Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

[Khaldun]

I actually do not get the idea that WW is hard for "modern sensibilities". Ok, so you can't go back to the early comics, since they're all about femdom and lesbian bondage fetishism and a weird variant vision of feminism, and you can't do the 70s cheese version. But you can get WW out of her bathing suit and into something like a stylized and colorful suit of Greek armor (which is not very far from what's been done to other longjohn and spandex costumes) and basically make her a warrior who is also a stranger in a strange land. The only real narrative puzzle is what to do about the Greek gods: I think you have to get rid of them or make them inaccessible to WW and the Amazons, make Paradise Island more like Asgard in the Marvel films--a sort of science/magic hybrid in a pocket dimension that WW is an exile from.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Exactly.  EVERYONE knows wonder woman, comic fan or not, It's definitely a bigger name than iron man was pre-movie. Yet no one wants to go near a wonder woman movie for some reason.

[Khaldun]

Yeah, it's weird. Maybe it's just Warner Brothers/DC, who really seem to have an aversion to success. I hope somebody there today is holding his head in his hands and weeping softly at the thought that they had Whedon all lined up to make a Wonder Woman movie, for example.

[Miasma]

Dark seems to be in right now.  I don't know anything about her origins, is there something dark, brooding and compelling in there?  Something good enough that the campy 70s tv show could be purged from people's memories after watching a trailer?

And that invisible plane nonsense would have to be dropped.

[Khaldun]

The new 52 Wonder Woman has been really quite dark in some ways, but not in the conventional adolescent style of most of DC's books. Mostly Azzarrello just went back to Greek myth, both about the Amazons and the pantheon and built up from there. So, for example, we found out early on that the Amazons (as in myth) did sometimes abduct sailors to serve as sperm donors, more or less, and that they got rid of any male babies (not by killing them as in myth, but by giving them over to the god Hephesteus to serve as forge workers). He also made a smart change in WW's origin--now she's not a magic parthenogenic baby made from clay but just one more of Zeus' many demi-god children, and the whole "I made you out of clay thing" is a lie that her mom told her that she actually believed for most of her life.  You can also add some grit to WW around the circumstances of her departure from Paradise Island--either she can be an exile who can never go home or Paradise Island is lost to her for some reason, which gives her a link to both Superman and Batman's origins. (Add in Martian Manhunter, Aquaman and Hawkwoman and almost all of the Justice League can be played as orphans cut off from their home cultures and families in some way or another: only GL and Flash are 'normal' guys where there's really nothing in their classic origins to set them up that way.)

[Sir T]

The problem is that a modern wonder woman would either be bad karate in stillettos or Xena the warrior princess. Either of which has been done to death and would make everyone puke. Doing her as effectively the She hulk type of empowered woman character seems to be beyond the imagination of holywood. They seem stuck in "Empowered women means they take their clothes off"

[Lakov_Sanite]

but but but....catwoman is empowered...

[jgsugden]

Whedon had a WW take.  I may not have 100% confidence in everything he does, but I'm pretty sure he'd have an empowering and non-exploitative take on the character.  If DC were smart, they'd gravitate in that direction.

Honestly, I don't think it matters.  DC characters don't work for the screen.  The reason is simple.  Pick 10 Marvel characters and 10 DC characters and write an elevator pitch (One or two sentences of about 25 words that summarize the core of the character) about each.  Pick out the key words of each.  Most people will find that the words that describe the majority of the DC character descriptions will focus on WHAT the character is (God/alien/robot, powers, etc...) while the Marvel desciptions will focus more on WHO the character is (motivations and personality (With great power comes great responsibility, FF is about family, mutants ar about persecution, Thor has family issues, etc...)).  The DC penchant fo overpowered characters doesn't help, either.  DC characters are outdated and unrelatable.  The only real excerptions are two of the characters that translate best to the screen - Green Arrow and Batman.  And, if you think about it, those characters would probably fit better in the Marvel Universe than the DC universe.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Honestly a WW period piece could do well. I don't know why they couldn't have an entire movie devoted to ancient culture cause stylistically it always plays out well.  Captain America style so at the end it's modern day but only briefly.

[HaemishM]

DC characters are outdated and unrelatable.  The only real excerptions are two of the characters that translate best to the screen - Green Arrow and Batman.  And, if you think about it, those characters would probably fit better in the Marvel Universe than the DC universe.

I disagree with what you said. Hell, Green Arrow is a particularly silly character in the comics context - an archer who shoots boxing arrow gloves at people?

