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You've done it. You've beaten the movie. You win. Your prize is you no longer have to discuss the film with anyone, at all. Other points of view are Officially Dead.
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Jul 2, 2014 16:33
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Yoshifan823 posted:Note I said "No one who isn't an idiot." Wyoming can be abrasive but I don't believe he is an idiot. He made a good post just above, with the pictures. Also BrianWilly never said anything about plot holes or accuracy. He's talking about directorial choices and the impact they have on the whole piece. When you have characters, even minor ones, say and do things that don't follow from what they just experienced, it creates a certain effect. That's not always a bad or wrong or inappropriate choice to make but BW was accurate in describing the effect it creates. Your take is basically "small choices don't add up to a larger whole! It's just a movie, not a sculpted experience where everything that the director makes happen conveys something!"
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Jul 2, 2014 16:50
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Man. Why are you still arguing this incredibly pedantic crap? The original quote I was responding to claimed that Superman didn't save Jenny and in fact didn't really save anyone because he is a failure. This is objectively false because he destroyed the terraforming machine and literally saved everyone, including Jenny. The author of the original article was blatantly lying to make Superman and by extension the movie seem bad, but it turns out he was wrong and stupid like Yoshifan said! You chose to nitpick my argument by zeroing in on an aspect of it that neither I or the original author made any claims about. You apparently thought this was the best point to plant your flag in because it seemed like the easiest to argue, but to your surprise people are arguing against it and it is so frustrating and  for you.Even if everyone was to concede this point, what does that mean about the original article? Is it now validated because a point the author never made has been successfully argued by you?
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Jul 2, 2014 16:54
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DNS posted:Also BrianWilly never said anything about plot holes or accuracy. He's talking about directorial choices and the impact they have on the whole piece. When you have characters, even minor ones, say and do things that don't follow from what they just experienced, it creates a certain effect. That's not always a bad or wrong or inappropriate choice to make but BW was accurate in describing the effect it creates. Your take is basically "small choices don't add up to a larger whole! It's just a movie, not a sculpted experience where everything that the director makes happen conveys something!" The thing Jenny said did follow from her direct experience, though, since her direct experience was to go from almost dying while alien machines flew around overhead to being alive and safe with an empty-except-for-Superman-holding-Lois sky overhead. You have to begin with the assumption that the character we're talking about is ignorant and stupid to argue that it's actually unreasonable for her to conclude that she was saved by Superman. Now, if you actually want to talk about the film as though it were a film rather than a historical document, you can just take it as given that Jenny represents the takeaway of Superman the man-on-the-ground has developed and not worry about the precise sequence of between-scene events that allowed her to develop that understanding - the back-and-forth between her being about to die and Superman taking down the world engine/scout ship tells you everything you need to know. In general, I am sympathetic to BrianWilly's desire to attack the movie, just perplexed by the way he's going about it. Man of Steel subverts normal Superman stories by telling a completely by-the-numbers Superman story (bad guys come to earth and threaten it, but Superman saves it, the end) whose details and tone don't match up with viewer expectations. The plot is very mechanistic and logical and pretty much every scene arises from the material conditions postulated by the film's premise, so you're only going to flounder if you start asking inane questions about how character X knew Y or why character P didn't do Q. That's all in there already and it's pointless to use it as a proxy for your actual complaints about the main character's decision making being so abstract and calculating or about the consequences of the story's action being so brutal and uncompromising. I liked that Man of Steel unfolded in such a coldly logical way, while good friends of mine found it offputting. This is completely fine and has nothing to do with whether Zod should properly have been able to beat Jor in a fistfight or something. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Jul 2, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2014 17:31
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Ferrinus posted:The thing Jenny said did follow from her direct experience, though, since her direct experience was to go from almost dying while alien machines flew around overhead to being alive and safe with an empty-except-for-Superman-holding-Lois sky overhead. You have to begin with the assumption that the character we're talking about is ignorant and stupid to argue that it's actually unreasonable for her to conclude that she was saved by Superman. Now, if you actually want to talk about the film as though it were a film rather than a historical document, you can just take it as given that Jenny represents the takeaway of Superman the man-on-the-ground has developed and not worry about the precise sequence of between-scene events that allowed her to develop that understanding - the back-and-forth between her being about to die and Superman taking down the world engine/scout ship tells you everything you need to know. I don't feel confident that I can argue from a character motivation perspective whether or not she should've emerged from the rubble hailing Superman a hero or not. We don't know a lot about Jenny, and we get little sense of her POV, so you can probably fudge it in either direction. I will say I believe, going back to your (very good) posts about the final battle's lack of clarity, if she came out from under the rubble and exhibited uncertainty about what happened, who won and why, it would've recalled the cinematic approach to the Zod fight and the film would appear more patterned and purposeful. When we watch the fight that we got, and we presume Jenny saw it too and she comes to the immediate conclusion that Superman is an Epic Hero, it creates a disconnect and gives the appearance of not having been thought through. It's a character telling us one thing after showing us something else.
