Rules: explain why
Ready player one.
That has to be one of the cringiest movies I’ve seen, is tries so hard, too hard with it’s “WE LOVE YOU NERD, YOU’RE SO COOL FOR PLAYING GAMES AND GETTING THIS 80S REFERENCE” message and the whole “corporation bad, the people good” narrative seems written for toddlers… The fan service feels cheap and adds nothing to the story.
Finally, they trying to make the people believe that very attractive girl with a barely visible red tint spot on her face is “ugly”… Like wtf?
Yet it received decent reviews plus being one of the most successful movies of that year.
Oh I have another one. Thor Ragnarok. People loved it because they liked the Thor character and found his earlier films too dull or something, but I loved that they were unapologetically serious about themselves, using comedy in ways that felt very authentic to the characters.
But Ragnarok? It came out later the same year as this excellent essay about bathos, and it was dripping in it. I was hyper tuned to the problem with bathos, and it leaned even harder into that took than nearly any other MCU film did.
What sucks so much is that it had the bones of a really good dramatic story. The Bruce Banner/Hulk storyline had built up over multiple previous films, and come the climax of this film it’s established that he’s in Bruce form now and has enough control to stay that way, but if he transforms into Hulk it’ll be a big deal and he may never be able to be himself again. So they arrive in Asgard at the climax of the film and it’s pretty urgent. In a dramatic moment you can see him steel himself to make the sacrifice; he jumps out of their aircraft onto the rainbow bridge, clearly intending to transform into Hulk to fight Fenris.
…and he splats. Faceplants on the bridge. Still in human form. It’s played for laughs. The ultimate conclusion of Hulk’s story in this movie and probably the most important moment of his arc over the entire MCU to this point, and it’s undercut by a joke. Not even a very funny one. A slapstick joke that would make Charlie Chaplin cringe.
And it means nothing, because the very next shit, he’s transformed anyway and throwing Fenris around like a doll.
Not to mention it undermines the verisimilitude of the movie. I can suspend my disbelief in these movies pretty hard, but Bruce Banner, in human form, is meant to be painfully average, physically speaking. He should have died from that fall, given he didn’t transform. That’s certainly not the worst thing about the moment, but it is was the sprinkling of salt on top of the wound that just made it that little bit worse.
That moment was the worst bit, but the film as a whole was full of lazy humour and bathos, and it was really just the worst example of what was wrong with a lot of MCU movies at the time. I was shocked to hear so few people came away disliking it in the same way I did.
On a vaguely similar note, God of War: Ragnarok was hot garbage that had shit gameplay and worse plot and was a Marvel wannabe (also I detest marvel shit)
The only God of War games I’ve played are the first two, on PS2, which is the only console I’ve ever had (well, apart from the Wii, which barely counts).
I also liked the slightly more serious Thor in the former movies, even though the second one was shit and I have watched it twice and don’t remember anything from it…
Ragnarok was OK, good even but it was the first step into making Thor a comedic joke character that occasionally does hero stuff. I could live with Ragnarok, but Love and Thunder showed that they completely lost it and don’t get what made Thor worth watching. There was some funny jokes in that movie, but apart from that the entire thing feels like a parody of Thor to me. It’s all turned too unserious, which removes any weight from the moments in the movie. Feels like the IQ of everyone just keeps dropping every movie at this point.
Bruce did die from that fall, but they established in the first avenger movie that he can’t die, anytime he does, the Hulk takes over and heals.
And the problem is further minimized when smart hulk is revealed with no effort at all in the next film. I hated it.
I’m sorry but all the previous Thor movies (and the one after this) are ASS. Ragnarok is the only good Thor movie.
Sorry, and you’re entitled to enjoy what you enjoy, but it’s just not good. Fundamentally undermining your own characters within your own story, let alone undermining arcs that have built up over multiple movies before you, at the climax of those characters’ arcs, does not a good movie make.
