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THE PUNISHER now a Netflix series


Werthead

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I'm concerned about the repetitive use of the "innocent patriotic soldiers in the field being betrayed by the Uncaring Man" narrative. It's dangerously close to becoming cliche, and it's absolving the responsibility of the individual who chose to enlist in a military belonging to a government who has quite clearly done some questionable shit, repeatedly, for more than half a century. The way military veterans (not just in the US) are treated is appalling and that's well worth exploring, and it's to The Punisher's credit that it does so in a surprisingly detailed and serious way, but there's a disturbing message that comes through that soldiers can go into the field and do horrible shit and then blame it all on The Man. Some of it is a predictable consequence of the individual choice to go into the military.

If the show had explored the idea that maybe these troops had joined for the education/healthcare benefits or came from broken homes or something that would be a very interesting angle to come at this from, but they don't. Most of the vets seem to have come from pretty good homes or have good jobs. They can't rely on the post-9/11 patriotic blindness either, like Generation Kill touched on, because people should know far better in the mid-2010s than they did in the early 2000s.

I'm only on Episode 6, so maybe this angle will be explored in later episodes.

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21 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I'm concerned about the repetitive use of the "innocent patriotic soldiers in the field being betrayed by the Uncaring Man" narrative. It's dangerously close to becoming cliche, and it's absolving the responsibility of the individual who chose to enlist in a military belonging to a government who has quite clearly done some questionable shit, repeatedly, for more than half a century. The way military veterans (not just in the US) are treated is appalling and that's well worth exploring, and it's to The Punisher's credit that it does so in a surprisingly detailed and serious way, but there's a disturbing message that comes through that soldiers can go into the field and do horrible shit and then blame it all on The Man. Some of it is a predictable consequence of the individual choice to go into the military.

If the show had explored the idea that maybe these troops had joined for the education/healthcare benefits or came from broken homes or something that would be a very interesting angle to come at this from, but they don't. Most of the vets seem to have come from pretty good homes or have good jobs. They can't rely on the post-9/11 patriotic blindness either, like Generation Kill touched on, because people should know far better in the mid-2010s than they did in the early 2000s.

I'm only on Episode 6, so maybe this angle will be explored in later episodes.

That does sound a lot more interesting than what we are getting. I doubt they would ever take the risk to make any actually cutting political statements about the armed forces however.

To me this feels like a storyline from the 80s refitted to our time. Afghanistan is basically Vietnam.

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I haven't started the series yet and probably won't until I finish the last season of Banshee but I'm confused on one thing: Why is Castle still hunting for the people who murdered his family? Was that not resolved in Daredevil S2 with the Blacksmith storyline?

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2 minutes ago, WarGalley said:

I haven't started the series yet and probably won't until I finish the last season of Banshee but I'm confused on one thing: Why is Castle still hunting for the people who murdered his family? Was that not resolved in Daredevil S2 with the Blacksmith storyline?

Well you need to start watching. I've only watched the first two episodes, but things happen.

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14 hours ago, Eggegg said:

To me this feels like a storyline from the 80s refitted to our time. Afghanistan is basically Vietnam.

Kind of makes sense considering some of the best Punisher stuff (including the MAX run) had Frank as a Vietnam vet.

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Episode six spoilers:

Spoiler

Loved when Lewis stabbed Jay Landsman (no idea what is name was on this show) on accident, but instead of doing the typical "oh god I'm so sorry" scene, he doubled down and just stabbed him like ten more times.  Nice twist on how that scenario usually plays out on screen.

 

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On Episode 10. This series has definitely benefited from not being binged quite as excessively as some of the other Netflix shows. Each episode has its own place in the arc, many episodes have their own storyline or thematic point and the way they expand secondary characters who aren't doing much in the first few episodes into major player is very well-handled. Secondary characters are also really well-handled. This is easily the best-paced Netflix Marvel series since the original Daredevil, assuming it doesn't fall apart in the last few episodes.

