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 Bong Joon-ho's latest effort, a Sci-Fi tale of Mickey, a regular joe who's a part of a colony of settlers venturing to a new planet. Mickey get's aboard the crew by volunteering to be an "Expendendable" or someone who can be killed over and over and over again – because he can be reprinted. Watch Robert Patterson get injected with poison! Watch Robert Patterson die horribly in space! Watch Robert Patterson embrace his inner Nic Cage and deliver a slapstick performance that is legit kind of charming and funny. Will the colony survive the thinly veiled Trump surrogate leading them on? Will Mickey escape his sisyphean existence? Will Mickey choose his aggro cop girlfriend or the spoiled girl who's heart grows four sizes? This is a dang fun Sci-Fi, and feels like a breath of fresh air in that it isn't Alien or Predator. The world building of the space colony is a delight, and the alien species they run into is adorable. Worth a watch! CatstropheWaitress fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Mar 12, 2025 |
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Mar 12, 2025 22:30
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needed more mickeys imo, not nearly enough mickeys
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Mar 12, 2025 22:42
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Where are the other 8 or 9 posters? I suppose technically it was toxic like 5 times? I think the movie is flawed but I still liked it a lot. Ruffalo was too over the top for me (though Toni Collette was on point as always) and the end had too much stampeding around.
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Mar 12, 2025 22:44
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I left the theater thinking this was an okay movie but the more I think about it the more angry I get at how much it squandered the premise. Like the metaphor feels like it should be that the space ship is a little society and the underclass is literally just one guy who does everything contrasted with the one guy at the top who is a useless parasite. But mickey basically doesn't do anything. His role on the ship seems 99% identical to everyone else's beyond being a lab test animal they kill. (also the girlfriend seems like she was missing some sort of arc or point. Like the ship is ultra white supremacist and she's the only minority visibly on the entire ship but seems absolutely fine. also she loves the space drugs from the space drug plot that never goes anywhere. also it feels like when they show why she likes mickey the answer is 'she loves his suffering" because she apparently loves any old mickey even if one with a totally different personality shows up.)
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Mar 12, 2025 23:05
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Saw this Monday night going in blind other than seeing one of the trailers a while ago. Only Bong I've seen so far is Parasite (which I also saw theatrically and really liked). It's only March and I'll be surprised if another film this year tops Mickey 17 as my favorite of 2025. This has so many things I love about cinema. We get a central performance from Robert Pattinson that is nothing less than spectacular. He's already proven himself to be one of the finest actors of this generation, but getting to see him flex his comedy muscles is quite a sight. I'd compare it to Peter Sellers' best work, with another incredible voice he's crafted and this sort of physicality. There's one particular scene that had me sore from laughter, despite the absolute agony Mickey is going through. How does an actor portray such pain while also making it funny? Then you add in the fact he's playing multiple iterations of himself, inclusive of the dual role for the latter half of the film. While this is essentially a science fiction film, it's really more of a satirical screwball comedy that happens to be sci-fi. One filmmaker I kept thinking of, especially in terms of the blending of existentialism and science fiction is Don Hertzfeldt, with his equally darkly hilarious World of Tomorrow trilogy. And even the narration in the first act by Mickey reminds me of It's Such a Beautiful Day. And sure, the political undertones probably aren't that subtle, but I was cackling the whole time seeing Mark Ruffalo playing such a gross and veneered oligarch. Sure, it's not a subtle performance, but he looks like Abel Ferrara doing a Trump impression. Toni Collette plays an even more evil character doing a Nancy Reagan. What the hell did she do with her fingers to make them look so gross? You also get Steven Yeun in a largely deadpan performance, which makes some moments even funnier like the opening scene of the film. I didn't recognize a lot of the other cast members, but there's some wonderful characterizations here. Patsy Ferran with those adorable glasses and bubbly personality as she boasts a certain diabolical "record" for one of the Mickeys. Naomi Ackie is wonderful as Nasha, especially getting some great bits in the last act. Visually, I loved every minute of this. Shot by master cinematographer Darius Khonji, this is exactly the sort of film worth seeing in a theater. Everything looks so real and lived-in, gross. Hopefully nobody tries to re-create any of the food from this movie. These are just some quick thoughts, but it's been a while since I've seen a film that I enjoyed this much that just had me laughing so much while also thinking "lol, we're so hosed"
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Mar 12, 2025 23:10
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Have not seen it yet (hopefully I'll be able to catch it while it's at one of the decent theaters here) but I appreciate that whenever Bong gets a Hollywood Budget with Hollywood Actors his impulse is "okay now let's do a silly one  "
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Mar 13, 2025 02:34
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Ruffalo's character isn't completely Trump because him and his wife actually care about each other.
