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I think I'm going to have to disagree but I'm not eloquent enough to disagree sensibly.

That's not going to stop me from trying, especially since I'm not great about comic knowledge.

I think for the "modern age" anyhow, both Batman and Superman have tried to have a different tone to them than marvel comics. Though, television, at least, seems to prefer going for a more 'Silver Age' Superman with Lois&Clark, Smallville and Supergirl. Sadly, I haven't watched enough of Superman The Animated Series or Justice League to see just about where they sit.

Man of Steel seemed to be closer to the "Modern Age" - well, maybe not the Modern Age anymore. - This is where my comic knowledge breaks down. In any case, the 80's / 90's period.

So much of "Batman VS Superman" seems inspired by "The Dark Knight Returns" after all.

But honestly, with Superman, I think they need to try a 'big' something. I'm not entirely sure this is it, mind you (I kind of stopped watching trailers and tv spots for this film since before the last trailer came out - because people were saying 'well, that trailer just spoiled the whole movie').

Anyhow... I really don't think a traditional Superman plotline would work with modern audiences.

1) Perry tells Clark/Lois to write a story. Clark/Lois bicker.
2) They investigate story. They find out story relates to <Insert Villain A>
3) <Insert Villain A> overpowers and captures Lois (who does manage to take out a couple of thugs first). He incapacitates Clark/Superman using <Insert Villain A's superpower>
4) Clark angsts, seeks advice from <Trusted Figure>.
5) Clark figures out how to overcome <Insert Villain A's superpower>
6) Clark rescues Lois.
7) <Insert Villain A ends up in prison>

 Mr Morden wrote:

 Breotan wrote:

 BlaxicanX wrote:
Man of Steel Supes had an almost psychotic disregard for collateral damage.

You should rewatch that movie. Most of that damage was caused by Zod and his attempt to "terraform" Earth with that "gravity machine". Superman is responsible for some cosmetic damage only.

I don't think that the amount or even by whom or why the destruction was caused is actually important - Its how characters react adn deal with it. I don't recall Superman ever showing the slighest interst in actually saving anyone who might be caught up in that (sooo long and tiresome) fight - you know when they were toppling skyscrappers which may or may not have been full of people - not that the filmaker could be bothered to show you one why or another - it was all "hey look mum I can blow buildings again and again and again and agian...........

again the complete opposite in Avengers.

It might be that DC want Superman to be a "darker character" in a darker world - who knows but they certainly don't seem to want to make any of their charcters have a sense of humanity - and of course DC established that Superman is just there to defend the USA not the rest of the world

I dont care at all about Superman killed Zod - in fact IIRC the same thing was said about Tony Stark killing people in Iron Man - apparently he doesn't ever in the cmics (despite using massively powerful weapons - wierd comic logic) - Batman with a gun doesn;t phase me - the Michael Keaton one used rotary cannons and was for me the best incarnation ever of the character.........bar none

Kevin conroy is the best batman, bar none, Mark Hamil the best joker....

My ideal Superman setting/story would be something like a lighter then light, gooder then good Superman. I don't want to say the 'classic' image of Supes but at least the idealised image of him.

And then, put him into a darker, greyer, more realistic world.

Marlon Brando's classic line.

"They can be a great people, Kal-El; they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. "

That's what I want to see.

Sure, give him those dark, nasty, horrible choices. Have him struggle with them. But somehow, some way, he will find a way through them and he'll keep that light, that goodness while doing so.

And we,the audience, will learn something about ourselves while he did so.

I think... What I want is Superman crossed with Captain Picard...

 Compel wrote:


Sure, give him those dark, nasty, horrible choices. Have him struggle with them. But somehow, some way, he will find a way through them and he'll keep that light, that goodness while doing so.

And we,the audience, will learn something about ourselves while he did so.

I think... What I want is Superman crossed with Captain Picard...