Also, the casting of Shohreh Aghdashloo and Amber Rose Revah as mother-and-daughter is excellent. I completely bought that they were related and their dynamic is pretty well-handled.

The biggest complaint I have is that the guy you think is going to be a villain turns out, in fact, to be a villain. I was hoping they were going to invert that cliche.

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27 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The biggest complaint I have is that the guy you think is going to be a villain turns out, in fact, to be a villain. I was hoping they were going to invert that cliche.

Just finished ep. 6, and yes, they definitely took their sweet time with that. It would have been a nice twist if he didn't turn out be the villain, but I kinda liked that they strung us along with it.

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3 hours ago, Werthead said:

The biggest complaint I have is that the guy you think is going to be a villain turns out, in fact, to be a villain. I was hoping they were going to invert that cliche.

Was just coming to post this same thing. Every Netflix Marvel show but Jessica Jones has done this already.

As soon as someone from the main character's past shows up you know he's gonna be evil. 

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Holy shit this was fantastic... The one person who won't get the credit he deserves is Daniel Webber (Walcott) .... man, he sold his role... Berenthal is perfect for this role... likewise, Prince Caspian, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Amber rose Revah were all really, really good.... the fight scenes were excellent...  For me, this was the best marvel/netflix series of them all

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Yeah, I really liked this one. Definitely my favourite Marvel-Netflix show along side s1 of Daredevil. The first couple of episodes were a bit slow but once it got going it was great. Plus it felt a lot better paced than the other show and didn't run out of steam towards the end in the same way the other usually does. Even if it probably would have worked just as well with 2-3 fewer episodes.

Jon Bernthal was fantastic and the rest of the cast was pretty damn good too. Especially Ben Barnes, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Amber Rose Revah.

Spoiler

 

It was fairly predictable though. Nothing that happened ever really felt like a big surprise. Especially Billy being a bad guy, even if I hadn't known the name Billy Russo it was obvious that he was going to turn out to be one of the antagonists.

The fight scene were great. Especially the fight between Frank and Billy, which was also really brutal.

I liked that they showed the softer sides of Frank too, and didn't just have him in a glum kill-all-criminals mood the entire show, which both the comics and the previous movies has a habit of falling into.

Hopefully they'l add Barracuda if we get another season.

 

 

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Finished this today, and I enjoyed it with reservations (I'd say it's the 2nd best Netflix season after DD S1), but it still didn't need to be 13 episodes -- the usual Netflix Marvel problem. Good cast, great acting from Bernthal in particular, and I thought Amber Rose Theva was someone to keep an eye on because I thought she really sold being a dedicated officer of the law and looked pretty good in scenes handling guns and so on; she might have a knack for action-loaded parts.

That said, I feel like the show has a real problem in that it really doesn't have a good way of dealing with the fact that Frank Castle is a murderous sociopath. It doesn't really engage with this at all, and yet that's what we've got. Darren Franich's review for EW covers a lot of the ground of what I think is wrong with the series, but this paragraph captures the heart of it:

Quote

Cards on the table: I don’t think anyone who works on The Punisher really wants to make a show about a dude who spends his whole life shooting people. So they start their show with the Punisher deciding not to punish anymore, and then they airdrop in various explanatory excuses about why he simply has to do this punishing thing he does, he simply has to, Martha. There’s the bad government, and mean coworkers, and when in doubt pull the dead-family lever. The Punisher always had a murdered family, but there were comic books that didn’t need to mention that every five pages. And the way the show keeps bringing out those flashbacks feels like a con job, a way to avoid any potentially difficult (or interesting) questions about Frank’s motivations. I admire how the show situates its Punisher within the greater realities of Middle East conflict veterans, but that’s another bluff, another way to self-justify the inevitable insane bloodshed. The Deer Hunter can’t be Rambo: First Blood, Part 2, you know?

