• Tag Archives DC Comics

  • The Batman & Zack Snyder’s Justice League

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    Not sure why I decided to watch this most recent movie reboot of the titular Batman character since I’m not a big fan of DC comics or superhero movies in general. Think I was just bored… a state of affairs the movie did little to alleviate. While there’s no problem with the various actors (beside Pattinson looking a bit too much like a punk rock frontman with all that eyeliner maybe), the pacing is pretty damn slow and it ends up feeling more like an endless miniseries than a movie.

    The Snyder Cut of the Justice League movie on the other hand has been on my ‘to watch’ list for some time now, ever since I found out the original release had been heavily modified by Joss Whedon (which handily explained the Avengers resemblance). Anyway, while this extended version no longer feels like a poor knockoff of that movie, I still wouldn’t go out of my way to call it worth watching unless you’re already a fan of the material. Basically it’s a pretty standard superhero movie through and through that you’ll probably like if you can’t get enough of that genre.

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  • Batman & Lucifer

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    The Batman prequel Gotham starts off remarkably good, basically a crime drama with some action elements and a moderate streak of eccentricity, but as it progresses events become increasingly unhinged. So while there are a few good bits in the second season (the third is garbage), ultimately I can’t recommend watching beyond the first.

    I specifically avoided watching The Dark Knight Rises when it was released mainly due to a review that said it was more a Bruce Wayne movie than a Batman movie. That review ended up being spot on. More problematic though is Bane; why does he sound like an English aristocrat? His voice is beyond disconcerting. Overall I’d say Batman vs. Superman tells this sort of ‘aging Batman’ story far more competently, with a far more believable villain, and a much bigger payoff.

    Lucifer meanwhile turned out to be a hybrid of buddy cop police procedural and urban fantasy familial drama. In quite a few ways it’s reminiscent of Castle, and so far it’s the only DC TV series I’ve seen that manages to avoid deteriorating over time: What you get in the first episode is what you get in the 40th.

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  • ARROW – Seasons 4-8

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    Let’s just get the remaining Arrow seasons out of the way all at once:

      Season 4 – Fantasy elements take center stage this season. Both the present and past main villains are sorcerers, there’s a couple Constantine cameos, a bit more Lazarus Pool fuckery, and a crossover special heavy with Egyptian mythology. It’s not very good… and whomever thought that airing halves of a plot-driven crossover event in different series was a good idea should’ve been fired. Also: Netspeak should never, ever be spoken aloud.

      Season 5 – This season introduces a (mostly) new team, trades the boardroom for the mayor’s office, and retreads some of the same ground the first season covered adversary-wise. The fantasy elements are gone, which is a positive, but the new team is worse than the old and once again we have orphaned cross-over episodes (two this time, one featuring a brief creepily perky Supergirl appearance).

      Season 6 – Hey, remember that annoying secret identity drama from the first season? Guess what? That just so happens to be the central focus here. The series really should’ve just ended after the first season.

      Season 7 – Events here don’t start off very Arrow-like at all. Lot of focus on the police, FBI, and prison side of things… not so much the vigilante side. If this is what you wanted to do, why not just go work on one of the quadrillion existing police procedurals floating around instead? While it does gets more Arrow-y toward the halfway point, it does so in the bad arbitrary way that’s been par for the course in recent seasons and doesn’t drop the police-side perspective until the last quarter or so.

      Season 8 – This is more like a miniseries than a proper season. With less than half the length it mainly focuses on a single extremely comicbook plotline (alongside continued flash-forwards and an episode to wrap up the Guild of Assassins subplot). It’s amazing how they could so thoroughly squander the opportunity to finally tell a concise, focused story.

    Well, that was an impressive waste of time. On the positive side of things, at least the crossover episodes cured me of any desire to check out Supergirl or Batwoman (never had any plans of watching Flash).

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  • ARROW – Season 3

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    Arrow’s third season starts off decent enough. Rather than unfocused it instead comes across as… unhurried? It knows what it wants to do and does it without any particular fanfare or expository explanations.

    While preferable to the ‘pick ideas out of a hat’ methodology the second season had going on, I can’t say the end result is particularly engaging since ‘what it wants to do’ is explicitly contradict its own core premise. Not only is Oliver now ‘poor’ (though functionally there’s no difference) but he was no longer trapped on a island for 5 years; the survivalism flashbacks get replaced by secret agent flashbacks. What’s even the point of this retcon? What does it add besides extreme incredulity? Then there’s the last quarter.

    The League of Assassins plotline is dumb. Real dumb. So of course the show has to focus on it 100% for the climax while tossing in some fantasy elements (which appear to become more pronounced in later seasons) and bizarre character behavior. Just because a work is inspired by a comic doesn’t mean it’s required to feature the same sort of nonsense plot developments and schizophrenic characterizations endemic to the medium.

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  • ARROW – Season 2

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    This season picks up from where the first left off following a short time skip.

    It’s nowhere near as focused and mostly just comes across as a random assortment of ideas thrown at a wall: Arbitrary resurrections, sudden sci-fi elements (though some might consider those a positive considering the series didn’t start off very superhero-like), some questionable costume choices, and the appearance of a ninja army (not quite as bad as Daredevil‘s, but still pretty bad).

    I’m generally not one to mourn a loss of realism, but here that was in a sense the show’s defining trait. The corporate elements don’t work well either. As for positives… well, I guess Laurel’s arc is solid enough and I’m certainly not sad to see the (apparent) end of Thea’s questionable romance.

