DC Superheroes in Film (1943 - 2024) (Page 17 of 19)

I've seen the Schumacher cut of BATMAN FOREVER in the theatre of the mind -- which is to say I've read the adult and junior novelizations which adapted the original script and not the final cut that went to theatres. The original cut is definitely an improvement in specific and isolated areas: there's a more psychological arc for Bruce Wayne with an amnesia arc where he loses all memory of Batman, remembering only his Bruce Wayne identity, and has to decide whether or not he wants to be Batman again.

There's a peculiar and poorly-conceived (but beautifully dialogued) resolution where Bruce is haunted by guilt, feeling that as a child, he pleaded for his parents to take him to a movie and if he hadn't, they wouldn't have been robbed and murdered -- and the resolution is Bruce finding his father's journal and realizing that his parents didn't take him to the movie, that he has remembered it wrong, and that his parents' death wasn't his fault (but it wouldn't have been his fault regardless!) -- and he puts the Batsuit on again.

There are darker scenes throughout the film, but they exist within the day-glo, Vegas-style look of BATMAN FOREVER surrounding it, so the overall tone of the film wouldn't have changed. It wouldn't have been a better film, just a longer one and a more complete one. It wouldn't have been less silly; it would have just had the same silliness spaced out and diluted with darker scenes.

I liked FOREVER when I was a kid. I can't imagine what I'd think of it today. I found the first two Burton movies joyless and depressing and Batman was barely in them. Call me crazy, but I think the title character should actually be the star.

I remember enjoying BATMAN FOREVER: Val Kilmer was convincing as a troubled and capable warrior. Chris O'Donnell was a bit too old to play Robin but very enjoyable. The costumes were cool and I craved all the action figures of Batman in the sonar suit and Robin in his garb. The Riddler was disturbing. Two Face didn't really stand out to me. Kilmer and Nicole Kidman had amazing chemistry. The action was exciting although a bit random at times with Batman randomly driving around and then being attacked in a coordinated assault (because the scenes had been moved around). I remember liking the novelization from Peter David a lot.

There's a lot of silliness in FOREVER that's at odds with the psychological tone of the film. Two Face is just a clownish presence. The henchmen are irksome. The competing clowning between Two Face and the Riddler is annoying. But the silliness seems quite isolated unlike BATMAN AND ROBIN where it went crazy with Batman attending charity balls.

I didn't consider the film to be in continuity with the Burton movies as Bruce says in this film that he's never been in love when he was clearly in love with Vicky Vale in BATMAN and certainly infatuated with Catwoman in BATMAN RETURNS.

It wasn't a great exploration of Batman, but it had all the charm and fun of creators playing with their Batman action figures and there was care and thought put into the story such as hiring puzzle creator and crossword designer Will Shortz to write all of the Riddler's riddles. It's a good effort and a fun time. It isn't THE Batman movie for me, but compared to the unpleasant BATMAN, the bleak BATMAN RETURNS, the obnoxious BATMAN AND ROBIN and that racist BATMAN TV serial, BATMAN FOREVER hits the dizzying heights of good enough.

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Matt Reeves' THE BATMAN will apparently have a TV show called GOTHAM CENTRAL. No word on whether Robert Pattinson (Batman) and Jeffrey Wright (Commissioner Gordon) will appear. But -- it'd make sense if they didn't. How often would any police officer be in the same room as the city's police commissioner? How often would any cop encounter Batman in person?

If Batman were to appear, from the point of view of the police, wouldn't Batman be a distant or shadowy figure glimpsed only in silhouette? And to communicate with any GOTHAM CENTRAL characters through notes? It makes more sense for Batman to (not) appear in this fashion, played by a barely on-camera stuntman, than it did for, say, Dick Grayson's flashbacks to his childhood in TITANS where Bruce lives in the same house as Dick but inexplicably chooses to talk to him through handwritten letters.

Snyder cut trailer: https://youtu.be/z6512XKKNkU

I'm not a huge fan of Zack Snyder, but I think that when a studio hires Zack Snyder, they should expect a Zack Snyder movie instead of a Joss Whedon movie and as much as I enjoyed JUSTICE LEAGUE (and I enoyed it a lot) -- WB, Geoff Johns, Diane Nelson and Jon Berg should have just let Snyder make the movie he was hired to make and let his team complete it instead of bringing in Whedon to change it. Would a Snyder film have been more successful? It would have at least had the benefit of standing or falling on its on merits.

