been pointing out the super serious loo of BVS. They seem so afraid of the audience not taking them seriously, so they gave you a super serious movie, and from the early reviews I'm seeing, its not successful. Early reviews have not been positive.

[pepper_green]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

I don't know — you're the one who brought him up, asshole.

asshole?!?! I call you people geeks and you go and get yr panties in a twist. lighten up man. geeks. lol!

you live in a void? you should have tougher skin than that.

[Severian]

Originally Posted by LifeDistortion

DC comics seem very afraid of the audience mocking their characters, its why I've been pointing out the super serious loo of BVS. They seem so afraid of the audience not taking them seriously, so they gave you a super serious movie, and from the early reviews I'm seeing, its not successful. Early reviews have not been positive.

I've read some definite stinkers at this point, but also many good ones. Everyone seems to be united in saying it's better than Man of Steel, which I doubt.

Whatever, I expect I'll be entertained, but I'll shed a tear at the continuing public smear campaign poor Superman is going through. I think it's safe to say there won't be any more Supes solo films for a while, God morherfucking dammit.

[Severian]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

I don't like mopey Superman.

do they make these comic book films visually dark because they are afraid of the bright colors of the comic books themselves?

He's not mopey. He's just serious. You would be too if you were an alien protector of a planet that did nothing but slam you on need blogs.

As for DC being visually dark... Have you ever seen The Flash or Supergirl tv series? They're the opposite of dark.

Even Arrow, which tries to be dark so hard that it gets comical, is a pretty light affair these days. And what about the Green Lantern movie? Shit, but not dark.

And Superman Returns. Definitely not dark. Everyone hated it.

I don't really think of Man of Steel as dark; I think of it as epic and dramatic. It had plenty of light humor, but it doubled down on action because that's what everyone wanted from Superman. And then people hated it for having too many explosions. Ugh.

Superman needs to *bigger* than your average superhero, almost by necessity.

[Severian]

The Evolution of Good
By JOSÉ ALANIZ, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

