Are "post heroes" a good thing or a bad thing?

[Scalenex]

I don't particularly like that version of Luke. Very uncharacteristic.

Wisecrack.com covered this. They also spoil Logan, Star Wars, among others and they touch on R-rated stuff like sex and violence, but it doesn't show the adult stuff, it just analyzes it. Here


Wisecrack makes a great parallel to Western and post-western movies. Your old school Westerns involve a heroic stranger ride into town, restore order and ride away with the admiration of the town (and probably the heart of the rancher's daughter or other female lead).

Post-Westerns involve a gunslinger or other western hero retiring, bitter at remorseful about the actions they had to do. Usually living like a hermit and they get pulled back in reluctantly. Usually they do this to help their kids or some surrogate kid.


My intellectual side loves post-______ movies, but my inner child doesn't like it.

My inner intellectual child points out that Westerns are basically a dead genre, or at least a much weaker genre. I am mildly concerned that Hollywood is going to kill the super hero genre.

The Han Solo movie looks like it will become the first Star Wars movie to lose money. More than a few DC superheroes flop. Marvel has a pretty good track record on movies, but they drop the ball on TV shows while DC usually does pretty well with TV shows both live action and animated.

I haven't given up on DC movies because the Dark Knight in my opinion is the best movie of the 21st century.

I doubt any Hollywood producers are reading this, but I think I figured out why Christopher Nolan's Batman and most Marvel movies do well and DC is struggling.

Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man dive into cognitive dissonance and regret and other post-hero themes BUT their initial debut is pretty light-hearted and simple. Batman Begins wasn't exactly light and cheery but the good guys were fairly clear and the bad guys were fairly clear.

Apart from the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy, DC movies do not start with a classic super hero story and then branch off from it in more mature and dark directions. Man of Steel starts with Clark Kent watching his father die and basically go through a roving hobo period in mourning. Then reluctantly battles the villains and defeats his first villain by brutally murdering him.

I don't remember if it was Man of Steel or Dawn of Justice but there was a scene where some nameless soldiers are shown dead. Zac Snyder revealed an Easter Egg that one of the soldiers was Jimmy Olson. Problem is, that's not an Easter Egg. If you don't tell the audience who it is, if you don't introduce Jimmy as an important character, he's just a nameless red shirt. I may be an amateur writer, but I know how to kill characters. You have to make the characters like-able before you off them. At the very least you have to make them seen. The fact that the Winter Soldier is Bucky means something because BEFORE he became a cyborg killer he used to be a loveable sidekick.


If superheroes dies out as a genre, I don't know what will replace it. Badass ex-operatives like Jason Born or Liam Neeson in Taken?

What do we have coming out in 2018. Another Star Wars prequel, another Synder franchise DC movie, a live action Winnie the Pooh sequel (you could call it post-Pooh because Christopher Robin is a middle aged man!), a Jumanji remake, a Pixar sequel, a Tomb Raider remake, an all-female remake of Oceans 11,

I'm not that interested in Hotel Artemis but it may be the only way to see something new (though I did think Incredibles 2 was able to live up to its predecessor). Game of Thrones last season isn't out yet, but HBO is already working on a prequel series.

Are we in a dark ages for new things? I notice new things tend to flop in the box office.

 

[Aginor]

Some franchises just run too long.
And producers and directors don't take enough risks.
The only movie that really took some risks lately was The Last Jedi, and people disliked that apparently.
So now we are probably going to be back to standard plots because people like those.
No risk.

As for post-____
Yes please! Some of the best Western movies out there are exactly that.

 

[NIGHTBRINGER]

The Han Solo movie looks like it will become the first Star Wars movie to lose money.

I certainly hope so!

 

[pendrake]

I certainly hope so!

I don’t get it. What was not to like?

Speeders? Check
Blasters? Check
Villains? Check
Skum? Check
Hives of the previous two? Check
Strange Aliens? Check
Chewbacca? Check
Explosions? Check
Spacecraft? Check
Battles? Check
Droids? Check
Chases? Check

Lightsabers? Hmmmm, not remembering a lightsaber (is that the problem @NIGHTBRINGER ??)

 

[NIGHTBRINGER]

I don’t get it. What was not to like?

Speeders? Check
Blasters? Check
Villains? Check
Skum? Check
Hives of the previous two? Check
Strange Aliens? Check
Chewbacca? Check
Explosions? Check
Spacecraft? Check
Battles? Check
Droids? Check
Chases? Check

Lightsabers? Hmmmm, not remembering a lightsaber (is that the problem @NIGHTBRINGER ??)

Flawed ending? Check
Flawed logic with the Sabacc games? Check
Dull villains? Check
SJW droid inclusion for obvious political agenda? CHECK
Anger over mismanagement of the SW IP? Check
Knowing that your primary characters are in no real danger? Check
A movie that very few people wanted? Check

The movie was okay, but highly forgettable. Lando and Chewie were the only real positives I got from the film. Overall it's not something I can imagine revisiting multiple times. Even the prequels, which I often complain about, have very memorable moments and are films that I have re-watched many times over.

 

[pendrake]

Flawed logic with the Sabacc games? Check

The What? Whatsa “Sabacc Game”?

Pretty sure I didn’t fall asleep for a scene...

