Superheroes!

I've been rewatching some eps of Supergirl on Netflix, and couldn't help noticing the digs at Man of Steel in the episode where Supergirl fights Astra. First, Alex tries to convince Kara that lethal force is sometimes necessary, and Kara notes that Clark never kills anyone. Later, Kara and Astra go crashing through the upper floors of a downtown office building - if the shot isn't a literal recreation of Superman's fight with Zod, it's at least a deliberate reference - and a big chunk of concrete and rebar goes flying into a nearby park; Supergirl lets Astra fly away to go catch the debris before it hits people on the ground.
 
Kevin Smith and Marc Bernardin were still under NDAs and couldn't talk about any specifics, but they'd seen the first 7 episodes of Luke Cage and both said it was great. Smith thought it was the equal of season 1 of Daredevil, and that Mahershala Ali's Cottonmouth stood alongside Vincent D'Onofrio's Fisk and David Tennant's Kilgrave. Bernardin gave the show a thumbs-up for its "Blackness" and its portrayal of Harlem. Bernardin is black, and while I don't know if he's ever set a toe in Harlem, I think it's a good sign that a nerdy black man feels good about the portrayal of the black characters in a nerdy show.
 
EgonSpengler said:
I've been rewatching some eps of Supergirl on Netflix, and couldn't help noticing the digs at Man of Steel in the episode where Supergirl fights Astra. First, Alex tries to convince Kara that lethal force is sometimes necessary, and Kara notes that Clark never kills anyone. Later, Kara and Astra go crashing through the upper floors of a downtown office building - if the shot isn't a literal recreation of Superman's fight with Zod, it's at least a deliberate reference - and a big chunk of concrete and rebar goes flying into a nearby park; Supergirl lets Astra fly away to go catch the debris before it hits people on the ground.
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I've actually been pretty happy with the "evolution" of superhero fiction from the comics of my youth where depicting someone getting killed was not allowable to the modern movie version. Let's face it, demi-gods of Norse mythology square off in the heart of New York, one backed by an inter-dimensional army and the other backed by, among others, THE HULK, there are going to be casualties among the collateral damage. Two Kryptonians square off in a fight that one of them absolutely insists should be to the death in the heart of Metropolis after the city has been rocked by an alien terraforming device set up to generate artificial gravity waves to compact the core of the Earth there is going to be a lot of damage and people are gonna get killed.
 
Timsup2nothin said:
I've actually been pretty happy with the "evolution" of superhero fiction from the comics of my youth where depicting someone getting killed was not allowable to the modern movie version. Let's face it, demi-gods of Norse mythology square off in the heart of New York, one backed by an inter-dimensional army and the other backed by, among others, THE HULK, there are going to be casualties among the collateral damage. Two Kryptonians square off in a fight that one of them absolutely insists should be to the death in the heart of Metropolis after the city has been rocked by an alien terraforming device set up to generate artificial gravity waves to compact the core of the Earth there is going to be a lot of damage and people are gonna get killed.
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Did civilians actually get killed onscreen in Avengers or Man of Steel? Now that I'm thinking about it, I can't remember. Anyway, the criticism is of the hero, not the villain. The first comparison that Man of Steel was subjected to was Superman II, because it was essentially the same fight scene. Back in the original, Zod made the observation that Kal-El was trying to save people ("He actually cares for these humans." "Like pets?" "I suppose so.") And the comics I read as a kid in the late '70s-early '80s certainly featured violent characters and the kind of city-crushing mega-fights we've gotten in recent movies: Ben Grimm punching Terrax so hard he went through two skyscrapers was a formative moment for me. :lol:
 
Maybe not on screen, but the classic "drop everything and chase down every piece of rubble and guide it safely to open ground" staple was certainly missing, and I didn't miss it. Part of the irksome nature of comics was always that (example) Superman was so grossly overpowering that he could beat the supervillain even while spending 90% of his efforts on side jobs.

Thinking while typing...I seem to recall Iron Man in (maybe) the first movie killing people outright. Terrorists, yes. Holding hostages as (ineffective) human shields, yes. Deserving of summary execution? I'm willing. But that would never have happened in a comic book.

By the way, I think those two skyscrapers were shown in the standard comics "building with a hole in each side" form where the idea that everyone in the building probably died would never enter your mind.
 
It's more than a little disingenuous in my mind at any rate. In the Dark Knight movies Batman is firing machineguns and rockets in the middle of a huge city. And there's no collateral damage?
 
Timsup2nothin said:
Maybe not on screen, but the classic "drop everything and chase down every piece of rubble and guide it safely to open ground" staple was certainly missing, and I didn't miss it. Part of the irksome nature of comics was always that (example) Superman was so grossly overpowering that he could beat the supervillain even while spending 90% of his efforts on side jobs.
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I wasn't really into the uber-powerful heroes when I was a kid, either. Superman, Dr. Strange, Green Lantern. For me, it wasn't because they spent too much time rescuing people, but thinking back on it, I'm not sure what my problem was. Maybe they just weren't 'relatable' or something.

You reminded me of the fight in Sokovia, when the Avengers took great pains to evacuate the civilians. As with the Supergirl-Astra fight, that scene looked like a direct response to some of the criticisms of the other films.

Timsup2nothin said:
Thinking while typing...I seem to recall Iron Man in (maybe) the first movie killing people outright. Terrorists, yes. Holding hostages as (ineffective) human shields, yes. Deserving of summary execution? I'm willing. But that would never have happened in a comic book.
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Yes, Iron Man definitely killed people, in that quick & clean, action movie/comic book way. I also remember a scene or two in Iron Man 2 when a bunch of people should have been killed and weren't. I think that movie was pretty mediocre in a number of ways, now that I'm thinking about it.

