Wot films are you watching?

[Skalpadda]

So it’s basically Jurassic Park, Voldemort / Dementors, Agent Smith and Sauron (who is a building)

I don’t think Sauron counts given he’s from a book from the 50s and was the iconic fantasy villain long before the movies. I guess the movies did redefine him as a literal burning eye on top of a building though. Superhero movies almost exclusively reuse stuff from comics that are much older so I’m not sure that those really count either (and as I sit here I can’t name a single monster from a recent superhero movie).

I guess movies aren’t really about the monsters that often these days. We’re not getting any new Terminators or Gremlins or Aliens where the monsters get first billing and are supposed to be the draw. And when they are I guess the calculation is that it’s safer to revive an old one that people recognise.

[BillButNotBen]

I wonder if it’s just difficult to come up with an iconic monster these days that isn’t very similar to other ones already out there. We are so overloaded in pop culture these days that there are billions of cool looking monsters in movies, games, tv, etc… but they often fall into Aliens/Terminator archetypes and it’s very hard for them to stand out.

The Quiet Place had some cool aliens and I feel like if they’d appeared in the 80s or 90s they might have been iconic… but these days they’re so similar to everything else out there that they didn’t really develop their own status, despite the movie being popular.
Superhero villains tend to be people, and if there are monsters they tend to be disposable and forgettable. I guess because the heroes are so powerful. I mean, that huge hell demon thing in Thor Ragnarok would have been hella memorable in an 80s movie, but as a cgi thing in a superhero movie it’s disposable, forgettable and I can’t even remember its name. The Aliens Queen on the other hand…

[LexW]

Just watched Aquaman. I’d been told it was good, but didn’t really believe it. However it is in fact excellent.

People overuse “turn your brain off” as a way to excuse like, fucking terrible shite movies, but Aquaman is actually a movie that is both extremely dumb and extremely fun, for once in human history. Well, not really for once, it used to be fairly common (c.f. a whole lot of Will Smith movies for example), but recently dumb has tended to equal bad.

Here, it doesn’t. James Wan was obviously the right director for the job, and he starts off with what seems like it might be a protracted origin story, but about not far into that he just switches to the main story and tells the rest through implications in dialogue and a couple of short and fun flashbacks, and the whole movie just zips along and stays extremely fun despite it’s 2hr 20mins length (felt more like a normal movie length).

Jason Momoa is perfect is Aquaman, even though/because he’s basically playing Jason Momoa, and also playing a character who is frankly, a dumbass, not an idiot, but definitely a dumbass. The rest of the cast is universally solid. Amber Heard is totally decent as Mera, Willem Dafoe plays Aquaman’s mentor, and is just amazing like Willem Dafoe always is, he never fucking holds back or sneers at the material.

There are a lot of “just don’t think about it too hard” scenes in terms of physics/biology (I’m pretty sure torpedoes are neutrally buoyant and that underwater pirates can hold their breath for a couple of minutes… I mean, I can hold my breath that long… whatever…), but the movie is directed in such a way that you don’t sit around thinking about that stuff because new crazy shit is catching your attention, or Momoa is waggling his eyebrows and exerting his not-insignificant charm, and honestly the battle scenes, both individual and massed are easily some of the best I’ve seen in any superhero movie - I’d certainly say the final large-scale battle basically outclasses Endgame in terms of style and spectacle, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It’s cheesy as fuck and it knows it, and it doesn’t care, nor should it.

The directing in general shows a sort of lack of regard for how things “should” be done which is almost like… and this is weird, Wes Anderson. It’s like Wes Anderson meets Taiki Waititi or something, only there’s a bit of Snyder in there as well. I’m not saying it’s as good as those first two, quite, but it’s like, it’s a noticeably unusual directing style in a good way.

And it’s got heart too. It’s not a cruel or mean or nasty movie (unlike all of Snyder’s work, and even unlike a lot of Marvel stuff).

The closest thing is probably Thor Ragnarok, but this is less ironic and less reliant on slightly meme-y stuff, it’s also less beautiful (though perhaps impressive?), and has less of a brain, but maybe even more of a heart (and Ragnarok definitely had a heart). They’re both stories about big dumb superpowered kings doing big dumb stuff against an incredible backdrop, in a good way, and both contain a lot of cute and stupid moments.

Anyway, definitely in my top 10 superhero movies now, maybe even top 5 depending on my mood. It’s like a superhero movie made by someone who was actually in a good mood - you don’t see that very often.

[Det.Bullock]

I’ve finally seen Solaris by Andreij Tarkovskij.
I didn’t expect this close of an adaptation, but then again Italian synopses (including the one on the back of the Blu Ray I have now that I look at it) are really misleading to the point that I think who has written them either didn’t see the movie of weren’t paying attention.
The biggest differences from Stanislaw Lem’s novel are an earth-bound section at the beginning that serves to basically cram most of the digressions about Solaris studies and give a bit of context to how Kelvin normally presents himself and the new ending (I doubt the novel’s ending could have been done at the time) which is the other big difference.
It’s a low movie but it picks up gradually both in pacing and emotivity, the protagonist little by little from an almost robotic drone to a delirious wreck when Solaris puts him in front of one of the tragedies of his life with a “cruel miracle” as they are called in the novel.
The theme of needing to know the nature of humanity before or in keeping with exploring what is outside it (which was intended by Lem as a jab against the Soviet disapproval of modern psychology so typical of totalitarianisms), the people on the Solaris orbital station are forced to see parts of them that have been repressed recreated by Solaris (but we only glimpse them because like the novel the focus is strictly on Kelvin and he barely gets a glimpse of whatever enigmatic presences the other scientists on the station have to deal with) and that comes close to destroy the main protagonist who has to deal with a past tragedy of his life over and over again.
Of course I saw in subtitled Russian because Italian distributors at the time cut the movie to shreds and while the Blu Ray gives the option to see a partially dubbed full version I preferred not to take my chances with that kind of adaptation.