What’s frustrating is that the DC animated universe (Batman: The Animated Series, Superman: The Animated Series, Justice League/Unlimited, Batman Beyond) is incredible. It contains the best long form arc of Batman ever with the perfect balance of light and dark, and the other characters get good treatment too. That approach executed on film would be a winner.
With Batman specifically, he can lean too dark and ‘realistic’ at times at the expense of flair, and that’s the case now IMO. A Batman Forever style movie would be just the trick. Big adventure and proudly comic to attract a wider audience. Matt Reeves isn’t going to get kids interested in Batman even if Part Two appeals to the converted.
In many ways it mirrors the rise of the “Marvel Age of Comics” back in the 60s. At the time, anyone who heard “superhero” thought Superman and (maybe) Batman, then out of the blue come these crazy books and characters who turned convention on its ear, presenting heroes with doubts, neuroses, money troubles, health issues, and who when they weren’t fighting villains were bickering or trading blows with each other. It gave readers a whole new way to look at the genre, and audiences love novelty. What’s more, Marvel introduced the idea that all these characters lived in the same world and could run into each other from time to time, leading to friendships, rivalries, misunderstandings and p*ssing contests. Readers could spend forever arguing about who would win in a fight, which at DC would’ve been anathema – real heroes don’t fight each other – but proved Marvel had a better grip on what really interests kids. And when events in one book affected others – indeed when plotlines that began in one title could only be resolved in another – you had to buy the whole line of books to keep up, which showed a mercenary genius at once shameless and respect-worthy.
After a LOT of false starts (decades of them), Marvel finally figured out how to recreate that era on screen with characters who challenged the general public’s perception of superheroes, giving us protagonists who started off as selfish jerks but were redeemed by some trial or other (Tony, Thor, Strange, Ant-Man, arguably Starlord), battered mercilessly by fate as a reward for their good deeds (Spider-Man) and so on. With characterizations that went a bit deeper than “altruistic do-gooder” it became more interesting to see them meet each other (egotist Tony vs straight arrow Steve) and since what happened in one character’s film would directly lead into and shape the next one’s, again we felt compelled to keep filling those seats. Fiege followed Stan’s playbook and it paid off big time. Movie-goers experienced what comic readers had decades before: “I didn’t know superheroes could be done like this!”
That said, you can only be the new kid on the block for so long, and with enough repetition what was once innovative and novel eventually becomes as formulaic and lackluster as what it originally sought to subvert. People go to see a Marvel movie because they know what to expect, but they also get tired of them because…well, they know what to expect.
The thing with DC is that they’ve never totally established what it is that makes them different, if anything. Pre-Marvel, their characters were uniformly square-jawed do-gooders and utterly interchangeable. If you could read Justice League without the pictures, you’d never know what dialog was coming from which character and it wouldn’t have mattered. The big guns got by in media adaptations based on how purely they embodied the basic concept of “costumed do-gooder.” Superman saves the day, that’s all you need to know. The second and third-stringers would never succeed on film because if you’ve got Superman who needs a pale imitation? After Marvel, DC was forever playing catch-up, trying to duplicate the “shared universe” schtick and grafting “personalities” onto characters in the eleventh hour, but it was always obvious they were just playing Marvel’s game, and you’ll never beat the other guy by imitation.
It’s the same now with the films; DC can try to build an interconnected universe and have characters squabble, etc but everyone’s just going to say, “They’re trying to be Marvel.”
I think the jury’s still out on DC and Marvel’s future success at the box office, but when the dust settles we may be right back where we started decades ago: Superman, Batman and Spider-Man can be relied on to sell tickets; everyone else is a gamble.
I’d have to disagree with her on the film being emotionally empty. I didn’t see that at all. Now, it’s not a drama where we’re going to see the characters sitting around opining about their feelings, but the emotion is there in the story. Odysseus obviously feels some combination of guilt and remorse for how they went about sacking Troy to end the war. We see this at various points throughout the film but it’s also the foundation upon which the dynamic between Odysseus and Athena is built. This was, I thought, one of the more clever parts of the film and it’s resolution was anything but “emotionally empty”.
If she had simply said she disagreed with some choices Nolan made I would not have used the word hatred.
