Suicide Squad - Why Care About DC's Sinking Ship?
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The first half is really bad. It's basically spent introducing all these different characters in various montage scenes with flashbacks, computer profiles and other immersion breaking plot devices that would have made more sense on a web site where you just click on each character to learn more. They are then brought together on the flimsiest of pretexts, which, at its core, is a plot hole Amanda Waller herself created. The main big bad's evil plot is to "cover the world in darkness". If you think I'm joking and there's something more to it, there isn't; it is *literally* darkness, and covering the world with it.Solkard said:
The second half is a little better, but is still bad. The characters are terrible. Their powers are looking sexy, shooting guns and throwing boomerangs. Only the Mexican dude who shoots fire is an actual meta human. His name is Diablo because Devil is English, and he's Mexican, ese. The Japanese girl is there to be Japanese; she uses a katana, speaks Japanese, has a Japanese flag on her mask and does martial arts. The Joker was a horrible character and a terrible portrayal. Think of any Joker you've seen before...Nicholson, Hamill, Ledger...this latest one doesn't deserve to be in the same paragraph as any of them.
There were a couple of funny jokes, the movie was pretty much carried by Will Smith but there was nothing to be interested in. I had no investment in any character, didn't care whether they stopped the darkness plot or not, the mooks were generic mooks, the special FX were OTT and didn't look quite right. The voices were awful...three or four characters have these computerised voices that sound really ridiculous. Killer Croc, the Enchantress and some others, their voices are synthesised things that sound completely wrong. Will Smith himself described the main plot device as the "circle of trash in the sky"...that really sums it all up.
I found it flawed bu enjoyable 
If DC heads more in this direction with their films, then I think I will enjoy what they have to offer in future.
If DC heads more in this direction with their films, then I think I will enjoy what they have to offer in future.
So I saw it today and...it's okay. Enjoyable, but okay. It's kind of the DCEU's equivalent to Guardians of the Galaxy, with more 'grit,' and a similar breed of insanity (i.e. you have to quickly accept that meta-humans exist, and if you didn't see BvS, you're going to be scratching your head). Both are films I enjoy, but not films that are "good" per se.
I will say that if this film has one problem is that its tone shifts noticably from the start (heavily styalized, high on humour), to the middle (where everything is played straight), to the end (where the two are mixed). Also, this is a film that focuses very much on a few key characters (Deadshot, Harley, Rick Flag), whereas GotG was far more an ensemble piece. So, it's a step up from BvS, and I think the best film in the DCEU so far, but it's flawed. And that's not even accounting for the plotholes (seriously, just bomb Incubus from the air if an explosive charge is all it takes to kill him).
I will say that if this film has one problem is that its tone shifts noticably from the start (heavily styalized, high on humour), to the middle (where everything is played straight), to the end (where the two are mixed). Also, this is a film that focuses very much on a few key characters (Deadshot, Harley, Rick Flag), whereas GotG was far more an ensemble piece. So, it's a step up from BvS, and I think the best film in the DCEU so far, but it's flawed. And that's not even accounting for the plotholes (seriously, just bomb Incubus from the air if an explosive charge is all it takes to kill him).
There was no plot hole with Incubus, they tried to bomb Incubus from the air and he destroyed the aircraft that tried to attack him. The movie literally showed him (his extending tentacle of death) swatting down aircraft. The bomb got Incubus because he did not see/hear it coming, was directly above the shaped charge and was heavily distracted fighting Diablo.Hawki said:
I do recall that Incubus swatted down A-10 Warthogs, but it's established that they're observing the going on via drones. Drones, in the modern day, can strike from insanely high up in the sky. It does make it harder, but it can be done.twistedmic said:
That's admittedly a nitpick, but I'm left to ask, what was Waller's long-term plan? That she's the asset that has to be retrieved is a good plot twist. But assuming that her helicopter wasn't shot down, what was the intended COA after that?
They'd really just need some bog-standard, WW2 iron bombs dropped from high enough up. That, or mortars. Rocket launchers. Tanks...really, I figure the only reason Enchantress was sent in was so Amanda Waller could show off, and then when she fucked up and Enchantress bolted, she sent in the Squad so she could do the exact opposite.twistedmic said:
They could have done what they did in Man of Steel, where it was pretty clearly shown that the Kryptonian ship was invulnerable to direct attack because of its weird gravity-effect. A more elegant solution would have been to explain that Enchantress/Incubus only become vulnerable when separated from their heart-phylactery, and then having the Squad tear that out of him during their fight before blowing him up. That would explain the need to get up-close with the Aztec tentacle god.
