DCEU: The Hare's Regret

[Heartofice]

I think it was mentioned by someone in another thread and actually I think it’s a good point that ensemble movies happen all the time , those movies don’t have separate films dedicated to introducing them. There is a whole Seven Samurai template that’s been followed for decades around this. 
 

Just because Marvel did it one way, doesn’t mean that DC automatically needed to follow that same formula. There is a way of doing a JL movie where you don’t have a bunch of movies building up to it, in the same way I think you don’t need to give everyone an extensive backstory to explain who they are. Aquaman is a dude who swims under the sea and shags dolphins ( or am I getting confused) what more do you need to know?!

[sifth]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

I think it was mentioned by someone in another thread and actually I think it’s a good point that ensemble movies happen all the time , those movies don’t have separate films dedicated to introducing them. There is a whole Seven Samurai template that’s been followed for decades around this. 
 

Just because Marvel did it one way, doesn’t mean that DC automatically needed to follow that same formula. There is a way of doing a JL movie where you don’t have a bunch of movies building up to it, in the same way I think you don’t need to give everyone an extensive backstory to explain who they are. Aquaman is a dude who swims under the sea and shags dolphins ( or am I getting confused) what more do you need to know?!

You can even use Guardians of the Galaxy as an example of Marvel using the "Seven Samurai Template".  All of those characters were unknowns to anyone outside of comic readers before that film and now they're household names. 

[Ran]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

I think it was mentioned by someone in another thread and actually I think it’s a good point that ensemble movies happen all the time ,
 

In the Seven Samurai, the Dirty Dozen, Guardians of the Galaxy, and whatever other ensemble you can think, you are introduced to all the characters, each fairly superficially, each having some basic commonality of origin (samurais! Army misfits in prison! Criminals in space!), and maybe one or two of them are a little more the focus than the others.

In JL, you have Batman, Wonder Woman, and eventually Superman as the central, already-introduced, very famous characters who have had prior stories and an expectation from the audience that they are central characters whose stories are progressed in this film, and then you try and shoe horn three completely unrelated (both to the main characters and to one another) characters, far less known to audiences from prior appearances in other media, with some origin and background and unique powers to explain, each of whom is supposed to come off well enough in this film to justify a solo film follow up, plus a new, never-before-seen villain.

It was dumb. There's no ensemble film that I can think of that has ever tried anything like it, and for good reason. It's completely out of balance.

Quote

Just because Marvel did it one way, doesn’t mean that DC automatically needed to follow that same formula.

They have certainly not followed the Marvel formula given that they have basically abandoned the Marvel approach to inter-connecting works. They also  failed to follow a long history of how Hollywood handled ensemble films. You either introduce all the players together or you introduce them individually and team them up later. Trying to do a mix of both in a single film is, as we have seen, a recipe for failure.

[DaveSumm]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

I know Warner and DC were playing catch-up, trying to jam through a large-scale DCEU that could stand up to the burgeoning Marvel juggernaut

The thing I never understood here: Marvel made a shit ton of money on Avengers, but they also made a very healthy return on EVERY movie that came before it. They were all profitable. Why was it so important for DC to beat them to the punch? Why not make money on all the build up movies? If anything, there’s talk of whether Marvel can hype up anything to the scale of Endgame again. Why not squeeze all you can out of what might be your one shot at the great grand team up movie?

[polishgenius]

2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

I think it was mentioned by someone in another thread and actually I think it’s a good point that ensemble movies happen all the time , those movies don’t have separate films dedicated to introducing them. There is a whole Seven Samurai template that’s been followed for decades around this. 

 

 

Was probably me since I've been complaining about this for time. The problem was never that DC went straight to an ensemble movie too soon, it was that they didn't know how to do it. Doubly true because as much as I enjoy the Marvel legwork no-one needs superhero tentpoles to be deep character studies, so just flying straight in with a Justice League movie with no introduction whatsoever would have, in the right storytelling hands, been fine. Lie you say, everyone knows who most of these people are and if they don't, what you need to know isn't hard to get across. 

Ran's probably got a point about the balance being wrong and trying to do too much at once.

[Veltigar]

I'm genuinely flabbergasted by the passion on display here  Snyder has a lot of fanboys who over-exaggerate the quality of the film, but this is the opposite end of the spectrum.

