DCEU: The Hare's Regret

[Leofric]

It is brutal how they treat those poor mosquito guys, think of all those widowed mosquito gals and the orphaned mosquito larva back home.  

[polishgenius]

7 hours ago, Soylent Brown said:

Par for the course, isn't it?

 

Often, but the first WW wasn't like that, 84 is such a massive step down in quality.

BoP is also considerably better in the action (though the big final fight there fell  flat, probably because it was reportedly filmed as a one-take smackdown, though it isn't presented as such in the film, and thus had the actors doing things that should have been left to stuntwomen because they didn't have handy cuts to switch them out for close-ups etc).

[Veltigar]

12 hours ago, Trishkin said:

Well I haven’t seen the Holy Snyder Cut, but I’m really surprised at what seems to be the consensus around here, considering that all the ads on my Facebook feed are saying it’s easily the single greatest movie ever made.

I'm actually quite surprised by the negativity here. Granted, I didn't see the original to compare, but I was actually surprised on how decent this was. It's definitely not one of the greatest movies ever made, but I had fun during my 4 hours in Snyder land all the way up to the epilogue (which really should have been cut if you ask me). 

[Heartofice]

Yeah I find the negativity a bit odd. The Snyder cut isn’t a good movie , but it’s also not terrible. Guess what is terrible.. the Whedon cut. So it’s an improvement, and I find that interesting at least.

[Ran]

For my part, I rated it a 3/10. I guess the Whedon version is a 3.5/10. Maybe 4/10, but I think that's generous. Neither is a good film to me.

[Heartofice]

Whedon cut for me is probably 1/10 movie, I had to watch it after Snyder cut and it was just horrible. It’s an utter clusterfuck of a movie. 
 

Snyder cut is also a mess, but it’s like a planned mess.

[sifth]

So 10% of this 4 hour movie is apparently in slow motion. That's pretty insane, but I suppose that happens when a director falls in love with an effect. I get a feeling I'm be mocking this movie for years to come, especially the ego trip that was the final 15 minutes of the film.

I honestly think Synder is obsessed with making Superman evil, for some daft reason.

[Corvinus85]

OK, you've all done it and I've decided to watch it. Last night I watched up to the beginning of chapter 2. I have to say that the decision to keep this is 4:3 aspect was ultimately stupid.

So, this is mainly a hate-watch log, and I'll put in spoilers just in case. (brings me memories of watching the final seasons of GoT)

Spoiler

 

Superman's death shout was the apparent ringing of the bell Luthor talks about; ok, what does a Kryptonian who came to Earth a few decades ago have to do with ancient boxes?

Soo much slow motion. FFS. And not enough that we get too much of that, then we get unnecessarily long moments like that Scandinavian song.

Roose Bolton's crew is the best dressed group of anarchist zealots I've ever seen. What a stupid premise - blow up a banking district, and turn England back to the middle ages. What? The guard at the door was a moron.

Diana can move faster than a bullet, but instead of rushing Roose Bolton, she does that ridiculous defense slide. Then she proceeds to take out the entire wall, spilling massive debris all over the police cars, nearly killing some of them, just to take out one guy. Snyder is the king of overkill. She can also apparently see through walls.

The special effects involving Diana at the bank were excellent. The effects of the battle between Steppenwolf and the Amazons were dreadful. 

I can accept Steppenwolf surviving the complete destruction of that dome (he looks better btw) but his minions survive, too? Well Batman is screwed when he comes up against them. 

 

 

[Ran]

1 hour ago, Corvinus85 said:

Soo much slow motion. FFS.

That 10% figure that IGN estimated doesn't surprise me. Half an hour of slow-motion... 

1 hour ago, Corvinus85 said:

And not enough that we get too much of that, then we get unnecessarily long moments like that Scandinavian song.

It was Icelandic, so a Nordic song!

Quote

(he looks better btw) 

Apparently the design in the theatrical cut was the design Snyder had up to the point Whedon took over. I guess with an extra $70 million he decided that a burning necessity was making him more bad ass. More blades! More metal! MOOOOOORE!

[Kalbear]

Totally legit

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2021/03/24

[sifth]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

That 10% figure that IGN estimated doesn't surprise me. Half an hour of slow-motion... 

It was Icelandic, so a Nordic song!

Apparently the design in the theatrical cut was the design Snyder had up to the point Whedon took over. I guess with an extra $70 million he decided that a burning necessity was making him more bad ass. More blades! More metal! MOOOOOORE!

Steppenwolf feels like such a lame villain to me. Much like in the original version, he no longer becomes a threat to our heroes, the moment Superman arrives. The fact that he's someone else's underling, doesn't do him any favors either, at least with Loki in the first Avengers film, we don't have the Thanos reveal until the very end.

[Liffguard]

10 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Yeah I find the negativity a bit odd. The Snyder cut isn’t a good movie , but it’s also not terrible. Guess what is terrible.. the Whedon cut. So it’s an improvement, and I find that interesting at least.