I like this idea. Superman is a bright, shiny, lawful-good paladin stuck in a morally complex world? That works, especially if he stays lawful good the whole time (his powers let him solve problems in ways normal people can't, which is why normal people do the morally questionable things to solve their problems... they don't have his powers). That could make for an interesting story, especially if the villain has powers himself (it's very difficult to make Lex Luthor a credible threat without buckets of kryptonite lying around) and uses the powers to take the easy way out. Maybe he's not really full-blown evil, he just does the morally questionable things that everyone else does. Except the villain has powers, so he doesn't need to take the easy way out. He just does, because he's selfish. THAT becomes the source of the conflict between Supes and the villain. I can see something like that working, I just don't know where you get a villain like that from Superman's rogues gallery. Most of his enemies are full-blown megalomaniacs, which wouldn't be subtle enough to work.

What if they created a new villain without all that baggage?


Nah.

 Compel wrote:
My ideal Superman setting/story would be something like a lighter then light, gooder then good Superman. I don't want to say the 'classic' image of Supes but at least the idealised image of him.
.

This is probably what we'll end up with, maybe at the end of BvS but more likely once the Justice League has formed and the idea of heroes becomes accepted, and becomes a role that can be filled. However, there has to bea journey to that, it would have made no sense for someone like Clark in MoS (with a somewhat painful past, full of questions, unsure of himself and the world around him) to just put on the suit and become that.

The same goes for every character, at least in a 'first wave' of heroes. Even the ones that naturally lend themselves to being the archetypal superhero (The Flash, Superman, maybe Green Lantern as, after all, he is just a 'regular guy' without the Ring) need to become that over time, they can't just step into the light and instantly fulfil that role. The people aren't willing to trust them without proof, and they can't inspire people that aren't ready to be inspired.

So that's what we got in Man of Steel. It's Clark with no experience, no ideal to live up to apart from his own, no defined role other than winning. Eventually, he'll become the Superman we're familiar with (although hopefully more Modern Age than Silver Age), and that will be emphasised against the darker characters like Bats, and the ones like Cyborg and Wonder Woman who are too different to become heroes in quite the same way.

Yeah, that's my hope. I'm just uncertain mostly that they're able to pull it off.

I mostly enjoyed 'Man of Steel', to be honest and (sorry for retreading old ground) but my own, hypothetical Superman would have either found some other way to deal with Zod himself at the end, or, someone else would have taken the responsibility for killing Zod out of Supe's hands.

Throughout the character's history, Superman has rarely been faced with no-win situations. The writers simply didn't allow it, and provided solutions and escapes, usually in the form of fairly silly applications of his powers, a power up, or most rarely a new power.

As I've said many times before, the Silver Age (and probably Bronze Age) Superman would have dealt with the MoS situation by assembling a Phantom Zone projector at superspeed out of random pieces of stuff around the train station. I mean, I can see the Curt Swan rendering of that panel in my mind right now. Silly yes, but the priority was to keep the character's morality etc. intact first, and worry about logic or story second.

Perhaps the great all-time example took place not in the comics but in Superman: The Movie. He makes a decision about which nuke to stop, and there are consequences for that. But hold on! Superman makes a fairly silly application of his powers AND has a power up (because if he can fly fast enough to reverse time, he should have been fast enough to stop both nukes in the first place)! So nothing bad happens...there are no consequences because his power is just that unlimited.

The question becomes how well does that kind of writing play to modern audiences. The MoS reaction suggests that there are some who still want that from the character, and some that don't, and that's why there's such a difference of opinion about the movie. Personally, I found that scene in MoS to be a borderline brilliant confrontation of the old Superman situational trope, but then that's probably something that most in the audience aren't really going to get.

What I find incredibly lazy and frankly just plain dumb is the "that wasn't Superman" commentary regarding MoS. Superman has a long history and has been different things at different times. Hell, in one of the few and perhaps the most famous no-win situation Superman faced in the comics, he killed Zod and two other people. And less humanely, since he gave them a painful Kryptonite death instead of a quick neck snap. I guess that wasn't Superman either, except that it was.

