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SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN
It’s kinda sad to see people get caught up in franchise thinking and miss the entire point of the movie.

The ‘alien robot’ stuff is there because Zeus is (literally?) an alternate-universe Superman, who (quasi-literally) travelled to Earth from the future to ‘uplift’ humanity. The unspoken - but still fairly obvious - twist of the movie is that the traditional zombies pretty much all died out offscreen, and what the characters understand as “Alpha zombies” are actually a transitional form between humanity and some kind of new immortal/celestial being. The metallic bones and glowing eyes are a reference to Terminator, and its angelic/demonic cyborgs.

The “time loop” that the characters talk about is metaphorical in that particular instance (because they aren’t actually time-clones), but is making reference to Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same. That’s understandable because it’s a philosopher chatting with a Wagner enthusiast. But, of course, the philosopher quotes Joseph Campbell and eats poo poo minutes later, so you can see that Snyder is exploring/critiquing the multiple interpretations of that imagery. The film’s most obvious reference is Parsifal, and characters directly refer to a “holy grail” despite nobody agreeing precisely what it is.

In that vein, characters like Bautista are understandable in their motivations and not “bad people” - but he nonetheless ends up shooting the alien messiah in the face over a paltry $20,000 of charity money. A certain emotional distance is appreciated here.

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SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Neo Rasa posted:

It would be awesome of Van becomes a Zeus-esque ruler of some other city.

That’s pretty much the joke of him ending up infected in Mexico, after all this border imagery. You don’t really need a sequel to picture how that goes down.

People were evidently perplexed at why Zeus immediately bit the ICE rapist, while just keeping the women in a room - but what it shows is that he simply doesn’t want to transform everybody. The goal is not to conquer the Earth. If anything, the “zombies” have a certain affinity or brotherhood with those locked in the camps, with the ‘capture’ of the women easily read as a failed attempt at an alliance.

Anyway, I think this may be my new favorite Snyder film. It’s wild that he’s getting people really intensely fixated on stuff like depth of field, aspect ratio, or even just runtime.

Like, imagine somebody watching a Spiderman Homecoming sequel and getting really loving psyched at the aspect ratio and choice of lens.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:

the main zombies in Army of the Dead are more akin to the creatures in I am Legend/The Omega Man than any classical zombie.

Also, John Carpenter's Ghosts Of Mars.

lol

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN
You don’t need sales figures; just look at the number of people wandering into the thread immediately after the film’s release like “why are the zombies presented sympathetically??” Compared to an average thread, I mean.

porfiria posted:

I thought the zombies turning into robots and aliens was more of a comment on the alterity of Zombies in general--they're all things that are okay/good to shoot.

It’s definitely a callback to Sucker Punch’s fantasy sequences, with zombies, orcs, and robots all interchangeable.

But, also, none of the army dude’s guesses in the opening scene are exactly wrong. Is Zeus a Bigfoot? I mean, kinda.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

ozmunkeh posted:

The Vanderohe / Dieter double act was perfectly enjoyable. Everything else was forgettable garbage, but it's Zack Snyder, so you know that going in.

Which parts do you remember least?

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN
My current favorite part is how, aside from being very well-constructed, the entire Chambers fight scene is an extended joke about speed-ramping.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

A Buttery Pastry posted:

In any case, the actual meaning of nihilism as used generally seems to be edgily depressing, not any kind of philosophical position.

'Edgily depressing' is nihilism. That why the word is used, and we can accurately describe characters like The Punisher as nihilistic. However, there are two varieties of nihilism. The 'edgily depressing' version is what Nietzche would refer to as passive nihilism, whereas deconstruction - as Snyder is engaged with in this film - is actively nihilistic. Its goal is to interrogate master-signifiers like 'human' and 'american', and so-forth. Like, what do you mean by that?

Also, as with BVS's scene of all the pundits interpreting Superman, the movie moves beyond 'just' deconstruction. This is why Snyder included The Cranberries: "There is a sort of deconstructive element in the way that I approached the whole movie, and I [wanted to] use that song to reflect back on the movie. That song breaks the movie, more than the movie breaks the song." And, in this context, the song is much more about Bautista's character than the literal zombies of the movie.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

KVeezy3 posted:

Isn't this distinction one of content v form? Like the passive nihilism example of The Punisher is identified directly by a subgroup of police officers/military soldiers which would constitute, for them, active nihilism?

