Fanboys do not own the franchises of Batman and Superman movies, so director Zack Snyder went against the mob and dared to raise the genre to a level of adult sophistication in 2013’s Man of Steel, the most emotionally powerful superhero movie ever made. (Fanboys hated it.) Snyder’s sequel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice adds politics, bringing to the fantasy some contemporary, real-world concerns. This is not conventional comic-book allegory; rather, Snyder uses the figures of Batman (Ben Affleck) and Superman (Henry Cavill) walloping each other to give visible substance to social and moral issues, much as Greek tragedy does. He takes the wildest, Bizarro World fiction — of two superheroes turned super foes — and uses the premise to explicate our current dilemmas concerning power, principles, and divinity. It helps that Snyder is also visionary, inclined to extravagant spectacle and gifted with a signature erotic touch. An early montage equates violence, wealth, loss, and grief through symbolic images of bullets, pearls, blood, and tears. It is witnessed by the young Bruce Wayne, a paranoid orphaned millionaire who misconstrues Superman’s involvement in the previous film’s battle that devastated Metropolis (and traumatized nearby Gotham City), and so he vows a vigilante’s revenge.
Fanboys do not own the franchises of Batman and Superman movies...
Neither does Zack Snyder
Here we go
With its legal-brief title, Batman v Superman reflects the confusion that pits secularists against believers, and the partisanship that inhibits national alliance. This tension is so visually amped up that the opposition of Batman to Superman feels revelatory: Man versus the god in Man. Snyder’s opening sequences interweave the origin stories of these mythic heroes and their alter egos. What has become overly familiar through years of repetition acquires new dynamism — and new understanding — that particularizes and personalizes each wounded man’s suffering. Not only are these time-shifts audacious (movie marquees announce the 1940 The Mark of Zorro and the 1981 Excalibur — implying the evolution of history), but so is Snyder’s proposition about the nature of heroism and vengeance: Both stem from the way individuals react to and comprehend their experiences. Snyder’s thrillingly intelligent use of interior conflict and political antagonism vastly outclasses Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy: Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises — all noxious — which were bellwethers of our culture’s decline.
The main theme of Snyder's "Batman v Superman" on spiritual dematerialism is not eschatological, but a phenomenological ontology. Thus he implies that we have to choose between predialectic construction and deconstructivist neodialectic theory, essentially Heideggerian as seen in the concept of Dasein. The subject is interpolated then into a cinematic dematerialism that includes spirituality as a whole. But if the Kierkegaardian worldview holds, we have to choose between the cultural paradigm of expression and atomism. In Snyder's own "Man of Steel" he has a character say that "the world's too big”. Inherent in this is how the function of Lebenswelt (cinematically translated by Snyder as "world of life") operates in all his films, chiefly in "Sucker Punch" and "300". We see a phenomenological approach to the world showing a cinematic logic that presupposes a structural constraint in rootedness, another intentionality central to his filmography and philosophy. Because "metaphysical comfort" is not an object of temporality per se, but rather an aspect of automatic condition, as suggested by Cavell. Hermeneutic interpretations are also apparent in his post-"Watchmen" movies; in fact the interchangeable subjectivities are but another representation of Husserl's and Wittgenstein's "form of life". As his academic hero Heidegger succintly noted, "freedom is the ‘abyss’ of Dasein, its groundless or absent ground". This is essentially the thesis operating in Snyder's films.
>more long-winded, pseudo-intellectual drivel defending this shit sandwich of a movie
Snyder pls
Fanboys prefer the Nolan films for their “darkness,” which emphasized the sophomoric, pseudo-tragic elements of the Batman graphic novels. But Snyder’s more adult treatment finds the material’s emotional core. This displeases the fanboy/hipster whose adolescent embarrassment about feelings was exploited through Nolan’s emotionless violence and post–9/11 nihilism. Snyder counters that cultural crisis and (through the script by Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer) visualizes the millennial moral struggle as pop myth. His essential subject is mankind’s struggle to discover compassion as well as common obligation — or dare I use the non-political term: brotherhood? But fantasy cannot conscientiously be enjoyed Nolan’s way, without any sense of social or moral consequence. Snyder manipulates this new paradigm so that mankind’s sense of mortality is embodied by Batman, Superman, and their arch-nemesis, Lex Luthor. (All three characterization performances are, well, perfect.) When Superman’s motives are questioned, the skepticism and vilification create an antagonism between him and Batman that Snyder lays out as an ideological conflict and that Luthor exacerbates. Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg, who played Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network and thus personifies the craven millennium) cynically whines about “The oldest lie in America: that power can be innocent.” He even threatens a senator (Holly Hunter) who heads an investigation into Superman’s guilt. Luthor’s obsession with Superman (“He answers to no one. Not even, I think, to God”) reveals envy that is unmistakably demonic; a development that coheres with Snyder’s spiritual-social vision of post–9/11 grief and desire for salvation. He creates the year’s first great movie image by examining Superman’s “divinity” when he is surrounded by Day of the Dead multitudes. The image echoes our current desperation regarding “populism” — and that’s truly audacious.