Timsup2nothin said:
By the way, I think those two skyscrapers were shown in the standard comics "building with a hole in each side" form where the idea that everyone in the building probably died would never enter your mind.
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Heh. Yeah. I was thinking the same thing as I was typing, above. Tying into another thread I've been writing in, it occurred to me that before 9-11 most artists probably didn't know what would happen to a big building if it got hit like that.
 
Cutlass said:
It's more than a little disingenuous in my mind at any rate. In the Dark Knight movies Batman is firing machineguns and rockets in the middle of a huge city. And there's no collateral damage?
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Right, I think civilian casualties in these stories have always been there, for anyone who wants to think it through that far. That's a staple of action-adventure stories, not just superhero stories. Back in the day, my friends and I used to make fun of The A-Team for the total inability of anyone in the show to actually hit anything with any of the hundreds of rounds that were fired in every episode. This was while we were watching the show, of course. :lol:
 
EgonSpengler said:
Right, I think civilian casualties in these stories have always been there, for anyone who wants to think it through that far. That's a staple of action-adventure stories, not just superhero stories. Back in the day, my friends and I used to make fun of The A-Team for the total inability of anyone in the show to actually hit anything with any of the hundredsthousands,sometimes perhaps millions, of rounds that were fired in every episode. This was while we were watching the show, of course. :lol:
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FTFY :lol:
 
Not to mention that in the A-Team high velocity assault weapons rounds would ricochet off cardboard, with appropriate sparks, but not even scratch the paint, and wouldn't ricochet to anywhere!
 
Cutlass said:
Not to mention that in the A-Team high velocity assault weapons rounds would ricochet off cardboard, with appropriate sparks, but not even scratch the paint, and wouldn't ricochet to anywhere!
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They were those special rounds that just burst into sparks on impact.
 
Another fun Supergirl easter egg:

"The vulture he captured could be wanted on a dozen other worlds for crimes he committed long before he wound up on Fort Rozz. We could be dealing with an interstellar bounty-hunter."

"You don't think..?"

"No. If he were in town, we'd know."

:)
 


Agents of SHIELD season 4 premiere: 3/5 stars.
Not bad, but a little overstuffed. They changed up a lot at the end of season 3 - to the good, I think - and this season premiere felt like a pilot in some ways. Pretty decent SFX. I hope they can maintain that and didn't blow an enormous chunk of their budget on one episode. I hope Yo-Yo and Ghost Rider stick around and we get The Secret Warriors for real this time. Could AIDA become Jocasta? Probably not, but the thought occurred to me. Also, it took four years, but I think I'm finally on board the Daisy/Sky/Quake/Chloe Bennet train.
 
EgonSpengler said:
Agents of SHIELD season 4 premiere: 3/5 stars.
Not bad, but a little overstuffed. They changed up a lot at the end of season 3 - to the good, I think - and this season premiere felt like a pilot in some ways. Pretty decent SFX. I hope they can maintain that and didn't blow an enormous chunk of their budget on one episode. I hope Yo-Yo and Ghost Rider stick around and we get The Secret Warriors for real this time. Could AIDA become Jocasta? Probably not, but the thought occurred to me. Also, it took four years, but I think I'm finally on board the Daisy/Sky/Quake/Chloe Bennet train.
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I think it served well as a season premier, though that did make it a bit "overstuffed." Plenty of plot lines to be resolved through the upcoming episodes. I just hope they don't feel the need to "forward" each and every one of them in every episode all season.
 
Timsup2nothin said:
I just hope they don't feel the need to "forward" each and every one of them in every episode all season.
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I agree, that might be the worst approach.

I think they have to be careful not to keep Daisy/Quake separated from her comrades for too long. For as long as it goes on, they kind of have two separate shows crammed together. It can be done - as in The Wire, where the cops and crooks rarely interacted but both groups of characters were compelling - but it's got to be a tough balancing act for the writers. I hope they can pull it off, though; Quake & Ghost Rider could be fun.
 
Episode 2 of Agents of SHIELD seems "so far, so good." I was making dinner and doing laundry, so I may have to rewatch it, but I liked it.

I felt like I'd seen the guy who plays The Director before, so I was compelled to look him up: Jason O'Mara, a Dubliner who was in Terra Nova, the American remake of Life on Mars, and the film version of a Janet Evanovich novel with Katherine Heigl. He's not Olivier, but he has some charm. I got pulled down the rabbit-hole for a bit, and the web is all abuzz that his character is...

Spoiler :
a rendering/reboot of a Golden Age crimefighter named The Patriot, who Marvel Comics turned into a Captain America during one of Steve Rogers timeouts (iirc, Bucky and USAgent have also been Captains America). I think The Patriot may have been one of the backup characters in Captain America's WWII group, The Invaders.
 
I'm trying to find who did the music for episode 2 of Agents of SHIELD, but so far I've struck out. I know Bear McCreary has done the score for SHIELD in the first 3 season, but I don't know if he still is. IMDb credits Jessica Rae Huber as "Composer: Additional music" and "Scoring Manager." (And she went to Berklee School of Music, which I could almost hit with a rock from here.) The bit at the end really caught my ear. I'm calling it "Ghost Rider's theme", for lack of knowing its actual name. It's a little reminiscent of Brad Fiedel's music for The Terminator, with some spookiness thrown in. Anyway, I think it'd be cool if they actually used it as Ghost Rider's theme.
 
Agreed. They did a bit of the "forward all plots" that I was afraid of, but they focused enough to make a quality second episode.
 
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