I don’t believe either of those would be active nihilism, though I’m not sure what you mean with the latter example. (That the police using the logo aren’t necessarily depressed?)

The Punisher character can be summed up by the line in one of the movie trailers: “it’s not vengeance; it’s punishment”. The point of the distinction is the impersonality: in his way, Punisherman doesn’t will anything for himself but instead subordinates himself to become the agent of some nebulous unwritten law. (The present incarnation of the character is inextricably linked to the first Terminator film, which was released only a few years before.)

This is passive nihilism not because he’s being mopey and rude, but because his response to the meaninglessness of the universe is to fall back into authoritarianism. Shades of BVS Batman’s “the world only makes sense if you force it to”.

While it’s pretty obvious why this outlook pairs well with gloomy feelings and whatever, it would be the same even in a colourful cartoon.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Guy A. Person posted:

There's still a potentially compelling question of why they left Geeta and the others alive, but the fact is that if the above was part of Zeus's plan/methods there would probably be evidence of it elsewhere: it's not like Geeta and her friends are the first living women the zombies have come across this entire time.

The more obvious answers are that they are being kept either as food or bait, and the fact that one of Lily's former charges came back after a time means there's even a possibility that they're just serving out a kind of makeshift prison sentence for trespassing or something.

This is where people run into trouble understanding visual storytelling. The ‘alpha zombies’ obviously don’t speak English, so people are going off of what the human protagonists say they believe - i.e. that the captives are going to be subjected to nebulous bad things.

If you look at what the characters actually do, though, the ICE rear end in a top hat is tossed into the swimming pool full of lots of blood and several corpses. If people are being transformed through a small bite, why is there so much gore in the pool?

The only good answer is that being zombified is an imperfect/risky process. Not everyone gets to be a cool robo-zombie; even Zeus - the oldest zombie - is still wholly organic, while the majority evidently end up being ‘shamblers’. This simple fact explains why Zeus is reluctant to zombify people, only targets ‘bad people’, and why the robo-fetus is especially important to him. It’s not just his kid; it’s a new and better form of reproduction.

It’s kinda like the complaints about the bioweapon plan. Why bother creating the heist scheme as a cover story? The simple answer is that Tanaka needs a cover story to explain what these people were doing flying a helicopter out of the zone.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

TychoCelchuuu posted:

I got pretty rapey vibes from the way Zeus interacted with Coyote after he pinned her to the wall. Doubly so because his wife just died for good and now he needs another woman. He doesn't kill her or anything. He just gets real close to her and, well... acts rapey.

That is not what is happening in the scene.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Neurolimal posted:

The Xenomorph is very blatantly a monster based around sexual violence.

The shot is an Alien 3 reference, but the encounter in Alien 3 is specifically a metaphorical PTSD flashback to the murder of Ripley's colleagues in Alien 1, triggered by the sight of a needle. The alien, notably, doesn't kill Ripley (or even do anything at all) because it sees that she is already 'infected'.

In this film, it's literally a one-second shot of an implied bite, between Zeus watching the queen die and Zeus getting on a horse and leading an army of followers to avenge the queen. This different context changes the meaning of the shot: while Coyote also has PTSD, this particular demonic alien just straightforwardly kills her.

SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Jun 8, 2021

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

POWELL CURES KIDS posted:

Despite Zeus' literal origin, he's coded much more strongly as "vampire" than "alien" throughout the film

Yet there is a very big difference between those three things (zombie, alien, and vampire), even with these particular blurred lines.

A few handy Zizek quotes can help break this down:

“I like to search for class struggle in strange domains. For example it is clear that in classical Hollywood, the couple of vampires and zombies designates class struggle. Vampires are rich, they live among us. Zombies are the poor, living dead, ugly, stupid, attacking from outside. And it's the same with cats and dogs. "

"[The] Hegelian notion of habit allows us to account for the cinema-figure of zombies who drag themselves slowly around in a catatonic mood, but persisting forever: are they not figures of pure habit, of habit at its most elementary, prior to the rise of intelligence (of language, consciousness, and thinking). This is why a zombie par excellence is always someone whom we knew before, when he was still normally alive – the shock for a character in a zombie-movie is to recognize the former best neighbor in the creeping figure tracking him persistently. (Zombies, these properly un-canny figures, are therefore to be opposed to aliens who invade the body of a terrestrial: while aliens look and act like humans, but are really foreign to human race, zombies are humans who no longer look and act like humans; while, in the case of an alien, we suddenly become aware that the one closest to us – wife, son, father – is an alien, was colonized by an alien, in the case of a zombie, the shock is that this foreign creep is someone close to us...)."