IN CONCLUSION, I really don't know why every thread about a DC movie evolves (de-volves?) into this same tired exercise. I think we know where everyone stands on the matter, and clearly opinions aren't going to change.

 gorgon wrote:

 Elemental wrote:
My hunch (and it's only that) is that there's still a sense of embarrassment about making movies about guys in tights, like we saw in the majority of superhero adaptations pre X-Men. The Dark Knight trilogy and Man of Steel feel (again, to me) like they're constantly trying to distance themselves from accusations of silliness, often with clunky exposition on What This Means that feels more like film critics discussing the movie than characters acting naturally within the movie. No, this isn't about a guy in a red and blue costume who can fly and shoot lasers from his eyes, that's just a cover for a very very serious work on how humankind would react to powerful aliens amongst them! Oh, and the main character is Jesus or something.

So the recent wave of DC films try a little to be about something, while the Marvel films just embrace the dumb?

I agree 100%.

Excuse me a minute, just need to get some lotion for that epic burn. OK, sorted that out.

Pretty much all superhero concepts are "dumb", in the sense that they're implausible and wouldn't work unmodified in the real world. Even the Dark Knight movies have healthy doses of comic-book logic (how does the Joker put explosives wherever he needs them and have his instant army of madmen execute plans with military precision?) to enable cool action sequences. What I was saying was that if you go too gritty and down to earth, you lose the reasons that people started liking superheroes in the first place (before all the deconstructions and gritty revamps, which might be good, but still need that foundation of "You'll believe a man can fly!" to build on.)

To get away from a Marvel vs DC poop-throwing contest (because it's only possible to like one of them, of course), let's take the most recent Fantastic Four movie as an example of "gritty superheroes" or "darker = realistic = better" done badly. Show of hands, did anyone think it enhanced the movie or the characters to have Ben Grimm's catchphrase "It's clobbering time!" originate with an abusive family background? The Four barely work as a group and not at all as a family, Reed abandons the others for a big chunk of the movie rather than being a leader, Doom doesn't have his charisma....at that point, the drive for grittiness isn't making the film more relatable or plausible, it's just scribbling over the things that made the characters appealing in the first place. The drive to get away from the "goofy" origins and nature of the characters just led to a charmless mess.

Alternatively, you could see it more as, comicbook/superhero films are no longer a 'genre' like they used to be.

Instead they're a setting of which many different kinds of genres and stories can be told.

The Winter Soldier is an action/spy film. How much more ludicrous is that film compared to say, Eraser or True Lies?

Guardians of the Galaxy is a space opera. Heck, 'The Walking Dead' is one of the highest ranked tv series in the world and that's a graphic novel.

If DC wants their pictures to say something, that's fine. That goal is not 'betraying' their comic book origins. And whether they can pull it off isn't a result of being restricted by comic book origins.

It's usually because someone wearing a suit made a dumb call.

Yeah, it's all speculation how much is an intentional attempt to do something different than Marvel, and how much is the old (pre X-Men) lack of confidence that you can play superheroes straight. Hopefully it comes out, one way or the other, as a celebration of what makes the DC characters cool.

via

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2016/01/16/geoff-johns-and-kevin-smith-invite-you-to-watch-the-dawn-of-the-justice-league-cw-special/

In this promo for The CW‘s upcoming DC Films Present: The Dawn of the Justice League special, DC Entertainment CCO Geoff Johns and Kevin Smith invite you watch a special about the upcoming DC Films and see a new Suicide Squad trailer.

DC Films Present: The Dawn of the Justice League airs Tuesday.

The teaser is at the link, but it's nothing but Johns and Smith plugging the show on Tuesday, no new footage.

Still new Suicide Squad trailer sometime Tuesday then.

Yup, I've got my DVR set for that.

Looks like we're one Lantern short of a Justice League to me...

Still, Cyborg looks pretty decent from what I can tell. Can't see enough of Flash.

You wonder if the Flash and Cyborg costumes are 100% finalized, since those two are slightly in the background and hazier compared to the other four.

Regarding GL, mum's been the word re: casting too. There have been rumors that GL may not appear right off the bat in JL Part 1. If Big D is the baddie, then maybe the GL Corps shows up once things turn cosmic? Also, it remains to be seen which GL might appear in JL. I suspect -- and there are rumors to this end -- that we'll see multiple GLs in the DCCU, which should head off protests that this or that GL was chosen due to ethnic background.