And yet, in the hands of a competent writing team, the Green Arrow TV series is both a hit and a decent story. There's nothing particularly outdated or unrelatable about the DC characters other than an insistence on holding on to certain parts of continuity that may or may not work onscreen in the hands of the right creative team. The Green Lantern movie wasn't terrible but it wasn't written very well.

[eldaec]

The other thing about batman and green arrow is that they are very nearly the same guy.

As for wonder woman; she'd fit into Lois and Clark just fine. Yet another reason that is the best superman.

[jgsugden]

Green Arrow dumped the boxing glove arrows (and other gadget arrows) in the 80s with the Longbow Hunters.  LH is the start of the storylines that inspire Arrow.  He may use gadgets on occasion in the comics, but for the most part, AFAIK, he uses real arrows.  Like Batman and the Dark Knight reboot, Green Arrow from the 80s on is a different character than what came before.  From 1987 on, he is a more Marvel character that would fit in comics with Daredevil, Punisher, Captain America, Spider-man, and SHIELD. 

As for the relatability of Superman, WW, Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Martian Manhunter, etc... The characters, at their core, are not part of society.  They've above it.  They're Gods amongst mortals.  Aliens with powers thar keep them out of society.   People unbound by the laws of science.  People that travel the cosmos fighting threats that can consume worlds.  How are those relatable?

[HaemishM]

Yes, Thor the God of Thunder is so much more relatable than a guy raised by humans in Kansas or a test pilot given magic alien wish ring.  

EDIT: And just to clarify, relatable is in how you write the damn character, not the character concept itself. Martian Manhunter? Totally get the whole loner trying to find common ground with society at large thing. Hawkman or Green Lantern? Interstellar cops. Flash? Flash has always been a relatable character. Wonder Woman? Woman trying to succeed in a male-dominated society.

[Ironwood]

But Thor was made relatable precisely because he was human for, well, almost all of his own film and we identified hugely with him because he was Utterly Unable to Relate to Anything.

You know better H.  You do.

[HaemishM]

See my edit. I was being snarky.

[Ironwood]

Yeah, it's about how it's approached.  But I do agree that, previously (on Tour of Duty) DC have no idea how to get their heroes relatable.  They've never, ever, ever managed it with Superman for me.  Ever.  Batman is just barely there when we deal with Wayne, I can see Wonder Woman, oddly, being done great, but the rest of it ?  I'm not convinced.

I'm happy to be convinced.  But you won't do it with Green Lantern.  That was silly, silly silly.

[sickrubik]

It may just be me talking, but given my last name and the fact that i have shitty vision, I connect with Thor far more than I do with Green Lantern.

[HaemishM]

Classic Hal Jordan creates a problem with being relatable mostly because, 1) he has no fear and that's a pretty big component of his character and 2) he's an absolute dick. Of course, I would say the same thing about Wolverine and yet he's a beloved character (I personally hate him except when Jackman plays him AND he's written well). I always had problems relating to Capt. America because for the longest time, he was the ultimate WhiteBread character, as bad if not worse than Superman.

Tony Stark is a genius billionaire whose only real flaw is alcohoism - I can't relate to that concept at all. And other than his persona being more SOCIAL than Bruce Wayne's, how is he any different at an abstract level than Batman? Batman's flaw is grief, something much more relatable to most people than alcoholism.

DC's characters aren't less relatable, they are just generally VERY BADLY WRITTEN for the screen. The reasons they are so badly written is 1) they cling to too many Silver Age tropes that make no sense these days (test pilots anyone?), 2) WB producers I think tend to believe that comic book super hero movies will do good no matter the quality purely because geeks will buy anything with geek stuff on it. They haven't yet figured out that Nolan's Batman movies or the Marvel movies were so successful because they had top quality writers/producers/actors involved in the project. Geeks didn't make Avengers $1 billion at the box office.

[Khaldun]

There is no definitive or final version of these characters--Green Arrow goes back and forth in his comics from being a liberal blowhard with woman troubles and trick arrows to being a grittier vigilante and so on (but yeah, always tied in some ways to Batman, which goes back to his beginnings). I'm with Haemish on this--there is no DC or Marvel character that you couldn't do 'right' for a film if you found the right take.

