Okay, didn't expect Doomsday?
a) Why is Batsy even holding a gun?
a) Why is Batsy even holding a gun?
I think his no-guns rule doesn't apply to Doomsday.
Agreed, that rule doesn't apply to inhuman monsters.Maybe it shoots something to incapacitate superman? I'm presuming he brought it along to fight superman, not super-whatever. But a traditional gun wouldn't help with either; and I assume batman's pretty competent, so it's almost certainly something else.
Maybe it shoots something to incapacitate superman? I'm presuming he brought it along to fight superman, not super-whatever. But a traditional gun wouldn't help with either; and I assume batman's pretty competent, so it's almost certainly something else.
Kryptonite bullet to even the odds?
Edit: 'Cause, you know, no Oliver Queen to deliver a kryptonite arrow and all that.
The Superman of TDKR was very much similar to the very powerful Superman in the canon at the time. Even with the Kryptonite stun arrow Batman still needed a massive powered suit of armor just to make it a close fight. But in MoS, Superman was reduced to the strength of a normal human fairly quickly. This Batman wouldn't need both the armor and Kryptonite. Kryptonite alone, if it worked like the Kryptonian environment in MoS, would immediately place Superman at a huge disadvantage over Batman.I haven't seen MoS, so I can't comment on that.
I haven't seen MoS, so I can't comment on that.
However, in DKR, Superman's power level was reduced by literally being nuked and nearly dying due to lack of solar radiation. The Suit made it something of a fight, though Batman was still outclassed. Once the Kryptonite arrow exploded in Superman's face, the fight was over. Batman could have killed Superman at will, but chose not to.
Honestly, that fight was ridiculous.Overconfidence is Superman's real weakness. Occupational hazard of being a demigod, I guess.
Batman's suit has a flipping power cord attached to a street light!
If Superman had just pulled the dang cord out ... and even post nuke he still had enough super speed he could have just whizzed down and grabbed Batman and dropped his armored butt in jail.
I haven't seen MoS, so I can't comment on that.
However, in DKR, Superman's power level was reduced by literally being nuked and nearly dying due to lack of solar radiation. The Suit made it something of a fight, though Batman was still outclassed. Once the Kryptonite arrow exploded in Superman's face, the fight was over. Batman could have killed Superman at will, but chose not to.
That's not how I recall interpreting that fight. Its been a while, but I can recall that even when Batman was pummeling Superman after the Kryptonite arrow, Superman is still trying to convince Batman to stop fighting because he can hear Bruce's heart giving out from the stress. I figured at the time that each for his own reasons was still holding back in that fight: Superman, even Kryptonite weakened, was still not fighting Batman all-out to kill him and, unknown to him at the time, Batman was holding back slightly at the end because he was trying to orchestrate the fight to look a very specific way. Now I have to dig up my copy to reread it.Here's the pages in question (from here, which has more: https://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/5364139.html)
Superman is still concerned for Bruce's health, but doesn't put up much of a fight after the Kryptonite arrow.
Even with the Kryptonite stun arrow Batman still needed a massive powered suit of armor just to make it a close fight.My assertion was that it wasn't a close fight after the Kryptonite.
I didn't watch MoS, so I can't comment on any de-powering that went on there.
My initial response was to your assertion that it was close fight after the K-Arrow. My assertion was that it wasn't a close fight after the Kryptonite.
That all sounds plausible, but are we sure we're not giving too much credit to the MoS writers?
I see what you mean, but I would still content that even though it appears Superman would have lost if not for the Batman gambit, its still a pretty close fight in relative terms.
As to Man of Steel, in that movie it was shown that Superman's powers come not only from exposure to yellow sunlight, but overall from Earth's (lower) gravity, its abundant sunshine, and its atmosphere. In an environment that replicates that on Krypton such as within the Kryptonian ship that Zod has, Superman's powers quickly disappear entirely. And when Zod tries to terraform Earth into Krypton at the climax of the movie, Superman was shown to be negatively affected by among other things the stuff the world engine was spewing into the atmosphere.
