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I have a real "Comic Book Guy" doozy here that's perfect for this thread. Two scenes in the first Iron Man get under my skin a lot more than they probably should. --------------------------------------- 1. When Stark flies out of the cave in his Mark 1 armor he shoots like a rocket through the air and lands in a sand-dune legs up to the sound of a trombone going "wah waaaaaah" that never actually goes off. 2. When he's trying out the Mark II armor he flies really really high and falls what looks like a quarter mile straight down onto his car. Cue a maintenance robot shooting him with a fire extinguisher to the same trombone going "wah waaaaahh." In both cases Stark should be liquid goo inside of a tin suit, especially since both were prototypes and didn't likely have all the unobtanium safety measures the "full" armor does to keep him alive in a fistfight with Hulks and giant death robots. Seeing these moments took me straight out of the movie and had me groaning, and to this day piss me off. ------------------------------------------ It always pissed me right off that for a movie that goes so far out of its way to portray the characters and situation as realistically as they can, and does so for 98% of the picture, they pretend that the human body can somehow withstand massive amounts of punishment for a cheap laugh that could have been achieved without sacrificing the laws of physics. Before some chucklefuck thinks they're dismissing my point by saying the old "You care in a movie where the main character has rocket boots and flies at supersonic speeds?" or "It's just a comic book movie" line so old it has moth holes in it, hear me out: It's not that the laws of physics are broken that bothers me. I expect the laws of physics to be bent in order for the conceit of a superhero to work, the same way I expect Spider-man to stick to walls, Wolverine to have claws retracted in his forearms, and Superman to fly. I also expect a movie to recognize the upper limit of punishment you can expect a technology-enhanced human to take and not cross it without showing serious consequences. You don't even see Stark complaining about his back or with bruises/scars on his face, it's just cheap schtick for the sake of schtick. It's incongruous with the physics the rest of the movie has--the bending of reality to allow for flight and repulsor rays included--to show that a relatively normal human man can take such abuse and not get hurt. What makes Iron Man egregious opposed to any other major Superhero flick made in the last several years is that it's the only one who pulls poo poo like that. In The Incredible Hulk when Blonsky gets drop-kicked by the Hulk he's put into serious traction, even if he heals quickly due to super-soldier serum plot device bullshit. In Thor we don't know the physiology of the Asgardians but we can see that they're extremely powerful relative to humans, so it stands to reason they could take a ton more direct abuse. In the Dark Knight Bruce is put out by freaking attack dogs. In Captain America you see ordinary people taking abuse but never far past basic suspension of disbelief-- i.e: no one is put in a situation where your mind snaps out of the movie's atmosphere and goes "they would be loving dead if that actually happened--with perhaps the sole exception being Bucky towards the end for plot device reasons and the situation is played as his death anyway because for the most part it really is. I know it's irrational to give a poo poo, but even after all these years it still pisses me right off. It's on the same level as "The fridge" in Indy 4, which is stupid for very similar reasons.
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Sep 5, 2011 05:36
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Morton Haynice posted:Toy Story -What's to stop Woody and Buzz from just jumping out Sid's window when they first get the chance? Buzz probably only weighs a couple ounces, and Woody's made of cloth! Much as I hate to justify this, there's narrative conceit at stake. Having Buzz and Woody take the proportional equivalent of jumping off of a bridge--even though neither have nerves and would lose a few easily reparable parts at worst--it stretches the audience's ability to empathize with them as human-esque characters. They bend the ability with humor and atmosphere-building details all the time in the Toy Story movies, but once you start to defuse dramatic tension by calling attention to the fact that these characters are very non-human you risk losing the audience's ability to invest. That said they did also go a fair way to explain that Sid's house was on higher guard as Sid was a sadist with no life, with a "vicious" dog, and the scale of escaping on the fly would require a lot of ingenuity and energy Buzz and Woody simply didn't have.