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Jul 2, 2014 17:40
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What I really want is for Superman to save us from this conversation.
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Jul 2, 2014 17:42
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There is a flying alien going all over the place saving people, the horrible gravity well that was crushing everything has stopped, the alien spacecraft have been blown up by a flying object, this flying alien just floated down for some R&R with Louis. I can't possibly imagined who saved everyone. I am just stumped.
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Jul 2, 2014 17:42
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DNS posted:I don't feel confident that I can argue from a character motivation perspective whether or not she should've emerged from the rubble hailing Superman a hero or not. We don't know a lot about Jenny, and we get little sense of her POV, so you can probably fudge it in either direction. I will say I believe, going back to your (very good) posts about the final battle's lack of clarity, if she came out from under the rubble and exhibited uncertainty about what happened, who won and why, it would've recalled the cinematic approach to the Zod fight and the film would appear more patterned and purposeful. When we watch the fight that we got, and we presume Jenny saw it too and she comes to the immediate conclusion that Superman is an Epic Hero, it creates a disconnect and gives the appearance of not having been thought through. It's a character telling us one thing after showing us something else. Jenny emerges from the rubble before the Zod fight, though (I don't think the Zod fight was supposed to be unclear, incidentally). There's no question in the audience's mind as to what went down with the world engine and the singularity bomb and so on - Superman and The Troops had a plan to defeat the two Kryptonian spaceships and executed that plan pretty much to spec. There's no confusion in the viewer's mind as to what happened, so why should we see confusion in Jenny's? I mean, she probably did come out of the rubble confused and scared and so on and was only able to piece together even a broad-strokes version of what happened when she saw her friend Lois together with Superman in a calm and peaceful endboss arena, but we the audience weren't shown the entire sequence of Jenny's reasoning because the film isn't actually about Jenny.
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Jul 2, 2014 17:45
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Yeah I couldn't remember when the rubble emerging actually happened. I assumed it was at the very end or something.
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Jul 2, 2014 17:46
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Oh man, yeah, it would've been bizarre for some side character to emerge from the ruins and cry "he saved us!" right after the neck snap, both in terms of tone and in terms of logistics.
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Jul 2, 2014 18:12
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Guy A. Person posted:Man. Why are you still arguing this incredibly pedantic crap? This isn't nearly the worst thing about the film, but it's symptomatic of the larger issue wherein the film attempts to depict some sort of significant moment but ends up ruining it with some sort of absurd narrative choice. The Pa Kent tornado scene is another good example of a similar problem. And I'm "still arguing this incredibly pedantic crap" because the excuses people continue to come up with to try to explain away this bit of bad writing are just about as specious and faulty as the scene itself. Case in point: Ferrinus posted:Actually, I didn't make up that Jenny works at the news organization most closely tied to Superman or that you have founded your claims on the premise that she is an idiot. You even said she'd be as likely to believe that Lois saved everyone as Superman! It boggles the mind. I said that it would be as logical for Jenny to believe Lois saved everyone as it would be for her to believe Superman did so, not to mean that it was very likely for her to believe these things, but show that both situations would have been equivocally dubious from her perspective. "Superman is physically present right now so it must mean he stopped the attack" is not a logical deduction, because Lois is also present at the exact same time and place. Moreover, any number of things could have stopped the attack...and did! Superman may have stopped the monstrosity in the Indian Ocean to allow the military planes to do their jobs, but it was the military that actually sent the Kryptonians away, without ending up conveniently located in front of Jenny for her to wonder at. I'm beginning to think that the only way people can defend the problems and dissonances of this film is to flat-out think up storylines that didn't exist and invent background information to fill in the gaps that need to be filled so that things can actually make sense, or else to alleviate the criticism that all the mean ol' naysayers keep on being mean about. Superman didn't cause so many deaths...because Metropolis was virtually empty all this time! Jenny knew exactly what Superman was all about...because she was in secret contact with the US military!