I'm not that keen on THE SNYDER CUT personally -- but it's important to remember that Snyder's approach has an audience and is very popular. It just wasn't popular to the point of earning the one billion in box office that WB hoped for. But a lot of people watched and enjoyed MAN OF STEEL and BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (actual title) and a lot of people wanted THE SNYDER CUT. The majority of the people who watched JUSTICE LEAGUE were not happy with it. The only people I know to enjoy JUSTICE LEAGUE are you, me, Informant and Kevin Smith. I've personally never met or talked to anyone else who had any fondness for it.

Snyder, to me, is like Bryan Singer: Singer came aboard the X-MEN film for 2000 and he didn't like the X-Men. He found the costumes, codenames, backstories and the superhero universe to be ridiculous.

A lot of the X-MEN movie is making an effort to be serious, to take these absurd concepts and place them in a world that resembles our own except for the one fantasy element -- mutants -- spurring all other fantasy elements. And redressing them in a genre that Singer actually did like. So you have the school for mutants and technology and surroundings that, if they aren't like our world, exist due to mutants -- but everything else is close if not identical to our reality and with the look of a high tech military espionage thriller rather than the superhero genre.

Snyder's genre is horror. And with MAN OF STEEL and BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (actual title), he made a superhero film both times that used the style of a horror film, redressing superheroes in that style. Whether that worked or not is purely subjective, but JUSTICE LEAGUE suffers from Snyder's horror aesthetic having been ripped out of the film, replaced with Batman and Superman cracking jokes and pretty much every surviving frame of Snyder's film having been recoloured and brightened. The way in which a story is told is just as important as the content itself and for people who liked MAN OF STEEL and BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (actual title), the SNYDER CUT version of JUSTICE LEAGUE will offer a satisfactory conclusion.

I've personally never met or spoken to any of those people outside of Informant, but they exist in sizable numbers and enough of them will subscribe to HBO Max.

I feel like Margot Robbie's insistence on an R-rating and the title BIRDS OF PREY really harmed the success of the film. I like Slider_Quinn21's vision of a more DC Extended Universe oriented Harley Quinn movie. But I like the BIRDS OF PREY movie exactly like it is except that it has the wrong name and it has a few expletives that, if cut, would have allowed teen girls to watch it in theatres. I didn't even realize this was a Harley Quinn movie because of the title until my cineplex changed the marquee and online ticket listings to read HARLEY QUINN AND THE BIRDS OF PREY. Teenaged girls who would love to imagine themselves as Harley Quinn or in Harley Quinn's girl gang could not see this movie. It hid itself from the audience to whom it would have meant the most and even if they could find it, they wouldn't be allowed to see it.

With BIRDS OF PREY, Margot Robbie insisted on keeping a title and a rating that were ultimately irrelevant to her content, simply because she had a vision of Harley Quinn in an R-rated movie called BIRDS OF PREY. And it was pointless and self-destructive and I just do not understand this person at all and neither could the movie theatres which changed the name of the movie in their listings.

THREE JOKERS isn't getting very good reviews. People find it conventional, predictable and weak. I think it's really good; I think it understands Batman in the way that Zack Snyder so fundamentally does not, in the way that Frank Miller completely fails to grasp. And I think it uses its three 48-page issues beautifully. Spoilers follow...

Geoff Johns has had some setbacks in recent years. His progress from 90s Warner Bros. intern to DC Comics freelancer to DC Entertainment President hit the brick wall that was the failure of JUSTICE LEAGUE. Now Johns is a freelancer again, running individual DC projects like STARGIRL and writing WONDER WOMAN 1984 and consulting on some shows but no longer leading the DC characters. He wrote DOOMSDAY CLOCK in which Superman confronted WATCHMEN's Dr. Manhattan who had turned the DC Universe from optimistic and hopeful to being darker than a Zack Snyder movie -- a story in which Superman redeemed Dr. Manhattan and saved both their worlds.

Standing Apart
DOOMSDAY CLOCK was originally the big event for 2017, but as Johns' falling star had it standing alone without any tie-ins and without particularly influencing the other DC monthlies until after it was done. Now Johns releases BATMAN: THREE JOKERS, another DC Comics publication that is outside the main line of comics and a special prestige product. A standout project, but one that stands apart DC rather than one that is leading it.

