itt: consternation and wailing about Zach Snyder's upcoming SUPERMAN/BATMAN film/sequel to MAN OF STEEL -- official title: BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE

The guys at the Weekly Planet podcast who put together that YT vid Snyder references came out in their most recent ep excoriating the film say straight out "you missed the fucking point, idiot,"

A little more like manslaughter than murder, although I would say that in the Frank Miller comic book that I reference, he kills all the time. There’s a scene from the graphic novel where he busts through a wall, takes the guy’s machine gun…I took that little vignette from a scene in The Dark Knight Returns, and at the end of that, he shoots the guy right between the eyes with the machine gun. One shot. Of course, I went to the gas tank, and all of the guys I work with were like, ‘You’ve gotta shoot him in the head’ because they’re all comic book dorks, and I was like, ‘I’m not gonna be the guy that does that!’

Same series that has this panel?

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/batman-the-dark-knight-returns-weapon-of-the-enemy.jpg

well, yeah

also the panel snyder references is a little ambiguous about how injured the guy batman shoots is but for sure he's not 'shot right between the eyes' and later on in the book other characters explicitly mention that batman's never killed. that's the whole fucking reason his refusal to kill the joker later actually has any dramatic weight!

But let's be honest, Batman is prety much just Rambo. He's a tower of muscle, murdering everyone indiscriminately. That's the whole appeal of the character, that he's such a psychopathic badass who's always covered in his victims' viscera and always has heavy metal SQUEEDLYDEEDLYDEEEEEE music playing in the background every time he mashes someone's skull into paste (i.e. whenever he's awake).

Wow, this guy's kind of an idiot: Zack Snyder Loves Superman, And 'Batman V Superman' Proves It. First, he loved the movie (his words). But he tries to prove the article's titular point by using plot points to show Snyder's affection for the Superman in his own movie when really the point that everyone makes about Snyder neither loving nor understanding Superman is that he pretty blatantly ignored most of a prior century's worth of depictions of the character.

I don't mind so much that there are people that like this movie out there, just that every one of them wants their opinion accepted as the consensus one and get butthurt that it isn't.

Forbes contributor kind of an idiot shocker

I mean...as recently as Batman Begins he pulls the "not gonna kill you, don't have to save you" crap. Snyder's not completely in the wrong.

that's p far removed from plugging a buncha dudes not because they're committing a crime but because well you want their kryptonite

Or portraying Batmam as the Punisher with slightly modified iconography

tbf tho Keaton's Batman didn't give two shits about killing. set people on fire with the fumes of his ride iirc

tho it wasn't something he *set out to do*

the flamethrowing in batman returns was definitely deliberate, quite mean imo

it was also cartoon logic, the Batmobile basically pulling a Bugs Bunny. the same movie ends with an army of penguins shooting rockets.

quite possible the dude on fire ran around yelping for a while before leaping into a tiny glass of water and breathing a sigh of relief

the flamethrowing in batman returns was definitely deliberate, quite mean imo

― lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living (Merdeyeux), Wednesday, March 30, 2016 11:12 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean he didn't set out each night to put criminals in a bodybag, in that instance it was a spur of the moment action largely bourne out of opportunism.

whereas this Batman is more pre-meditated and when he doesn't kill the criminals he brands them so that they'll get killed in prison.

I perceive it as him not killing directly, but if the bad guy’s are associated with a thing that happens to blow up, he would say that that’s not really my problem.

So Batman is a complete moral idiot. Gotcha.

I still don't really get how so many smart people care about any of this.

it's terrible but not worse than burton batman tbqh

i think burton understood that batman was mostly a villain and didn't attempt to give him moral high grounds (like that "I don't have to save you" at the end of B Begins).

The moral handwringing about this movie's portrayal of these characters feels largely disingenuous IMO

People all of a sudden are pretending to care about Superman.

The movie sucks, who cares. Bleh.

This is one messy movie, but it doesn't make me angry like The Avengers did, and continues to do, because people for some reason list it as a good example of superhero movie making and not the leading cause of the genre's shitty aspects.

and what might those be?

I see we've made it to the challops portion of our program.

I like the Marvel movies but Avengers is just 90 mins of twatting around on a flying boat followed by a terrible fight scene.

Iron Man 3 and Agent Carter are both best things to come out of this (for me, anyway)

Neither of the Avengers movies are among my MCU favorites, but there's a wide gulf between that perspective and believing that the first movie is the 'leading cause of the genre's shitty aspects'.

i'm really only in it for the twatting

Yeah, I think the first Iron Man kickstarted the Marvel template - 75% twatting; 25% terrible fight scenes - and Avengers just ran with that.

tbf tho Keaton's Batman didn't give two shits about killing. set people on fire with the fumes of his ride iirc

― Neanderthal, Thursday, March 31, 2016 3:38 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Even though the murder rate was pretty small, Batman randomly offing goons in the Burton Batmans still seemed out of character at the time, tbh.

Also worth remembering that in the 90s there were those that insisted Batman wasn't edgy enough and should be allowed to go around shooting bad guys in the head like The Punisher. The writers' riposte to this was to create Azrael, essentially a temporary replacement Batman who was an unhinged psychopath that killed indiscriminately, as a way of saying, "See, this is why Batman shouldn't do this."

I feel like the Snyder Batman is closer to the Azrael version than we should probably be comfortable with.

