The Marvel/DC/Fox Pre-Expande Universe

Batman got even worse in the stories Miller wrote afterwards. The Batman in Year One is a good man, but after 9/11 Miller snapped and wrote stuff like All-Star Batman and Robin and The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Both of which are basically punchlines.

There's actually some tragic subtext to Batman's story in Bv S in that regard. Snyder's Batman witnessed something extremely traumatic happening to his home and it had a really horrible effect on his psyche, which is exactly what happened to Frank Miller as well.

edited 14th May '17 6:57:58 PM by Draghinazzo

Think you meant Miller there, not Burton.

And I am aware. I read a whole book about Frank Miller a week ago. My thread about it.

It's a really good book, got me to buy his Daredevil stuff. Still need to read that, though.

@Draghinazzo: You got Miller and Burton swapped around there.

The Dark Knight Returns is one of those massively influential stories that inspire basically everything. It's most recurring contribution that almost every batman adaptation since uses is the idea Bruce Wayne is the mask and Batman is the real personality or something to that effect. Snyder has the Bruce that is closer to Miller's because they're both broken old men, every other Batman takes traits but they're still way younger and less broken. Nolan's intellectual billionaire I feel is closer to Loeb's take on the character in The Long Halloween rather than anything (TDK borrows a lot from that story).

You're right that Keaton's Batman isn't as manic and depressing as Miller's Batman but really that's because they are at different points in their lives. Keaton's Batman is a this prime, Miller's an old man. I think Keaton's Batman isn't far from what I picture Miller's would be in his early years (which we will never see because Frank Miller has gone insane). He's driven, intense, highly traumatized and a walking ball of repressed rage. The final showdown of Burton's Batman in which Bruce is almost seething with rage as he beats the everloving shit out of the Joker is very Millersque (it was actually inspired by their confrontation in the love tunnel in the comic).

Returns Batman takes the Miller-ish interpretation of Bruce as a repressed, manic, rage-driven and highly traumatized individual and dials it up to eleven. One way to interpret Returns, in fact, is that it is Bruce kind of getting over himself and stopping being such a goddamn psychopath. I really think Returns (probably coincidentally) has more in common with Morrison's Arkham Asylum than Miller's. Morrison's Bruce is the absolute height of "let's show Batman as a deeply fucked up person".

Returns is a curious film. This analysis handily explains the flawed but entertaining spiral of complete insanity that the movie is.

Talking about Rises again...

Lots of people compare Batman vs. Bane to the fight with the Mutant Leader in Dark Knight Returns. Batman tried to out-muscle a guy he can't bet that way so he lost. They wanted him to, again, be more like Returns where he comes back with a more skillful strategy that plays to his strengths and triumphs that way.

i was talking to someone else about the movie elsewhere and they compared it to Rocky 3. Which is apt because in that movie, when Rocky finds "the Eye", he can just magically tank Clubber's formerly powerful blows like they were nothing. Because something something heroic spirit.

That's basically what happened in Rises. Batman rediscovered the Eye of the Bat and could now beat Bane.

But what's kind of interesting to me, and it wasn't something I thought about until re-watching clips on YT, is the setting for their two battles. Bane points out he was born and raised in darkness. He IS darkness in a way a spoiled rich kid - even a horribly depressed spoiled rich kid - can't understand. Batman loses horrifically in his natural environment.

But the final battle, in which he more or less curbstomps Bane, takes place out in the open, in broad daylight. With the power of light, Batman triumphs. You don't think of Batman operating in the blazing light of day, duking it out for all to see. That just...that isn't Batman.

Only it is here. This really is the most idealistic Batman thing ever.

It's much like Wayne surviving the final battle: It's an optimism that sticks out of the story like a sore thumb. Nolan goes to painstaking measures to build the realism of the narrative (movie wastes precious minutes on explaining how ruined Bruce's body is and how he has to fix it to be able to even stand a chance against Bane) but then throws it away with little concern and it doesn't fit with the story's entire narrative.

The movie builds this arc about the old Batman having to deal with the end of his career but...he doesn't. He comes out entirely physically and psychologically okay, so the entire arc of the movie goes exactly nowhere. Idealism isn't really the issue, its the fact it's completely illogical idealism that flies in the face of what the movie establishes.

