Dawn of Justice and Zootropo-topi-whatever

[daibhidc]

I saw two films in the last week, and enjoyed one of them a lot more than the other. MASSIVE SPOILERS for both.


Batman vs Superman was onto a bad thing from the start for me; I had severe problems with Man of Steel, and I didn't like The Dark Knight Returns much either. So a version of DKR with Mopey Superman ... Well, I wasn't going to be its biggest fan. (This is apparently because I don't read comics. Getting increasingly irritated with Snyder every time he opens his mouth didn't put me in the best frame of mind either...)

But there were things I liked, mostly Wonder Woman and the bits where Clark was actually being a superhero. And Lois doing reportery stuff, I always like that. The cameos of Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg were a bit forced, but fun. The rest of it...

Apparently, Lex Luthor's plan did make sense at some point, but they left that on the cutting room floor so we could get pop-psychology dream sequences and Martha Kent reminding Clark that she and Jonathan always said being a superhero was a stupid idea. Instead, we get that Lex wants to kill Superman because, and he learned Clark's secret identity somehow. (One could perhaps assume that he learned where Kal-El landed through having posession of the Kryptonian ship, but that really just defers the "somehow" slightly, since "Oh, Lex has control of the Kryptonian ship" also comes out of nowhere and is never explained.)

It picked up when it started being based on The Death and Return of Superman, which I did like. Also, ordinary people disappear entirely at this point, which I would normally be against, but given how terrible all the normal people are in this, it came as something as a relief. Seriously, if you're going to present an explosion as causing public sentiment to turn against Superman, maybe show something earlier which suggests everyone doesn't already hate him? (Oh, wait, there's also the people who literally worship him. That's apparently the only way Snyder can imagine anyone not wanting Superman dead, right up until the point when Bruce suddenly decides the coincidence of their mothers' names makes them besties.)

Also, I sat to the end of the credits waiting for a "He's not really dead, obviously" scene and nothing. Now I know he's not really dead, but there were kids in the audience. Is "And Superman's dead" really the right way to end a movie?



Zootropolis (as it's called in the UK), on the other hand, was awesome. I had a severe self-consciousness attack about going to see it on my own, but luckily my nephew wanted to see it as well.

I really liked the detail that had gone into it - the different biomes as districts, the reference to 90% of the population being herbivores and so on. The jokes were good, and the action was impressive.

And the metaphor was interesting. I liked that there isn't an obvious mapping: the predator/prey divide means different things at different times. Judy being told that bunnies can't be cops and given parking duty is obviously an analogy for sexism, but the anti-predator hysteria later is just as obviously racism. (And it turns out to be getting whipped up by a herbivore who wants to rule through fear, which sadly couldn't be more topical. I'm surprised we didn't get a speech about building a wall to keep predators out of the city,)

And unlike BvS, it contained explanations. The whole storyline fitted together nicely, even though there was a lot going on.

So, when do we get a Hopps & Wilde series on Disney XD?

Comments

[scarfman]

I think some of what you didn't see in Dawn of Justice was there but you missed it. E.g., Lex getting control of the Kryptonian ship: that was covered in the scene with the male congressperson, unless the scene with the male congressperson wasn't in the cut that played over there. And the "He's not really dead, obviously" scene was the last shot of the film before blackout and credits, when the dirt on top of the coffin rose into the air; I didn't realize that that's supposedly an allusion to the scene in Man of Steel when he flies for the first time, but I still saw it for the "He's not really dead, obviously" scene that you and I were watching for.

Now, how Lex learned everyone's secret identities, you missed that because it wasn't there, or at least I missed it too whether it was there or not. As for Lex's motivation to set them on each other, that has something to do with the demons in his father's painting (who were also the demons in Bruce's dream) who were later identified to me as Parademons, from Apokalips, and therefore are foreshadowing for the next film when Darkseid inspires the actual formation of the JLA.

As you may know, I despise Man of Steel for being an unlabeled deconstruction rather than an adaptation. So far I don't feel so strongly about Dawn of Justice, but that may just be because I expected that I would enjoy it while I was in the theater and then agree with all the negative criticism leveled at it for the rest of time like its predecessor, and I wasn't wrong. But, like with Donald Trump, I think there's plenty to criticize in what it did or didn't do without mistaking what that is.

[daibhid-c.livejournal.com]

Thank you, I like to have the facts as well.

Thinking back, I wonder if the scene with the male congressperson happened just after I realised that getting the large Coke for 50p extra had been a mistake. I think I only missed about five minutes, but they may have been important ones.

Not noticing that the dirt on the coffin rose into the air, on the other hand, I can only attribute to not paying attention.