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Jul 2, 2014 18:53
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BrianWilly posted:The claim of tone-deafness from the original article is entirely valid due to the delusional nature of Jenny's realization. Even if you choose to use the same language to describe a completely different flaw, it is still a completely different flaw. The article is saying that the scene was tone-deaf because Jenny's declaration was at odds with what actually happened, hence the scene was supposed to be triumphant but was instead horrific (because Superman failed them). You are saying that the scene is tone deaf because Jenny's declaration is confusing, so while the scene is still triumphant, your immersion was ruined by the character saying something confusing and nonsensical. "Confusing" isn't even really a tone. BrianWilly posted:I'm beginning to think that the only way people can defend the problems and dissonances of this film is to flat-out think up storylines that didn't exist and invent background information to fill in the gaps that need to be filled so that things can actually make sense Jenny says Superman saved them and she is correct, he saved them. Even if you are 100% right in all of your arguments you cannot deny that the preceding sentence is a fact. Those of us who don't believe/care about how nonsensical this is are not "thinking up storylines" or "inventing background information" to make things make sense, they make sense because they are objectively true. We do not need a full backstory to this single line of dialogue. Jenny says Superman saved them and she is correct. Nobody else but you cares how she reached those conclusions because she is speaking the truth regardless.
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Jul 2, 2014 19:31
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BWilly you have really bad problem solving skills. Very few people died in the context of the entire world being saved. Supermen is a metaphorical character. Jenny's rescue by Perry White is intercut with Superman fighting the machine. Supermen represents the good in all humanity, including Perry. Perry was fully prepared to die, but there was a small hope that Superman would stop the machine. This was, again, represented by the intercutting of the two sequences. Perry told Jenny, offscreen, that Superman must have saved them. If you asked Superman, he would say that they saved him, because it was Perry's courage that gave him the power to defeat the machine.
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Jul 2, 2014 19:37
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BrianWilly posted:Nope, wrong. Once again you've either misunderstood the film or are deliberate attempting to be misleading. The Daily Planet is only the news organization "most closely tied" to Superman in the same way that a drop of water is the wettest thing in a desert, which is to say, Superman isn't closely tied to the Daily Planet at this point in the film at all. The only thing he has to do with the Planet is that Lois was pursuing a story on him, which she eventually agreed not to publish! To try to portray this as if the Daily Planet had some kind of inside scoop on his demeanor and activities is a flagrant contortion of the storyline. And even if they did (they didn't), what the heck does that have anything to do with them knowing his activities with the military operation? I gotta tell you, it would be a lot harder to retort you if you didn't do me a solid by contradicting yourself in the space of a breath. Yes, Lois knows everything about Superman and furthermore has a circle of friends at the Planet who've been following her exploits. They've had ample opportunity to read the story she wrote about Superman and then leaked through that internet guy. Lois had plenty of time to get in touch with them (as well as her family members or whatever) between her touchdown in Kansas and her participation in the kamikazi plan. Note, though, that really all this establishes is motive. You don't need any kind of top secret military clearance to know that Superman is a super strong alien who fights the other super strong aliens because he actually, literally did fight the other super strong aliens in a public area, in full view of countless civilians, and to the ultimate approval of the military. That one soldier said "They're calling him Superman, sir." Who's "they"? Are we to believe Superman's been in personal, clandestine contact with howevermany battalions of troops? No, it's just that Superman stopped being a secret as of the brawl in Smallville. Anyone who cared to familiarize themselves had ample chance to. This is insanely obvious. quote:I said that it would be as logical for Jenny to believe Lois saved everyone as it would be for her to believe Superman did so, not to mean that it was very likely for her to believe these things, but show that both situations would have been equivocally dubious from her perspective. "Superman is physically present right now so it must mean he stopped the attack" is not a logical deduction, because Lois is also present at the exact same time and place. Moreover, any number of things could have stopped the attack...and did! Superman may have stopped the monstrosity in the Indian Ocean to allow the military planes to do their jobs, but it was the military that actually sent the Kryptonians away, without ending up conveniently located in front of Jenny for her to wonder at. Right, because you think that Jenny is necessarily an idiot. Jenny would surely assume that the military finally came through for her - even though she and other Metropolis bystanders watched firsthand as US jets not only failed to so much as scratch the alien warship but actually annihilated countless humans in the process of trying (recall that redirected missiles