Iron Man 3 had a similar criticism going on for it. That the movie sets up the idea Tony Stark is wracked with PTSD and this could have gone somewhere interesting, but the movie just drops it and Stark overcomes his trauma laughably easily at the second act. It's the same working principle of Chekovs Gun: "If you put a gun in the wall (i.e establish a concept), use it (i.e have payoff)."

I wrote an essay a few weeks ago for my Philosophy of Film class's final discussing the evolution of Batman in film and using it as a measuring tool for measuring the evolution of comic book movies in general.

Batman Returns is easily my favorite Batman movie, largely for its psychological themes - even if it's plot is absolute nonsense and it adapts Penguin and Catwoman terribly from their comic counterparts - but it adapts them interestingly, and that's what really matters. I think Burton more than any other director to tackle the Bat understood the underlying psychology more than anyone else, even if he didn't have as large a respect for the mythos as - say, someone like Snyder (who - while I believe respects the mythos, wrongly believes he can improve on them).

A friend of mine holds that while the Nolan movies are good movies, they are not good Batman movies, and I largely agree with that. Get rid of anyone's costume or gimmick and change the names in the Nolan movies and you've just got a cool, original story about a "realistic" superhero.

I have a lot of issues with Nolan as a filmmaker. Even Memento, masterpiece that it was, aggravated me immensely in the last ten minutes because Nolan pulled the emotional investment out from under his own movie to capitalize on the film's gimmick and philosophy and rob the audience of a proper payoff. Unlike a director like Kubrick - who never really expects you to care about his characters and expects you to get wrapped up in the visuals and the atmosphere and themes of a film - Nolan wants you to do both, and is good at both, but at the last second will hammer you over the head with his themes and do his well-developed characters a disservice by reducing them to props meant to hold those themes up.

The gutpunch of Leonard essentially becoming his own villain, knowing that he'll never even realize it, that's a brilliant payoff in its own right. It's a nihilistic, existentialist audience betrayal in the finest film noir style.

I'm curious, what would you have preferred as an ending to Memento?

I'm with Unsung.

I actually quite like how Burton reinvented the Penguin in Returns, to be honest. I've said before the Penguin is one of those characters no one quite knows what to do with these days. His characterization varies widely because no characterization ever stuck as iconic.

He's a deformed criminal and that's it. Sometimes he's a Gentleman Thief (Silver Age), sometimes he's a ruthless mobster (his most recent characterization), sometimes he's Gotham's numbers man (Azzarello's Joker), sometimes he's a soft-spoken criminal with severe anger issues (Jason Aaron's Penguin). No one can settle on how to play him or even how grotesque he is. Gotham's Penguin decided to play the Penguin as a poor man's MCU Loki and the character suffered for it (and the atrocious writing of the show).

Burton's Penguin, in light of this chronic lack of identity, is pretty acceptable to me. It brings the character's core concept (he's highly deformed) to the forefront rather than treat it as a quirk, and I feel that works best for the character.

I'm not sure if mainstream Penguin is supposed to be deformed. Most of the time I've seen him he's just a portly man with a large nose and pretensions of being a member of high society.

Also, I agree with the above two. I think Memento's ending is perfect the way it is.

Well, that's the thing, the extent of his deformity also varies. He has to be at least somewhat "deformed" because his core concept is a guy who really looks like a Penguin and for anyone to look like a Penguin, they need to be pretty weird. But it varies if this means "portly man with something much like dwarfism, stubby limbs and a unusually long nose" which is a light take on "deformed" or if it means "he looks so much like a Penguin he has jagged teeth and flippers for hands".

It's the same thing with Killer Croc's "condition". Everybody agrees he has something odd going on in his skin to justify his Killer Croc alias, but no one can settle on the extent of it.

For me, Batman returns and dark knight show the diference between a dark STORY and a dark TONE.

Dark knight is the darkest superhéro story so far(I haven see logan yet) the joker manage to win from beging to end and paralize Gotham with only a last minute action stoping him, something it dosent matter for him because he got is nemesis and them he turn harvey into two face, forcing Batman to take the blame.

In anything, dark knight is joker origin story and it show.

But Batman return have the darker Tone so far, the three main chararters are really mess up and it coment a lot on that, catwomen seen closet to Harley queen than selina(im fact, I will said michel piffer can pull a very good Harley) while the pinguin is just....ughhhh, I really feel unconfortable in his Scenes, specially when he bite that men Nose and make sexual coment of a near woman, the story is silly and weird but the tone stay.