Like Franich, IMO the best take on the character, bar none, was Garth Ennis's Punisher MAX run... and that was one that essentially gives us Punisher-as-boogey-man after decades of being, essentially, a serial killer in an unending war on capital-c Crime, someone almost entirely alienated from humanity, driven by an endless desire to stamp out something that cannot be stamped out. He's long since dealt with the criminals who murdered his family, but the war goes on because they're depicted as a very broad class of villain rather than something very specific, something that he can continue fighting without needing to justify himself.

The Netflix Punisher, OTOH, is essentially left to have been solely focused on the very specific group that the show picked -- a few gangs that got in the way of what turned out to be corrupt military and intelligence operatives -- and other than the incidental act of helping a guy with some mobsters and thugs he's really focused solely on revenge against the perpetrators of the murder of his family. He doesn't have some larger project, some greater drive than that; the opening montage of his killing various criminals is literally about his mopping up the various gangs he fought in the course of looking for his family's killers in DD S2, and this first season of The Punisher is simply mopping up the last element that he didn't really know existed. 

So what's the show going to do? Constantly turn up individuals he missed who have ties to the death of his family? Probably not. In fact, I suspect instead they'll just keeping finding ways to "force" him into slaughtering his way through a season by contriving things -- personal threats, threats to someone he forms an attachment to, etc. -- rather than simply making it clear that his only remaining goal in life is to kill criminals wherever he can find them. 

That's going to get old, fast.

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On 11/18/2017 at 11:58 PM, Nictarion said:

Finished. Loved it. Jon Bernthal is just so perfect in this role. The second half of the season is particularly strong, IMO. Episodes 10-13 were all amazing. 

This is good to hear as I'm up to episode nine so far and am enjoying it quite a lot. The old school comic book guy in me (ya know, the one who bought Punisher, Punisher: War Journal, annnnnnd Punisher: War Zone monthly) still gets irked when Frank does something badass and he's not in his skull logo vest. I mean, I'm not asking for white gloves and boots here or anything, just the symbol that's literally associated with the character, geez. It's kinda like seeing Batman fight without his cape.

I really like how they're tying everything together, even though it's kinda obvious where the plot is headed, the performances and pacing are so good that I don't mind when the predictable happens. Not to mention the writing when it comes to character development. This show has some very well written characters.

Even though we should all know the deal with threads about Netflix shows and spoilers by now, there's no SPOILER tag in the thread title, so I'll go ahead and hide these comments about S1E1-9...

 

I really like how they're developing Jigsaw/Russo. That scene with his mom and then how he revealed just enough truth later with Medani to give his motive for treating her that way--brilliant writing! You may not have even see that betrayal coming if you didn't know Russo was Jigsaw's name in the comics. This is such a great villain and I love how they tied him to the new character of Agent Medani. Him bathing her at the end of that episode was just the cringiest thing ever. I cannot wait for his face to get fuuuuucked up.

And Microchip/Daniel is another character I really like how they're handling. How he handled that kiss by his wife and Frank seemed totally in line with his character. He's definitely more than just "the guy in the chair" in this series more so than what I remember of his character in the comics.

Hopefully if Punisher gets a S2 we get Frank sporting the skull logo in every episode and Daniel being called Micro. ;)

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1 hour ago, Ran said:

That said, I feel like the show has a real problem in that it really doesn't have a good way of dealing with the fact that Frank Castle is a murderous sociopath. It doesn't really engage with this at all, and yet that's what we've got. Darren Franich's review for EW covers a lot of the ground of what I think is wrong with the series, but this paragraph captures the heart of it:

Only halfway through the series so far but I agree with this. Frank being a completely psychopathic murderer feels forced in that his primary solution to any and every problem is always to kill someone. It doesn't feel very natural and even if I accept his character as a completely bred for war soldier whose outlier personality make him perfect for a comic book vigilante, who are all of these side characters sympathizing with him? Karen's intro to him in particular was mystifying to me given how their arc ended in DD S2. She should have a reaction of fear and revulsion (particularly after that diner incident), not sentiments closer to big brother finally came home. And to actually aid him in a quest which will inevitably lead to a murder spree.. pretty unthinkable to me. Micro is the only character who has a legitimate reason to support and aid Castle.

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