I think if this was the movie that had come out in the first place then no one would particularly care. But given that it's the result of a ridiculous internet hype campaign and millions in re-shoots, the emotional and financial resources expended are just totally out of proportion to the result. There's no artistic reason for this movie to exist. The original was a deeply mediocre bog-standard superhero film, and the new cut is a deeply mediocre bog-standard superhero film, but longer.

[Heartofice]

11 minutes ago, Liffguard said:

I think if this was the movie that had come out in the first place then no one would particularly care. But given that it's the result of a ridiculous internet hype campaign and millions in re-shoots, the emotional and financial resources expended are just totally out of proportion to the result. There's no artistic reason for this movie to exist. The original was a deeply mediocre bog-standard superhero film, and the new cut is a deeply mediocre bog-standard superhero film, but longer.

I have to half disagree, although to be fair I’ve been lucky enough to not hear these Snyder fan boys. 
 

The original was a deeply incompetent, incoherent, rectal explosion of a movie that could barely be described as a film at at all.

The new cut is a reasonably incompetent, bafflingly misjudged, overlong tissue full of Snyder ejaculate. 
 

Not sure what it says about me that i preferred the second one. 

[Ran]

If Snyder's cut had been cut to 2 hours, it too would have been incoherent and deeply incompetent. He did not make a movie that could fit into 2 hours.

OTOH, Whedon added some actual soul to (most) of the characters (Cyborg does get short shrift, but that's because he was the non-previously-introduced character given the most scenes and so those were first on the chopping block), whereas Snyder's heroes are little more than action figures being manipulated from scene to scene (excepting Cyborg) who generally seem to have very little to say to one another that informs their characters.

The debate over the ethics and implications of resurrecting Superman vs. "Everyone is thinking what I'm thinking, right?" really illustrates the thematic and narrative gulf between the two cuts.

[Heartofice]

Was there not a plan to make it 2 films at one point? 

[Ran]

2 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Was there not a plan to make it 2 films at one point? 

Not to my knowledge. Looking at Wikipedia's article on the production, it doesn't mention it. It does say that Snyder envisioned a five film series, with JL as the third. (People were amused by a recent interview where he talked of it as a five film 'trilogy'). 

[Heartofice]

https://www.slashfilm.com/justice-league-two-parts-zack-snyder/
 

Quote

When Justice League was first announced, the official plan was for Snyder to make two separate Justice League movies that were broken into Part 1 and Part 2. That plan seemed to be scaled back to just one movie by the time production on the theatrical cut began. However, in an interview with The Film Junkee (via ScreenRant), Snyder seems to complicate things a tiny bit by seemingly talking about a different plan that could have resulted in two Justice League movies. This plan would have taken his long cut of the first Justice League and split it into two two-hour movies:

 

[Ran]

Thanks. It seems pretty clear that Warner wanted one movie and Snyder tried to force two, though.

 

ETA: I think a lot of issues ultimately stem from Snyder becoming so enamored with his vision that he filmed a monstrous long thing expecting he could convince them to let him show it. A recent interview talked about how he ignored notes from WB, and that he insisted on filming scenes they repeatedly told him they refused to use.

The cut he presented was 3.5 hours long(!) and he later claimed he had a 2 hour, 40 minute cut when he left... but the reason Warner wanted it down to 2 was because the film was a turkey at 3.5 hours and at 2.67 hours, and was sure to be one at 2 hours as well but at least they could pack in 50% more screenings the opening week. Hiring Whedon to try and lighten it up and bring some humanity to it while cutting it to two hours was something of a hail mary, but the worst that could happen is that they spent X million on additional shoots and Whedon's fees and still had a turkey that was 40 minutes shorter than the shortest cut Snyder was willing to give them.

[Kalbear]

It's also that he was tasked with introducing three entirely new characters, giving them something resembling a compelling backstory and plot and coolness, and also doing an actual movie that sets up two other movies. Marvel did the same thing in what, 21 different movies or so?

I can also see why Ray Fisher got pissed, because BOY did Whedon fuck him over.

[Ran]

Yes, I remarked that the whole premise of this was crazy, though the Marvel thing makes me wonder... the issue with introducing three new characters in this particular project is that you're also focusing on three already-established characters, which means balancing them is quite difficult in a 2 hour time frame. AFAIK, there's no Marvel film that has done this -- the Guardians movie introduces a bunch of new, low-profile characters and then the second film just adds a new villain and a new pal (IIRC), the Avengers film introduces Hawkeye I think no one, and the second one just introduces the villain and then the Vision (though technically, since he's in origin JARVIS, he's been around since the inception of the MCU), and so on. Marvel realized it's stupid as hell to try and give new faces playing characters most people aren't familiar with the same screen time as the three big established heroes that everyone knows. 

As to Fisher, I mean, Snyder and Warner were the ones who really fucked him over, the one by making an awful, long film that was going to bomb and the latter by realizing their only hope of not eating an even bigger loss was getting it down to 2 hours so they could hoover up cash on the opening week because it was going to fall like a rock after that.