I don't really know what COA stands for, so I'm just freeballing here, but; probably bomb the city and cover everything up.Hawki said:
"COA" is military shorthand for "course of action." And I could see Waller doing that (goodness knows she's morally reprehensible enough in this movie, enough to make her Arrowverse counterpart look like a nice, sweet girl), though she might have still tried to ride it out to capture Enchantress and/or Incubus (she mentions the potential for weaponizing Incubus's abilities for super-soldiers).bastardofmelbourne said:
Nice.Zhukov said:
Possible spoilers below.fluxy100 said:
She's sellable. That said, I think she has enough worry about her own health that at the very least she will fall in line untill she can get the bomb in her neck away. Thats the premise anyway, and fortunately its underscored by a villain getting his head blown off to make the point (the build up for it by Captain Boomerang is one of the better parts of the movie. In fact, shockingly captain boomerang is one of the better parts of the movie).
Harley was half-way brilliant. The casting was perfect, but the writing was a let-down. And it seemed to me that she was crazy when she needed to be, and sane when she needed to be, all for the script to work. Which is fucking lame. Instead of writing a believable story they shoe-horn her into a form which doesnt quite fit.
Also Will Smith was a disgrace as I thought he'd be. Hogging the spotlight and being the villain with a heart....god fucking damnit I wanted to strangle both him and whoever thought that making an assassin a likeable character a good guy. It seems the shoplifting moment from the trailer "we're BAD guys, its what we do", was just for show. None of these characters were bad, they were just bad-ass, sort of :\
Maybe with the exception of the witch, which ended up as the villain pretty damn quick anyway. BAH! Why DC WHY! THIS COULD HAVE BEEN SO GOOD!!!! >.<
It would've helped if they had been shooting actual people and not eyeball monster zombie things.tzimize said:
Or if Killer Croc had gotten a scene where he eats someone. Or if Harley had participated in more of the Joker's heinous shit, like skinning the owner of a strip club, kicking him on stage, and slapping a dollar bill on his asscheeks. Or if Deadshot had lost the "no women, no children" rule.
In the Secret Six comics, which are close enough to Suicide Squad that I'm comfortable bringing it up, there's a scene where Deadshot - on the direction of their current employer - shoots a fleeing slave on the basis that she was running away from her current slave labour. He does this without hesitation and without question. He later gets annoyed by it when it turns out it was the employer that ordered the slave to run for the fence, to test Deadshot's loyalty, but it's more because he was tricked than anything else.
Will Smith kind of half-way got there, in that the character seems to only care about his daughter and talks about killing people as if he enjoys it, but it's all talk - he never does any bad shit on screen. Even when he's told to shoot at a teammate, he deliberately misses, for no reason other than it'd be hard for them to be friends otherwise. (I was expecting him to shoot them somewhere deliberately non-fatal.)
I think they shoulda aimed for an R-rating on this one. It's not the stigma it used to be; most of the people seeing these films are adults. And if they'd really emphasised that they're bad guys in their little intro-vignette montage - like bad bad, not Ocean's Eleven bad - it would have made their character development from boxed crooks to boxed buddies much more significant.
But in this world of crossovers R rated charcaters have no buisness being anywhere near PG/PG-13 ones.bastardofmelbourne said:
I mean I don' want Punisher and Daredevil meet Star Lord and the Raccoon.
At least just to see Punisher smack Star Lord in the head every time he says something corny and quippy.bastardofmelbourne said:
I'm really feeling the Superhero burnout. I have skipped all of the recent DC movies and it took me awhile to bother to go see Civil War. I loved Civil War but I don't think I can do that many of these movies in the same year anymore.
While Agents of Shield's first season was pretty garbage, the show has vastly improved since. To put it in perspective, the 2 hour finale of season 2 had way more emotional depth and interesting plot points than the majority of the Marvel movies. The acting is also far better than the majority of the CW DC shows. Meanwhile, Arrow and Flash have done nothing but go down hill. Hell, the only season of Arrow I'd saw was genuinely good and not just guilty pleasure material was the second. The show relies far too heavily on "the liar revealed" plot device to manufacture drama. Flash at least nails it tonally, but the mind bogglingly stupid final episodes of the second season did a lot of damage. The first season was pretty good though.Transdude1996 said:While it may not be the alternative you're looking for, in contrast, none of the DC TV series suck. Going by what I've heard, the worst one is Supergirl and it's still miles better than Agents of Shield.Hawki said:"Why Care About DC's Sinking Ship?"
Because the only alternatives in the genre are Marvel (average films at best, bar a few exceptions), X-Men (average films across the board, with even fewer exceptions), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (can't comment, but I haven't read or heard many good things about them), and Power Rangers (please don't suck, please don't suck...), which isn't even out yet. So at this point I care just a little, in that the DCEU has given me one average film (MoS), one bad film (BvS), and Suicide Squad. Which I haven't seen, but with this review hardly being outside the consensus...sigh...
