In Discussion About Comic Book Films...

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Mostly crap, because they don't really care about the story, I think. You can depart from source material and tell a good story even if that story is an insult to the source material, right?



I think these films are crap because they seem to be made by algorithms and focus groups. Check-boxing "required items" and sending it back to committee for revision after revision is a massive investment to stave off abject failure by guaranteeing mediocrity. Even the "good" entries in the genre are kind of the equivalent of "Competently cooked Kraft Mac & Cheese."



We get the rare gem like Spiderman 2 or Ledger's Joker or Infinity War and the threads that miraculously bring it together and we start to expect more of these films than they're really designed to deliver. If I am spending half a billion dollars, I going to be more concerned with ROI than with taking risks. The budgets are too damned big.
To an extent (will a good story allow sacrifice of source material elements). But if you change the source too much, you will anger fans despite the quality of the story and begin to make the character unrecognizable.

With all the years of comic book publication, enduring characters have a lot of good stories to choose from (and probably even more bad ones to not consider).

Conversely - even if all the source elements are present, but the story is not good, it will probably flop. It goes without saying that you need a combination of things for a good comic book (primarily superhero) movie: good story, faith to the source material, good visuals & special effects, music & sound effects, and flow (which includes a comfortable mix of action, drama, comedy, etc.)

There's things like V for Vendetta (which, like Watchmen, I consider a "one off" - despite being originally printed in multiple issues, it's a self-contained story = it doesn't have an ongoing history, current continuity or evolution over decades like other lasting comic dramas). I thought updating the story in V for Vendetta (to address the same themes as the comic but using them to address a post 9/11 world) worked well in the movie, but again, such a change is easier when the story is a "one off".



Victim of The Night
Yeah, I just reject this entire conversation the more I read.
Great movies are great. I love them. I watch them preferentially over most things when I make time to watch movies now.
But so are so many other kinds of movies. There's so much pleasure to be gained. I happen to love Art, specifically painting, and I go to museums all over the country and the World when I have the chance. I am transported my the masterpieces of Art, I am. and the same is true of the masterpieces of film.
But that doesn't mean I can't enjoy Dogs Playing Poker.
And if you love movies, and you love the High Art of film... it's ok to also like Kaiju movies.
And if you do like Kaiju movies, I seriously don't wanna hear a word about comic book movies. Not a peep.
I consider artistic snobbery a position of weakness, not one of strength. It shows a deficiency of ones' taste not a refinement. And I don't think anyone is a true cinephile until they can watch something like Kieslowski or Tarkovsky one day and watch The Avengers the next and smile after both.
And man, Cinema Snobbery on a forum is just exhausting.



My two (slightly cheaper Canadian dollar) cents:


I've enjoyed enough comic book films, including some of the MCU ones, but I think what bugs me about the MCU is that they're too obviously part of a greater corporate strategy. I appreciate that you can build a shared universe, but I insist that you need to pay off a decent number of the things you setup, otherwise you're not respecting the audience's time. (I've mentioned before that I have a similar problem with television, so will concede that others have different priorities.)


So many of the dramatic beats of these movies have been pushed off to future installments that watching many of the individual movies feels like watching an ad for the next one rather than an actual movie. And the flipside is that when things do "pay off", they've all been set up like twenty movies ago that unless you're invested in seeing **** from the comics onscreen or something, the impact is lost. I remember watching Infinity War and, despite having seen most of the movies beforehand, felt like I was hit with a pop quiz that was worth like 50% of the grade but had stayed up playing video games the previous night.


I have the same problem with the new Disney Star Wars movies, where all the narrative beats feel too obviously in service of a greater focus-grouped, corporate defined plan. (Even in The Last Jedi, the one people cite as bucking the trend, is too conscious in the way it pushes against "expectations" to the point that almost all of its artistic choices are terrible.
Eh, I don't know about that; as far as I'm concerned, if you look at what seems to be the most "controversial" subversion of expectations in The Last Jedi, which is Luke's characterization as a reclusive, disillusioned hermit, I think that it makes perfect sense, both for the sake of the individual movie, as well as within the overall series, and the notion from the reactionary contingent of anti-TLJ trolls online that his characterization was meant as some sort of symbolic "middle finger" to The Force Awakens, or even to Star Wars fans as a whole, comes off to me like a bad-faith take. I mean, Force Awakens already established that he was in hiding, so his persona in TLJ feels like a natural outgrowth of that, because if he was still the same brave, eager Luke from the original trilogy, he'd be doing something proactive to help lead the forces of the Resistance in some way, ala Leia, instead of hiding out on some backwater planet.

Besides that, his initial refusal to help adds a lot of dramatic tension to the story, so instead of just watching one side fight the other with the Resistance versus the First Order, we also get the complication of an iconic, powerful character who for well-justified reasons, chooses not to get involved, leaving a potentially game-changing force (no pun intended) caught inbetween the two. Also, I think the specifics of his arc in the film was pretty great; I mean, his lifestyle was both a subversion of expectations, while also just being a natural echo of Obi-Wan's fate early on in A New Hope (one of the few callbacks in the sequel trilogy that felt necessary), and I loved the way that he came to the rescue without actually coming to the rescue (my audience literally applauded when that detail was revealed). So, because of all of that, I feel the portrayal of Luke in TLJ was not any sort of forced, self-conscious pushback against expectations, but a natural choice for the character, and the most compelling characterization he could've recieved.