Tag: dceu

transfemmefatale:

people always act like the dceu is dark because they’re trying so hard to be dark, when in reality there’s an inherent darkness in taking the source material seriously and having there be physical and emotional consequences to the crazy things that happen in this universe. when theres a battle in the middle of the city, innocent people die and zack snyder doesn’t shy away from that. but no, its just dark cause he’s an edgelord, has nothing to do with him taking these characters and asking himself how they would exist in our reality and weighing the consequences of that.

joons:

“doing good” is not an innate thing that people know how to do. it even takes time to articulate what “doing good” would mean even if our inclination to do so is pure and selfless. does it matter more to protect the people on your street? your country? the world? is it enough to save their life or to make their lives better? do you have enough moral foresight to make those decisions? if you only have so much time, who do you spend it on?

these are the questions zack snyder asks in man of steel and batman v. superman. too often, you will see people say that, because clark is taking the time to really consider his responsibilities, he is not a good person, that he has been hollowed out to someone who disdains the people he most often helps. this is a vestige of our desire to see superheroes hatching out fully formed; all they need is a suit and a plan, and they’re good to go, with a full sense of self-sacrifice. but what clark attempts is a careful consideration of difficult moral decisions that have no clear-cut answer. if your father believes that your life will be in danger if you save him, do you respect his wishes? if the closest thing you have to your race will kill another innocent family if you don’t kill him, what do you do? if a fellow crime fighter is terrorizing a poor neighborhood with impunity, how do you stop him? is the pen actually mightier than the sword? at what point is a line crossed that says you must interfere? what if interfering makes it worse?

mos and bvs are profoundly moral movies. they are altruistic movies. they are selfless movies. superman is humble enough, caring enough, kind enough, to know when he is out of his depth, to know that he cannot simply act and rationalize it after the fact. he can do too much good to rely on his own instincts without interrogating his own motives and making sure he knows what he’s doing and why. 

if anyone tries to tell you that clark doesn’t want to help, or that zack snyder’s movies position him as a distant god who’s icked out by the commoners, rather than someone deeply concerned with making sure that harming and helping don’t end up being basically the same, then they have never considered these questions for themselves, and their superman isn’t one i would care to fight for me.

I wanted to reblog this post about the first iron Man movie- in particular the ending line- because it was a great post and I agreed with everything, about the impact of that moment and how modernizing and fresh it was- until the dig at the DCEU movies. And I want to rebut it, but I’m not an active person in the superhero fandoms and not one of the vocal DCEU defenders (but I love everybody that is) and hadn’t seen any of them reply yet to it

so, yeah, that the DCEU movies kept the ‘superhero has a secret identity that that’s why they feel outdated because using this outdated concept/feel unreal unlike the MCU”. Well, by the end of Phase 1 and certainly getting into the later Avengers movies the MCU movies for me in absolutely no way feel ‘realistic’ – it feels like a ‘cartoon/comic book world’ and especially because the superheros feel isolated from the general public and outside media scrutiny- Civil War has been rightfully lambasted by people other than me. But in the DCEU, yes, the Justice League still have secret identities (but the villains don’t – see Suicide Squad). But in Man of Steel- it reverses what was a staple of Superman comics that lasted for 60+ years: Lois Lane knows Clark Kent is the Kryptonian Kal-El, knows his ‘secret identity’ before he even creates the persona of Superman. That might not be as earth-shattering a seismic story shift as “I am Iron Man”, but don’t pretend it wasn’t something very bold and updating an aspect that was universally mocked in pop culture and made the story feel ‘realistic’ and ‘logical’ the same way I felt the end of Iron Man did for me. And then BvS, one of the biggest themes of the movie is that because Superman doesn’t publicly expose that he does have a second life as a ‘normal human’, the media creates or shapes sometimes conflicting narratives of who he is and what his intentions are (that montage the ends with “but what if he’s just a regular guy trying to do the right thing?”). You really don’t have the media in the rest of the MCU questioning Iron Man and the others after they’ve revealed themselves, Chelsea the journalist disappears, never to challenge Tony Stark again. (And speaking of BvS and journalists challenging people in power, wanting to know if there’s been cover-ups of weapons in foreign wars, wondering who is this superhero vigilante and on what authority or public’s complicity allows him to be enforcer, judge, and jury, or even what the role of the public media is in deciding what stories are investigated and presented to the public …the Clark Kent and Lois Lane scenes are more as important as the costumed hero parts). And frankly, the role of media and politics in BvS is the most modern and relevant thing for today in a superhero flick.

Ugh. someone could articulate this better.

crocordile

replied to your

post

:


On my twitter feed someone is making a very long…

People complain about man of steel’s fights?? :O

…it’s almost utterly inescapable not just in the DCEU part of fandom, but general internet superhero pop culture. The overwhelming majority of articles about the Marvel films -and even non-Marvel, non-superhero- will include at least one line negatively comparing the subject to Man of Steel, BvS, or DCEU in general. It is a clickbait industry. Look at any MCU or DCEU related post or article or Youtube video and it won’t take very long to find the bashing. You will find FAR MORE people asserting that Superman from MoS wasn’t heroic or optimistic or a proper Superman, that he was ‘emo’ and ‘brooding’, that he caused more destruction and didn’t save anyone, that the ending fight was ‘destruction porn’- criticizing the ending might be the only comment you hear about the film, or something tacked on to an otherwise neutral or positive review- and that above all that movie did it wrong- and the MCU/Avengers did it right.

…and really it comes down to tone, because in MoS the music was somber and epic, there wasn’t any one-liner jokes during the fight instead, Zod was always treated as a serious threat -Loki throughout the Avengers, every scene, he was the victim of slapstick comeuppance so he was never actually a frightening villain. Iron Man leads the giant monsters directly through several buildings, but he quips as he does so and the camera quickly cuts away as the buildings start to fall. In MoS you see the fleeing people covered in a far more realistic amount of dust and damage- Avengers you have a few moments where the Avengers try to get the civilians immediately around them to safety- at least off the screen, so that the audience ignores the reality that so much of inhabited Manhattan is being destroyed- and unlike MoS you don’t even have the implication that Metropolis did have prior warning and time to evacuate – hence the empty office buildings that Zod and Superman fly through during their fight. But the Avengers scenes are brightly light with day-time colors, while in MoS there wasn’t the color filters to bright colors- the opposite in fact with the gray dust of a city with destroyed buildings. MoS purposefully used 9/11 imagery to convey the sense of impact such a superhero fight would have. Avengers purposefully used tone and writing and montages of cheering crowds and media coverage to gloss that over and keep the audience from making those connections lest they get upset and ruin the fun. Saturday Matinee Action Movie sensibilities versus Alien Invasion First Contact sensibilities- and Man of Steel was ripped to shreds because it wasn’t that first tone.

Another point the thread brought up was that the Avengers’ fight was eight minutes longer, but the tone and such disguises that.