The Penguin's not really alone in changing pretty significantly between adaptations. DC in general runs on broad archetypes, and DC has crisis crossovers and reboots the way Marvel has What If stories, bad futures, and alternate universes. That is, they both have all those things, but DC has had a lot more drastically different versions of the same character, often running concurrently and with a very hazy canon running between them, while Marvel tends to draw a much sharper line between the Earth-616 'reality' and everything else.

Which is good, because without that cross-pollination, we wouldn't have the iconic Mr Freeze, the creepy doll-headed version of Toyman, and Heath Ledger's Joker as well as Mark Hamill's. It's a mixed bag, but once in a while you get something really work keeping, I'd say. Like I hope they carry over the Arkham Penguin's bottle-end 'monocle' into other media, because as absurd as it is, I love it.

Ya know what's underrated? The Batman. They were very experimental which was a bold move after the fanatically beloved TAS.

Penguin was a fighter in that show, and I loved the reinvented Poison Ivy who was less of a sex bomb and more of a real threat. Damn near took over Gotham one time. Also reinvented origin making her Babs' friend, loved that.

Not to get too off-topic but @ Memento's ending: I would have preferred that Leonard was on the right track and found the real John G. (even if it wasn't Teddy) - because the whole story was this really well-developed personal revenge story but at the end of the day, it's the upteenth time it's been told in-universe. We just saw one, ultimately false iteration of Leonard's revenge. Seeing the actual culprit get what was coming to him would have satisfied me more. Like I said, I can understand the theme of Leonard being unable to heal since he can't feel time, but like he says in the movie - just because he won't remember killing the guy the world still moves on without him and justice is served; it doesn't matter if he doesn't remember, it isn't about him, it's about his wife. And Nolan just kind of forgets that at the end. The movie does a really good job of putting you in Leonard's state of mind, but we're still the audience - we're still the world that keeps moving without him, and I felt we deserved to experience true justice even if Leonard couldn't. Still a great movie, but the nihilistic cyclic ending just crippled all of the emotional investment I'd built up, and Nolan just felt like he was leaning on the theme and narrative structure as a crutch at the end because to end the movie in a proper, predictable fashion would have been too easy to just make Teddy the right guy. It also reminded me of how Pyscho ends; really great movie start to finish - at least until the psychologist starts explaining what's wrong with Norman, just in case you didn't get it.

Anyway...sorry for that tangent. Batman's cool. Returns is still like the only real depiction of Penguin I care about, honestly. And the best live action Catwoman as well. I actually didn't mind her being crazy, it added a little something extra to the Femme Fatale she's usually seen as.

The implication is that the real John G is long since dead, that Leonard killed him but can't remember and won't believe that he's already had his revenge, similar to how he deludes himself about how his wife died. That crippled emotional investment you feel, that sense of disappointment.. That's exactly what you're supposed to be feeling. It's a movie that ultimately works because of Nolan's basic detachment. It works great for movies that are supposed to make you doubt meaning and attachment in the world, like Memento and The Dark Knight. It works less well when he's actively trying to argue against that bleakness. Which I'm sure is a bit disheartening for Nolan, but it works like hell for those movies, so...

Not sure why we're spoilering the ending of Memento any more than the ending of Psycho or Citizen Kane, at this point. It's been nigh on twenty years. Edit: Eh, fair enough.

edited 15th May '17 10:18:26 PM by Unsung

I mean, I hadn't seen the movie until last year and I'm sure many people hadn't either. I don't think it costs much to spoiler tag it.

Anyway, I felt that having the story end that cleanly would honestly not have been very interesting to me compared to what we got. Sure, the movie's plot is about Leonard seeking revenge but before that the movie is gradually building up to the idea that Leonard is being misled in several important ways, culminating in The Reveal that the biggest lie is the one he created for himself, and that his faith in the incontrovertible proof that written messages leave behind don't take into account that he would weaponize the condition against himself. Leonard being stuck in a never-ending cycle and choosing to chase after a lie to give himself a purpose is WAY more compelling and interesting to me and fits way better with the type of film noir story it was trying to be.