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Mar 13, 2025 06:34
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I thought there were some strong RFK jr vibes as well, and of course his bearing and presentation is very Mussolini. If he was supposed to be 100% Trump he would have had to have been way more prissy. Trump's not grabbing a handgun and offering to kill someone personally, he'd be skittering off like a cartoon that just saw a mouse.
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Mar 13, 2025 12:41
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I think that's just Ruffalo's go to behavior for prick. It's not too much different than the way he acted in Poor Things.
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Mar 13, 2025 14:33
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I said this already in the first impressions thread but I was really disappointed in this movie. Pattinson is good, but the script is incredibly sloppy with dropped threads and pointless subplots that go nowhere. It’s not actually very funny and the satire is completely toothless. The cool premise is totally wasted. It also has major pacing issues, this movie drags like crazy. The final act is interminable. When we got home from the theatre we rewatched Snowpiercer and that movie slaps, it’s propulsive and is filled with memorable imagery and creative sequences. It’s also a lot more pointed in its satire. Mark Ruffalon in Mickey 17 is a poor substitute for Tilda Swinton.
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Mar 13, 2025 22:26
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Cat Census posted:
I didn't get any impression of the purity thing being a white supremacist thing. More about aesthetics and genetic purity, not racial. There are also other minorities within the crew, Steve Yeun and Steve Park notably. I also saw lots of minority extras throughout, including goons of Ruffalo at the end. I didn't see that theme at all to be honest.
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Mar 13, 2025 22:45
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I'd have to rewatch to be sure but in one of the scenes with Ruffalo I think it's after the cave in that kills Kai's gf and he is yelling at Mickey in the voice call but it also could have been at the dinner definitely says something about a pure white race/colony but like you said there's minorities on the ship that don't seem to be any more oppressed than anyone else on the ship so I chalked that up to a dropped thread. I also said a bit about the movie in the first thoughts after finishing thread but I left the theater thinking it was an alright movie but the more I thought about it and the more I watched other movies over the same weekend I have come to the conclusion I didn't really like it at all. I have never been a person that cares too much about pacing, I like long movies and I generally enjoy it when a movie takes its time and meanders with not plot relevant scenes to make everything feel more real and lived in so while I see what people are talking about WRT the pacing issues and the third act it didn't bother me too much. I don't feel like the clones thing, the core concept of the movie, was used enough and barely mattered at all most of the movie. R Pat ruled and I thought he did great as every iteration of Mickey and the aliens were very cute, just so I don't seem like a total hater. The main things I didn't like about the movie were that I found it to be extremely not funny and there seemed to be entire chunks of the movie missing. Basically every time the movie tried to be funny I thought it sucked really bad, the whole sauce thing was really unfunny and made even worse by it being a reoccurring bit for the entire movie and driving parts of the story. Half the punchlines of the movie seemed to be another character going "huh, looks like Mickey is going to die/just died/just got cloned, time to make a comment that undermines the severity of what just happened. Isn't that wacky and morbid?" Basically everything that happened with the Kai character felt like it was from another cut of the movie, all the "are you guys open?" "okay give me one of the Mickeys" stuff felt incredibly sudden and out of place and Nasha's reaction to it and really everything with her too had me feeling like I zoned out and missed like 30 minutes of the movie. I honestly liked the third act more than the rest of the movie, it for the most part finally felt like it was a coherent story without a lot of chopped-togetherness that the rest of the runtime had. At least until the very end with that dream sequence that came out of nowhere and wasn't a callback/payoff of anything else in the movie and once again had me wondering if I had somehow missed a chunk of the movie. Nazzadan fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Mar 14, 2025 |
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Mar 13, 2025 23:55
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Nazzadan posted:I'd have to rewatch to be sure but in one of the scenes with Ruffalo I think it's after the cave in that kills Kai's gf and he is yelling at Mickey in the voice call but it also could have been at the dinner definitely says something about a pure white race/colony but like you said there's minorities on the ship that don't seem to be any more oppressed than anyone else on the ship so I chalked that up to a dropped thread. I think he calls her generally superior (hence the part where she's like "so all I am is a womb?") and then at the end when they've got the baby skewered above the magic lava pit, he says something about purity but I don't think there's anything explicit about it being racial purity. I think it's obviously supposed to call to mind white supremacy to the audience but it isn't in-universe literally white supremacy. In universe I think it's a generic kind of purity/supremacy that isn't defined because it's allegorical to Christian nationalism and white supremacy without having to be confined to those specific current real world problems.