An interesting question is what that stuff was. Perhaps in the Man of Steel universe, the stuff that the world engine puts into Earth's atmosphere to replicate the atmosphere of Krypton is, in fact, that universe's Kryptonite. Maybe there's something beneficial about it for Kryptonians, but it interacts badly with them when Kryptonians live for extended periods of time on a planet like Earth.
Incidentally, the introduction of Doomsday opens the door to a theory of mine I've tossed around regarding an otherwise weird plot hole in Man of Steel. If exposure to Earth gives Kryptonians superpowers, why would Zod want to terraform Earth into Krypton? Wouldn't it be better if they kept Earth earth-like, and even if there was a period of suffering the net result would have obviously been great for Kryptonians. It seems like Zod is pursuing a strange goal; the goal of depowering his own people.
It might actually make sense when seen from the perspective of Zod and Kryptonian culture as portrayed in MoS. As Jor-El seems to imply when he describes Kryptonian history to Clark and Zod also seems to imply through his actions, Kryptonians were very conservative in their beliefs about everyone having a specific pre-ordained place in society that was dictated by genetic programming. In their own way, they believed in a genetic purity of their species. If so, what if the mechanism that grants Kryptonians their powers on Earth is not simple adaptation, but something that happens at the genetic level. Their actual genes adapt to the new conditions and cause them to in effect mutate into something that can thrive in their new environment. Superpowers would be a kind of genetic mutation. If so, then that might be the reason Zod isn't swayed by superpowers. In his opinion, Kryptonians should live the way they were meant to live, which is in a Kryptonian environment and a genetic adaptation to that environment only. He might also feel that a world full of superpowered Kryptonians would be disruptive to order, but the notion that he would also have a racist reaction to anything that "changes" Kryptonians in any way actually makes sense in the story.
There's no basis for the hypothesis that superpowers come from a genetic adaptation anywhere in MoS, but Doomsday might provide that. In the original canon, Doomsday was the product of strange, Lamarckian experiments with Kryptonians, suggesting that Kryptonian biology isn't like most: their genetic structure can adapt to harsh conditions in unconventional ways. If Doomsday establishes a similar fact in BvS, that Kryptonian biology is adaptive at the genetic level and can produce a being like Doomsday through experimentation, then that would connect to the theory that Zod didn't see superpowers overall as a good thing, and would be motivated to terraform Earth into a planet that wouldn't grant Kryptonians superpowers (or at least as much superpowers - the Sun would still be stronger) because it was far more important to Zod to return Kryptonians to their predestined state.
I think to think of it as "help" more than "credit."...
I believe that Zod and the Kryptonians were so eager to Krypton-Form Earth because the enhancement of their senses was incredibly painful for them and hard to adjust too. Kal-El had spent virtually his entire life here and had learned to focus; they hadn't and it pretty much put them out of the fight each time it happened until Zod himself learned to focus past it.
I still want to know why Zod didn't just use the machine on Mars or Venus. He would have saved conflict with Kal-El and gotten the chance to rebuild his world without a fight
You're probably right. I used to do such constructive nitpicking all the time when I was teaching. I still do it for media that I like. You seem to be much more generous than me in extending the practice. I've got a definite threshold for charitability when it comes to what could also be explained as bad writing, especially if there are other examples of such in the same piece.
With Hack Snyder at the helm, it was always going to be appalling - two movies into their "cinematic universe", and DC already needs a full reboot.
Oh yeah, the early reviews are seriously panning it. It's not going to slow down opening weekend but if the rumor that the film cost $400 million to make, WB is in some serious trouble. The reviews just moved my viewing from Thursday night to a discount Tuesday night a week or three in the future. And I even went to see Fant4stic in the theaters after it got a 9% on RT.
I think tomorrow we will see WB stock take a dip while Disney's stock goes up. Unless BvS is so bad it could harm the entire superhero genre (together with Fant4stic and ASM 2). WB better pray that Suicide Squad does bank.
I think these kinds of movies are practically immune to reviews.
Case in point, the Transformers franchise has grossed nearly 4 billion.