The odds of getting it 'right', though, go down if you insist on doing what Marvel's doing and having a bunch of characters who come together in a single franchise package. That's why that was so gutsy on their part and so impressive that it's worked out pretty well so far.  I don't think you can back into that the way Warner is about to--you gotta have a plan. You could way up the fantastic and weird and superhero-fetish elements in the DC film universe and have it succeed (The Incredibles works fine, for example, with that kind of treatment) but that then has to touch on any character who is in your shared set of films. You can keep characters completely isolated and do fun shit that's very different with each of them.  You can ground it all in a grittier, more 'real' approach but then there are characters who no longer work right or who only work right if you're willing to abandon everything that audiences think they know about them. (You can make Superman work in a 'realistic' mode if you're willing to go where Alan Moore went with Miracleman, for example, where the character almost inevitably becomes a god and dictator whether he wants to or not.) But you have to have a take, a direction, an interpretation and it has to be based on something other than what some studio guy hears in the elevator pitch.

If I had to name DC characters who could work as one-off characters in their own little world, it would probably *not* be the Justice League except for Batman and Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman could work because she carries along with her a potentially interesting mythology that also helps supply some matched-up antagonists and some solid relationships. If I were looking over DC's catalog and not thinking about a Justice League movie, I'd be looking at the weird second-stringers who have a completely self-contained sort of aesthetic, an interesting hook in terms of powers/origins, and don't require a universe full of spandex-clad guys to make sense--the Demon, Hitman, Animal Man, Resurrection Man, etc.  Flash, Green Lantern, Cyborg, Black Canary, all those kinds of people really only are interesting in a setting with other fantastic beings and people in costumes.

[Ironwood]

You wouldn't think they could cock up Constantine so badly, and yet there it was.  Also, I would reallllly like to see Zatana up there.

(Though I've lost the plot of who's arguing what now and we've drifted so far from Batman and Supes that it's not real.)

[Lakov_Sanite]

Preacher as directed by the Cohen brothers.

[jgsugden]

There is no definitive or final version of these characters--Green Arrow goes back and forth in his comics from being a liberal blowhard with woman troubles and trick arrows to being a grittier vigilante and so on (but yeah, always tied in some ways to Batman, which goes back to his beginnings). I'm with Haemish on this--there is no DC or Marvel character that you couldn't do 'right' for a film if you found the right take.

I'm awaiting your pitch for a viable Vibe movie.  You know, other than the porn version.  

At the core, relatable means that we can get into the character's skin and feel for them.  Everything that makes up the character is apart of that equation.  The way the character is written plays a huge part, but the history (including the origin) of the character is a huge limitation.  How many people have written Superman stories?  How many of them are relatable to the audience?  The Godlike nature of the character makes it nearly impossible to write stories to which people can relate.  That is why so many of the stories are 'I'm an alien' stories.

I'm not in left field with my observations here.  In fact, they're not really observations.  They're vomit.  I'm just regurgitating things that have been observed a million times before by much more hard-core geeks than me.  DC has failed, and will continue to fail, because their characters, outside a select few, are out of synch.  

As for the Thor observations - I almost brought him up, but decided to wait to see if someone else would.  The vast majority of the Thor stories boil down to family stories.  Thor and Loki.  Thor and Odin.  More are responsibility stories about his duty to Midgard and Asgard.    Thor is the least relatable of the Marvel characters in many ways, but even he is built upon topics that are relatable.  Duty.  Family.  Hots for a nurse.

[sickrubik]

You can reduce most characters down to that, though. It's really not anything that's exclusive to Thor.

[Tannhauser]

Not sure why they need Batman and Superman to team up except to form the Justice League down the road.  Because, you know, there are threats out there the World's Greatest Detective and the Man of Steel can't solve on their own. 

Why do they HAVE to film the Justice League?  Just because of Marvel's The Avengers? 

[Trippy]

Yes.

[sickrubik]

Not sure why they need Batman and Superman to team up except to form the Justice League down the road.  Because, you know, there are threats out there the World's Greatest Detective and the Man of Steel can't solve on their own. 

Why do they HAVE to film the Justice League?  Just because of Marvel's The Avengers? 

That is the weirdest set of questions.

[HaemishM]

As for the Thor observations - I almost brought him up, but decided to wait to see if someone else would.  The vast majority of the Thor stories boil down to family stories.  Thor and Loki.  Thor and Odin.  More are responsibility stories about his duty to Midgard and Asgard.    Thor is the least relatable of the Marvel characters in many ways, but even he is built upon topics that are relatable.  Duty.  Family.  Hots for a nurse.

Everyone of those things you mention are in the Man of Steel movie. Family is a HUGE part of that movie. Duty to his homeworld and parents vs. duty to his adopted parents and the world he feels at home in. Hots for a nurse - well, ok for a journalist but still. I felt a lot more empathy with the Henry Cavill/Zak Synder Superman than I did with Thor and I liked the Thor movie a lot. I also say this as someone who feels Superman isn't a very interesting character BECAUSE of the god-powers.