100% otm

I don't even remember Keaton killing people. The movie is so cartoony (in a good way) it didn't really register to me as "death" anyway - not like, you know, consciously snapping a dude's neck

xpost
At least two hardcore Marvel fans I know thought that Iron Man 3 was the absolute nadir of the whole MCU movie cycle - too much like an action movie, Iron Man out of costume for large parts of the film, Tony Stark carrying a gun, plucky boy helper etc - whereas the first Avengers movie especially does actually feels like an issue of The Avengers, complete w/ all the twattery and fightery.

I've zero interest in seeing Dawn of Justice, but all this hand-wringing about it betraying the 'true' Superman and Batman is a bit excessive. These are corporately owned characters, written and drawn differently by hundreds of writers and artists over the years, subject to the whims of fashion and the needs of commerce; 'dark' Superman and 'psycho' Batman are entirely legitimate interpretations of these characters, no more or less so than Batmite-era Batman, or Bizarro-era Superman. Perhaps the problem is that the grim and gritty era has gone on too long, and already feels a bit dated - the success of Deadpool seems to suggest that we've now reached the decadent postmodern era of superheroes.

There was that extended sequence in Batman Returns where Batman slowly and graphically disembowled the Penguin but it wasn't made clear whether he actually died from his injuries.

xpost

Those hardcore Marvel fans are emblematic of why I pay roughly zero attention to the other fans of things that I enjoy. Outside of ILX, of course.

dark superman and psycho batman are legit interpretations for sure but usually when they show up in comics there's an in-story reason for them to be that way, be it an elseworlds or batman being replaced by azrael or whatever - they're stories which benefit from the juxtaposition of, say, the superman of red son with the more convetionally heroic character in the nine other books which feature him that month. although they are corporately-owned characters who have passed through the hands of hundreds but they have core characteristics - it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that 'does not kill' is a critical part of batman any less than 'does not have heat vision or super-ventriloquism'

when the dc cinematic universe is built on what feels like alternate takes on the characters rather than the values which have almost always animated them in the comics it feels like the creative teams are embarrassed to be working on superheroic characters. the marvel movies, on the other hand, have done a mostly excellent job of taking the core appeal of the characters and translating them to the screen, so it's not like dc/warners can't see it being done elsewhere

All very well-put, bizarro. Yes.

i guess another way to put it is that there are some elements of the characters which have kept them popular for more than a quarter of a century and very few, if any, are evident on-screen in man of steel or dawn of justice

on an even more basic level i'd be happier to swallow a dark superman and/or psycho batman movie if there were a single sympathetic or likeable character in the movies but there are literally none. everyone's a total asshole.

I've zero interest in seeing Dawn of Justice, but all this hand-wringing about it betraying the 'true' Superman and Batman is a bit excessive. These are corporately owned characters, written and drawn differently by hundreds of writers and artists over the years, subject to the whims of fashion and the needs of commerce; 'dark' Superman and 'psycho' Batman are entirely legitimate interpretations of these characters, no more or less so than Batmite-era Batman, or Bizarro-era Superman. Perhaps the problem is that the grim and gritty era has gone on too long, and already feels a bit dated - the success of Deadpool seems to suggest that we've now reached the decadent postmodern era of superheroes.
― Chicamaw (Ward Fowler), Thursday, March 31, 2016 2:34 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

xpost I agree, but the "not killing" thing is an aspect of both characters that has held true over almost all those different interpretations, it's fairly fundamental.

I think the Batman of the 40s did use a gun to euthanise some mutants in like Batman issue 1, but after that it was decided he wouldn't use guns in the future, which has something that has stuck pretty much ever since.

yeah Batman + guns was in the earliest incarnation, when he was a pulpier comic

superman throwing guys in cars off cliffs and killing spies was his first few issues too. mickey mouse packed a pistol in the '30's!
http://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/27/d0/ba/27d0ba1f89efa23fcd8a27efccf56342.jpg
it's not that this interp isn't unprecedented, it's that it's a shitty way to present them now and that snyder is a fucking hack.

There was that extended sequence in Batman Returns where Batman slowly and graphically disembowled the Penguin but it wasn't made clear whether he actually died from his injuries.

?

i would fucking love a grim'n'gritty mickey mouse reboot - c'mon disney do it for the fans

i guess another way to put it is that there are some elements of the characters which have kept them popular for more than a quarter of a century and very few, if any, are evident on-screen in man of steel or dawn of justice

It seems like Snyder *thinks* he's doing "real" Superman though, rather than an "alternate" take - that's the slightly galling thing. Also WTF is the point of a Superman movie you can't take a 7-year-old to see.

yeah Batman + guns was in the earliest incarnation, when he was a pulpier comic

Batman was certainly not pulpy in the 1950s under the likes of Sprang or 1960s under the likes of Fox or 1970s under the likes of Englehart or Robbins or 1980s under the likes of Newton or Aparo or Grant or Breyfogle or Collins or the 1990s under the likes of Dixon or Loeb or Moench, you're right there

you know, once they'd gotten rid of the gunhappy pulpmeisters Moldoff and Finger in 1942

Suicidal Mickey is pretty good fodder for your grim n' gritty Mickey Mouse reboot.

i would fucking love a grim'n'gritty mickey mouse reboot - c'mon disney do it for the fans

― Upset by racist left wingers calling me an egg (bizarro gazzara), 31. marts 2016 16:50 (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This kinda happened in the nineties. Stories about a hardboiled detective Mickey. I remember a sorta adaptation of D.O.A. (though of course I didn't know at the time that was what it was) and a story about a serial pyromaniac. It was pretty cool.

Also this, apparently, which I haven't read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MM_Mickey_Mouse_Mystery_Magazine

Also, this happened very recently and is kinda great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xRCYmbvfEs