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Mar 14, 2025 00:26
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The symbol for the guy's flag was flat out an olatha rune. The aryan symbol.
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Mar 14, 2025 00:47
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Yeah there was a ton of Nazi imagery. He doesn't say anything in the text about white supremacy, which is why "the only POC character" (ignoring all the other POC characters) isn't yelling at him when he talks about the colony being racially pure - he doesn't say racially pure.
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Mar 14, 2025 00:54
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he also repeatedly refers to Niflheim as their "pure white planet," it's very intentionally skirting just around the issue
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Mar 14, 2025 01:45
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The line is "The Earth's beyond saving with all its muddied people. But you, you're something special and I'm creating a world on a pure white planet full of superior people like you and us.", c'mon, it is not subtle
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Mar 14, 2025 02:09
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Yeah it's got the subtlety of a freight train. It's not supposed to be in universe white supremacy but it's screaming to us, the audience "HEY IT'S WHITE SUPREMACY, LIKE ALL THOSE CURRENT FASCIST FUCKS IN ALL YOUR GOVERNMENTS! GET IT! THEY'RE NAZIS, JUST LIKE YOUR NAZIS!"
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Mar 14, 2025 02:12
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Baron von Eevl posted:Yeah it's got the subtlety of a freight train. It's not supposed to be in universe white supremacy but it's screaming to us, the audience "HEY IT'S WHITE SUPREMACY, LIKE ALL THOSE CURRENT FASCIST FUCKS IN ALL YOUR GOVERNMENTS! GET IT! THEY'RE NAZIS, JUST LIKE YOUR NAZIS!" it is white supremacy in universe too
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Mar 14, 2025 02:20
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I love how goofy this is. Mickey is basically a slapstick character trapped in a sci-fi film.
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Mar 14, 2025 02:37
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I do kind of wish the third act of this went somewhat differently. I was with and really loving the movie up until the moment where his girlfriend accosts the other girl for trying to sleep with Mickey 17. Could kind of feel that the sci-fi part of this story was over, which felt like a shame given how strong all that stuff had been. Then in a little bit came the confrontation scene and I felt like I was watching a Dr.Who episode. That show can be good, but jesus christ I just can't do any more scenes of people awkwardly standing around as the good guy and bad guy trade grandiose statements. It just kills me and always feels like the movie is just grinding to a halt. There needs to be some choreography for these things – apple and oranges but I think of the Immortan Joe/Dementus negotiation in Furiosa as a better example of this. There's back and forth, constantly interesting things to be watching, stakes that go back and forth in spite of the power imbalance... people yelling at each other rather trite stuff has me drifting off. It didn't help that the way characters are moved around from the arrest moving forward just feels like checking boxes off. Mickey gets to have his revenge on Glenn without killing him and still gets arrested. The baddie agrees to send him outside so he can have a 1 on 1 with the aliens. The baddie decides to join him so he can be killed in a way that doesn't harm anyone else and ties up that plot nicely. The seams just felt really visible. The fakeout was doubly weird. Came out of nowhere, never felt real, and was wildly uncomfortable in a way the rest of the movie hadn't been. It's all nitpicks, but it was a bummer given how strong the first 2/3 had been imo. Still overall dug it. We should get more slapstick sci-fi that doesn't snooze with the world building side of it.