Inside Baseball
Like every Johns comic, THREE JOKERS has a strong and meaningful grasp of the heart of DC superheroes. Also like most Johns comics, you need to have some familiarity with other comics written by other people to appreciate it. In this case, BATMAN: THREE JOKERS draws on THE KILLING JOKE (in which the Joker shot and crippled Barbara Gordon and ended her career as Batgirl). THE KILLING JOKE also posited that the Joker was a failed standup comedian who went mad after his pregnant wife died in a home accident. The story also draws on A DEATH IN THE FAMILY (in which the Joker smashed the skull of the Jason Todd incarnation of Robin with a crowbar, then blew him up and left Batman to find the boy's corpse). And UNDER THE RED HOOD in which Batman discovers that due to an alternate universe Superboy pounding on the walls of reality, time was altered to resurrect Jason inside his coffin. And that Jason has now returned to Gotham City to finish Batman's war on crime with lethal force. And on the FLASHPOINT/NEW 52 cosmic event in which Jason's resurrection was altered to Talia Al Ghul wanting to help Bruce Wayne (whom she loves) by resurrecting Jason in a Lazarus Pit only for Jason's brain damage to leave him feral and unstable for years. And the NEW 52 BATGIRL where Barbara regains her mobility and resumes her role as Batgirl. And DEATH OF THE FAMILY in which Batman and Jason (now the Red Hood) come to an uneasy truce where Jason agrees to stop actively assassinating villains unless in the heat of combat. And BATMAN: ETERNAL where Batgirl and Jason develop a flirtation that leads to Batgirl almost kissing him until Jason stops her, saying he knows she just misses Dick Grayson and won't take advantage of her. And that JUSTICE LEAGUE storyline where Batman asked a New Gods computer: "What's the Joker's real name?" and the computer replied: "There are three."

True Identity
With THREE JOKERS, Batman, Batgirl and the Red Hood begin investigating how the Joker staged three violent murders that took place at exactly the same time. They soon find themselves confronting three Jokers: the Criminal, a master planner who is the original version of the Joker. Then there's the Clown, the Joker who is focused on sight gags and pranks, the version from the 60s. And then there's the Comedian, the version of the Joker who has become a grotesque serial killer, further obscuring the mystery that the Bat-Family now wants answered: who is the Joker? Where did he come from? What's his real name?

The Joker Army
And worse -- Batman, Batgirl and the Red Hood discover that all of the Joker's victims have been dosed with the same toxin that first drove the Joker insane and then mutilated to mimic the Joker's hair and frozen smile; the three Jokers are attempting to create new Jokers with one prime candidate being Jason Todd himself. And this is not the first time: it's revealed that the Joker, since the beginning, has periodically sought to duplicate himself by exposing some mentally deranged criminal to his toxin. He has succeeded on two occasions: this is why the Joker has had so many shifts in appearance, demeanor and personality over the years, and at this point, none of the three Jokers can even remember which of them (if any) are the original.

The First Candidate
The Jokers torment the Red Hood by reminding Jason of something that has never been revealed: that when the Joker was beating Jason's head in with a crowbar, Jason begged for his life and even pleaded for the Joker to let him become his henchman and betray Batman if he'd be spared. Jason loses control and shoots one of the Jokers through the head and kills him. Batgirl is horrified and even more aghast when Batman says he intends to allow Jason to get away with murder; he has been all along -- because imprisoning Jason would only ever expose the Bat Family in court. The Jokers express glee at having created the Red Hood who might as well be working for the Joker with all the agony he causes Batman.

The Favourite
The Jokers remind Batman that even if he stops one of them, they'll constantly create more of themselves and then reveal they have ultimately chosen someone to be a new Joker -- Joe Chill, the man who murdered Bruce Wayne's parents who has been dying of cancer in prison until the Jokers broke him out. The Jokers are irritated that Batman's greatest torment is not the Joker or any member of his rogues gallery but instead a convicted criminal who has only ever commited one crime of notoriety. Their plan: they'll expose Joe Chill to the Joker toxin that will restore his health and give him the Joker-madness matched with his status as the cause of Batman's greatest trauma. The Joker will always create chaos; even in death, he'll simply have a successor.

Remorse
The Jokers interview a captive Joe Chill and records it, torturing Chill into confessing why he killed Thomas and Martha Wayne. Chill says he saw the Waynes walking down the alley, wealthy and happy, and he blamed them, feeling that their money and joy could only have come by making someone else poor and miserable. He whipped out a gun and fired, only seeing the boy he'd orphaned after he'd gunned down the parents. In jail, he learned that his victims had been generous philanthropists who'd done more to alleviate poverty than anyone in Gotham and Chill became ashamed. He wrote Bruce Wayne letter upon letter of apology but could never send them, and he grovelled before God for forgiveness only to learn he was terminally ill, a fate he decided he deserved. The Joker taunts Batman, saying Joe Chill will be a Joker who is everything Batman fears, embodying both madness and trauma that will override any order Batman tries to build or offer while condemning the source of Batman's grief to eternal insanity.