He's definitely not a "hack"
He's worse than a hack - desecrating the entire concept of Superman wasn't enough for him - he's spread it around this time.
And on the plus side, I wouldn't care too much if Superman killed that Lex Luthor.^This... so much. He looks, sounds and well, feels like some kind of Bizarro-Lex.
I think these kinds of movies are practically immune to reviews. The early reviews for Avengers Age of Ultron were not kind, and even I think it was a weaker movie than the first Avengers, but it still made 1.4 billion in total box office (8% less than the 1.5 billion of the first Avengers, but still plenty successful overall) and all the "Marvel has finally lost it" commentary did exactly zilch to Marvel's momentum.I would like to draw some additional discussion to the difference between bad early reviews for Age of Ultron and BvS. As you mention, the Marvel movie franchise had momentum at the time AoU came out. I would argue that the DC Cinematic Universe does not at this point. Man of Steel was somewhat polarizing and the people who didn't like MoS probably won't be heading into BvS if it's got bad reviews (ie. more of the same as MoS).
I think to think of it as "help" more than "credit." In order for something to be plausible, or to be more precise in order for it not to be implausible, its only necessary that there exists a reasonable explanation that fits all the facts. Its not necessary that the creators presumed it or believed it or were even aware of it, only that they did not explicitly disavow or contradict it in their content.
I like to think of myself as a "constructive nitpicker." Its a personal preference of mine that on the one hand I like to think about things in a way you might call nit-picking. But I like to take those nitpicks and see if there's a way to turn them on their head and make them strengthen rather than weaken the original content. The Peter David novel Vendetta is something I consider a commercial example of this kind of thinking. It starts by looking at the Trek TOS episode The Doomsday Machine and asks a pretty simple question: if the Doomsday Machine moves around so slowly, how could it come from another galaxy as Spock suggests in that episode? And the answer is: it really shouldn't have: it would take too long and there's no way for it to fuel itself during the trip between the galaxies. That seems to be a nit pick plot hole. But what if that nitpick is flipped upside down: what would explain those facts? What if it came from outside the galaxy not because it came from another galaxy but because it had been put there from originally inside our galaxy? Let's keep going: maybe it was put there because its creators were essentially throwing it away. Why? Maybe because it was a prototype: clearly it wasn't a very good Doomsday Machine in actuality: although it did destroy many planets and wrecked havoc with two starships, really as a true Doomsday weapon it wasn't difficult to destroy. A really big fusion bomb thrown down its maw did it: during a full-scale interstellar war that wouldn't be considered a big price to pay to take that thing down.
Okay, so we have a prototype weapon that moves around slowly and destroys whole planets, mostly ignores small warships, has an impenetrable hull, no crew, and a single powerful antiproton weapon. What sort of foe would this be useful against? How about the Borg? The Borg (at least as originally envisioned) didn't care about individuals, didn't fly around in small warships, primarily targeted technology and planetary cultures, used high technology cutting beams to slice up interesting technology, and assimilated the beings of the cultures it tried to absorb. The Doomsday Machine seems almost specifically designed to be an antiborg weapon in retrospect. Its design is actually kind of silly if its enemies were anything like the Federation: its slow enough to allow its enemies to mount a defense, and its weaponry, outside of surprise, its not really good at destroying fleets of enemy warships. But against the Borg, that usually come at you one at a time in large colony ships? And assimilate whole planets?
Once you take the nitpicks apart about how the Doomsday Machine worked, how it functioned, how it moved, how it attacked, what its weaknesses were, and instead of saying its nonsensical ask instead what circumstance would make those actually make sense, an interesting idea emerges. That's what I consider constructive nitpicking. We *know* the writers of the Doomsday Machine were not thinking about the Borg for obvious reasons. But that doesn't mean there's no value to thinking it for them.
Funny you should bring that up. There was an old TNG novel where they found a 2nd Doomsday Machine and it was discovered they were in fact created to fight the Borg.
