Renzatic on 3/5/2019 at 18:13
Quote:
I gave up on Discovery a few weeks ago. I'm a huge Star Trek fan, but Discovery felt more like an obligation than something I actually wanted to watch. There were a couple of decent episodes midway through the season, but overall the pacing made it hard to watch.
That's about my take on Discovery. It has promise, but it's just too hyperactive, too much in a mad rush to tell an epic story. It takes no time out for the characters, only showing you enough to make you sorta committed to them before throwing them all headfirst into the plot.
Meanwhile, the Orville becomes more and more like TNG with every passing episode.
Tocky on 3/5/2019 at 23:42
Quote Posted by icemann
Been slowly catching up on DUST, mentioned a page or so back. This one is just brilliant:
It was wasn't it? And with a princess no less. None of them are particularly bad but some few are a bit flat though with at least some interesting angle. That one was excellent. Most are better than 95% of what you see on TV. I wonder how many there are. I've been through dozens and I'm still finding new ones. Not sure what algorithm pegged me for these but I'm glad it did.
mopgoblin on 6/5/2019 at 10:05
Quote Posted by henke
Avengers EndgameLiked:
[...]
-FAT THOR! :D In fact I would've been fine with that being his character design from day 1. Fits with his good-time, mead-swilling persona. And what does he need to be in shape for anyway? He's a god! It's not like his divine strength comes from his actual muscles. As far as future Marvel movies I'm looking forward to, Thor teaming up with the Guardians is at the top of the list.I wasn't a fan of
the number of jokes about that from other characters or the way the film treated him in a few scenes, but yeah fat Thor himself was great. I particularly liked that the key thing for him was finding a way to get an upper hand over his depression/ptsd, and that he fought as fat Thor rather than getting some sort of magical transformation back into buff Thor or something. Kinda hoping that he keeps the chubbiness even if he gets more of the muscles back, buff bear Thor would be amazing.Quote:
Did not like:
-Captain Marvel. I haven't seen her movie, but the only thing I learned about her character from this one is that she likes to change her hairdo a lot.
Also she conveniently leaves the movie from most of the running time for REASONS only to show up at the end and act as a deus ex machina.I liked Captain Marvel in Endgame in particular because she tends to react to things exactly how I would in her situation
both when she decides to go and kill Thanos in the beginning and when she's on the verge of breaking his fingers at the end. Women get little enough wish-fulfillment representation in a genre that's saturated with that for guys, let alone if you've got a bit of a ruthless streak. And I like that
she's not invincible, the fact that Thanos was clearly fucked if he hadn't thought fast enough to use the power stone in his other hand felt like the perfect balance. I also felt like the film should have spent more time showing the effects the snap had on regular people, and other than the memorial with the huge circles of monuments, her line about the rest of the universe needing her more than Earth does was one of the few things that emphasised that (of course it's there so she won't be around to make the whole second act trivial, but it still has value beyond that).I do think they should have her be
explicitly queer though, every lesbian I know fully expects her to be after her own film, let alone after Endgame.Quote:
-Thanos turning into a regular comic book villain at the end. He was evil but compelling in the last movie, but when he decides to just wipe out all the life in the universe here the screenwriters are just giving us permission to unambiguously hate him and the whole thing turns into a bog-standard GOOD vs EVIL story.What I took from that was that
this is a less emotionally mature version of Thanos. In his time he's still going planet by planet and presumably has more of a taste for blood at this stage, and that combined with learning that the good guys have reversed his plan after he won in their timeline, it feels right that he'd lose his composure and show more of the narcissism that was mostly buried/hidden in Infinity War. It does simplify the way we get to feel about him, but I think I prefer that to him not really changing, especially since we do get our semi-sympathetic moment when he's on the farm at the start.My own thoughts:
I liked that they gave us the
five year time skip and the slow start before the action really got going, it felt like a world and a set of characters that had really been living with the consequences of the snap - and for the most part really struggling with it. Like I said earlier, I'd have liked to see more of how the rest of the world was affected, but I can't fault the pacing in the slightest. I'm hoping that some of the next few films going forward will explore the consequences of reversing the snap - suddenly a lot of people who were thought to be gone forever are back, while on the other hand the survivors have aged five years from their perspective and presumably have been trying to move on. The people may be back but the world still has a lot of healing to do, and I really hope they don't gloss over that in the next few films, because it's a great opportunity for the MCU and even the genre to branch out into telling a richer variety of stories. In terms of other superhero movies, I liked both
Venom and
Captain Marvel for their buddy-cop elements as much as anything else, and I think there's heaps of potential for superhero films to diversify a lot more than that in terms of style and genre.
Things I disliked/that I'd hoped to see that didn't happen:
*
I was hoping that Nebula would get to kill Thanos ever since Guardians vol. 2, it was a shame not to get that even if both of his deaths were super-fitting in the film* I was hoping that they wouldn't go with
Ant-Man quantum realm time travel malarkey, it seemed too obvious, though I do think they pulled it off pretty well
* I would have preferred
Bucky rather than Sam to be the new Captain America, I like Sam as the Falcon and feel like he's a pretty under-appreciated characterBest bits, in rough order:
*
Captain Marvel vs Thanos, both that she doesn't even flinch from his first attack, and that he still figures out how to stop her*
Captain America using Mjolnir, we've been waiting to see that since Age of Ultron*
The sheer emptiness when they kill Thanos at the start of the film, it both showed how far the heroes have fallen and set the tone for the post-snap world perfectly* The oh-shit moment when
past Loki grabs the tesseract and escapes* The realisation that
Captain America must have ran into the Red Skull when returning the soul stone (with no forewarning since presumably only Clint knows the Red Skull is there, and he probably doesn't know who that is)Overall a solid film, hoping to see it in the cinema a second time.