Bradshaw even gave it 4/5 stars in the Guardian. That's a bit excessive, but it's a solid 7/10 film I'd say   

[Ran]

18 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

Why was it so important for DC to beat them to the punch? Why not make money on all the build up movies? If anything, there’s talk of whether Marvel can hype up anything to the scale of Endgame again. Why not squeeze all you can out of what might be your one shot at the great grand team up movie?

I'd be very interested if there's ever a tell-all about the thought process. I'm sure DC, Warner, and Snyder were all collaborating on this and came up with this for some reason.

Like, if you held a gun to my head and told me to introduce Aquaman, the Flash, and Cyborg in a movie that would revive Superman and feature him, Batman, and Wonder Woman defeating a big bad, my approach would have been:

1) Foreground Cyborg as someone who is inadvertently tied to what happens because of the Mother Box. Give us the history of that box being in the hands of humans first, and how it leads to Cyborg, and how that leads to Steppenwolf finding Earth. (Think LotR opening prologue).

2) The parademons hunting, narrowing in on Cyborg's box, gets Batman on the case, and it leads him to Cyborg.

3) Have Steppenwolf try to take that box, killing Cyborg's father in the process despite the effort of Cyborg and Batman, and then Wonder Woman who shows up in the nick of time before they're wrecked, who says she came only because the Arrow of Artemis warned her of what had happened, revealing the back story of the Amazon mother box...

4) ... while intersplicing Steppenwolf Boom Tubing down to take that box in the recent past....

5) So, their box and  one other box left, but ... where? Diana says in a place they can't hope to get to: Atlantis, deep beneath the sea,. WTF audience says?! Atlantis?! 

6) Mera and the Atlantean guard try to stop Steppenwolf and fail. BUT -- enter an off-screen presence, to whom the guards bow but is never shown. Music, cinematic technique, shows whoever it is is important.

7) Their mother box reacts in such a way that lets them know that Steppenwolf has taken the Atlantean box. Theirs is the only one left, and it's a matter of time before they're overwhelmed. Debate about Superman and reviving him. Batman wins the argument, says it's what they have to do, despite the risk.

8) Revive him (have Cyborg hack the Metropolis power grid to redirect the power to the ship), lose the Mother Box in the fight that follows as confused, angry Superman interferes with their attempts. Oh, no!  Superman goes with Lois.

9) Big fight in some place public. Let the whole world understand what's happening. Background scenes of regular people performing their own heroics, trying to save one another. Awesome hero moments from Cyborg, Batman, Wonder Woman, but also a sense of futility, that without Superman there's no hope.

10) Zip, zap, boom -- a young guy in the background of some public scenes in the past reveals himself as the Flash (but no suit, yet). He's had his powers all along, but was afraid to use them for anything important. But the world is on the balance, and these heroes are fighting and may die to try and save it. How can he do less? He swats a host of parademons, saves a bunch of people, lets the others focus on what they need to do.

11) But it's not enough! Their combined might isn't doing it, not with the power of the Unity behind him, not with the portal to Darkseid's universe opening and parademons, countless, marching through--

12) Enter Superman, who saw what was happening or heard it with his super-hearing and realizes why he was broughtback, why he's needed. Bad ass! But the Unity is like the Infinity Gauntlet and Steppenwolf is super-charged, he's able to stand up to him, able to push him back, to keep the portal open as more and more of the hordes come through...

13) Enter Aquaman, big reveal of this heavy metal water god. A tidal wave of water is funneled through the portal, flinging Darkseid away before he can step across. The king's trident impales Steppenwolf. It buys time, for Wonder Woman, Superman, and Cyborg to break the Unity, restore the mother boxes, close the portal once and for all. 

14) The end.

The main benefit of this is you really only introduce and follow one new character (Cyborg), other than a hint of Aquaman in act 2, and then you just reveal the Flash and Aquaman in the final climax in ways that hype them up as much as possible but also leave them superficial enough that, if you did it right, people will want to know more about these guys in their own films. Yeah, it's deus ex machina, but that's in a very grand dramatic tradition, isn't it?

 I still don't think you'd have a successful movie with something roughly strung together like the above, but it'd at least be better balanced.

