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The action scenes were a blast and the family stuff was great, but man, that movie was just totally incoherent from a structural and thematic perspective. What's the takeaway from the gender-role reversal stuff? By the end, they're all just doing heroic things together just like they were at the start, so what's the point of anything? Why does the villain have a bunch of anti-consumerist rants... are they wrong? Right? Just random ideas hurled into the void to seem smarter than it actually is? How does anything about the villain's plan make sense? Superheroes are illegal... so I'm going to make them legal... and then make them ILLEGAL AGAIN ? What the hell does 'superheroes are illegal' even mean in a movie in which Elastigirl is openly doing superheroic things and taking public interviews about them and not being arrested? On the most basic level what is this movie ABOUT?
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Jun 17, 2018 22:00
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Missingnoleader posted:The villains main goal is to make even the thought of super heroes being restored to legal status to be political suicide. To kill all public trust in supers. She blames supers for her parents death cause her father believed that they would save his life more then the safe room would. Screenslaver himself was the puppet to play out the whole legalization process to gather the most prominent political supporters in one place and kill them. But in theory, that's already where we are the start of the movie. Supers are illegal. The pubic doesn't trust them. The villain's entire motivation boils down to THE CURRENT STATUS QUO BUT EVEN MORE SO which is just super weak, and all the moreso when the villain is made the mouthpiece of all the movie's most interesting philosophical elements (the anti-consumerist rants, the questions of pursuing your vision), none of which have anything to do with their actual plan or agenda. It's just.... super muddled and sloppy at best. Missingnoleader posted:Supers being illegal is more in the terms of wearing the costume is fine, but fighting crime is considered vigilantism thus illegal. Being liable for property damage too as supers can be very high property damage. The way its framed, it's likely that even using powers is prohibited which is likely the major contention. Okay but at the point when it's illegal, we see Elastigirl openly using her powers, making no effort to hide her affiliation with Deveraux, and even going on national TV to talk about it. So in what meaningful way is it illegal if you can do it openly all the time with no consequence? General Dog posted:I also have to admit that up until the point that Bob says "you have powers!!!", I thought that they all already knew Jack-Jack had powers. Things like Bob leaving the card table on top of the crib and Helen's line about "even taking care of a normal baby is a lot of work" seem strange if they don't know he has powers. I guess she just literally meant "taking care of our normal baby is a lot of work". Did Rick Dicker never feel the need to let them know after he debriefed Kari the babysitter? Yeah, wait, Helen totally heard the voice message from the babysitter in the first one freaking out about all the crazy things Jack-Jack was doing, didn't she? Z. Autobahn fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Jun 17, 2018 |
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Jun 17, 2018 22:24
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General Dog posted:I understand that dynamic, but it never really goes anywhere other than "Bob is frustrated at first, but he learns to deal with it pretty much on his own", and the plot thread is basically abandoned by the end of act 2. Contrast that to his midlife crisis/pseudo-infidelity story which is the heart of the first movie from beginning to end. Yeah, the weird thing here is that like... the movie sets up all these interesting questions and ideas constantly (a reversal of gender roles! a husband jealous of his wife! Elastigirl's moment to take the lead! Media as a means of control! Consumerism and ease vs quality!) and then does... nothing with any of them. QuoProQuid posted:Bob's Mr. Mom subplot is seemingly resolved by him learning to accept his own weaknesses, whether that be in getting Edna to babysit, learning the "New Math" to help his son, or accepting that he cannot fix his daughter's romantic life.. The message does get a little muddled by the rest of the action, though. Yeah, I thought this is where it was going, but then like having Bob do the much more important heroic thing in the climax really undercut that. The more I think about, the more it feels like the whole third act is just awkwardly grafted on starting from the twist reveal and undercuts/muddles everything that came before it.
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Jun 17, 2018 22:41
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Ghost Leviathan posted:There's a word for that: Reactionary. the villain sees change on the horizon and reacts hard against it. The concept of a reactionary villain is fine, but it doesn't make sense to have the reactionary also be the key architect of the thing they are reacting against. Had she not wanted supers to be legal again she could've just....not done... anything... and the outcome would've been much more safely the same.
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Jun 24, 2018 22:37
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21 Muns posted:I see this complaint a lot, and it seems like people aren't getting that her goal isn't to preserve the status quo, it's to create a much more intensely regimented version of the status quo. If the boat crash plan had worked, it would have singlehandedly done vastly more damage to supers' reputation than the earlier Screenslaver business did to improve it. She wants to change supers from a legally-troubled but popular class to a loathed underclass. She's not just trying to prevent a legal change that will benefit Muslims in the United States, she's trying to fake 9/11. Presumably if she had succeeded she would have gone on to aggressively pursue super oppression and genocide where before they'd just kind of been in legal limbo. Okay but..... if she had goggles that she can put on superheroes and make them do terrible things she could just.... do... that.... in the first place. SatansBestBuddy posted:Well, her brother is the one strongly pursuing getting supers legal again, if she hadn't done anything then they would be legal again, even without her help her brother does have a huge company that he could devote resources towards that goal. She argued with her brother to drop the whole thing but he refused, so she agreed and planned to sabotage the whole idea in the biggest way possible. The movie makes it pretty clear Winston is just a hollow, charismatic empty suit and Evelyn is the real brains behind the company. All the positive stuff that happens is her agenda. Without her support, Winston has nothing.
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Jun 25, 2018 00:17
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