Jesus fucking Christ.
If ever there was a person in desperate need of an intervention.
Discuss and Rate the Last Film You Watched
- Thread starter Th3Ch33s3Cak3
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If ever there was a person in desperate need of an intervention.
Korey likes the movie well enough. He does not consider it Marvel's worse nor best film. So I am seeing so far are exaggerations and knee jerk reactions from early reviews and criticisms. I'm more than likely going to enjoy this film, so I will see it next weekend when it comes out.
They were already making jokes about Iron Man and Black Widow's deaths in Spidey 2 by featuring a trite high school in memoriam scored with "My Heart Will Go On". Marvel can't hold a straight face for more than a beat.
They've gone from spending 4 years (2008-2012) releasing 5 movies introducing 6 characters before paying off with a climactic team-up in Avengers to simply releasing Eternals, a movie that has 10 superheroes nobody knows or cares about by the time you're supposed to. Just shoehorn in all the exposition and holographic PowerPoint presentations in there somewhere. Whole movie felt like I had just walked in.
For a movie boasting so many unconventional ideas (including a bizarre take on Scientology), it delivers them in the most conventional way. Generic space reptiles here we go. This is only the third or fourth alien invasion in a row. Get the band back together, drop the ego, learn about teamwork. Ten superpowers and not a single new one. Almost all of them conveniently go to throwing people around. Men are quippy and women are broody. And so on. Bottom of the barrel Saturday morning cartoon trash with the credibility of having an Academy Award sellout at the chair.
Were any of the spoiler leaks from back in March true? 'cause it seems like a very silly movie if so, with the Eternals being androids and Thena having memory issues, and Ajak being killed off screen, and Ikaris actually being the villain, etc...
I remember seeing a video of MovieBob about how the average Rick and Morty fan isn't as smart as they think, and the show is only for incredibly smart fans like himself. No joke, he went on a rant about how Rick and Morty is too smart for the average Rick and Morty fan, and you need to be as smart as him to actually get all the meta commentary.
If he's honestly saying Eternals is too smart for comic book fans, but HE got it, boy howdy he's hitting new lows in lack of self awareness.
I didn't know about any leaks but yeah, sounds about right. The bad guy reveal is barely a spoiler, should be obvious from the very beginning. You're not gonna kick off your brand new multicultural superhero team with another white dude in charge. The Angelina Jolie character is going insane from being overburdened with memories (just her for some reason). Salma Hayek dies off screen pretty early on but later we see her death in a flashback (one way or another she doesn't do much). As for them being androids... We get an assembly line type of scene that kinda confirms it. They're synthetic but not really alive (which is why they "don't die", unless killed).
It's funny I was a fan when he was here on TE and I was even subscribed to him on his own channel for a while. Sometimes he can very insightful and even when I end up not agreeing with him on a film I dug his review, but he very publicly lost his mind a few years ago and I don't think hes ever quite recovered.
Sometimes he's fine, Ive always enjoyed his documentary stuff on comics and what not, I thought his Halloween kills review was spot on, but man when he gets on his soapbox it is down right cringy and he tries to present himself as like he "knows better" than anyone else. Being called a literal nazi for thinking TLJ sucks was enough for me to disconnect.
If youtube happens to recommend one of his reviews and its not something I think Im gonna have to hear him rant on I'll occasionally check it out. I have no intention of watching his eternals review, he spoils the shit out of everything.
10 characters?
Oh it's worse than that.
10 Eternals
+ The Black Knight (Also in The Eternals film)
+ Shang Chi and however many of his associates come over for the cross over
+ Female Loki and the new villain Kang
+ US Agent
+ New Black Widow
+ New Hawkeye from the Hawkeye series out November
Kinda funny to think quite a while back when asked if he was a Democrat or Republican he said he was for whichever he felt benefitted him the most. He's really swung hard it seems in more recent times. I mean in his most recent Schlocktober he managed to go on a Trump rant again too.
I mean specifically for the Eternals movie. Which I guess would include "Black Knight" (just Kit Harrington as a puny live interest, he's more of a set up) and Thanos' brother apparently, who shows up after the credits in one of the laziest, out of the blue teasers I've seen in these movies.
This it's nothing new for Bob. He's been doing that type of commentary since 2010. I'm a smart fan and anyone else that doesn't get it is a dumb fan or is misguided. He's been pulling that diatribe over a decade.
I was more commenting on what I saw as your larger point about them spending 4 years to introduce 5 characters and to a greater or lesser extent even without the Eternals they've been introducing a lot in 1 year already.
One more thing to add to what peeves me about those Eternals tweets: Marvel Movies are essentially assembly line products, made mostly by second units working on visual effects and having only the most perfunctory personal input from the directors. And yet MovieBob credits Chloe Zhao for "raising the bar with visuals in the superhero genre", when she likely had about as much input on the visuals of the movie as the actors did. The thousands of overworked, underpaid, nameless visual effects artists and designers desperately trying to make a career for themselves, you can just forget about them. Namedropping famous directors and using big words on Twitter in the hopes that Marvel-senpai will give you a job as their professional bootshiner is far more important. This would be low enough on its own already, but in the midst of the largest industry labor struggles in decades it's downright shockingly tone-deaf.
