inverarity (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
inverarity) wrote2009-12-23 01:58 pm
inverarity) wrote2009-12-23 01:58 pm
Entry tags:
Giant Monsters and Superheroes Still Need to Make Sense
I love fantasy and science fiction, but I overthink things. I nitpick everything for plot holes and believability. I can read comic books and appreciate good stories that conform to the rules of the genre, but get annoyed when they break my suspension of disbelief even within that framework.
In other words, I am a great big annoying nerd.
I recently saw Watchmen (finally) on DVD, and while I think for the most part it was a surprisingly good adaptation of Alan Moore's graphic novel, it annoyed me that they “powered up” the non-powered characters, having them effortlessly beat up hordes of goons and get thrown through walls and stuff. In the comic book, most of them were not super-fast or super-tough; they were just a bunch of crazy people in tights.
I was thinking about this as I watched Cloverfield on my laptop during an airplane trip the other day. (I hate seeing movies in theaters, so I'm usually catching up a couple years later with Netflix.)
Cinematography-wise, Cloverfield was pretty good (if you can handle all the bouncing camera shots). Story-wise, there wasn't much to it: giant monster trashes New York; people run.
Watching with my author's eye, though, what bugged me about it was the details that would make me throw it against a wall if I were reading it as a story. So, yes, I'm going to nitpick the “realism” of a monster movie.
Two main things bugged me:
I love Godzilla movies. When I was a kid, seeing a Godzilla movie scheduled for a Saturday morning would make my weekend. And even now, I can kind of accept that Godzilla's hide can bounce tank shells and bombs and lasers, because Godzilla is basically a comic book monster. He can bounce tank shells the same way Superman can bounce tank shells; he's a magical being to whom the laws of physics do not apply.
But Cloverfield was filmed as a “modern” monster movie. The critter is supposed to be (kind of) believable. Well, I'm sorry, but unless it's made of some sort of alien matter, no living thing that size would still be alive after being hit with tank shells, rockets, RPGs, grenades, heavy machine guns, and finally, HE bombardment for eight hours. After a while, I was no longer buying the way it just kept shrugging off everything the military threw at it. It could have been made of titanium, and it would still be scrap after taking a pounding like that.
Especially since the little spider-spawn it was shedding appeared to be quite killable. If its kids can be beaten to death with table legs, then it's not made of invulnerable space-matter.
What's known as “Player Character invulnerability” in role playing games. You expect the main characters to be luckier than average and survive things most people wouldn't, but you shouldn't show them walking away from things that kill everyone else for no other reason than that they're the main characters.
It was unrealistic enough when they climbed into the demolished apartment building and found that the main character's love interest was still alive after lying there impaled on a piece of rebar for hours (let alone that after they pulled her off of it, she was able to climb down and run away with them).
The helicopter crash, however, really made me roll my eyes. Everyone in the helicopter should have been pulped and incinerated. But no, all the Army guys in the chopper are dead, but somehow all three protagonists are able to walk away?
I'll admit their “invulnerability” was subverted in the end. But what was otherwise a pretty good monster movie was flawed, to me, because too many implausible occurrences were stacked together.
Plus, of course, there was the too-stupid-to-live behavior of the main characters to begin with. Which, I admit, is pretty much a requirement of the genre, but still, I'd like to see just one monster movie in which the main characters say, “No, let's not go toward the giant monster that's destroying the city, let's go away from it!”
So, I give Cloverfield 3.5 out of 5 stars. For what it was (giant monster movie), it was pretty cool, but it was all visuals. Probably would have been worth seeing on a big screen. (Although watching an aerial view of a giant monster wrecking Manhattan and knocking helicopters out of the sky, while you're on an airplane going through turbulence, was also a unique viewing experience.)
In other words, I am a great big annoying nerd.
I recently saw Watchmen (finally) on DVD, and while I think for the most part it was a surprisingly good adaptation of Alan Moore's graphic novel, it annoyed me that they “powered up” the non-powered characters, having them effortlessly beat up hordes of goons and get thrown through walls and stuff. In the comic book, most of them were not super-fast or super-tough; they were just a bunch of crazy people in tights.
I was thinking about this as I watched Cloverfield on my laptop during an airplane trip the other day. (I hate seeing movies in theaters, so I'm usually catching up a couple years later with Netflix.)
Cinematography-wise, Cloverfield was pretty good (if you can handle all the bouncing camera shots). Story-wise, there wasn't much to it: giant monster trashes New York; people run.
Watching with my author's eye, though, what bugged me about it was the details that would make me throw it against a wall if I were reading it as a story. So, yes, I'm going to nitpick the “realism” of a monster movie.
Two main things bugged me:
1. Invulnerable Monster
I love Godzilla movies. When I was a kid, seeing a Godzilla movie scheduled for a Saturday morning would make my weekend. And even now, I can kind of accept that Godzilla's hide can bounce tank shells and bombs and lasers, because Godzilla is basically a comic book monster. He can bounce tank shells the same way Superman can bounce tank shells; he's a magical being to whom the laws of physics do not apply.