I like where this thread is going.
didnt read lol
Among today’s outstanding American filmmakers, Snyder has an eccentric interest in the spiritual expression of his characters’ conflicts. From the erotic antiquity saga 300 to the anthropomorphic fable Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, Snyder demonstrates a caricaturist’s knack for elaborating Good vs. Evil. It takes just such dreamlike moral clarity to reprove the Nolan trilogy’s chaos. Look at Snyder’s second high point: Batman’s nightmare of battling Superman plus his own enigmatic demons imagined as Stymphalian wasps. The scene spins agonizingly slowly (though not in slow motion), becoming ever more hallucinatory. It fuses comic-book imagery to the oldest Western myths.
In this age of petty Marvels, most comic-book movies merely perpetrate fantasies of power, but Snyder, enacting his personal aesthetic, braves a film that examines those fantasies. He boldly challenges popular culture’s current decay. Man of Steel was a magnificent, hugely satisfying response to what’s often missing in pop culture, and Batman v Superman raises more ideas without (yet) resolving them. An attempt to invoke other superheroes from the DC Comics stable, starting with Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot, accompanied by tribal drums that recall Snyder’s overawed feminist fantasia, Sucker Punch), ultimately goes unfulfilled. And Snyder, obliged to placate the Marvel hordes, lets a couple of fight scenes devolve into Avengers-trite turmoil. Still, the equation of moral myth and contemporary political catastrophe marks an important advance. Snyder intends to resolve the conflict between commerce and art, power and morality. “Knowledge with no power is paradoxical,” one character says. “Man made a world where standing together is impossible,” frets another. With Batman v Superman, the battle for the soul of American culture is on.
Jurassic Dreams
Chris Pratt haunts fanboy wet dreams in Spielberg’s dino franchise
How many youngsters will see Chris Pratt in Jurassic World and deposit his image in their spank bank? One of pop culture’s dividends is the additional pleasures contained within innocuous merchandizing (ask Andy Warhol). Jurassic World is neither good or bad enough to be camp — its predictable action scenes are limp enough to call “damp” — but Pratt’s He-Man image as dinosaur roustabout Owen is the kind that firms-up any man’s resolve.
But it’s not all innocently raging hormones. Jurassic World, the third sequel of the 1990s dinosaur adventure series, is the product of one of the canniest filmmakers in Hollywood history. Producer Steven Spielberg always knows what he’s doing whether you like it or not — remember dreamboat Brad Johnson in Always? (“He looks like I won him in a raffle,” Holly Hunter gushed.) Spielberg’s decision to cast Pratt, streamlined from his bearish role on TV’s Parks & Recreations series to his buff military image first showcased in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, carries cultural significance.
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This Owen is not just a hybrid of the series’ Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum daddy figures, both braniacs; Owen’s a deliberately sexualized Spielberg brainiac like the two-fisted anthropologist Indiana Jones. (Owen empathizes with the raptors he trains without fear: “I said I was Navy, not Navajo” he explains.) Why repeat that archetype—especially in a series that plays with evolution, ontology, phylogeny and race? Contrasting Owen with his brawny African assistant Barry (Omar Sy) and Indian park owner Marsani (Irffan Kahn) perpetuates Hollywood’s unquestioned white male supremacist fantasies.
Pratt himself is not to blame; his dark blond, sharp-nosed, blue-eyed type deserves its appeal but dramatic scenes opposite military contractor Vincent D’Onofrio exposes definite weaknesses. Pratt has muscle but the burly D’Onofrio has acting strength. Something’s unconvincing, half-parodistic, in Pratt’s bearing (he’s like a gainfully employed Matthew Rush but less stolid than Chris Hemsworth’s similarly imposing Thor). It’s easy to imagine Pratt providing one-note effectiveness in a Josef Von Sternberg silent erotic masterpiece, playing stevedore roles like George O’Brien in The Docks of New York or in Murnau’s Sunrise where a big man’s physical heft was erotically magnetizing and then drew one into his spiritual being.
The Jurassic World script doesn’t allow Pratt the personal charm — the wink — that Harrison Ford brought off as Indy, hero of many adolescent boys’ dreams. Pratt’s eyes are gentle, yet his stout-thewed crouch and voluptuous trapazoids overwhelm this formulaic movie — and Bryce Dallas Howard’s shrill, vapid Park supervisor. She’s unappealing as Owen’s love interest. Maybe a lesbian critic could try justifying her cold acting but who can say what hetero guys who see Jurassic World put into their spank banks? I bet it’s Owen.
Ill take this over MCU shot any day. You know why theres barely any discussion about MCU movies after release? Because they dont invoke discussion. You watch MCU movies when you want to be entertained for 2 hours. Thats about it.
At least MoS and BvS TRIED to be deep and have substance besides being all about colorful heroes punching eachother. It should have been executed better, but damnit they were at least trying. Now the JL trailers and WW movie look like they're headed the Marvel route.
>You know why theres barely any discussion about MCU movies after release?
Because they're mainstream.
>zack snyder
>substance
my fucking sides
unironically this
>this entire thread
>They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun.
Stop. Your long texts trigger me. MCU is inclusive in that I always get every reference.
cuck