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Sep 8, 2011 00:35
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Ambiguatron posted:The only way to explain Spider-Man 3 is to assume Sam Raimi or whoever wrote the script or someone on the movie hates Kirsten Dunst. Half the movie is about her being a bitch and then getting punched in the face. 0. I explain Spider-Man 3 as Avi Arad and every marketing dude finally excising some sort of leverage on Raimi because every mouthbreathing fan in existence was clamoring for Venom without actually knowing what that would entail. As for Gattaca.... 1. Ethan Hawke's character exposits that there are anti-discrimination laws still on the books, just that it's not really followed because it's really easy to get a genetic profile on someone from a handshake or doorknob. It falls under the same banner as a racist firm hiring a small quota of uneducated minorities, putting them on janitorial duty, and keeping a small slush fund to pay most regulators to look the other way, and saying they have a diverse workplace. Given how de-regulation is all the rage within the last two decades it's actually not that hard to believe a firm could get away with it. Plus the "thesis" in point 2 is hard to disagree with as a justification for suck actions. 2. One thesis of the movie is the question "Is it wrong to be elitist when there is a scientific, measurable and reprovable foundation for that elitism? What happens when you can empirically bet on who is 'Atlas' and who is 'parasite' and be right at least 51% of the time?" You'll notice that while Ethan Hawke's character is rarely if ever outright maligned or attacked for his "inferior" genetics he is without question seen as a member of a lower caste simply because the question of "how" his genetic code will express itself is different than the people whose parents said "Six foot two, blonde hair, metabolism slows at a rate of >1% a year." On top of that there's the unspoken implication that only the richer castes of society pre-genetics are able to afford modification for their children. That's a big and subtle reason Ethan Hawke's character is presented, as his parents are shown to have the funds and socioeconomic class to get genetic modification for their children but Ethan Hawke happens to be one of the last members of his caste to go through life 100% unmodified. He gets to see the caste system from both sides of the the modified/unmodified; rich/poor line. There's also the unspoken capitalist component, which isn't hard to extrapolate. "Who would you rather hire for your Fortune 100 company that deals in huge profit margins and risks a lot of capital, the triathlon runner with no history of lung cancer or the chain-smoker with a hacking cough and high cholesterol? Which seems like the riskier investment, all other qualities being equal?" The reality is that once you get up to the "astronaut" caste where physical, mental, and emotional excellence are requirements of the job then the guy who wasn't pre-selected to fit astronaut qualities is a huge financial liability. At best he stresses you out as you wonder whether or not he'll die in a gravity simulator, and at worst he dies and gives your firm a ton of bad publicity and flushes funding away. It's not malicious to not want to hire him, it's "good business" and logic that is hard to argue despite the human tendency to root for the underdog. So they do genetic tests because someone at the executive level knows that their firm attracts a huge number of pie-in-the-sky kids with a dream and some gumption, like Mr. Hawke, and they need to weed them out. On top of that there's the implication that once genetic modification was well into its first generation it became standard protocol to weed out anyone who wasn't fitting the genetic model of "excellence" in a case of outright discrimination. Such behavior isn't foreign these days either. Even though we're not at the level of genetic modification the higher up you go on the ladder the more intangible factors like "where you went to school" and "how powerful/wealthy is your family?" and "Are you important enough to us to look the other way about that summer in Thailand where you killed a hooker? You do know that if you gently caress up bad enough we'll use that as an excuse to get rid of you right?" become hidden but very real basis for hiring and employment discrimination and really muddle the supposed meritocracy up with notions of oligarchy, plutocracy, and general caste. It's nowhere near as bad as the world Gattaca presents, but Gattaca was meant to be an exaggeration of the kinds of discrimination that already exists. 3. I always assumed that the job in Gattaca was bureaucracy and paper-pushing that everyone has to do, physical training, and computer modelling/research/analysis for their missions. Still, you got me on that one. I think it ultimately came about because Gattaca wasn't made with a blockbuster budget, and they couldn't afford all the expensive sets/equipment nor imagination necessary to create an "astronaut of the future" experience.
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Sep 10, 2011 19:38
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Twiggy Johnson posted:Star Trek is usually less egregious than most "science fiction" with its physics. I'm willing to overlook psychics, gods, and exploding computers as dramatic license. TNG was the only series I got into, so maybe the later series were worse. Actually TOS was probably the worst about it because it wasn't like any of the showrunners knew that not only would the franchise be alive and expanding 10, 20, 50 years later, but that its fans were going to spend massive amounts of time and effort figuring out how "the planet of NYC gangsters" fit in the same universe as "dilithium crystals." For the most part TOS was whatever the writers wanted it to be week in and week out, and it wasn't until around TMP in 79 that both creators and fans alike got truly serious about making all the science behind the shows and movies as factually based as the narrative would allow. And even TNG wasn't faultless. It had that episode where Troi had a kid who grew up in a few days, and more than few hyper-omnipotent beings like Q mucking about. Believe me, I was ticked that Trek09 didn't even bother to try for the usual Star Trek morality play and instead was just big fast action, but I was ticked knowing full well that Pre-09 Star Trek was by and large soft sci-fi with a really dedicated and knowledgeable fanbase to fill in the gaps.
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Sep 14, 2011 19:45
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Terminator 2 is one of the absolute triumphs of combining practical effects and CGI. For every cool CGI trick there's something equally phenomenal like "they actually flew a helicopter under an overpass to get that shot."
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Sep 18, 2011 21:30
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