“What is the ape to man?
A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman:
a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883
Thus spoke German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in advancing his concept of the übermensch (“overman,” more commonly translated as “superman”). The evolution-tinged language, not uncommon in Darwin’s late 19th century, speaks to the threat of our eventual obsolescence, of outmoded humanity yielding to some Homo Sapiens 2.0. Such is the superman, the superior being who would withstand the burden of history’s “eternal recurrence” to rise above the herd and ful ll the species’ potential.
Nietzsche’s thought, often misunderstood and distorted, had a tremendous in uence on such moral maladies of Western culture as eugenics, Social Darwinism and fascism. It taps deep modern anxieties over our replaceability in
a fast-changing world, both by machines (the increasing mechanization of life) and by those younger, faster, smarter or otherwise more t. Yet one could say the philosopher’s ideas—with their language of “ful ll,” “rise above,” “over” —hint also at our greatest aspirations: of unboundedness, triumph—a dream of ying.
Leave it to popular culture then to translate that optimistic wish into accessible dramatic terms. The “superman” slowly ltered into the public mind, helped by George Bernard Shaw’s 1903 play Man and Superman, which prepared the soil for the word’s acceptance. Some 30 years later two teenagers
from Cleveland, Ohio, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, started peddling a novel idea in the burgeoning eld of comic books. In 1938, the publisher National (later DC) nally took them up on it, despite the dubious sci- premise: a colorfully-garbed strongman with amazing powers, come from another world to save Earth from all manner of menaces. To everyone’s surprise, Action Comics No. 1, featuring the rst appearance of Superman, ew o the racks and launched a new industry: superheroes. (Siegel and Schuster’s success led Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann to atly declare in the 1950s that the idea of the superman had become indelibly “associated with Nietzsche and the comics.”)
Ostensibly stripped of the übermensch’s more troubling aspects, Superman represents the best of our human form (“faster than a speeding bullet!”) and also the best of our human morality. As University of Oregon English professor Ben Saunders put it: “Whatever we collectively imagine ‘good’ at any given time, Superman must strive to be that, too.” He is not just ultra-powerful and godlike; Superman as conceived was a moral exemplar as well.
But over 78 years of history, times change—a lot. What does the concept of “good” mean today? As with all Superman stories, this is the question that Batman v Superman: Dawn
of Justice seeks to answer. The lm’s immediate predecessor, 2013’s Man of Steel (by the same director, Zack Snyder) rebooted the character (played by Henry Cavill) for a bleaker, gloomier, post-9/11 age. Its palettes of greys and blacks (even his costume got murkier) seemed out of keeping
with the hero’s bright four-color image, while its ethical breaches (Metropolis destroyed! Superman kills the bad guy!)
translated into box-o ce gold—but also alienated legions of fans who had trouble accepting this version of “good.”
Superheroes in general have certainly gotten more “adult,”
in part to shake o their camp associations; in a February
Los Angeles Times Review of Books essay, Jackson Ayres notes that since the 1980s “a shift toward darker themes, graphic violence, sexual explicitness and a generally cynical tone, an approach commonly summed up by professionals and fans with two words: grim and gritty.” (See rival studio Marvel’s recent hit Deadpool, about an R-rated superhero who delights in ultraviolence and sardonic snark.)
Many yearn for Superman as the exception, though. If Christopher Nolan’s successful Dark Knight trilogy of Batman lms—with their thematic explorations of terrorism, government overreach and madness—represents the nightmares of 21st-century USA, Superman should stand for something higher, brighter, more transcendent. But no: Man of Steel showed that not everyone minds a “darker” take on America’s rst superhero.
And judging from the new lm’s ad campaign, dark is what
we will get. “Pointedly, in these trailers Superman never once smiles,” remarked Asher Elbein in a recent Atlantic article. The storyline, in which the man of steel shares top billing with
the dark knight, deals with the impact a real demi-god would have on human society (the premise of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1986 Watchmen), as well as the repercussions of the previous lm’s casual approach to ultraviolence as “cool.”
We return to Nietzsche’s übermensch, to the appeal of the overman (awed by the hero’s power, some choose to worship him) and to “obsolescent” man’s struggle against it (embodied by Batman/Bruce Wayne, played by Ben A eck). The lm,
in fact, takes much of its visual look from Frank Miller’s
1986 series The Dark Knight Returns, which climaxes with a showdown between the “S” and “Bat” logos. (Both DKR and Watchmen are seminal works of the “grim and gritty” school.)
Another way of putting it: Batman v Superman blows wide open the fascist underpinnings of the superhero genre, of stories whose allure lies in vigilante überbeings outing the law for the sake of what they call “justice.” And being adored for it!
In his 2000 novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon cuts right to this dilemma facing the creators of superhero comics (many of them Jewish-Americans) in
the lead-up to World War II. One of them wonders “if all they had been doing, all along, was indulging their own worst impulses and assuring the creation of another generation of men who revered only strength and domination.” In 1954, psychiatrist Frederic Wertham would go further, testifying before Congress that superhero comics harmed children
by facilitating a “Superman complex,” with its “fantasies of sadistic joy in seeing other people punished.”
Heavy material for a comic book movie!
On a lighter note, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice represents DC Entertainment’s ploy at franchise “universe- building” on the scale of its rival, Marvel (maker of the Avengers series, among others). The movie introduces Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) and Aquaman (Jason Momoa), seeding future lms.
But in viewing this work’s confrontation with the double- edged superhero’s übermensch appeal, we may nd ourselves recalling Nietzsche’s contemporary Lord Acton, who in 1887 penned the sobering adage: “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

[Severian]

Sorry for formatting issues ... Copied from a PDF. Will fix later.

[Rob Instigator]

the whole point of Superman in the comics is that he was RAISED RIGHT, by two loving people who taught him right from wrong, hard work, middle--America values, and that he should never ever ever use his powers to hurt, only to protect people.

His morals, like most of us, are ingrained in him since early childhood.

He is not and never was supposed to be a god, just an alien being whose home world was destroyed and he was the last one around.

what would be cool is a What If type story where Kal-El is not found by a middle-american couple, but by some sort of horrible motherfuckers who raised him to be a goddamn animal killing machine. THAT would be scary!!!!!!!!!

[Rob Instigator]

BTW, the premise of Watchmen is NOT about a godlike being and what he would do to society. It was, Who watches those who are designated or self-designated as our Watchmen? That comic is the best damn thing and I hate how, once a book is converted into cheap fluff film (comparatively speaking) every talking head idiot takes the films to be the TRUE iteration of the story. I HATE THAT SHIT!!!!!!