While the virus in this film is of alien origin, it's fairly obvious that there is no underlying intelligence 'behind' it. Instead, we have this community of ex-human outcasts who have passed through the zero-level of humanity that is the 'shambler' and are literally born again as new subjects - as literal supermen, in this case. That's the genre vocabulary employed. With the cape and helmet, Zeus could be Darth Vader.

While zombies and vampires are both forms of undead, the 'alpha zombies' remain distinct from vampire in that they remain 'lower class'. There is no disguising themselves as the living to drink the blood of innocent workers or whatever. The zombies of all stripes remain just one step removed from those people interned at the ICE-styled 'quarantine' camps - which again implies an affinity and potential solidarity.

This is where we should note that the specific Alien film most referenced in the movie is Alien 2 - which, unlike others in the series, is formally a zombie movie. (The introduction of the mass-produced alien 'eggs' makes the film entirely unlike Alien 1 and 3, which play out more like ghost stories.) The conflict in that particular film is presented in class terms: as a labour revolt by disgruntled miners, with the military sent in to put them down in an all-too-familiar way. And, as in this film, these 'zombies' are shown to have a certain superhuman, demonic character.

This is where we can start listing differences, though, because although many of the marines in Aliens are captured, there is no real threat of conversion (except to the child, Newt, which could be its own essay). Conversion has already happened to the workers, while the marines effectively just disappear. This is altogether different to how multiple characters in Army are bit, and most are Ripley-like traumatized veterans of the zombie outbreak. So there is a fusion between Alien 2 and 3, where a lot of the major characters are already themselves half-human, traumatized, compelled to reenact the past.

This is why Scott and Coyote end up becoming the monsters - in one sense succumbing to madness and, in another, shedding their mere humanity to become something new and potentially better. In Alien 3, Ripley has a full conversation with the monster, and uses it.

SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Jun 8, 2021

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Blood Boils posted:

Yup. And as has been pointed out, xenomorphs aren't just rape monsters, but also insects and dinosaurs and dragons and colonial rebels -a good reading really needs to address the context!

Right; the xenomorphs are psychosexual nightmare creatures, but what that actually means is very dependent on context. There are scenes with overtones of sexual violence (e.g. Parker and Lambert's death scene in Alien 1), but you're more likely to have characters like Kane who are effectively just injured on the job.

In Army Of The Dead, likewise, Scott is very obviously specifically traumatized by the experience of re-killing his own wife. And Coyote's thing is more related to her survival guilt over all the people she didn't save (hence her ultimate attempt at sacrificing herself).

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN
Again, it’s good not to get caught up in franchise thinking. You don’t need to show the dried zombies getting rehydrated, when it’s just a lead-up to the hibernating zombies that appear shortly afterwards.

The overall point is that the ‘traditional zombies’ are no longer an issue because they don’t have, like, goals. After the last humans left, they literally just stood outside, baking in the sun, for like five years.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Judakel posted:

The level of care shown is kind of integral to the idea that he wants to expand his family. He doesn't give a crap about shamblers. He isn't reproducing with anyone except one person. Alpha creation could be a sign of family expansion, but he doesn't particularly care much for them either beyond their ability to serve. They're a tribe, not family. These relationships are different. Accusing an immigrant of xenophobia is an all-time take. You're a deranged idiot.

Immigrants becoming themselves xenophobic is a fairly well-known phenomenon.

But just to be clear here: you are arguing that, because the zombies aren’t representative of a traditional family unit, they are therefore a hostile, even existential-level threat to humanity?