I have to say I much prefer Sam Elliot's version of Thaddeus Ross to any other version. Elliot's Ross actually feels like a person unlike the strawman who seems more concerned with keeping Banner from marrying his daughter than protecting the public.

So I got a bit curious over the last few days and saw two pre-cinematic universe movies, Unbreakable and the Ang Lee Hulk movie.

I'll talk about the Ang Lee Hulk film first since it's more directly relevant to the thread subject.

I've heard that it's a somewhat controversial movie that hasn't really been well-received by the general moviegoing audience, but some of the praise I was hearing made me want to check it out. I'm glad that I did.

When I saw Marvel's "The Incredible Hulk" as it came out, the movie really had no effect on me whatsoever. I haven't seen it since then, so maybe my opinion would be different now, but I just found it a very forgettable action blockbuster movie that really left me with nothing substantial after I left the theater. It doesn't have some of the crippling flaws that Thor did that made it such a weak film, but even that film at least had Loki.

But this film? Right from the getgo, multiple aspects of it stand out. The music by Danny Elfman is great, it reminds me of his work on the Spider-Man films which I also greatly enjoyed. It's been so long since I've seen a movie with a score that actually struck a chord with me.

The editing style was rather jarring for the first 20 minutes or so, but I eventually got used to it. It's definitely an interesting stylistic choice, but I don't think it really worked that much to the film's benefit since it really clashes with how serious and no-nonsense the movie is.

What really makes this movie to me is the whole dark psychological aspect of it. I really think it tried to dig into who Bruce Banner is and what makes him tick, that he's this mild-mannered, emotionally repressed man, and it really nailed that with aplomb. It takes about 40 minutes for him to hulk out for the first time, but it's worth it to me to see the build-up towards it and the scene itself is VERY intense.

I didn't give a shit about Bruce Banner in the 2008 hulk movie, but here I actually kind of related to and cared about him. What's more, this movie actually has a really interesting insight, the idea of emotions as the source of the Hulk's infinite power, that adds some really meaingful substance to the Hulk as a character concept.

Of course this is all helped by the fact that the cast is great. Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, and Sam Elliott are brilliant and give excellent and convincing performances.

While I'm at it, I also think the romance aspect of the film is above-average for superhero movies. Betty isn't as active as we'd like love interests to be these days, but Jennifer Connelly's acting is really good and the idea that she left Bruce because he was emotionally distant, but still loves him adds some pathos and investment that we just don't get in a lot of movies in the genre.

I admit the film does have some noticeable problems and missteps: it's longer than it needs to be, the editing style can come off as goofy sometimes, the hulk dogs were a little weird(but this IS a comic book movie, I guess), a lot of the special effects haven't aged very well, some of David Banner's dialogue combined with Nick Nolte's acting is Narmy (and Talbot's death is impossible to take seriously because of the freeze frame effect). All those things keep the movie from reaching the heights it could have otherwise.

But honestly, I think this might have become one of my favorite superhero films, in spite of the flaws, because it really does have something interesting to offer compared to a lot of other films in the genre. It's a dark, interesting and psychological auteur-driven superhero movie, and not only that, it...somehow doesn't feel embarassed to be a comic book movie at all. If nothing else that's a pretty impressive achievement. You certainly can't call it a generic, milquetoast film.

-

Unbreakable is a film that I watched for similar reasons as Hulk; it's actually fairly well-regarded overall, unlike Ang Lee's Hulk, it just isn't super well-known. KJ Mackley actually called it one of his 5 favorite films and it's M Night Shyamalan before his plummet, so I thought it would be worthwhile to have a looksee.

It's by far the most grounded and realistic superhero movie I've ever seen. Some might think that title belongs to Batman Begins, but Unbreakable makes Begins look downright farcical in comparison. It isn't even until a ways into the film that you realize it's actually a superhero film. It presents a really interesting concept I've not seen in other superhero stories: that even if you had superpowers, you might not ever be in a situation where you'll notice them, or even if you are, you'll just rationalize it away. People are very quick to write off anything that seems out of the ordinary, and for good reason, but what if something that wasn't ordinary did happen?

Admittedly I think it takes a while for the film to really hit it off, a lot of it is just buildup. But around the time when David remembers what actually happened during the crash, it starts to become very engaging.