But in her first piece she already gave some blunt statements which are not just criticism of this adaptation but blanket statements on Nolan in general. Doubling down and pursuing this further in another publication is not adding anything to her perspective as a scholar, she just wants to stay in the conversation.
What I never understood about that Batgirl movie. Was it just not released and stored somewhere, or was it destroyd, so nobody can and will ever see it?
I agree that it was clever, but its cleverness is what drained it of emotion for me. Athena was turned into a symbol of harm/trauma that appears to both father and son, but the symbol was inert and lost among the visual pageant.
From my two screenings, I admired the technique and the pace, but was never engaged emotionally by the film. In fact, I experienced greater emotional engagement watching SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY. Fun fact: as I was exiting the theater, a patron in front of me exclaimed to her friends: “Now that was the odyssey.”
I think Wilson nails the problem when she writes: *“Moreover, the movie’s devoted attention to mechanics, and its heedless willingness to give us massacres as spectacle, undermines its moralizing claims of caring about man’s inhumanity to man. Verbally, we are told that people matter; visually, we are shown that they do not.”*
I found the characters’ emotions signaled rather than conveyed. Visual spectacle was Nolan’s paramount concern. Again, S-M:BND provides an interesting counterpoint. It is also a film of visual spectacle, but Destin Daniel Cretton creates space for emotion within the spectacle. For example, in THE ODYSSEY, we get Penelope’s angry scene with her son, but it plays like Anne Hathaway (and the mise en scene) doing anger. Matt Damon’s Odysseus reflecting on the horror of the destruction of Troy competes with wondering just how Nolan got that tower to burn and fall that particular way. I also doubt that in the heat of battle Odysseus would have paused for such reflection. It may well have come later, but splicing it into the actual battle comes off as phony. There is a similar moment of reflection in S-M:BND, but Cretton shows it as occurring afterward, and he evokes what is being reflected upon without depicting it.
Sometimes blunt statements of criticism are what is needed, and Wilson provides formal analysis to back up her blunt statements. Oates saying that Wilson should not have criticized Nolan, and instead been “just a wee bit more thoughtful & respectful of others who are acting in good faith” misses the point (and reeks of academic politesse. Oates has been ensconced at Princeton forever). I am sure MAGA folk and other right-wingers act in good faith, but blunt statements regarding the harm of their good faith are appropriate.
One should be even more blunt in that case. But this whole „I would ashamed“ and „Nolan is incapable of this and that“ business makes me think that she was looking for a soundbite/click, and she got it.
Oates, in my mind, pointed out correctly what Wilson did, and this diminished Wilson‘s validity in this discussion.
It was exactly the opposite for me. Now, I will say, that if the performance hadn’t been there, he cleverness might have overshadowed it. But, I thought Zendaya absolutely crushed that moment. The look that she gave Odysseus in that moment packed more of an emotional jolt than any of the other horrific things that we’d seen up until that point, which I think is largely because a lot of the characters in the story don’t really drum up much sympathy from the audience, but to flash back to that point towards the beginning of the story and give the audience a reason for why this version of Odysseus does some of the things that he does, I thought it really worked.
I agree that the “I would be ashamed” comment weas over the top, but Nolan is incapable of things, as a close study of of his work reveals. He is not a great screenwriter, (over)relying on expository dialogue, and his depictions of female characters are often clunky and unnuanced.
It didn’t hit me that way. I think she and Tom Holland are both better in S-M:BND.
True. But then they don’t do so in Homer either. In some ways, it is a perfect text for Nolan to adapt.
Makes sense. I guess I prefer by Odysseus plagued by hubris rather than PTSD.
Up until my viewing of The Odyssey, I’d never seen her in anything, so this was my first time seeing any of her work. She doesn’t get much time in it, but I thought she did great with what time she did have and it has me interested to check out the new Spider Man films.
I prefer that version of Odysseus as well. And, I do think we get some of it. His wounding of the Cyclops and some of the decisions he makes that fly in the face of his men’s warnings about angering Poseidon kind of hint towards the hubris found in the text. But, of course, there’s considerably less hubris in Nolan’s version than there is in Homer’s and decidedly more PTSD. As already stated, I’d generally prefer something a bit closer to the original vision, but that’s not what Nolan delivered. And, for what Nolan did deliver, I thought his choices at the end and in regards to Athena worked very well. They would not, however, have worked in a more faithful telling of the story.