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Judakel posted:

Their method of growth requires the "death" of a human, so they are necessarily hostile to humans. As far as we know, only Zeus has been capable of finding another way to reproduce. There is no reason to assume that the alphas Zeus creates can impregnate anyone. Whether they are an existential threat to humanity largely depends on their ability to reach areas outside of their biome. It is unclear whether they spread far beyond the deserts of the west coast. As we saw, they do not do particularly well out in hot environments. There would most likely be problems in freezing environments, too. There is no evidence they are a family unit in any sense that has been anthropologically catalogued - traditional or not; you are begging the question. They most closely resemble a tribe.

The main part that people find objectionable about this (though certainly not the only part) is the basic assertion that these characters have a innate rapacious drive to “spread” like rats and consume all available resources, ultimately doing a ‘white genocide’ on humanity.

Like a lot of stuff people have insisted about the zombies, it looks like pure projection because there’s no actual basis in the text.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Judakel posted:

Your rhetoric is lazy and intentionally provocative, which is typical for you. You've already granted by omission that they're not a family in any sense of the term, so now you're moving to talk of "white genocide". Comparisons to growth of human groups (and ignorant fears of replacement) are unwarranted because those are not a zero sum game, but zombification is a zero sum game. The fact most zombies are born out of a human death is self-evident. All the basis for their expansionist mindset is there, in the text, and I've discussed it at length already. People finding it objectionable that they do have this drive is not a testament to the idea that they do not have this drive. It makes for interesting conversation, though.

Nothing is ‘granted by omission’; we could say that the zombies are brothers in Christ - or anything - because anyone even tangentially aware of Fast And The Furious knows that ‘family’ is a pretty elastic concept.

No, the reason I avoid the “debate me!!!” style of point-by-point internet rebuttal is because it’s an obfuscation that only benefits you. You are insistent that we must ‘define family’, and that “a tribe is not a family”, because that has almost nothing to do with your actual point that the underclass deserves the bomb because of its evil essence. “Tribe” just has enough usefully negative connotations for you to double down on this pedantic-semantic tomfoolery.

So we’re not doing that.

Instead, we can simply point out that, between the prologue and Zeus’ wife getting killed, the “alpha” characters bite a total of one (1) persons - after the (human) Coyote character effectively asks them to. It’s quite the leap from that to the wanton slaughter of eight billion people, yet you’ve made it. Why? Because of how they look?

Like, yeah, they do get confused with the ‘shamblers’ - but they’re about as distinct from the ‘shamblers’ as humans are from, say, chimpanzees. So it seems we’ve got a case of that sci-fi racism that always seems to be rearing its head. You are arguing that you are not a bad person “irl” but, because this is a movie, this particular outgroup is just objectively subhuman and deserving of death. You perceive this as a universe where racism is simply true and, so, you can indulge safely. (It’s the old illusion that, as in online communication, you can say and do anything because none of it is real and that avatar isn’t ‘me’.)

But there is no universe where racism is true. The basic plot of the movie (whose tagline is “they’re not what you think they are”) is that the monsters immediately turn out to not be a threat at all. It’s fairly easy to communicate with them, and they clearly aren’t interested in mindlessly murdering and spreading disease because they do the exact opposite of that.

All those assumptions emerged from you, but you are unwilling to take responsibility for them.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Real Cool Catfish posted:

People seem to give him very high film budgets.

The average budget for a studio film is 65 million. Army of the Dead was 70 million.

For comparison, Adam Sandler vehicle You Don’t Mess With The Zohan was 90 million.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Judakel posted:

Then don't omit counterpoints. I am not surprised you think it "only benefits me", because I am certain you have no real point to make beyond ad hominems. And yes, we're doing this. Tribe has an anthropological meaning and it isn't my fault that you're too much of a dunce to know that.

We’ve all been on the internet long enough to not be fooled by this stuff. You could have spent two seconds on Wikipedia:

“The definition [of ‘tribe’] is contested, in part due to ... the problematic application of this concept to extremely diverse human societies. The concept is often contrasted by anthropologists with other social and kinship groups, being hierarchically larger than a lineage or clan.”

If you’d like to do armchair anthropology, then the group could probably be more accurately described as a single “clan” of a broader “tribe”, given that they are united as ‘descendants’ of one quasi-supernatural ancestor. But I would be wary of doing this, because you are blithely paving over important distinctions between various societies. Normal ‘kinship’ or ‘blood relations’ or whatever are out the window when the characters do not reproduce sexually (and arguably do not reproduce at all). If this is a “clan”, it’s a clan with only one marriage - ever - and zero children born. What actually connects them is their implementation of, by all appearances, a type of nanotechnology. But you clearly weren’t using “tribal” in the McLuhan sense.