But Cloverfield was filmed as a “modern” monster movie. The critter is supposed to be (kind of) believable. Well, I'm sorry, but unless it's made of some sort of alien matter, no living thing that size would still be alive after being hit with tank shells, rockets, RPGs, grenades, heavy machine guns, and finally, HE bombardment for eight hours. After a while, I was no longer buying the way it just kept shrugging off everything the military threw at it. It could have been made of titanium, and it would still be scrap after taking a pounding like that.
Especially since the little spider-spawn it was shedding appeared to be quite killable. If its kids can be beaten to death with table legs, then it's not made of invulnerable space-matter.
2. Invulnerable Protagonists
What's known as “Player Character invulnerability” in role playing games. You expect the main characters to be luckier than average and survive things most people wouldn't, but you shouldn't show them walking away from things that kill everyone else for no other reason than that they're the main characters.
It was unrealistic enough when they climbed into the demolished apartment building and found that the main character's love interest was still alive after lying there impaled on a piece of rebar for hours (let alone that after they pulled her off of it, she was able to climb down and run away with them).
The helicopter crash, however, really made me roll my eyes. Everyone in the helicopter should have been pulped and incinerated. But no, all the Army guys in the chopper are dead, but somehow all three protagonists are able to walk away?
I'll admit their “invulnerability” was subverted in the end. But what was otherwise a pretty good monster movie was flawed, to me, because too many implausible occurrences were stacked together.
Plus, of course, there was the too-stupid-to-live behavior of the main characters to begin with. Which, I admit, is pretty much a requirement of the genre, but still, I'd like to see just one monster movie in which the main characters say, “No, let's not go toward the giant monster that's destroying the city, let's go away from it!”
So, I give Cloverfield 3.5 out of 5 stars. For what it was (giant monster movie), it was pretty cool, but it was all visuals. Probably would have been worth seeing on a big screen. (Although watching an aerial view of a giant monster wrecking Manhattan and knocking helicopters out of the sky, while you're on an airplane going through turbulence, was also a unique viewing experience.)
no subject
Lilandra and her people having proved to share the collective IQ of a four-slice toaster, the X-Men then go on to prove that theirs is two-slice. You are on alien, uncharted territory, one of your members under sentence of death, and being stalked by super-powered enemies who seek her life. What do you do? What the supposedly competent X-Men field leader Cyclops does is break the team in two and send them on the offensive, hunting for the hunters. Such an asinine strategy gets the exact reward it deserves - total humiliating disaster.
We should bear in mind that for the great Phoenix continuity to have its proper tragic ending, nothing is really necessary except her final suicide. That is rightly there (no thanks to writer Chris Claremont, who wanted to "redeem" the mass murderess Jean Grey and had to be ordered by editor Jim Shooter to change the ending) and means that, in spite of the idiocy of the previous few pages, the final impact of the story is tremendous. But the point is that, as a writer, you can get to that suicide any way you want. Chris Claremont chose the worst imaginable; whether this was a conscious or unconscious rebellion against Shooter's orders, or an ugly foreshadowing of the coming self-inflicted ruin of his talent, or both, I don't know, but it is a piece of self-inflicted damage that did not need to be there, at the climax of an immensely influential and rightly admired piece of work.
For a yet stupider ruination of a yet greater work of art, see Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet. Most of the film is interesting and beautiful to watch, but the final scenes are insane. Fortinbras is shown to be marching against Denmark - in the face of the actual script, and making nonsense of the whole struggle going on at the Danish court - and Branagh kills Claudius with a ridiculous Tarzan-swing across the dance floor, hanging, if I remember right, on a curtain. This is pure jealousy: Branagh filmed Hamlet because Lawrence Olivier had filmed Hamlet, and Olivier's beautiful movie had a terrifying climax when Olivier jumped at the Claudius character, sword in hand, from an upper walkway, and ran him through. Branagh tried to do something even more spectacular - and made a fool of himself and a mess of Shakespeare.
no subject
But Claremont really is a writer of mixed talent; I loved his X-Men run for the most part, but you're right that he resorted to some really stupid plot devices and characterizations just to get that "dramatic scene" (and not just in the Phoenix saga).
no subject
The Needle on the Nerd-Meter is Spiking...
Sure, Phoenix needed to pay, but arguably Jean Grey wasn't in her right mind, literally, so I could have bought a redemption story. I'd be more impressed with Marvel/Shooter's moral stance on mass murder if there weren't so many other characters in the Marvel Universe who have gotten away with mass murder.*
For certain, though, I hated the "reboot" where Jean Grey got resurrected. "Oh, gosh, she was never really the Phoenix in the first place!"
* Unrelated rant: Dr. Doom shedding a tear over the victims of 9/11. Are you fucking kidding me?
Re: The Needle on the Nerd-Meter is Spiking...
As for the use of cock and cunt as distinguishing features, I had every intention to be brutal. Anyone who finds them so desperately important as to distort historical facts (such as the repeatedly confirmed reason for Shooter's order to Claremont) is not on the same page as I am.
Dr.Doom shedding a tear