I have no idea how it took me over a decade for these words to cross my mind, but I hadn't even thought of MovieBob in years, so maybe that was needed for this revelation: he's an asskisser. His biggest aspiration seems to be to become a professional shill for Marvel, and damn anything else. He'll give the most limp-wristed, silk glove critiques of Marvel films to maintain a tissue-thin veneer of credibility as a critic, and then goes right back to gobbling them all wholesale.
I have no idea how it took me over a decade for these words to cross my mind, but I hadn't even thought of MovieBob in years, so maybe that was needed for this revelation: he's an asskisser. His biggest aspiration seems to be to become a professional shill for Marvel, and damn anything else. He'll give the most limp-wristed, silk glove critiques of Marvel films to maintain a tissue-thin veneer of credibility as a critic, and then goes right back to gobbling them all wholesale.
The thing is rom what I'm hearing the visuals style etc aren't raising the bar so much as a more polished version of the kind of things Zack Snyder has been doing for a while.
If the directors had only perfunctory impact on the final movie it would be pointless for Marvel to seek out different directors for their various movies. Looking over the trailer for Chloe Zhao's Oscar winner Nomadland makes me think she's a director that uses landscape imagery as part of her film making, so even if it is more proper to credit the CGI artists for whatever visuals are present, they wouldn't be there without someone ordering them been made, someone choosing to let that be a part of the film.
Django Unchained.
One of the few Tarantino movies that has the FEELS. The friendship of Django and Schultz, the romance of Django and Broomhilda
One of the few Tarantino movies that has the FEELS. The friendship of Django and Schultz, the romance of Django and Broomhilda
Directors are little more than casting stunts for Marvel. Movies are already long in the making before they sign them up. Chloe Zhao is a cheap, freshly Oscarized indie director ready to sell out, lend some clout and also plug the movie in the Chinese market.
"There's a landscape" is not an auteurish trademark. It's just a second unit selling vistas and pickups they probably shot a while ago, before they even knew what they'd use them for. If you think pointing to a desert is a Chloe Zhao trademark, she's directed thousands of movies.
This isn't to knock Zhao, but none of the things that make her a good director are going to shine in a movie like this. She's a hired hand. The people calling the shots are the higher ups at Disney. She's just there to make it look like actual artistic vision went into movie number 26.
I haven't seen either movie but I've seen/read enough about Bright to feel it's like the perfectly example of how NOT to do an Alternate History or an Urban Fantasy. I get how, yes, budget requires you to make sacrifices but they didn't even try to make it seem plausible.
And for god's sakes, you could at least have the self awareness not to code Orcs as Black people or use lines like "Fairy lives don't matter" with total seriousness? I mean, there's a ton of other issues too but this is just the tip of the damn iceberg.
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Hold the phone! They made a sequel to this....
searches Google.....
And it's animated! Jesus, Netflix!
I could spend awhile going on about how Bright doesn't work as alternate history, but TL, DR, watch Lindsey Ellis's video on it - it sums it up perfectly as to why the setting doesn't work.
So, I'm probably going to turn some heads here, but since you haven't seen the film, I'll give my thoughts on the above.
First, the orcs. The orcs in Bright are simultaniously coded as being African Americans, yet also aren't. On one hand, we see that orcs occupy the lower rung of human society (at least in the US, but going by Samurai Soul, this status seems to be global), the stereotypes applied to them are similar, and we know that the orc protagonist is the first orc (LAPD?) cop in history. I don't recall if affirmative action is mentioned, but you can take that as a possible example.
On the other hand, the orcs explicitly AREN'T African Americans, because not only do African Americans still explicitly exist here (see Will Smith for instance), but the context of their circumstances don't line up. We know that 2000 years ago, "the Dark Lord" had orcs serving him, but it was an orc who defeated him. So, on one hand, the world hates orcs for the 'servants of Satan' thing, but conveniently forget the whole orc Jesus thing as well. From an in-universe standpoint, it doesn't work IMO, because I find it hard to believe that the same level of contempt is going to endure for 2000 years in a world that seems to follow real-world history regardless. From an out of universe standpoint, I don't think it works either, because the roots of the prejudice are far too different. It might have worked if this was a world where only inter-species prejudice exists, but no, a Mexican cop mentions (paraphrased) "we Mexicans are still getting shit for the Alamo." So on one hand, you have analogy that doesn't work as analogy, and in-universe circumstances that don't work much better.
As for "fairy lives don't matter," while the line itself is a reference to BLM, I think this is a case where context changes a lot, since the implication is that fairies are pests, and that there's some people who are campaigning for fairy rights (same way you might campaign to save cane toads or rabbits here), but mostly people are fine killing fairies. One might find the line in poor taste, but I think the context here actually makes it work.
Alternatively, if fairies are a sapient species here in Bright, then bloody hell, Will Smith committed murder before turning up to work. 0_0
Prequel, technically. Though it doesn't really tie in with the first film. If anything, it arguably opens up plotholes, because the Wand in the first film is dropped into the ocean off Japan at the end of Samurai Soul, but ends up in the US regardless.
Samurai Soul can easily be viewed on its own, but that doesn't make it any better or worse - it's lacklustre regardless. And for fans of the original film, I don't think it adds anything. If anything, as far as setting goes, it has the same problem of history being pretty much the same, only with fantasy creatures in it. I'll grant that the animation does allow more non-human species to be shown than in the original, and it does establish some additional races (such as goblins, and actually showing dwarfs), but I'm not a fan of the original Bright, so meh.