 

[NIGHTBRINGER]

The What? Whatsa “Sabacc Game”?

Pretty sure I didn’t fall asleep for a scene...

Sabacc is the card game that Lando and Han engage in, once in the early/mid stage of the movie and once at the very end.

 

[pendrake]

Sabacc is the card game that Lando and Han engage in, once in the early/mid stage of the movie and once at the very end.

OK thanks. How on Coruscant could anybody possibly work out the logic of, or rules to, the game from seeing no more than five hands of it played?

It is too brief, some cards get revealed, piles of markers and chips get shoved about, in just 2 scenes, it all goes by too fast.

I don’t get it.

 

[Aginor]

It is like poker in a James Bond movie.
It isn't necessary to understand the rules.

I also liked Solo, for me the plot is not at all forgettable, and neither are the characters. In fact for me it beats Rogue One with ease.

Anyway, I suggest we not turn this in yet another Star Wars thread and focus on the actual question.


What probably makes the anti heroes in post-western movies great is that they are more realistic. The idealistic heroes are bound to be hit by reality at some point. It is hard to stay that positive when shit falls apart around you.
And that (sorry, Star Wars again, but only one character) I liked about Luke. He always had his dark side in him. He always had his doubts in him. We are talking about the pitch black clad guy who used the dark side of the Force to beat Darth Vader. The same guy who single handedly killed several thousand people during the wars. That has to have had an impact on him. It had in the comics and books of Legends and it had in the canon.

For me the Luke we see in TLJ is the next logical step, so I was surprised that people called him 'out of character'. He wasn't. He just evolved from the stereotypical idealistic hero.
But enough Luke for now.

Many people didn't like the sad and whiny Tony Stark in Iron Man... was it 2 or 3? Whatever. But I liked that he finally got some depth. Marvel cinematic universe heroes normally are far too one dimensional for me, in contrast to the comics.
Interesting thing though: every time the writers give a character depth many so called fans instantly dislike the change. So again they revert to the boring but beloved stereotypes.

The best DC movies (Nolan's) do that right somehow. Batman (along with other characters) has more depth there and for some reason people seemed to like it there.

I am not sure why.

 

[Scalenex]

I haven't watched the Solo movie, but I looked over a fair number of critiques.

Main critiques are:

1) No one asked for this movie. This can perhaps be forgiven. Han Solo is the most popular character from the original trilogy and it's Disney...

2) It didn't have any real character development, Han basically came out of the box as his character from the New Hope. He was a cocky scoundrel that ultimately had sympathy for the good guys. Han went from first meeting Chewbacca to falling into an old buddy pattern in ten minutes of screen time.

Just for a counter example. X-Men: First Class had both Xavier and Magneto show character growth. The Wolverine prequels movies maybe a little less so, but they had some character growth.

Batman Begins had the iconic Batman we know so well go through a character arc where he is figuring out his morals and has many training sequences.

3) A lot of rehashing of A New Hope. Even the positive reviews I read by critiques say something like "It's a fun movie, but it's not really Star Wars iconic or super memorable." This leads into number four.

4) In place of character development and original plot, the Internet seems to count at least 35 Easter eggs and callbacks. That's at least one per two minutes of screen time.

I insert a 'member berry meme but unfortunately most 'member berry movies are intensely politically. So here's a link to an on topic discussion by Wisecrack.com where I plagiarized most of the content of this post from.

Remember when nostalgia was good?

5) There was a backlash against The Last Jedi. The Last Jedi made money because people watched it out of habit. I cannot speak for other cultures but you are American you are almost conditioned to watch a Star Wars movie whatever it was. A lot of people left The Last Jedi unsatisfied, but they already bought their tickets and sat through the movie, so they took out their wrath on Solo. This ties into six. A lot of people thought The Last Jedi had the odor of too much social justice shoehorned in.

6) Social justice themes were hamfistedly forced into this. If your goal is to project values in media, and you build a story with this in mind, it works great. If you take an old story and try to force new morals and values on it, it usually fails. The original Star Wars trilogy only had five or six female characters in the whole thing, putting female empowerment in the franchise seemed weird. The original Wonder Woman comics were created to showcase female empowerment, so social justice themes fit in seamlessly to the Wonder Woman movie.

Though Wonder Woman fails the Bechdel Test after leaving her magic island. You couldn't give us one bit of dialogue between Wonder Woman and a normal human girl or woman? I hate to be that nerdy, but the animated DC universe is generally much better. Way better characterization. Exception, The Killing Joke. Skip that one. Somehow you took most of the people who made Batman the Animated Series spectacular and gave them the story of one of the most iconic Miller Batman comics of all time and they blew it. But I can forgive them since 90% of their animated movies are great. TANGENT!


So we got an all female remake of Ghostbusters and all female remake of Lord of the Flies and an all female remake of Ocean's Eleven. The best you can do is be almost as good as the original. Pitch Perfect and Brides Maids made a lot of money and garnered a lot of acclaim with a low budget because it was well written and well-acted, so there is an audience hungry for female led movies, but they have to be original.

That's a problem in today's movie industry. Originality is almost forbidden. I'm tempting to watch Hotel Artemis just because it's new even though crime movies are not normally my cup of tea.