and pinwheeling jet planes always reached way farther than the slowly-growing Kryptonian gravity zone). Maybe this is because she's really gullible or patriotic or something. Also, having seen Superman and Lois descending from the sky, she'd really have no more justification in assuming that Superman was Lois down than to assume that Lois was flying Superman down, because I guess Jenny is also a radical skeptic and/or solipsist who hasn't grasped even the most basic facts about Superman's properties or allegiances. This is consistent with the fact that Lois spends the entire movie wondering at Superman's secret identity, such that her "Welcome to the planet" line is ironic only to we in the audience, establishing the great privilege our viewpoint has over that of any of the human characters. The problem here is that you're carrying assumptions about comic book characters over to movie characters, specifically that every human in a Superman story is by necessity an incurious moron who'll never actually reach independent conclusions about things because that would interfere with their ability to be exposited at. Since Man of Steel doesn't need to churn out a new story every month it can afford to be basically charitable even to its least powerful, least important characters, and afford to them the basic dignity of deducing that two and two make four. quote:I'm beginning to think that the only way people can defend the problems and dissonances of this film is to flat-out think up storylines that didn't exist and invent background information to fill in the gaps that need to be filled so that things can actually make sense, or else to alleviate the criticism that all the mean ol' naysayers keep on being mean about. Superman didn't cause so many deaths...because Metropolis was virtually empty all this time! Jenny knew exactly what Superman was all about...because she was in secret contact with the US military! See, none of this is true. No one needs to be in secret contact with anything. This stuff follows obviously from the events of the movie... to anyone who doesn't have a preexisting axe to grind with the themes and tones of the movie, such that they deliberately forget, misread, or just plain fail to extrapolate from the incredibly simple stuff that happens onscreen. Like I said, criticisms of "plot holes" - and I'm not just talking about Man of Steel, here - are fundamentally dishonest. They always boil down to "I'm going to pretend that the movie screen is actually a window into a really-existing and internally-coherent alternate universe... except for the part of that universe I don't like." It's, like, an attempt to summon the collective will by which some offending element can be blasted from canon. But that doesn't work - if you want to start being empirical about it, you have to be empirical the whole way through, taking events that didn't make sense to you at first blush and figuring out how to explain them rather than whining about not wanting to explain them.
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Jul 2, 2014 21:52
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Guy A. Person posted:Jenny says Superman saved them and she is correct. Nobody else but you cares how she reached those conclusions because she is speaking the truth regardless. Well that certainly does explain a lot. Just to be clear, Jenny's declaration isn't confusing...not in the way you suggest. I understand what she's meant to do perfectly. She just does it in a way that makes no sense. Characters doing things they shouldn't logically do is a form of bad writing. Superman gaining the trust of Metropolis, if not necessarily the rest of the human race, is one of the key moments of his story. How exactly he manages to do this should therefore be a key moment of his character that is satisfyingly revelatory upon scrutiny. And the way he does this in MoS is...well, evidently he kinda just shows up at the right place and at the right time and someone, who should be in no way informed of these events, simply makes a haphazard deduction as to what he's been up to that just manages to actually be correct by pure happenstance of Truthiness or something.
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Jul 2, 2014 21:54
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It isn't the film's fault you can't make even the most basic of deductions.
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Jul 2, 2014 22:13
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sleepingbuddha posted:They specifically say 1300 in TF4, which just seems absolutely loving ridiculous. Maybe he forgot to add a 'per hour' to that number. However, to derail a bit, every Transformers movies almost feels like it exists in a different universe than the one that came before it. Given how well Chicago seemed to recover in just a few years, in TF4's reality the Battle for Chicago was just a Mission City-level war.
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Jul 2, 2014 22:32
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I just watched this movie for the first time a few hours ago and I have to agree with BrianWilly, although certainly not with the manner he's trying to get his point across. The way the events unfold is that Superman destroys the terraformer and flies to the other side of the planet, knocks a gunship out of the way or something so the military guy from Law & Order can crash his ship into other gravity machine. Superman gets up out of the rubble after Lois begins falling and he rescues her and sets her down and that's when Jenny gets up to exclaim Superman saved everyone. It ends up feeling really weird because you know Superman just got there. Speaking of the gravity machine ship thing, I guess the producers from the '90s who wanted a mechanical spider in their Superman movie from Kevin Smith got their wish. 