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Mar 14, 2025 02:59
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Saw this last night and enjoyed it a lot although it felt like the mood in the theater had dipped at the end. It's definitely not at the level Parasite was but it was still highly enjoyable and full of extremely good stuff. I think the one major misstep around Marshall was having some of his supporters early on wearing red (well and blue) ballcaps with slogans. That is so deeply linked with Trump at this point that after that point you are subconsciously comparing him to Trump even as their methods and personalities and inner circles/followings differ drastically from each other. Cat Census posted:(also the girlfriend seems like she was missing some sort of arc or point. Like the ship is ultra white supremacist and she's the only minority visibly on the entire ship but seems absolutely fine. also she loves the space drugs from the space drug plot that never goes anywhere. also it feels like when they show why she likes mickey the answer is 'she loves his suffering" because she apparently loves any old mickey even if one with a totally different personality shows up.) So two things: one is I don't think you need to "explain" her drug use, drugs are fun and people use them, the drug subplot was mainly just to show Timo continuing his schemes in this new setting (and also why Timo was eager to get back the flamethrower while abandoning Mickey). Also I think assuming she loves him for his suffering is reversing the causality and leading to a kind of cynical read. You might argue that they don't show enough of their budding relationship to justify but it's clear from the "reveal" scene that she is comforting him during his suffering because she loves him and not the other way around. I do think we could have gotten more of an explanation on how each Mickey has a slightly different personality (maybe based on the method of his previous death?) but at the same time I don't think this negates Nasha's feelings, they have a shared history, inside jokes, mutual attraction, etc. People in general can have different personalities and moods and phases over the course of their lives and typically healthy relationships just adapt to these changes, the fact that there are more clear delineations in Mickey's case wouldn't necessarily mean that his girlfriend would dump him, any more than a real life relationship would end just because one of the partners had some life altering experience that changed how they acted.
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Mar 14, 2025 16:14
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Piell posted:it is white supremacy in universe too Yeah ethnostates can and will rely on an underclass to handle the undesirable jobs. Especially if they have seized the means of reproduction. Unless I missed one, Marshall talks to or about three women that aren't his wife. Two of them are white and specifically calls out their role in repopulation. Nasha is treated as a disappointing pet or tool. One that talks too much and needs to be muzzled.
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Mar 14, 2025 16:56
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Nazzadan posted:I'd have to rewatch to be sure but in one of the scenes with Ruffalo I think it's after the cave in that kills Kai's gf and he is yelling at Mickey in the voice call but it also could have been at the dinner definitely says something about a pure white race/colony but like you said there's minorities on the ship that don't seem to be any more oppressed than anyone else on the ship so I chalked that up to a dropped thread. I think this sums up a good deal of my feelings on the movie. A couple of the gags worked, the aliens revealing their entire strategy was a complete bluff, Pattinson's physical comedy, but I didn't care much for the rest. I felt like this movie did way too much "tell, don't show". A good deal of Mickey's narration just repeats information that's already being shown to the audience without really adding much. Tons of events and happenings that are resolved in a single line of narration from Mickey, and then we just move on to the next scene.
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Mar 14, 2025 19:07
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It sucked OP and the heavy handed trump references were painful
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Mar 14, 2025 20:17
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Guy A. Person posted:
Like, it's fine to have a drug plot and have it go no where. And it's fine for there to be a white supremacy subplot and not matter directly to the black character. And it's fine she liked him instantly but not for looks or status or money but also we learn not for his personality either. But like, at some point that is the core problem with the movie. Nothing goes anywhere. She's just kinda there. the printing is just kinda there. everything that could be the story is just kinda there.
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Mar 14, 2025 22:32
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Toxic Mental posted:It sucked OP Noted quote:and the heavy handed trump references were painful I made peace with this when he got re-elected. Red Hats will continue to show up in movies, tv shows for the near future. Share (I imagine) your opinion that they're lazy indicators of stuff that could really be left to dialog and behavior to signify, but they're here and will be here for the long term.
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Mar 14, 2025 22:57
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CatstropheWaitress posted:Noted You're likely right but I don't see them being the antagonists much longer. It was likely too late to change this film but every American studio will bend the knee at some point in the next few years if they haven't already.
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Mar 15, 2025 05:19
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My main complaint with this movie is I misread the runtime as 1 hour and 37 minutes and so as the movie approached two hours started thinking this was the worst paced movie in the world and felt so much longer than it was. The movie itself I thought was very funny but the wrap up was totally unnecessary and could have been cut, especially for those of us who had hosed up reading the run time. Warner Bros needs to sell some creepers to recoup the budget.