[Ran]

@Veltigar

I tend to try and think of how a film stacks up to other films as I try to rate it. Just as a simple exercise, looking at films in the 75-79 region on Metacritic's action genre list gives me films like Natural Born Killers, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Captain America: Civil War, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Last of the Mohicans, Wonder Woman, 3:10 to Yuma (the remake), Logan, The Road Warrior, Oldboy (original), The Three Musketeers (Richard Lester), Rescue Dawn, Kung Fu Hustle, Dr. No, The Dark Knight Rises, The Thin Red Line, Speed, Drive, and Iron Man.

Or here, 70-74: Batman Begins, Men in Black, Edge of Tomorrow, The Crow, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Tropic Thunder, 48 Hrs., Doctor Strange, Die Hard, The Matrix, Spider-Man, Mad Max, Sonatine, The Bourne Supremacy, Wind River, Thor: Ragnarok, 28 Days Later, The Magnificent Seven, Inception, and Black Hawk Down.

I happen to have seen every one of those, and while my ratings for some may be higher than the Metacritic average, they're not necessarily wildly much higher; and while a couple may be a touch lower, they're not wildly lower. These are all fairly comparable films to me in the "Good, solid action" category, personal tastes aside. 

Zack Snyder's Justice League is in no way in the same calibre as any of the above films, for my part, but mileage does vary.

As to critics... Mark Kermode's review was interesting in that he remarked that he was baffled by high marks some critics he knew were giving it, and intimated that some critics had shared that they were dreading toxic backlash from certain quarters, implying that some critics have given overly-positive reviews for peace of mind more so than out of any conviction. 

[DaveSumm]

26 minutes ago, Ran said:

70-74 

Die Hard

Say whaaaaaa

[Heartofice]

3 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

Say whaaaaaa

That’s my reaction to pretty much every movie on the above list 

[Ran]

Yep, those are the averages. Bear in mind Metacritic will include contemporaneous reviews. Either way, it seems to me a 7/10 critical consensus is a pretty decent mark!

[Liffguard]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

8) Revive him, lose the Mother Box in the fight.

Somehow I completely forgot that they just left the plot-critical maguffin on top of a random car and had the bad guy steal it off-screen.

[Gronzag]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

I'd be very interested if there's ever a tell-all about the thought process. I'm sure DC, Warner, and Snyder were all collaborating on this and came up with this for some reason.

Like, if you held a gun to my head and told me to introduce Aquaman, the Flash, and Cyborg in a movie that would revive Superman and feature him, Batman, and Wonder Woman defeating a big bad, my approach would have been:

...

 I still don't think you'd have a successful movie with something roughly strung together like the above, but it'd at least be better balanced.

That was really, really, good! Assuming, of course, that you must do the Justice League right after BvS. Easily better than the actual film.

It would do wonders for Cyborg, upgrading him into something of a lead/point of view character. It would also add a huge tension from the beginning, when he is still alone, knowing that things are so serious that Batman, Wonder Woman, and even Superman will have to get involved.

[Slurktan]

1 hour ago, Liffguard said:

Somehow I completely forgot that they just left the plot-critical maguffin on top of a random car and had the bad guy steal it off-screen.

That happens in the wheden cut. He definitely takes it on screen in Snyders.

[Soylent Brown]

Here are some other alternatives to Ran's grand vision of how things could have been improved-

https://lwlies.com/articles/david-squires-snyder-justice-league-cartoon/

[Relic]

18 hours ago, Ran said:

It was dumb. There's no ensemble film that I can think of that has ever tried anything like it, and for good reason.

Well.....i dunno bout that. The Star Wars prequels did it, as did the newer films, no? 

[Ran]

8 minutes ago, Relic said:

Well.....i dunno bout that. The Star Wars prequels did it, as did the newer films, no? 

The new films introduced a bunch of new characters as the main characters and then had old characters appear as cameos/supporting to "pass on the torch". Had the new film just been Luke, Han, and Leia as the main characters, but also here are Poe, Rey, Finn who are also main characters, it would not have worked at all because of course the former three are going to be dominant because they are familiar and people will want to know their story way more than they'll want to know the story of these new people being elevated out of nowhere.

The prequels basically introduces only Qui-gon and Jar Jar, while Anakin, Padme, Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Palpatine are at least notionally established canon characters who are just getting their origin story now. In that sense, Qui-gon (and Obi-Wan) are more like my pitch for how to fix Justice League above: take the "new" guy (literal in Qui-Gon Jinn's case since no one knew of the existence of this character, but also literal in Obi-Wan's case as he's a novice Jedi apprentice in over his head), make them the focalizing character for the audience through which to see the stories of the already established characters.