So, you are muddying things. Perhaps deliberately, though that doesn’t matter.

I am interested in clarity.

It beats repeating that your actual point has absolutely nothing to do with the definition of “tribe” at all. Your actual argument is:

“Zeus wants to keep offerings coming” and is therefore “interest[ed] in expansion”, and is therefore expansionist, and is therefore a genocidal imperialist and so-on.

By staying focussed, we can safely discard your parade of spurious ‘counterpoints’ (“alien nanomachines work differently on tigers! Prove me wrong!”), and examine the core misunderstanding:

That’s not what ‘expansionism’ is.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Carly Gay Dead Son posted:

Watched this last night. Trying to get a grip on it. I mostly really liked it. Initially, it seemed like a reversal of, maybe even an apology for 300. But it's not really that. It's the same exact conflict, just presented with a bit more levelheadedness. The undead of Las Vegas (alphas as Spartan analogues and shamblers as the wimpier Greeks) live in defiance, not just of a powerful empire but of all previously-held laws of nature. They are the future. YET, at the same time, as they toil under a traditional king and queen, make rudimentary tools and ride horses, they resemble the past far more than the encroaching, technologically- and politically-advanced empire does. Because they're starting fresh. It's more Planet of the Apes than Game of Thrones IMO. The undead don't appear to be expansionist, but they do seem to represent fascism as much as the Spartans did. Only here, rather than sexy buff white people, it's nasty walking corpses who do little else but shriek and leak goop outta their faces. Which is, at least, a more accurate depiction of fascists. But the film, as did I as the viewer, still sympathized with them.

Meanwhile, the heroes of AotD, the heisters, are a perfect representation of woke capitalism. A diverse group of people living equally stagnant lives who just want to get paid and laid. They try to make their individual identities coexist, self-correcting and attempting to weed out the truly despicable among them, only to realize that their team, a wonderful success from an IDPOL perspective, was just fodder all along. The top-down authoritarian power structure is present in both the undead and the living, it's just obfuscated in the latter and starkly, classically heroic in the former. The king of the dead uses his privilege to fearlessly lead the fight. Hiroyuki Sanada and the generals we see him with, the "kings" of the living, are a bunch of lousy, cowardly maniacal pricks.

I don't feel comfortable classifying Snyder as fascist or not fascist. But this movie is definitely a depiction of how Snyder compartmentalizes his fascist inclinations and makes them coexist with genuine concern for the rights of marginalized people. The whole conflict struck me thus: a bold, unabashedly amoral authoritarianism which is equally beautiful and grotesque, long-dead but unkillable; versus this self-destructive, schizoid authoritarianism, that is revolted by itself and has to present a different face to each part of its mechanism in order to survive. Both are doomed. I haven't seen his superman batman movie, or justice league, and I don't think I will, but I'll bet it's got that kinda thing going too.

This is where it’s important to be careful about what words mean, because in what sense is the Zeus character authoritarian? There don’t appear to be any laws that his people must submit to. How can the characters be fascist without industrial capitalism? Is Zeus anticommunist? What are we even talking about here?

It’s like the expansionism thing: there doesn’t appear to be any expansionism because there simply isn’t any. Expansionism almost exclusively refers to state-level policies of territorial expansion - either through direct acquisition of land, or more abstract expansion of influence over other territories.

A population increase (of maybe one person per month) is not in any way expansionism. How many people do you think Coyote’s sacrificed there in five years’ time?

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

2house2fly posted:

If you give the zombies someone they don't bother you, that truce is presumably a law which Zeus enforces. What if one zombie decided to attack the humans while that truce was in effect?

You can’t ascertain the existence of laws from that at all.

Like, if I ask you for five dollars and you give me five dollars, does this mean you were legally obligated to do as I asked? Nah, of course not.

Carly Gay Dead Son posted:

I don't think the Alphas are literally fascist, I meant they represent fascist ideals a lot like the Spartans did in 300. They are the improved form of man sought by fascists, paragons of Western ideals. They live without industrial capitalism, but like fascists, are the product of industrial capitalism.