[Khaldun]

One of the charming things in an odd way is that the Justice League wasn't one of these teams built where everyone is a different kind of specialist so you can see why they have to be a team. It's more like a bunch of really successful guys who have a social club and then it turns out that every once in a while there's something too big for any one of them. But it's definitely not what you'd do if you were trying to come up with the conventional "we have a ninja and a strongman and a psychic and a smart guy and a teleporter" teams, which mostly have not actually lasted.

Vibe might be a good example of the kind of character that's so third-rate that you can't really think of a way to do it right conceptually. Or maybe all you'd need is to dial it back and ask, "So what would happen if you were a Latino street kid and you suddenly had weird sonic powers?" That can go comic, it can go semi-serious, you just have to decide which and then get a guy who is actually going to understand the setting and the possibilities. Hell, the Justice League cartoon found a way to make the Wonder Twins, Black Vulcan and Apache Chief into interesting characters; Alan Moore found a twist that made Swamp Thing something way more interesting than just another man-into-monster. There's always something an imaginative person can see in there somewhere, or at least almost always.

[jgsugden]

...Everyone of those things you mention are in the Man of Steel movie. Family is a HUGE part of that movie. Duty to his homeworld and parents vs. duty to his adopted parents and the world he feels at home in. Hots for a nurse - well, ok for a journalist but still...

Dude, if you're going to compare a nurse to a journalist, then we're just wasting our time here.  You're clearly not being realistic.

[Fordel]

The problem is that a modern wonder woman would either be bad karate in stillettos or Xena the warrior princess. Either of which has been done to death and would make everyone puke. Doing her as effectively the She hulk type of empowered woman character seems to be beyond the imagination of holywood. They seem stuck in "Empowered women means they take their clothes off"

She's not wearing much to begin with! 

[MahrinSkel]

The great part of it was that Wonder Woman was originally a feminist vehicle chock-full of man-hating crypto-lesbian subtext, but it's absolutely impossible to make a movie about her now without setting off the professional feminists, in full "TEAR DOWN THE PATRIARCHY!" dudgeon.

Of course, Xena would probably get the same treatment now, too.

--Dave

[UnSub]

I've always thought that DC / WB should just go all in and make "Kingdom Come".

At the core, relatable means that we can get into the character's skin and feel for them.  Everything that makes up the character is apart of that equation.  The way the character is written plays a huge part, but the history (including the origin) of the character is a huge limitation.

Most superhero movies select key bits of character history and throw out the rest. "X-Men" cut things back to a core idea of good, attractive mutants fighting evil, ugly mutants in a world that fears both types. Where a film doesn't like part of the comic book origin, it gets changed. Like where Bruce Wayne is trained up by Ra's Al Ghul in "Batman Begins".

[Velorath]

I've always thought that DC / WB should just go all in and make "Kingdom Come".

Yeah, I can see how taking a story which was largely notable for its art, would come across as gibberish to most of the audience, and would have to be butchered so much to fit into a movie length that even fans of the comic wouldn't be happy with it would seem like a good idea.

[Khaldun]

The great part of it was that Wonder Woman was originally a feminist vehicle chock-full of man-hating crypto-lesbian subtext, but it's absolutely impossible to make a movie about her now without setting off the professional feminists, in full "TEAR DOWN THE PATRIARCHY!" dudgeon.

Of course, Xena would probably get the same treatment now, too.

--Dave

1. She was at least a not-unproblematic "feminist vehicle" at the start by any standard. Unless your conception of feminism involves tons of bondage and domination.
2. Since nobody has made a movie about her, I think arguing that the "professional feminists" (whatever the fuck that means) would set off in dudgeon is a bit premature to say the least.
3. The feminists (most of them, admittedly, amateurs) that I read or know about who also like comics were perfectly geeked out about the possibility of Whedon making a WW film. Less so some other scripts but not because of feminism, simply because they sucked. Sort of like how nobody wanted James Cameron to make a Spider-Man film when they heard about the working script and Cameron's take on the character. It's true that some comic bloggers who are also feminists don't like Azzarello's take on the character but I see why they don't like it and I think it's a legitimate reaction. Oddly this has not made it "impossible" for the current comic version to go ahead. Perhaps only professional feminists have sufficient dudgeon.

[jgsugden]

Uhhh.. they only let WW join the Justice League because they needed a secretary. I'm not making that up. When she was dreamed up, it was an era of sexism and close mindedness. You can argue she was feminist for the time in that she was sometimes not the damsel in distress( sometimes), but don't go too far down the rabbit hole. She was far closer to WWII porn than a voice for change.