 

 

[Veltigar]

16 hours ago, Ran said:

@Veltigar

I tend to try and think of how a film stacks up to other films as I try to rate it. Just as a simple exercise, looking at films in the 75-79 region on Metacritic's action genre list gives me films like Natural Born Killers, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Captain America: Civil War, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Last of the Mohicans, Wonder Woman, 3:10 to Yuma (the remake), Logan, The Road Warrior, Oldboy (original), The Three Musketeers (Richard Lester), Rescue Dawn, Kung Fu Hustle, Dr. No, The Dark Knight Rises, The Thin Red Line, Speed, Drive, and Iron Man.

Or here, 70-74: Batman Begins, Men in Black, Edge of Tomorrow, The Crow, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Tropic Thunder, 48 Hrs., Doctor Strange, Die Hard, The Matrix, Spider-Man, Mad Max, Sonatine, The Bourne Supremacy, Wind River, Thor: Ragnarok, 28 Days Later, The Magnificent Seven, Inception, and Black Hawk Down.

I happen to have seen every one of those, and while my ratings for some may be higher than the Metacritic average, they're not necessarily wildly much higher; and while a couple may be a touch lower, they're not wildly lower. These are all fairly comparable films to me in the "Good, solid action" category, personal tastes aside. 

Zack Snyder's Justice League is in no way in the same calibre as any of the above films, for my part, but mileage does vary.

I think it's fairly hard to do that to be honest, especially across such a wildly different set of genre and with so many different rating tools. For the former, I tend to follow Roger Ebert's advice to look at what a film tried to achieve in its genre. I can watch a real B-movie action flick like e.g. something made by Jesse V. Johnson and give it a high score because it succeeds in the type of B-movie action adventure that it sets out to be. That score might be higher than a comparable film in a different genre that I like better but wasn't as good within its most comparable peers. And that's without taking personal preferences into account (e.g. I tend to like westerns a lot and dislike superhero films, so the former has less work to do in order to qualify as good imo).

On top of that, you also have the different rating systems (and cultural perceptions about it). Stuckmann uses the American lettergrading system, which I don't particularly connect with. A lot of reviewers rate on a scale of 4 or 5 stars which doesn't particulary translate well.

For example, rating it on a scale of 10 I'd give it a 7. Rating it on a scale of 5 I'd probably be more inclined to go for a 3/5. Both those numbers to me mean that it's decent to watch. Anyways this is a very long-winding explanation to say:

15 hours ago, Ran said:

Yep, those are the averages. Bear in mind Metacritic will include contemporaneous reviews. Either way, it seems to me a 7/10 critical consensus is a pretty decent mark!

I thought it was a pretty decent film  Not great, nor can I  compare it to the Jostice League, but it certainly isn't as bad as it seems here. It's a very bizarre experience having to be the one to defend a superhero film for once XD

16 hours ago, Ran said:

As to critics... Mark Kermode's review was interesting in that he remarked that he was baffled by high marks some critics he knew were giving it, and intimated that some critics had shared that they were dreading toxic backlash from certain quarters, implying that some critics have given overly-positive reviews for peace of mind more so than out of any conviction. 

I tend to prefer Bradshaw anyways XD I do think Kermode's statement is pushing it though. They get hate all the time, why would they fold for this one movie? The Snyderista's won after all, I don't think they would care.

[Rhom]

As someone who has not actually watched either version of the film yet, I find this all fascinating.  We all said “WTF?” around this board when they announced skipping right to JL.  But honestly, if there was a world that could pull it off... it should have been DC.  Everyone knows the main characters other than Cyborg.

And ensemble movies should be pretty easy; bring Clooney back as Danny Ocean... I mean Bruce Wayne and let him assemble his team of specialists.  As Ran noted, you don’t need a lot of info.  We all know The Flash is fast and Aquaman swims.  Let’s just find a contortionist who can crack a safe and a wheelman to get us out of there and call it good.

[Veltigar]

At this point, I feel like I'm dumping bloody bait in the water to rile y'all up, but this was too good to ignore. In the article below you can find some more details by Snyder himself on his plans for the rest of the Snyderverse. Big trigger warner here, but I think a lot of you will freak out just a little  

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/mar/26/zack-snyder-cut-justice-league-dc-batman-superman-wonder-woman#comment-148295714