What? How so? They’re weird-skinned homeless kept in a fuckin’ quarantine zone by Literally Donald Trump.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Carly Gay Dead Son posted:

Well yeah they're literal zombies. Things which should be dead, not being dead. Zeus is an ancient ideal made flesh in modern times. Of course he and his subjects are going to appear grotesque by our standards.

So are we talking “ancient ideals”, “western ideals”, or “fascist ideals”?

And which ones?

You seem to be making the same sort of associative leaps as Judakel, where the character briefly admires a statue of Zeus before occupying the Olympus Casino and is therefore fascist because the Nazis had once appropriated greco-Roman aesthetics.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

bushisms.txt posted:

We don't know if this is true. That's just what the coyote does. She probably had poo poo go sideways and found out, cause it's not like they're talking to her.

Right; the main reason I like Army Of The Dead is the affinity with Prometheus. The audience is shown this alien culture with very little hand-holding, so it’s a test of your ability to interpret things.

It definitely is far more likely that the entire ‘sacrifice’ thing was actually her idea; like a previous expedition went south and she screwed over a compatriot to save herself. That’d be far more likely than a dude somehow coming up to her to explain terms & conditions.

And then, how many people has she told about this? Like, how many people know that you can just get full access to the zone in this way? Tanaka’s sent multiple crews in, and he didn’t know.

So the already-silly notion that Zeus is actively asking for “offerings” from people outside is totally out the window.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

McCloud posted:

I mean, I'd absolutely argue (and have done so repeatedly, in fact) that 300 isn't fascist at all. It's a story from a fascist about fascists, sure, but it isn't an endorsement of either

Even that isn’t exactly right, since the events of the film predate the emergence of fascism by over 2000 years. It’s easy to forget that the battle of Thermopylae predates Christianity. I think it’s more productive to view it as a condensed nightmare version of the entirety of “western civilization”.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Judakel posted:

The zombies have a common ideology, a common culture, are large in numbers, and are settled for the time being. They are a tribe.

That is not the definition of “tribe”.

So, where did you get this from?

I was initially going off my own knowledge, but I figured I’d be charitable and do some research for you. In my efforts, I have been unable to find any source that agrees with you. The closest I’ve found is an entry in Encyclopedia Britannica, which says that your use of the term is outdated but persists as “a technical shorthand in college courses, documentaries, and popular reference works.” (Anthropologists prefer the term “ethnic group”.)

The EB also says that, even in those informal contexts, you are using the term incorrectly: “tribe” is, there, a collection of distinct communities (e.g. villages) who collaborate and whose members share a self-name. The group in the film is not divided in any such way, and has no evident self-name.

I could do more detailed research for you, but that isn’t really necessary. More than half your post is just you insisting that you are ‘smart’ without actually saying anything. Your only citation is the abstract concept of ‘anthropology class’.

Also, your use of the term “expansionism” remains incorrect. Your notion of ‘minor expansionism’, which you use to describe the opposite of expansionism, was invented out of whole cloth.

It is not going well for you. You need to be truthful and accurate.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN
You spent weeks trying to produce a source and just wrote "school" lol.


Judakel posted:

The zombies in the film are clearly self-divided into different communities, with shamblers and alphas being distinct and living apart. Yet they still belong to the same tribe.

There are two groups that live apart and have no interaction with each-other in the movie. To prove that they are a 'tribe', you are saying "they are a tribe". You give no reason, but it's presumably because they look similar. Similar skin tones, for example?

So you are grouping disparate communities together (insofar as the hibernating zombies can be called a community) based on their skin tone and arbitrarily applying outdated anthropological labels to categorize them. Why are you doing that?

Also, you are still using the term 'expansionism' incorrectly to refer to an unfalsifiable "mindset". That suggests that you possess an "eating poop mindset". See the trouble with that?

Weeks!

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN
Army Of Thieves is CONFIRMED for extremely good.

There's the expected Snyder influence, but it plays out more like a less-hyperactive Edgar Wright movie.

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SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN
The state of movies is such that a charming heist picture without any flaws automatically trounces most of the years' 'biggest' films.

But this one is even trickier for being an actually-good version of Baby Driver. That sort of 'live action Paddington' magical realism stuff is pretty hard to pull off.

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