Sulphur on 7/5/2019 at 18:35
I'm pretty sure this is the simultaneously the best and worst thing I've ever seen at the end of a long-ass day. I laughed when I shouldn't have. Again, best and worst. It's the borst.
[video=youtube_share;yH-q-aEymws]https://youtu.be/yH-q-aEymws[/video]
Thanks for the profoundly mixed feelings, Jesh.
EvaUnit02 on 8/5/2019 at 06:49
Alien Covenant
It was cheesy and plot points were very predictable. For what it's worth it was FAR, FAR better than Prometheus. Scott learned his lesson not to hire king hack Damon Lindelof. The crew weren't as braindead stupid as they were in Prometheus, for starters.
6/10
Tocky on 9/5/2019 at 04:26
Quote Posted by icemann
The final minute of that, is the trippiest stuff I've seen in a long time.
While I did enjoy it I've seen infinitely more complex fractals just by closing my eyes while in a particular state. Infinitely. Beyond the scope of anything put to paper or film. I think the point is we watch till the end. We risk it don't we?
froghawk on 9/5/2019 at 04:46
Quote Posted by EvaUnit02
Alien CovenantIt was cheesy and plot points were very predictable. For what it's worth it was FAR, FAR better than Prometheus. Scott learned his lesson not to hire king hack Damon Lindelof. The crew weren't as braindead stupid as they were in Prometheus, for starters.
6/10Nah, it was even worse thanks to the sad excuse for an alien origin story they came up with. That crap retroactively ruins the entire franchise.
Hmm, I wonder what backstory would deepen the intrigue of this mysterious and terrifying life form? Oh, I know - it was created by a ROBOTIC MAD SCIENTIST! Plus it was even more generic and unmemorable, which in my book is worse than memorably bad. But yes, Lindelof is dreadful with the sole exception of The Leftovers, and I dread his new Watchmen show.
Sulphur on 9/5/2019 at 05:15
I've seen some decent attempts to defend both as invoking the cycles of Greek mythology (if Prometheus wasn't already obvious as a title) - the Titans and the new gods, Deucalion and Pyrrha, etc. etc. This doesn't wash, though, because the Greek myths were inherently about mankind's hubris as viewed through the higher powers of its gods. Greek gods are arguably some of the most human deities any civilisation has come up with, endowed with the full human emotional spectrum and a heaving extra helpful of the stuff that makes most people go 'hmm': lecherous, deceiving, egotistical, fearful, jealous, over-engorged with pride, etc.
Alien, on the other hand, was a simple story about something primal and ineffable having come about from the devices of creators long-gone or long past caring about that sector of the universe. It isn't an argument for hubris or pathos, it just taps into our species' deeper fears of sex, birth, and death all deriving from the same source, and the universe doesn't care to differentiate between you and me or anyone in terms of how special we are to continue that cycle.
The Scott sequels figured that that wasn't enough to hang the thread of a sequel around - which is fair, a sequence of films focusing on nihilism and raw survival can get pretty tiring after some time without a deeper point to be made - but I think they missed a trick in not embracing the fact that the title of the first fucking movie was Alien and going full bore into the unknown instead of welding the Greek mythos into the franchise so poorly that the entire frame fell apart in the end.
And defend it if you want to, but two androids playing their bone flutes and kissing each other was an overextended act of narcissism (arguably the one Greek figure that would have been kinda effective as subtext in this framework, but of course in a movie like this it's just text) and the exact point where I realised that Alien: Covenant just made me feel very, very tired.
demagogue on 9/5/2019 at 09:37
About the most I can say about both movies is that I don't remember much. I remember morons entering and exploring a cave with a drone flying through it in the first and people hanging out in a massive & completely empty city in the second, and my memory gets really hazy really fast beyond images like that, how they got from those scenes to later scenes. It's possible I fell asleep halfway through Covenant. See I don't even remember that much, although I'd agree it was better than Prometheus, from what I remember I remember at least. Events in both movies were hard to connect while I was watching them; no way my poor memory is going to reconstruct them now.
I mean as opposed to Alien & Aliens, of which I have a photographic memory literally scene by scene to the point of echoing the lines of characters as they say them. Well maybe a decade or two ago I could do that. It's been a long time since I've watched them lately. I might admit some of it was my greater enthusiasm for movies when I was younger; but I want say it has something to do with how movies are scripted and plotted these days, i.e., not as well.
Thirith on 9/5/2019 at 10:26
There are elements and aspects of both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant that I like a lot. Some of Prometheus especially is visually gorgeous, the performances in Covenant are generally strong, and I like the motifs of creator gods rejecting their creation (Prometheus) and the mirror image of this we get in Covenant, where an android created by man rebels against his creators by becoming the creator of abominations himself. There's potential in so much of this, but the scripts are not up to the job and the need to tie into the overall Alien mythos definitely doesn't either. Having the elements in there that are worthwhile just makes the failure of the two films more keenly felt IMO.