Spoilers for the ending: When it was first revealed, I thought the twist of Elijah creating all the accidents was alright, but a bit underwhelming. As the conversation went on however I realized what the twist ACTUALLY was, that he was a supervillain. "Mr Glass"; that's actually pretty neat.

It very much feels like a film that was very ahead of its time; it's more relevant now than it ever was, what with the abundance of superhero movies we have today compared to back then.

edited 26th May '17 6:58:56 PM by Draghinazzo

I'm glad to see someone else who liked 2003 Hulk. It's a criminally underrated film.

I liked it too. It's not perfect but I do feel it's a better film than most give it better for.

Terrible design choices but good story and characters.

Thanks for the shout out.

I recently bought Unbreakable on blu ray and watched it again. For me the more I watch it the better it becomes. The big thing is that calling it a superhero story doesn't really describe it well enough, as within the story there is a constant push back to all the implications that come with calling it a superhero story. In Elijah's own words it's a superhero story "without the commercialism." I think the movie has become even cooler with stories of people who have actual physical abnormalities giving them some low-level form of superpower, like "Stan Lee's Superhumans."

Just in this last viewing I was catching on to the fact it is also a rather touching love story. There are some hints throughout the movie, practically confirmed in a deleted scene, that Audrey has been unfaithful. Now also consider that David has Touch Telepathy and until he started investigating that ability it came across as subconscious instinct. David and Audrey only interact physically in three scenes. The first was a light hug and awkwardly hold hands for a second when he leaves the hospital after the train crash. The second was in the flashback to the car crash where he carries her away. The third is the end of the film when he carries her upstairs and they hold each other while in bed. Since he can subconsciously read people it stands to reason that any physical interaction with Audrey clues him in that she has been unfaithful, even if he doesn't know why he gets that impression. On their date night Audrey even asks him why he acts distant to his own family. So him embracing Audrey near the end can be seen as him learning to forgive her because he knows better why he gets those impressions.

All of that is using the premise of how superhero powers would have an impact on the real world. The emphasis is on the private drama of what this all means rather than discovering some big plot against the world.

As for the 2003 Hulk, something I liked was how the movie never lost track of the character of the big guy. He displays a wide variety of emotions, instead of sticking with constant berserker rage and hatred. There are several points when it is quite clear Hulk is operating on Tranquil Fury, and at several points it seems like he is calming down a little and then whipped back into a frenzy because people start attacking him. When you look at the movie as a whole it actually has quite a bit of action, it just took a long time to get to the monster. I think one problem was that it was directed as literally a comic book movie, using a collage of images to fill the screen like a comic book panel layout and sometimes warping the image to replicate the more stylistic imagery (such as Banner turning into the Hulk after being attacked by Talbot, one shot was a close-up of him shaking during the transformation but his head remained still and the rest of the room was warping). In some ways it was cool but it was used inconsistently, combining high energy cinematography with a very slow paced story. The Raimi Spider-Man movies did a couple of similar shots, but had more energy even in their slower scenes.

I hadn't noticed that detail about Audrey at all. I mean, I picked up on the hints that she'd been unfaithful, but the idea that David distanced himself from her because his powers reminded him of her infidelity makes a lot of sense, it's not something that everyone would pick up on but those that noticed it would definitely get a richer viewing experience.

I want to go see Split now.

I liked in Ang Lee's Hulk how the scenes of Banner transforming were predicated by the image closing in on him, giving a sense of restriction and claustrophobia, before open up when he "Broke loose" as the Hulk.

In general, I think the biggest triumph of Ang Lee's Hulk is what the focus of the movie actually was, and how it was relatively good at pulling it off.

With a dark, psychological character-driven movie, we can come to understand who Banner is, what makes him tick, and why he's so angry. That's the key: the Hulk is a character about unrestrained emotions, rage most emblematically but this movie assigns a deeper meaning to the character than just that. Him turning into the Hulk after a 40 minute build-up is actually really intense and meaningful exactly because the movie shows us just why Bruce Banner would be the kind of person to lose control of their emotions like that.

What I'm saying is, that's exactly the kind of story that really taps into the character's potential.

It's so much more meaningful and interesting than what the 2008 Hulk movie did which was way more focused on action and just standard hollywood action fare instead of anything interesting.

edited 27th May '17 1:56:36 PM by Draghinazzo