RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Media Batman v Superman v G-man (my review)

I saw it this afternoon. Reviews aside, I was looking forward to it.

The Batman solo stuff was great. Affleck was a very good Batman. Irons was the best Alfred to date, hands down.

Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman stole the movie. Too bad she was only in it for about ten minutes total.

The final battle/team up was a good action sequence (again, in large part to Wonder Woman ["I've killed monsters before...']).

Cavill plays Superman okay. He plays Clark very well in this one.

Unfortunately, the rest of the film was, at best, a hot mess and, at worst, actually boring in places.

Eisenberg's Luthor was every bit as bad as he looked in the trailers. The way the character was written might have worked if someone like Terry O'Quinn or Byran Cranston had the part but even then some of the dialogue they gave him was just cringeworthy. And Eisenberg is no O'Quinn or Cranston. In some ways he was so over the top he made Tommy Lee Jones' Two-Face look like Heath Ledger's Joker.

The cameos from the Justice League (and who thought that America was dying to have a Flash who looks like Kylo Fucking Ren?) were a joke. There were dream sequences for no good reason (other than needing some cool shots for trailers) and the attempt to meld both "The Dark Knight Returns" and "Doomsday" into a single storyline was clumsy.

At this point, I'm still willing to give the Wonder Woman film a shot because of what I saw of her here, and I'd be up for an Affleck solo Batman movie. However, that's about it. In fact, this movie dampened my enthusiasm for Suicide Squad.

All in all, they probably needed to do the Batman and WW solo movies, and maybe another Superman sequel, before they tried to give us BvS or a JLA movie. They just couldnt cram all the stuff they needed in this one and still make a good film.

Usually I wait til the end of the post to take the piss--or at least the middle. But you just open up with it right outta the gate. Innovative I suppose, but it doesn't exactly motivate me to read the rest if I already know you're joking.

It's a wait for cable deal for me.

But I have to be honest, what everyone else loves (Spiderman, Iron Man, Avengers and all these other box office superhero mega-hits) I just have no interest in. So with humility, I admit I'm the wrong guy to ask.

I didn't even particularly like Christian Bale as Batman. Arguably as sophisticated as a superhero movie could be, but it still came off as silly to me.

Kind of like this guy...

will be catching it tomorrow. So far its been one of those movies that the critics aren't fond of but the majority of my friends that have seen it really enjoyed it.

So are comics in general silly to you or is just when they're in movie format?

With very few exceptions, I stopped caring about the "new" comics around 1993. But I still love the old stuff: Kirby, Neal Adams, Wrightson, Steranko, Kaluta, Rogers, Golden, etc.

I just hate the cocky overblown ultra-serious pretentious style in comics, and when that spills over into the movie versions of the last 20 years or so.

Some really great movie adaptations are the two Hellboy movies, 300, Sin City, the Phantom movie with Billy Zane, the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, the 1989 Batman movie, The Mask, Mystery Men, and a few others. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is one I actually thought was more engaging as a movie than the Alan Moore comic version was (but then again, Alan Moore is not the writer that he once was).
A few I can think of offhand.

I hated Iron Man.
I hated Avengers.
I hated the first two Spiderman movies.
I hated the Hulk movies (both recent versions).
I hated the X-men movies.
Since Reeve, I've hated all the TV show versions of Superman/Superboy, and can't bring myself to watch them, even for free on TV. Daredevil with Ben Affleck sucked balls.
In fairness, it's just not my style. But I often think (Iron Man in particular) the characters are just unlikeable jerks. For all the expensive special effects, I'm just bored with them, and think they're relatively unimaginative, relative to other movies out there.

So basically you're constitutionally averse to fun.

Not here to tell people what they're supposed to like, but I find it odd that Wondy considers Iron Man and Avengers as ultra-serious pretentious, with expensive special effects. If anything, they're actually lighthearted popcorn flicks. Especially when compared to 300, Sin City, and the 2nd Hellboy film.

It seems to me the more popular superhero movies are the ones that are the closest to their comic books.

Halle Berry's Catwoman is a great example of this.

Nobody making the thing gave a shit about the comic interpretation.

They just took the name, 1/4th of her costume.

Result = el bombo

When was the last time we got a live action DC movie that wasn't a "re-imagining"?

We want the iconic characters we already know and love, but DC/WB refuses to make the films that way.

Ironically, Affleck's Batman is, except for his age (and, therefore, some of his DKR tendencies [which includes the machine guns and the branding]) possibly one of the more faithful versions of the character.
Looks like Batman, in and out of the suit.
Actually moves like Batman in the fight scenes.
Bruce Wayne is used as foppish Playboy persona to gain access to places Batman couldn't get to.
Police use the batsignal but (apparently) officially disavow Batman.
Alfred was crotchey but competent and actually assisted Bruce (rather than just lecture him or wait for Lucius to do the tech work).

If Snyder and Affleck had given us a solo Batman movie, the thing would have probably worked quite well.

Batffleck was a vicious psychopath.

He was also the bomb in Phantoms.

Watched it again. DC fucked up when they tried to build hype by revealing every single cameo in the film. Of all the things that they could have copied from Disney and Marvel's approach, that was the one that could have really served them well. It's not like they needed all of those to drum up hype. Just having Superman and Batman in one film is enough to get people watching.

Gadot's scenes would have been awesome if you didn't know that she was Wonder Woman. With the way it is, all those scenes of her being all mysterious and stuff were useless.

I can see where you're coming from, there.

But I guess even with the lighter elements in the Avengers and Iron Man movies, I still look at them (despite the lighter elements) as dark and very different from the Romita Layton IRON MAN (issues 115-154, 1978-1981) and AVENGERS (issues 141-224, 1975-1982) that I thought perfectly defined the characters.
Bullshit like, in a complete departure from the comic version, making Samuel L. Jackson Nick Fury, or having Tony Stark played by an obnoxiously cocky Robert Downey Jr, just didn't work for me.

I'm at a loss to fully explain why the movies Sin City and 300 worked for me. Except that they adapted the comic book version to the screen with remarkable faithfulness, that they were dark in their original form. And that just for the eerie otherworldly atmosphere they projected, they were exceptionally well done.

Micheline, Romita and Layton were the guys who gave us "Demon in a Bottle," which was probably darker than anything in the Iron Man movies.

The first hour could have been cut down to twenty minutes. The remaining hour and a half was more what you went to see the movie for.

Well, that was one plot thread kind of on the back burner for 10 or so issues, but mixed with a lot of humor in the other scenes. Those alcoholism stories always get credited with being so great, but it was everything else in those issues that appealed to me. I loved the humor that came from how much wealth Stark had. And unlike in the movie versions, the Michelinie/Romita Jr/Layton Tony Stark was confident without being arrogant. There was a perfect balance of humor and seriousness in those issues.

As I've said previously, this IRON MAN run was my favorite even over the Claremont/Byrne/Austin X-MEN issues that ran concurrently with the Michelinie/Romita Jr/Layton run.