Forgiveness
But Batman saves Joe Chill being dropped into a vat of Joker toxin. A terrified Chill thanks Batman for saving him, and Batman accepts the gratitude of his parents' killer. One of the Jokers tries to blow them up, but is shot through the head by the now last surviving Joker -- the Comedian serial killer. This last Joker reveals: he knew it would turn out this way. He let the Criminal and the Clown run their plan and fail, knowing it would end with Batman forgiving the man who killed his parents, healed of his trauma -- and now the Joker will be Batman's greatest terror instead of a sick old man in jail. Chaos to Batman's order.

The Secret
Bruce puts the last Joker in Arkham Asylum and then tends to Joe Chill. He reads all of Chill's letters of apology and accepts them and holds Chill's hand as he dies of cancer and buries him peacefully. Alfred and Bruce begin cleaning up the Three Jokers files in the Batcave and Alfred wonders if they will ever know who the Joker really is.

Bruce tells Alfred: the Joker, before his transformation, had a pregnant wife. A woman he abused horribly. A woman who feared him. She faked her death and went into hiding with her son. She now lives far from Gotham City with her boy. Ever since Batman first encountered the Joker, Bruce has been hiding the Joker's true identity, obscuring the trail from the clown to his wife and child.

Bruce regularly checks in on the mother and boy to ensure that they are provided for and protected. Bruce has known the Joker's secret all along and kept it safe because ultimately, Batman is not a creature of order or rule or law. Batman is a character who can find it in himself to forgive his parents' murderer, a warrior who ensures that his greatest villain's true identity will always be hidden, a hero who uses his power to spare others from suffering and bring them to redemption and peace. To Geoff Johns, Batman is a superhero defined by his mercy.

JUSTICE LEAGUE in the Snyder Cut edition will apparently have a whopping, massive amount of newly filmed footage not produced during the original shoot. There will be extensive new material shot with the actors this past year. There will be four whole minutes. :-)

Snyder's interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsY_bdXTmJ8

I'm distantly interested in JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE SNYDER CUT. I love watching different versions of the same story and seeing how the editing can present different things differently. I'm happy that the DCEU will get a four hour finale. I'm pleased that someone I care about will get something that he wanted badly and that is harmless in its existence. I'm moderately intrigued by Zack Snyder's horror-driven version of superheroes and would like to see it concluded. And I'm glad that he's getting to do it.

I'm more invested in STARGIRL and THE FLASH and LEGENDS and SUPERGIRL, of course. And I need to get into BLACK LIGHTNING. I'm not really a very big fan of horror. Despite all I've written about THE X-FILES, I don't really like it; I just learn from it. And that's how I feel about Zack Snyder movies. I'm sure there's an audience for it.

Conversation with the niece!

ME: "You'll recall that after that time with that thing and the dogs, you agreed that you would watch JUSTICE LEAGUE with me and comment on it while we ate a pizza."

LAUREN: "Yeah. You just never called it in. And now you can't because we're socially distancing! Ha! Although I guess someday you could when we're not."

ME: "Are you aware that JUSTICE LEAGUE will now be four hours long? And with the theatrical cut, you'll likely have to watch this movie for six hours while providing commentary for the entire time while eating a pizza."

LAUREN: "Oh God."

I'm seeing it tonight. Admittedly, I've said that two nights in a row and gotten sidetracked by other things. Haha!

DC Films president Walter Hamada says that going forward, DC movies aren't going to be focusing on building ongoing continuity between their superhero movies. There will be multiple versions of Batman (with Affleck and Keaton in THE FLASH and Robert Pattinson in THE BATMAN) and it'll just be viewed as one big multiverse even as WONDER WOMAN, SHAZAM and AQUAMAN see sequels continuing from their DC Extended Universe origins. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/busi … ovies.html

News outlets paint this as Earth 1/Earth 2, but looking at the actual strategy, the goal seems to make sure that WONDER WOMAN  movies are consistent with WONDER WOMAN movies, AQUAMAN movies are consistent with AQUAMAN movies, SHAZAM movies are consistent with SHAZAM movies -- but with no particular concern for whether or not Wonder Woman, Aquaman and Shazam will be exist in the same reality or crossover with each other -- and THE FLASH will introduce multiple versions of Batman to indicate why Batman is played by different actors in theatres and on television and why the individual character/team movies will unfold separately going forward.

I have to say, I don't really understand why so many trade magazines are claiming that DC movies will now have "Earth 1" and "Earth 2" established through THE FLASH featuring Affleck and Keaton to bridge the two Earths when, as far as we know, Robert Pattinson's Batman will not be in THE FLASH, so what Earths are being bridged? It's probably due to some trade journalists just not really grasping the multiverse concept and not being overly familiar with so much as the TV version of CRISIS.

