MCU and DCCU Differences in Mentality

@Swanpride the Lo A isn't interesting because of magic. They're interesting because they have similar goals as Batman but are willing to go to extremes he wouldn't. They're the perfect example of a noble movement being co-opted by the wrong people.

I should also point out that Batman Begins did whole subversion of the Yellow Peril villain thing eight years before IM 3.

I don't see what is noble about killing.

Generally speaking, I actually don't care what kind of villain is used. I can find just as much enjoyment out of a villain which isn't flashy and mostly serves the plot than out of one which stuffs pencils into people eyes. Important is that the end-result works.

I think what windleopard meant was that the League of Shadows had the same basic goal as Bruce: ridding Gotham City of its systemic corruption.

But because the League was headed by the wrong people, their only solution was "Burn everything to the ground and start over."

This is a problem with most of Nolan's movies really, the dialogue is honestly kind of pretentious a lot of the time. I mean who the fuck even says "It's time my enemies shared my dread"? that's a line that belongs in a bronze-age comic book, not in a movie made in the mid 2000's. and most of his movies still have that lol

ultimately though this is what makes them interesting as characters, rather than just being some bad guys for the hero to fight.

i think this has been discussed in other threads before (i'm not really sure why we have this one in particular since this kind of discussion could easily be in the dcu thread, but whatever), but the main thing with marvel films is that they're very heavily centered around the main character. i haven't clocked this but i'm pretty sure that most given marvel movies give the villain considerably less screen-time than the main character. most of the time the villain has to serve the plot rather than be a fully fleshed out and interesting character.

this has its advantages, clearly, but it also results in most villains having to rely on the actor giving a threatening/hammy performance to give the character some weight. it works to varying degrees, but doesn't really produce memorable and charismatic villains like say, nolan's joker.

by contrast in the few times they spend time on the villain and treat him like a main character, you usually end up with someone audiences react to more. This is the main reason people enjoyed Loki in Thor (which was otherwise a very mediocre movie), because he had an unexpectedly complex motivation for what he was doing that you wouldn't have really guessed, and it felt like he had his own storyline in the movie as opposed to simply being the villain in thor's story.

I haven't gotten very far in Daredevil, the last episode I saw only just introduced Kingpin at the end, but I know that people reacted well to him for the same reasons. This is just a result of it being TV and not a movie, they can afford to spend time on Fisk to make him a layered and memorable character instead of just a bad guy for Daredevil to fight.

edited 30th Aug '15 10:57:53 AM by wehrmacht

So many lines like that where you can almost feel Nolan himself elbowing you in your side while pointing at the screen and going "Eh? EH!?" like an eager-to-please child.

edited 30th Aug '15 10:57:39 AM by nervmeister

"This is a problem with most of Nolan's movies really, the dialogue is honestly kind of pretentious a lot of the time." Nolan monologued too much like Hideo Kojima, mainly for Batman Begins. In real life no one talks like that unless it's in an academic setting. However, this is a problem for Batman anything in general - just look at Arkham Knight wow. So much heavy handed anvilicious

edited 30th Aug '15 11:00:38 AM by xbimpy

i'm not sure that nolan really writes the script himself though? i think it's mostly just that someone in his Production Posse just writes really pretentious dialogue.

edited 30th Aug '15 11:03:25 AM by wehrmacht

well it wasnt in I Nstaller. Inception was closet. i think its a problem anyone has when you try so hard to be "serious" rather than just let life be

edited 30th Aug '15 11:05:57 AM by xbimpy

In inception the pretencious talk mostly worked because most of the time it was a setting in which people would talk pretentious to explain something to a novice.

The "problem" with giving the villain a lot of screentime is that this is time the hero is automatically lacking. You can get away with that if you deal with an already established character, but not if you have to built up a whole world and introduce a fairly unknown hero. That's why Ronan was perfect for Got G. (Plus, I never got why so many viewers apparently didn't notice that the guy is literally bathing in the blood of his enemies. He is freaking nuts!).

Yeah. Even 616 Ronan would be taken aback by that. Still think Crosstron beats him in utter bastardry though. And remarkably enough, he's a more realized character too.

edited 30th Aug '15 11:23:47 AM by nervmeister

"Important is that the end-result works."

For the movie? yeah. but in the end it become rather forgettable, not for nothing the most memorable are Loki and Hydra because they let them take the spotlight for a little bit longer or a least being a theme drive movie instead of a chararter driven one.

Also the ending useing even that with know heros, malekith as a generic doomsday villian or Ultron with chararterization where all over the place and of course the whole "in retrospective I..." which was cringe worthy, as marvel just decide they have to be like that otherwise it will be "silly or too serious"

Let me ask you a question: Who is the villain in Shawshank's Redemption? In The Last Crusade? In Golden Eye?

