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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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His visual flair and dubious auteur credentials aside, do you not think that the grimdark tone was reactionary? Watchmen, Sucker Punch or even his recent Rebel Moon antics, while still retaining his style were nowhere near as pompous as a Batman v Superman or even a Man of Steel.

He does have an unearned tendency to take himself way too seriously, especially now that he's selling director cuts, but I am utterly convinced that some producer shenanigans were involved to get to "do you bleed" levels.

He said this before getting Man of Steel:

Everyone says that about [Christopher Nolan’s] Batman Begins. ”Batman’s dark.” I’m like, okay, ”No, Batman’s cool.” He gets to go to a Tibetan monastery and be trained by ninjas. Okay? I want to do that. But he doesn’t, like, get raped in prison. That could happen in my movie. If you want to talk about dark, that’s how that would go.

So did the producers push him in that direction or did they find the man for the job?

My intuition was that Batman vs Superman was a studio mandate to rush the shared universe, Snyder tried to do some comic grimdark/Frank Miller inspired stuff and couldn't pull it off.

Just as, iirc, a lot of Watchmen fans argue he didn't get Watchmen either. There were a lot of complaints about Snyder insisting on the violence and gore itself being cool for their own sake so this isn't even new. But obviously far more people feel invested in Batman and Superman than Watchmen so they didn't make as much of an impact.

Snyder was still more respectful of Watchmen in his movie adaptation than whoever is responsible for the hbo series, showing just how low fidelity has fallen.

The HBO series was fucking weird and the female lead was a good actress, but that world was just so tortured in its framing that nothing about it made sense. Vigilante police, reparations, the Klan, nightmare squid storms... its just such a baffling show so far up its own ass that there it took until the penultimate episode to figure out what the central conflict of the show was.

Everyone despises JJ Abrams Mystery Box attitude to storytelling now, but the overly convoluted framing also is Damon Lindlehofs doing. His grubby fingers are good for kneading slow burning plots like The Leftovers, but most of the time he works just collapse in the bake.

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