[Rob Instigator]

Almost all films made from books are as Reader's Digest Condensed Classics compare to the actual novels. They are but pale imiitations, crafted by conglomerates who care not for the source material, but instead want to create cash cows.

[LifeDistortion]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

what would be cool is a What If type story where Kal-El is not found by a middle-american couple, but by some sort of horrible motherfuckers who raised him to be a goddamn animal killing machine. THAT would be scary!!!!!!!!!

D.C. have played with the idea of a non-American-raised Kal-El on a few occasions, perhaps most famous being Red Son where he fights for Stalin's Russia.

[pepper_green]

I liked David Carradine's characters, or if you will, Tarantino's interpretation of Superman in Kill Bill.

always struck me as profound.

[Severian]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

BTW, the premise of Watchmen is NOT about a godlike being and what he would do to society. It was, Who watches those who are designated or self-designated as our Watchmen? That comic is the best damn thing and I hate how, once a book is converted into cheap fluff film (comparatively speaking) every talking head idiot takes the films to be the TRUE iteration of the story. I HATE THAT SHIT!!!!!!

The film was fucking awful.

I agree that it's not about a godlike being. Not sure what the author was going for there. But it is about accountability to some extent, and the dangers of personal agendas of "good." The Comedian is a hero and a fucking monster. So is Rorschach, even though his character is the moral compass of the story.

That movie was an abomination of a comic that is frankly overrated. What nobody realizes about the book is that it's really NOT A SUPERHERO STORY ... Like... At all! It's a moral quandary in comic book form, that just happens to feature costume wearing characters. But as far as actual writing and story are concerned, I've always preferred V for Vendetta. The movie was way better than the Watchmen movie too.

Jesus... That sex scene set to Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. Yuck.

I was gonna go apeshit if Man of Steel resembled that piece of smut filth. Thank god it didn't, but it had Chris Nolan as a producer, so... This time around it's all Zach Snyder, and I'm ready for anything.

I'm not eager to find out why "Superman tub sex" is a thing now. (cringe)

[Severian]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

He is not and never was supposed to be a god, just an alien being whose home world was destroyed and he was the last one around.

I have to disagree with you there. He's been a Christ analogue since his inception. Just like Harry Potter. Just like King fucking Arthur. But more so. I encourage you to read Our Hero by Tom DeHaven and (if for some reason you haven't) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay if you doubt the depth of Superman's spiritual origins.

He's more fascinating as a god figure anyway. Take that away from him and what do you have? Fucking ... like... Luke Cage or some shit. Just a tough dude, with no world building mythology surrounding him. In other words, pretty much every Marvel character.

Also, the question of how the planet would (realistically) react to a person like that is an important one, and I believe it's the secret to keeping Superman relevant. We'd fear and hate him. Times Do change. It's not 1938 anymore. Superman either adapts and changes with it, or he stays in the past. Not an option.

Everyone need to get over their gripes about what a character "should" be. These films are just reflective of one era... Sometimes just one year or one weekend. They pass. There will be others. The character is what it is, and it's different at different times. I think Man of Steel maintained the essence of Superman very well without being a silly little joke.

Starting to worry about BvS though.

[The Soup Nazi]

Well, there's always The Lego Batman Movie. Voiced by Will Arnett!

http://news.google.com/news/story?cf...l5F X06K_m-LM

[pepper_green]

sees upper man isn ont conflicted like bateman, tge geejs kuve tgus abd tgat . icneruc gerei gere. I lunch today and couth a gleinp of booting

[Severian]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

Well, there's always The Lego Batman Movie. Voiced by Will Arnett!

http://news.google.com/news/story?cf...l5F X06K_m-LM

Will Arnett? Really? I saw that in the store the other day and briefly considered watching it. Now I'm definitely going to.

[Severian]

I've read some terrible reviews, and a few glowing ones... But mostly so-so ones that say "there's some cool stuff, but ultimately.. It's a goddamn mess."

You know what's weird and kind of embarrassing? I honestly just want everyone to shut up about the movie so I can see it and tell people how it really is. I legitimately feel like I'm more qualified to comment on this movie than anyone I've ever known in my life, certainly more than some blogger whom I know nothing about.

Looks like I'm going to be able to write a review though. Which is cool in a really satisfying way. Even if I hate the film, being paid to write about it as a fun side-project to my actual job as a reporter is just totally and objectively fucking badass.