When your main character is shit and the side characters are almost all worthless? Ragnarok was the right call
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I really don’t like this sentiment. First of all because it doesn’t match my experience on the ground, where many of the most highly-regarded superhero films do take themselves quite seriously. The first two Toby Maguire Spiderman films. First two X-Men films. (And, the third of each of those trilogies also takes itself seriously but is not as good. But the point isn’t that being serious is automatically good, but that being serious is in no way a detriment to being a good film.) The Nolan Batman trilogy and The Batman, as well as The Penguin from a live-action TV perspective. Logan received widespread critical acclaim even outside of the comic book world. Or we can leave the live action realm and look at cartoons like BTAS, whose excellent dark tone basically defined what the title character should be like, and whose early crossover with STAS often received favourable comparisons to the far inferior Batman v Superman live action film two decades later.
But even if there weren’t good counter-examples, I wouldn’t like that sentiment, because it’s essentially admitting “it’s impossible to make a superhero film that is also good”. And I fundamentally do not agree with that defeatist message. The superhero genre is one that is capable of a great range of tones and subject matter and of instilling a wide range of emotions in its audience.
Ragnarok was good though? Entertaining and overall engaging. The original was a snooze fest, dark world is AWFUL and ugly looking. The last one is as bad only with bad jokes and unfinished CGI
While I still just fundamentally disagree with your assessment that “Ragnarok was good though”, what’s definitely true is that calling Ragnarok good is utterly irrelevant in response to this specific comment.
Because this isn’t about Ragnarok. It’s about the notion that comic book adaptations can be taken seriously at all.
How is that any different than Ragnarok?
Most of the jokes landed in Ragnarok and you don’t see Thor jumping like an idiot, he actually has badass moments
Some of the jokes land, “most” is debatable. The few badass and dramatic moments are ruined by being immediately followed by some slapstick bullshit.
100% agree with you. There’s a lot of stinker Marvel movies but Ragnarok is really where they started sucking pretty consistently (with a few exceptions like GOTG 3). I fucking hated that movie almost from the start and felt like I was taking crazy pills afterwards when I saw people’s opinions on it. Fortunately I had a couple other dudes at work who agreed with me that I could vent to. Then the last Thor movie came out and everyone was saying the same shit about that one that I was saying about Ragnarok and I’m just confused.
OMG YES. I just don’t understand it. I didn’t love the 4th Thor movie, but it seemed to me like it had all the same problems that Ragnarok did. If anything, I was happy that it walked back the Jane Foster erasure that Ragnarok had committed. But everyone thought it was terrible even though it did most of the same stuff as the movie they all loved.
Literally everything Taika watiti touches turns to shit. I don’t understand his appeal. He’s like a 14 year old in the head that can’t take anything seriously. I know if I’m watching one of his shows or movies it’s just going to be lame joke after lame joke and then at some point he will remember he needs to get a story in and rush everything.
Also, I can’t stand anything JJ Abram’s touches. I know a lot of people say that now post StarWars disaster, but I remember being very disappointed when I heard he was directing the first sequel and people were acting like I was crazy. I absolutely hate his “mystery box” story telling because I either never cared about “item A” or I know the payoff for discovering what “item A” actually is I’d going to be lame.
Part of the problem is that Abrams has no idea what’s in the box. Basically his entire career was writing the first act of a story with some mystery to solve, handing it off to someone else to finish, then, when they ask what’s in the box, he tells them, “I dunno, figure something out.”
Apart from the two Thors, the only Waititi I’ve seen was Jo Jo Rabbit, which I thought was incredible. It’s a shame someone capable of touching that subject in such a sensitive yet humorous way could turn around and be supportive of genocide elsewhere. But yeah I don’t like either of his Thor movies.
As for Abrams, I completely agree that his mystery box style is terrible. I actually was hopeful when it was announced he’d be doing Star Wars though, especially when it was going to be only the first film, and we didn’t know that there was no planning ahead. I thought that the studio as a whole would rein in his mystery box style by insisting on a plan across 3 movies. And as much as I hated Abrams’ Star Trek films, I thought that their action style might work well for Star Wars in a way it didn’t work for Trek. So I was reasonably hopeful, and I don’t even think I was too let down by the first movie per se. The problem came when he returned for the third movie and revealed that there were no good answers for the mysteries set up at the start (which, admittedly, itself came about because the mysteries had been set up in the first one without thought for how to resolve them). Fuck mystery boxes.
Wtf is wrong with you. I hope you get eaten by the swear wolves, when the vamps bring you as food to the masquerade party, Steve.