I do hope the GL film is based around the Corps rather than just the one Lantern, but I think I'll be disappointed if we get anyone other than Hal Jordan as the League's Lantern, he's just the coolest and has been a member of the team for most of its incarnations.

I do like the idea that, whoever it is, they're already off Lanterning in space, and they'll come back to a changed Earth where you've got nutters running around in bat costumes and aliens and superhumans are a known reality.

So:
-Flash in the cinematic universe has "access to parallel dimensions and all of time/space"
-Cyborg was considered to be a pivotal character for this cinematic universe with how "wired" the modern world is.
-The footage of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman in her film was fantastic. She kicked the crap out of some Nazis.
-The Green Lantern film? The official title, with key art and all, is
"GREEN LANTERN CORPS". No more details than that.

The new "Suicide Squad" trailer was fantastic as well.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 gorgon wrote:
You wonder if the Flash and Cyborg costumes are 100% finalized, since those two are slightly in the background and hazier compared to the other four.

Flash's costume is finalized as of now. Cyborg's is not.

They joked that the reason the Flash was hazier is because of the fact that "he was coming back from a brisk jog". Cyborg was hazier/backgrounded because they did not have a hard deal with an actor at the time so it was essentially at the concept art stage.

That looks very promising indeed. It may be time for Cap to move on over as the world's coolest shield-toting Nazi-basher!

Interesting that they're going for a fully powered up Flash by the sound of it. I can see why (the TV version is still very much learning his powers, can hit maybe mach 2 or 3 at most rather than near light speed), but I do wonder how they're going to handle that on screen and in the script without making the rest of the League irrelevant.

The WW trailer/snippet/whatever was fun. I think that this should be a good movie, even if the comparisons to Captain America 1 will be easy to draw.

Wonder Woman is probably the only part of Dawn of Whatever I'm interested in.

AFAIk the Wonder Woman movie is actually set during/in/around WW I.

Which is fair enough, that war is ....was..... certainly more morally grey than WW II.

I was assuming WW2 as that's when she first appeared in the comics. Either way, it looks good.

Cyborg promo




Actor certainly looks the part -- human wise anyway

If you watch through it moves/starts again about The Flash & Aquaman.

 Ouze wrote:
Wonder Woman is probably the only part of Dawn of Whatever I'm interested in.

So far agreed - the Wonder Woman clips look really good - And her bit was the best bit in the Superman/Batman trailer!

Cap A 1 was one of the weakest Marvel films IMO so hoping for a really good WWII/superhero based film.

Is she likely to just fighting the Axis powers or is there a Wonder woman "villain" in that period - I know little about the character

 Mr Morden wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
Wonder Woman is probably the only part of Dawn of Whatever I'm interested in.

So far agreed - the Wonder Woman clips look really good - And her bit was the best bit in the Superman/Batman trailer!

Cap A 1 was one of the weakest Marvel films IMO so hoping for a really good WWII/superhero based film.

Is she likely to just fighting the Axis powers or is there a Wonder woman "villain" in that period - I know little about the character

From what I heard, it's going to be in two timelines; the World War stuff (whichever one it ends up being) and a modern day one that takes place before Dawn of Justice (which will apparently feature Batman or at least Bruce Wayne, explaining how they know each other in DoJ). There were rumours of Ares as the villain, and Sean Bean has been mentioned in connection to the role, though I don't know how reliable that was. Really, WW's two main villains are Cersi and Ares, so I'd bet we'll see at least one of those in some capacity, maybe both.

WW I

http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/JoshWildingNewsAndReviews/news/?a=129994


Guess maybe Cheetah for any super powered foe ?


http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Cheetah

Cheetah could work, but I'd really rather see Ares. It would be interesting to see someone that powerful and dangerous but not inherently evil; as the God of War, it's just not in his interest to prevent conflict, but he's got no plans to take over the world or anything.

I do wonder if they'll take the Marvel-esque Gods=Aliens approach, or something more traditional, or just not go into any great detail about it.

Enchantress from the 'squad movie seems to suggest/show that magic et al is around.

Course there may well be some other idea -- ancient astronaut and so on etc etc.