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Mar 15, 2025 05:24
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Cat Census posted:But like, at some point that is the core problem with the movie. Nothing goes anywhere. She's just kinda there. the printing is just kinda there. everything that could be the story is just kinda there. The Kai storyline is probably the worst offender here. What even is her character about? That plotline goes absolutely nowhere.
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Mar 15, 2025 07:51
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Blisster posted:The Kai storyline is probably the worst offender here. What even is her character about? That plotline goes absolutely nowhere. Kai and the scientist who comes up with the translator should probably have been combined into one character IMO. it really feels like there was an earlier version of the script where Kai was a more important character that ended up getting cut Piell fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Mar 15, 2025 |
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Mar 15, 2025 20:59
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Piell posted:Kai and the scientist who comes up with the translator should probably have been combined into one character IMO. it really feels like there was an earlier version of the script where Kai was a more important character that ended up getting cut This is what I was thinking too. Those two are actually interesting too, when you consider their reactions to Mickey. Dorothy, the scientist, comes across at first as a bit uncaring like the rest (being excited to tell that one Mickey he's the one with the shortest lifespan), but then seems to develop an appreciation for him after he reveals he has picked up on the creepers language, which makes her relate as that's what she's into. And maybe even earlier as she was the one who noticed he was being printed without a tray to catch him and tried to stop his fall. Kai is just weird, she just vanishes from the last third of the movie and then is in the crowd at the end. It really does feel like something was cut. Overall I thought the movie was ok up until the last third, the bit from when Mickey 18 tries to kill Ruffalo on. Another odd thing was it was definitely a film about class, but Mickey is somehow the entire underclass by himself, which just feels weird. Also, if Mickey was supposed to do those dangerous jobs as he was expendable, why when Jennifer was killed did non-expendable crew go with him?
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Mar 15, 2025 23:46
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Was the scene with the failed assassination of Space Trump really filmed before the eerily similar attempt on Terrestrial Trump ? Because if so that's one hell of a coincidence
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Mar 16, 2025 00:18
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FreudianSlippers posted:Was the scene with the failed assassination of Space Trump really filmed before the eerily similar attempt on Terrestrial Trump ? Warner sat on the film for about a year, so yes.
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Mar 16, 2025 00:30
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FreudianSlippers posted:Was the scene with the failed assassination of Space Trump really filmed before the eerily similar attempt on Terrestrial Trump ? I thought so too at first but it being a parallel to Mickey 18's burn to "tell them apart" makes it make more sense on reflection. e: Or was the assassination attempt done before the multiples situation was known? I forget
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Mar 16, 2025 02:08
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I like that the burning hot poker was in like four different scenes including one where it wasn’t in the lava pit and was just hanging out somewhere else glowing anyway. Like someone really extremely liked that prop and wanted it on screen as much as possible
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Mar 16, 2025 02:49
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Those lava death pits really need tighter security and safety precautions.
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Mar 16, 2025 05:04
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I, Butthole posted:I thought so too at first but it being a parallel to Mickey 18's burn to "tell them apart" makes it make more sense on reflection. The poker scar was part of his retribution for the shot.
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Mar 16, 2025 13:20
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FreudianSlippers posted:Was the scene with the failed assassination of Space Trump really filmed before the eerily similar attempt on Terrestrial Trump ? The part where Kamala Harris screams at Trump about being a loser and going away would have played a lot better if Trump had actually lost. I found it bizarre that the film justified the religious conservatives’ beliefs about multiples being soulless killers by making Mickey 18 an aggressive psychopath.
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Mar 16, 2025 14:06
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ANOTHER SCORCHER posted:The part where Kamala Harris screams at Trump about being a loser and going away would have played a lot better if Trump had actually lost. How does it justify? Is he really any more of a psychopath than Marshall and his wife? If I had to die and be regenerated 17 times, I don't know if my mind would be in the best place. But at least Mickey 18 wasn't chopping off the tails of puppies to make sauce Egbert Souse fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Mar 16, 2025 |
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Mar 16, 2025 14:34
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