A memorable villain is nice, but he is not essential for the quality of a movie.

(And I don't think that anyone ever claimed that Malekith was anything but a bad villain...but one or two bad villains in 12 movies hardly equals a "villain problem")

edited 30th Aug '15 12:55:48 PM by Swanpride

The villain in Goldeneye was 006, Trevalyn, and his relationship with Bond was kind of the heart of the movie's conflict. Also Onatopp. Two very memorable villains.

And in the Marvel movies, it's not two weak villains, it's "everyone but Loki and HYDRA". Because the villains are simultaneously not frightening enough to feel genuinely threatening, and not layered or nuanced enough to be compelling characters in their own right. Even Loki isn't on a level with the best antaognists produced by the other franchises.

And though I don't recall his name, the villain of The Shawshank Redemption was The Warden: a symbol of the corrupt system the protagonist (whose name escapes me as well) is thrown into that begins relatively genial then becomes more and more cruel and greedy the more he relies on the protagonists skills to escape his own judgment - a contrast to the legitimately not-guilty but punished protagonist. Ultimately, he represents one of the major things that must be overcome in order to find freedom from complacency.

He's a pretty engaging character as far as villainous foils go, and definitely memorable since he creates some of the most important parts of the plot.

But in any case, its worth noting that Shawshank Redemption is an entirely different genre from any of Marvel's movies.

edited 30th Aug '15 1:20:53 PM by KnownUnknown

To be fair, other than Ultron and Mandarin (I'd include Leader as well, but the Sam Stern we saw in film was no Leader at all to begin with, so I'm not counting him), none of the 'bad' villains who have been in the MCU have been worse than their comics counterparts either, at least from what I know (I'll admit I'm no big expert on Ronan or Malekith, but what I've seen of them didn't bowl me over). It's still too early to judge Thanos, and while Hammer was a joke, he at least was more entertaining than his printed version for what he was.

Really, most of the 'good' and iconic Marvel villains had gone to FOX and Sony. Now we'll see what can Marvel do with the Spider-Man rogues, they'll never pry Magneto from FOX, and Dr. Doom is still a possibility, but one marred by three lousy portrayals already.

I actually didn't think that Ultron was that bad, although I'll admit I'm not sure why Whedon wanted to go that route with him.

i'm pretty sure hammer was supposed to be a joke, more or less.

the thing with iron man 2 (and to a degree the other iron man movies) is that the main villain is not really ivan vanko, but tony's own self-destructive behavior. granted i have not seen iron man 2 in years, so i might be misremembering, but iirc that was pretty much the emotional crux of the movie. vanko, tied to tony/his father's past actions or not, still felt more like a superfluous bad guy that tony had to fight because of a genre convention.

Yeah, it feels like they actually wanted to do a very thoughtful movie in which Tony struggles with his own demons, but they needed the action beats, so they threw Vanko in.

Still coming to grips with what DCCU did with Luthor. Maybe they wanted to heighten the contrast between hero and villain and felt that the source material's version wasn't "puny" or "wormy" enough.

We only know how 'puny' this Luthor looks, not how 'puny' he actually is...

Well, yes Im talking about appearance and demeanor. Im not necessarily saying he's going to be the Justin Hammer of DCCU.

This Luthor seems to be more of a "devil on the shoulder" type character rather than Loki being the "chaos for its own sake" kind of character. They tried to make MCU Loki a relative physical threat, but that is where the character is the weakest. Several depictions of Luthor have him with something of a bodybuilder physique, and similarly when he dons the Powered Armor he is not as interesting.

"Really, most of the 'good' and iconic Marvel villains had gone to FOX and Sony. Now we'll see what can Marvel do with the Spider-Man rogues, they'll never pry Magneto from FOX, and Dr. Doom is still a possibility, but one marred by three lousy portrayals already."

It depend, the first trilogy show why magento dosent work as a villian and the prequels have move away into a extremist territory or a jerk with a point while Doom...ughh.. he is just a hammy overlord and with the most recient movie at all is going to take a while.

"I actually didn't think that Ultron was that bad, although I'll admit I'm not sure why Whedon wanted to go that route with him."

For me his chat with Vision before been destroy was his best part: he suddenly speak as tired, thinking humanity can survive in his own for a moment Vision agree with him, it was very good...and that it, from most part he is eloquent and them become eviltony! because that is what we need: another evil tony. ughh

I like my Lex Luthors to be super smart, super rich, super manipulative assholes who still have some shred of decency in them (if only because I've always imagined that Superman could one day turn even his archenemy into a kind of good guy, because that seems like a Superman thing to do). And that they have some kind of point to make that can't just be brushed off, even if it's buried deep within their bullshit.

That's a good outline.