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Jul 3, 2014 04:44
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setafd posted:The way the events unfold is that Superman destroys the terraformer and flies to the other side of the planet, knocks a gunship out of the way or something so the military guy from Law & Order can crash his ship into other gravity machine. Superman gets up out of the rubble after Lois begins falling and he rescues her and sets her down and that's when Jenny gets up to exclaim Superman saved everyone. It ends up feeling really weird because you know Superman just got there. You know he just got there. Jenny only knew she was saved by someone, then saw Superman saving someone. But of course BrianWilly is correct and Lous logically is just as likely to have saved everybody as the guy who can fly.
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Jul 3, 2014 08:39
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This has got to be the worst thread on the whole forum.
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Jul 3, 2014 10:34
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Grendels Dad posted:You know he just got there. Jenny only knew she was saved by someone, then saw Superman saving someone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTl81iYhIJM&t=66s
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Jul 3, 2014 11:14
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Grendels Dad posted:You know he just got there. Jenny only knew she was saved by someone, then saw Superman saving someone. Holy crap Lous
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Jul 3, 2014 15:47
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The first official pic of Superman in Dark Knight Rises:
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Jul 3, 2014 16:32
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Going to guess that's Gotham.
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Jul 3, 2014 16:44
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That's clearly Sin City.
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Jul 3, 2014 17:11
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Even from that skyline, Gotham does not look like a place I want to live. I'm looking forward to this. 
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Jul 3, 2014 17:12
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Nightmare Superman
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Jul 3, 2014 17:19
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Ferrinus posted:Nightmare Superman Superman in Crime Alley
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Jul 3, 2014 17:22
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Everybody seems so drat sad in this movie. Wanna cheer Superman up.HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Superman in Crime Alley If they figured out a way to twist it so that Superman was somehow responsible for the death of Batman's parents it would be loving amazing.
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Jul 3, 2014 17:26
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Mister J posted:Everybody seems so drat sad in this movie. Wanna cheer Superman up. America is still in a national state of mourning after Superman killed all those people.
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Jul 3, 2014 17:36
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Cavill's looking a lot older. I think that hairstyle ages him.
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Jul 3, 2014 17:50
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:America is still in a national state of mourning after Superman killed all those people. World Engine was an inside job.
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Jul 3, 2014 17:52
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Luminous Obscurity posted:Even from that skyline, Gotham does not look like a place I want to live. Yeah, even though that's a temp background, I imagined they used it because it's not far off from what the CGI Gotham will look like in the finished product. Looks like there's oil refineries every other block.
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Jul 3, 2014 17:54
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DNS posted:Cavill's looking a lot older. I think that hairstyle ages him. I thought it looked a bit different. I really like it. It brings some gravitas.
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Jul 3, 2014 17:55
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setafd posted:Speaking of the gravity machine ship thing, I guess the producers from the '90s who wanted a mechanical spider in their Superman movie from Kevin Smith got their wish. "They told me it was unfilmable! They told me a giant space squid would look ridiculous, they said it would ruin the whole tone of my comic book movie! I'll show them, heh heh, I'll show them ALL!" But really, a giant mechanical spider isn't exactly a ridiculous thing for Superman to fight, Braniac and Hank Henshaw have both taken the form of mechanical spiders before. DNS posted:Cavill's looking a lot older. I think that hairstyle ages him. That shot looks to me like they don't want to make this movie happen directly after Man of Steel, maybe they're going to say this is five or ten years after MoS and Superman has been around the block a few times. scuba school sucks fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Jul 3, 2014 |
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Jul 3, 2014 23:06
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Kush posted:The first official pic of Superman in Dark Knight Rises: This looks very much like a painting and im failing to understand why anyone hasn't seen that but instead are gooning out about how old he looks and how awesome Gotham is etc...
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Jul 3, 2014 23:15
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What makes you think people have failed to see that?
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Jul 3, 2014 23:15
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It looks like a bad painting that would be on some foil embossed trading cards from the 90s.
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Jul 3, 2014 23:18
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Network Pesci posted:
It looks very similar to the original poster of Man of Steel.
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Jul 3, 2014 23:21
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 14:35 |
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:What makes you think people have failed to see that? Posts
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Jul 3, 2014 23:31
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