Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Q. ... although the Avengers did have killer dialogue, my problem with the plot was that all the action felt contrived - some really flimsy excuses for the heroes turning against each other, all the bad guys dying after they took out the controller, and so on.

Well, the heroes turning against each other was the answer to generations of fanboys' "do you think Hulk could beat Thor?"-type argument, so it was brilliant to have those entirely concocted fights in the movie.

The movie was an entertainment, eh? Audiences come to movies for multiple reasons. One is story, sure. But the other is spectacle. The pod racing in Star Trek I was gratuitous and sort of pointless, but the intended audience (kids who buy branded merchandise) ate it up. 

Yeah, all the bad guys dying was convenient, but I think a the audience can figure out that without the controller, the aliens would eventually have been hunted down and destroyed like the orcs after Sauron's demise. No one wants to see a mop-up operation. Much, much better to end the movie with the superheroes getting shawarma. 

I mean, a movie is a movie. I know you can't hack a computer or a network the way they do in movies, but it would be really super boring to watch real hacking, so I don't care. 

I think a good rule is you can do something convenient in order to avoid something boring. 

11:32 AM

2 Comments:

In movies which are there for spectacle, when can't you do something convenient? (The Avengers, which was an awesome spectacle (the "Puny god" scene was just fabulous), actually had Tony Stark comment both sincerely and correctly on how dumb the plot was.)

By  Chris Lansdown, at 4:09 PM  

I really hated the Avengers. But I thought the useful thing about the boom in superhero movies is that it really showed how dumb the whole superhero genre is. As in, "I'm going to put on a ridiculous outfit, lurk around and hope to find a crime in progress, and then resolve it with a fist fight."

If someone wanted to catch the biggest criminals, they'd clear out Wall Street, as Bane so admirably pointed out (in another dumb movie which was a piece of fascist agitprop).

By  David, at 6:00 PM  

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