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I suspect that the reason DC has decided to no longer pursue a shared universe going forward: it builds the expectation of a crossover movie featuring all the individual characters together -- and that's proven highly expensive and not profitable.

It was very expensive to feature Henry Cavill AND Ben Affleck AND Gal Gadot AND Jason Momoa in one movie that also showcased the powers of Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Flash, Cyborg and the gadgets of Batman. AVENGERS had the benefit of having as many street level type heroes like Captain America and Hawkeye and Black Widow as it did more effects-demanding characters like Iron Man and the Hulk.

The Justice League is very costly to show on camera together with these specific actors unless it earns a billion dollars at box office and DC movies are more in the low to mid hundred million range. And since they're not aiming to do another very expensive, not terribly profitable JUSTICE LEAGUE movie featuring all the characters together, they've elected not to worry about keeping them all in the same continuity.

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I've never understood why AGE OF ULTRON was so hated. Or why JUSTICE LEAGUE was so loathed either. But that's personal taste for you!

I hope it's not true that Reeves and Pattinson aren't getting along. Matt Reeves -- I don't really know his work, but Slider_Quinn21 seems to like his stuff.

Robert Pattinson is a cool guy. I think he's hilarious. His blunt assessment of TWILIGHT movies and novels as silly fantasy in which the vampires never do anything to even qualify as vampires is spot-on. His disdain for the abusive Edward Cullen character and his admission that he took the role to pay his rent is wonderful. He has a delightful story about how a female fan was stalking him, so he approached her and asked her out to dinner and spent half the dinner whining about his life and the other half of the dinner sitting alone because she had fled. He used to earn pocket money in school by shoplifting pornographic magazines and selling them to his classmates. When he got his first paycheque for TWILIGHT, he bought a $1,000 car off Craigslist. Most actors of his stature would try to play heartthrobs (like Jerry O'Connell did), but Pattinson has always gravitated to playing dysfunctional characters.

I think your distaste for superhero movies is probably a factor. Which is fine. Superheroes are a problematic genre to begin with and we’re all going to have genres we don’t like. I myself don’t like horror.

Well, if you saw JUSTICE LEAGUE, a Joss Whedon film -- and if you saw BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN DAWN OF JUSTICE ULTIMATE EDITION, a Zach Snyder film -- I think it's pretty clear what the difference will be in tone and style.

Okay, I have watched Part 1 of JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE SNYDER CUT. "Don't Count On It, Batman" is pretty good. There is a terrible sense of dread and danger as eldritch abominations from worlds unknown are emerging across the globe. The parademons are disturbing and eerie and Steppenwolf is a bulky mass of spikes and sharp edges. The Amazon army tries to contain them, several hundred women valiantly sacrificing themselves to contain a strange MacGuffin, the Mother Box, and to no avail; Steppenwolf survives hundreds of arrows and even being buried in the sea in a rigged-to-crumble landmass.

The body count is horrific, but Zack Snyder is surprisingly tender and thoughtful, giving Queen Hippolyta moments of grief and regret as her soldiers give themselves up or die in combat, and Connie Nielsen sells each loss well. This is something at MAN OF STEEL failed to convey in its destruction porn finale; it's something the theatrical cut of BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (actual title) also failed to offer but the ULTIMATE EDITION did provide -- which has me wondering if the problem has always been that Zack Snyder films scenes of people grieving the deaths in his films, but the studio always cuts them.

Diana has her scene of rescuing hostages from terrorists and Snyder and Whedon's competing versions of this sequence really shows the difference. Whedon is quick and minimalist, keen to make using superpowers feel effortless. Snyder, however, wants to show the weight and force of each application of speed and strength as Wonder Woman throws each punch, blocks each bullet and coils herself to leap into the air to detonate a bomb in the sky. And Snyder gives Wonder Woman a tender moment of kindness to the hostages after the fight is over -- something I don't really expect from a brutalist storyteller like Snyder, but once again, maybe he does shoot these scenes but studios make him cut them while HBO Max is letting him keep them for a four hour version of JUSTICE LEAGUE.

I'm not particularly in favour of Snyder's approach of depicting superheroes as mythological beings removed from humanity, but he's not really removing them from humanity at all in JUSTICE LEAGUE. I'm not particularly fond of Snyder's work in general, but objectively, JUSTICE LEAGUE is (at least in Part 1) a well-told, well-paced (!), well-done episode of a big budget JUSTICE LEAGUE TV mini series. It isn't the JUSTICE LEAGUE series that I want to see, but it's still a good series regardless.

I'm looking forward to Part 2 when I have time for it, but right now, I have to go to bed and go to work in the morning.