Unless SS really impresses me, the DCEU might just be a write-off for me as well.
OT: I definitely didn't think the movie was as bad as people were saying. The plot really wasn't hard to follow, but the real issue for me was the dialog. Whenever someone had a "we're bad guys lol" line, I cringed pretty hard. However, the characters were pretty good for the most part and the humor was decent. The action was hit or miss with an over reliance on slow motion (I don't need to see you toss a gun 10 feet in slow motion), but still pretty fun. Overall, I thought it was pretty average. However, it's not the bad kind of average where everything is bland. More that it does some things quite well and other things quite poorly.
After I saw Did You Know movies's video about the crew's commitment to this movie before it had aired, I thought, "Wow, even if it fails, at least these people are having fun and seeing how dedicated they are, going to the edge of sanity to get in character, how can it flop?" I'll answer that with WB, WB can make it flop.
After I heard about the Special Edition of Martha v Martha: Dawn of Martha, I really thought WB would stop making big and unnecessary cuts to their movies (if I am in the cinema, that means I can stay for longer than 2 hours, movies longer than that exist you know and they are not criticized for being long either), but DC is in a rush for delivering something as big as the MCU that really is not paying attention to the choices it makes, the only thing the DCEU did right up until now was Batfleck and that was after a lot of raised eyebrows with this one, we need to get what little has been built so far and give to people that not only are competent, but give a damn about these characters, who they are and what they stand for
Here's the video for anyone curious:
After I heard about the Special Edition of Martha v Martha: Dawn of Martha, I really thought WB would stop making big and unnecessary cuts to their movies (if I am in the cinema, that means I can stay for longer than 2 hours, movies longer than that exist you know and they are not criticized for being long either), but DC is in a rush for delivering something as big as the MCU that really is not paying attention to the choices it makes, the only thing the DCEU did right up until now was Batfleck and that was after a lot of raised eyebrows with this one, we need to get what little has been built so far and give to people that not only are competent, but give a damn about these characters, who they are and what they stand for
Here's the video for anyone curious:
This. I can nit and pick all over..chozo_hybrid said:I found it flawed bu enjoyable
.I hate when the "hero's" big mission is to undo damage caused by the existence of the hero in the first place: ie FF fight Doom who was created same as them, evil Mutants, heck the entire run of the TV show "Heroes". In this case, a suicide squad member that, shockers, cannot be controlled. Heck, Amanda was pretty much wrong about everything!
Even so, I enjoyed it. One thing it did MUCH better than Batman vs. Superman: there were actual surprises in this one. The trailers did not give us a point by point plot of the entire movie.
It's funny you bring that up, because one of my favourite [http://static5.comicvine.com/uploads/original/4/46646/4361341-4384426810-1080p.png] re-designs of Justice League characters had a quite slim Batman.fisheries said:
It's less applicable to live-action, naturally, because having very clear and distinct differences in character design is much more important in animation. But I don't think Batman necessarily needs to be a flesh-bear. In the case of that concept art, they made him much slimmer and sharper to contrast [https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--keWCfDUR--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/17plf856t9chujpg.jpg] Superman. (The comics themselves fail to do this all the time; for a long period in the 70s, Jim Aparo drew Batman and Superman with literally the same face and hair.)
That said, for BvS specifically they were adapting the Frank Miller Batman, who - due to the limitations of Miller's distinctive art style - is more of a single rectangular muscle than a human being. And there's positives to that; it looked damn impressive when Affleck was in the batsuit, and it emphasised the unsubtle brutality of that particular interpretation of the character.
But a skinny Batman...well, I think it's entirely possible. It might actually be harder, because you'd have to get an actor who has a slimmer physique but can still be convincingly intimidating. Robert Pattinson...probably couldn't do that.
I think it would be hard to have an unattractive Wonder Woman. It's not like she's determined entirely by how pretty she is, but an important part of the character is that she's a super-Amazon from a utopian feminist paradise where they've cured disease and aging. It would be weird for her to have cankles in that context. She definitely couldn't be fat; I'm not damning overweight people (I'm very hefty myself) but no-one with Wonder Woman's lifestyle and upbringing would be physically unfit.fisheries said:
Even a conventionally unattractive Wonder Woman, with scars and a hatchet face and calloused knuckles, would probably still be attractive to a hypothetical subset of people who prefer their ladies hewn from granite. In practical terms, no-one in Hollywood is actually ugly, even the actors who play "ugly" characters (case [http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/gameofthrones/images/8/89/Brienne_Mother's_Mercy.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20150617011915] in point [https://latimesherocomplex.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/gwendolinechristie-elle.jpg]).
Except for Steve Buscemi, who's made a career out of it.