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  • ARROW – Season 1

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    The first season of the CW’s Arrow TV series combines an assortment of themes/genres.

    It starts off quite good as a mixture of action-focused revenge story and courtroom drama, eventually adding police procedural elements, military survivalism flashbacks, thrillerish conspiracy-related developments, assorted familial/relationship drama, and a fairly large number of romantic subplots. Some parts work better than others.

    The action scenes are solid throughout and I have no complaints regarding the acting or casting (though some characters seem overly similar to one another). The justice-themed monologues however pretty much universally fall flat, him working alone initially plays better than him working with employees (once the tech expert joins it evens out), the background conspiracy is pretty sketchy, and I don’t buy that simply wearing a hood magically makes someone completely unrecognizable.

    It’s a good show, but perhaps just a bit too meandering. I think this season would’ve been better at about half the length with most of the secondary subplots, particularly the ‘crisis of faith’ and re-occurring secret identity drama, cut out to focus entirely on the main revenge/conspiracy.

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  • THE BOYS, WATCHMEN

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    The Boys is an adaptation of an ~adult~ comic of the same name, which is to say it features graphic violence, sex, cursing, and dark themes. It’s not a 1:1 adaptation though, making a number of changes which (after having read the original’s synopsis) I think end up significant improvements. Homelander and Butcher are fantastic, the majority of the other characters are solid, and only Hughie seems miscast. His acting is perfectly on point, it’s just that its highly visually discordant to see him grouped with everyone else.

    Considering how the first season ended, with a massive departure from the source material, I’m not sure how things can be believably resolved considering that Homelander is not altruistic in the slightest. At the very least I hope they have a different ending in mind for Butcher, since the way the original story plays out is incredibly dumb.

    The Watchmen TV series is also related to a comic, though in this case it’s a sequel rather than an adaptation. With the earlier Watchmen movie being my only previous experience with this franchise I didn’t really have any expectations going in, yet considering the bizarre combination of rural anachronisms and dystopian cosplay on display it doesn’t seem familiarity would’ve helped. It’s strange. Very strange, skipping between being a period piece, a murder mystery, a police procedural, a psychological thriller, and a romantic drama. Heavy on violence, both physical and otherwise, with little counterbalance.

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  • Assorted, Mostly DC, Movies

    Posted on by Offkorn

    Went on a brief movie kick recently in a fit of boredom (though I watched the first two on the list below at the time they were released):

    • Detective Pikachu: Reynolds and the pokémon are good; the humans are all extremely cringe.
    • Avengers: Endgame: Does a fantastic job wrapping up all the disparate plotlines featured across the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Surprisingly, a good chunk of it leans strongly toward comedy.
    • Mad Max: Fury Road: Most of it is quite strong… if a little odd in places. The third act however (revisiting the citadel) is a disaster.
    • Suicide Squad: The prologue bits (before they’re captured) are pretty good and the visuals are stellar throughout, but the rest is pretty meh and I wasn’t feeling the ‘forced to fight for the government’ angle.
    • Wonder Woman: Eh. The first two Captain America movies do something similar far more competently.
    • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: This is a very strange movie which plays out like a TV miniseries for the first two-thirds, featuring more thriller elements than action. But then Doomsday appears and holy shit. It’s like night and day; an insanely strong finish worth the price of entry alone (and Wonder Woman is better here than she is in her own movie).
    • Justice League: Not sure what this was supposed to be. An imitation Infinity War? It doesn’t succeed. It’s closer to the first Avengers movie… which is not a good thing.

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  • Some Movies and a TV Show

    Posted on by Offkorn 1 Comment

    Movies:

    • Quantum of Solace – The argument that it’s ‘overly violent’ for a James Bond film is patently absurd; most of the action is practically slapstick. The oddly bloodless and occasionally longwinded action sequences aside there’s not really anything to complain about here.
    • Skyfall – I see why people consider this a return to form for the franchise, but I don’t view that a good thing. The movie’s still decent, but it comes across like an imitation of days long past.
    • Spectre – Whomever’s responsible for all the extended chase scenes really needs to lay off them for a bit. That aside, what struck me was its anti-surveillance theme. Though clearly meant to be a criticism/warning I can’t shake the feeling that introducing surveillance states into fiction normalizes them. Oh, and despite what some may have claimed, there’s nothing even remotely confusing about the plot developments.
    • Fantastic Beasts: And Where to Find Them – Considering my acute dislike of Harry Potter I’m not sure what possessed me to watch this movie. The atmospheric connection between the two is hard to miss and would be bad enough alone, but far worse is how the protagonist here has the air of a child molester.

    TV Show:

    • Constantine – In the mood to re-watch the Constantine movie for some reason, I ended up reminded that a TV version of the franchise had been created and decided to check that out instead. While some of the episodes are a bit too episodic (and the non-English spellcasting scenes aren’t sold even remotely well) overall this is an often fun and consistently engaging series with perfectly fine production values.

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  • BATMAN NINJA

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    Transported, along with his allies and all of Arkham Asylum’s inmates, to what appears to be feudal Japan by one of Gorilla Grodd’s contraptions, Batman must find a way to both untangle the mess history has become and return to the modern day.

    An action movie with both martial arts and mecha action along with a bit of comic relief in the form of the Joker and Harley’s personality. Be aware that it requires some basic knowledge of the Batman franchise to understand the character dynamics and that the English script differs significantly from the original Japanese version.

    More Information:
    aniDB
    Wikipedia

    Continue reading → Post ID 9625

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