I would like to draw some additional discussion to the difference between bad early reviews for Age of Ultron and BvS. As you mention, the Marvel movie franchise had momentum at the time AoU came out. I would argue that the DC Cinematic Universe does not at this point. Man of Steel was somewhat polarizing and the people who didn't like MoS probably won't be heading into BvS if it's got bad reviews (ie. more of the same as MoS).
Your average movie goer doesn't have a half dozen previous good films to motivate them to give one with bad reviews a try.
I guess we'll see.
I would like to draw some additional discussion to the difference between bad early reviews for Age of Ultron and BvS. As you mention, the Marvel movie franchise had momentum at the time AoU came out. I would argue that the DC Cinematic Universe does not at this point. Man of Steel was somewhat polarizing and the people who didn't like MoS probably won't be heading into BvS if it's got bad reviews (ie. more of the same as MoS).
Your average movie goer doesn't have a half dozen previous good films to motivate them to give one with bad reviews a try.
I guess we'll see.
Oh, I DESPISED Man of Steel. And, Dark Knight Rises, too. And, I plan on seeing this piece of garbage as soon as possible. I can't wait to revel in the train-wreck that is this movie! I'm just hoping it's Plan 9 level horrible. That would be great!
I've never been this excited to see anything go down in flames as much as this.
Why? Because I'm a life-long, die-hard DC fan. And these movies are like the evil mirror universe version of a DC movie.
Zach Snyder is an abomination, and his desecration of DC is cultural vandalism - he needs to go, and there needs to be a full reboot.
Oh, I DESPISED Man of Steel. And, Dark Knight Rises, too. And, I plan on seeing this piece of garbage as soon as possible. I can't wait to revel in the train-wreck that is this movie! I'm just hoping it's Plan 9 level horrible. That would be great!The best way to tell WB that you don't want more of the current DC direction is to not give them any money. Wait for it to be at the library.
I've never been this excited to see anything go down in flames as much as this.
Why? Because I'm a life-long, die-hard DC fan. And these movies are like the evil mirror universe version of a DC movie.
Err...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwXfv25xJUw&feature=youtu.be
made me chuckle
I had the misfortune to see this 'Dawn of Justice' last night.
How can a movie with so little actual content take so very long to present it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwXfv25xJUw&feature=youtu.beMade me mostly feel bad for Ben. :-\
made me chuckle
The memes that will come out of the tidal wave of mockery and contempt that's flooding over this turkey will be the only worthwhile part of it - apart from the firing of Snyder and rebooting of the DC movies.
I'll not see this til the digital release, but I have no expectations for anything comics not on netflix anymore.Then (re-)watch Justice League: War and Throne of Atlantis instead... because those were awesome.
Then (re-)watch Justice League: War and Throne of Atlantis instead... because those were awesome.
'Batman: The Animated Series' is really all the Batman anyone needs.
When you think what a really good job the DCAU did with Superman/Batman it seems a real shame they didn't simply take the script from "World's Finest" and shoot it live action.
(World's Finest -- the 3 episode meeting of Superman and Batman in "Superman: the Animated Series")
I mean, I had small issues with the Bruce/Lois romance element, but it was still a terrific story.
I'd actually prefer if they'd have Timm try some live action tv to movies. I really feel like he's wasted doing adaptations or anything non-serial in general (especially since they have him doing killing joke next. I got enough of Joker explaining himself in the second half of dark knight to last me several lifetimes).
It's a shame that the general movie going public have trouble taking animation seriously.
Well, Bruce Timm is a long, long, long time artist and animator. I don't think "they" are having him do anything: I think at this point he's picking his own projects since stepping down as DC animation head honcho: he's supposed to be working on an adaptation of the Killing Joke. Given his passion for art design and animation, it is entirely possible he doesn't *want* to do live television or cinema. It might be completely out of his wheel house.
I suspect that he has the clout that if he really wanted it, he could make it happen. The fact that he isn't probably says more about what he wants to do with his time than what he's been constrained to do.
You're probably right, but as I have no access to the inner workings at WB/DC I reserve my internet-given right to irrationally blame a diffuse disembodied they based on a fabricated and oversimplified chain of cause and effect :P