#the epilogue contains more nuance than people are giving it credit for

[thesunsethour]

the brutalist was an extraordinarily beautiful yet at times deeply cowardly film. i will be thinking about it for quite some time

[legionofpotatoes]

Okay then, since both of y’all are just delving in I’ll try to keep things (relatively) spoiler-free and stick to story sense and semiotics! Few caveats:

Have not had prior experience with Kojima’s body of work and if that’s a prerequisite in how I “should feel” about it then yike on a bike (just getting this out of the way based on what I’ve had talked at me)

My read excludes the entire context of moment-to-moment gameplay; I basically watched chronological story cutscenes stitched together with NPC interaction vignettes sprinkled in-between. 9 or so hours in total. 

I did this because the gameplay does not interest me at all - and not in protest of chill social games (I adore both No Man’s Sky and thatgamecompany stuff, for example, and try to champion anything without Gun in it), but because the setting and length did not align with my expectations for something to invest so much time into. Still, I was super intrigued by the story, and, to a lesser extent, the plot.

also I have a hard time writing in condensed English, so this may run quite long. I’ll put the rest under a break. Second language, sorry!

I’m trying to think of a good way to start this. Like I said, the story, or what the thing was ABOUT, was infinitely more interesting to me than whatever wacko packaging Kojima thought up for the narrative. Which was a complicated, thought-out piece of fiction shattered into many disparate pieces and fed to us in a mystery-box-filmmaker kind of way, making us reverse-engineer what essentially was a rather simple interpersonal uhh. family tragedy, I guess. 

But to its credit the lore is visibly built solely to support whatever thematic messaging Kojima would want to weave in there - something I can respect. Meaning it gets as wacky and as nonsensical as it needs to be in order to reflect the high-concept allegories at play, aaand then it does so to a fault. I adore works of fiction that don’t give a shit about “tone” - I hate that word more than anything in modern media - but effective symbolism in storytelling, IN MY OPINION, requires a deft hand, nuance, strong authorial position, and a good grasp of social context. 

I want to like, go through these four points individually and nitpick my problems with the game in their lens, because I think they cover pretty much everything I feel like saying:

1. A deft hand - to me means to selectively dramatize correct themes and plot points as you go so that shit makes sense in the end. I felt this was incredibly lacking here. It was like a symphony going for hours without a crescendo. The absolute wrong bits of soulless exposition would be reiterated THRICE within a single cutscene while necessary context of, hell, character motives or even plot geography would be left vague. Intentionally vague, some would argue, but their later function would never arrive. Other times, what would visibly be conceived as wink-and-you’ll-miss-it foreshadowing could overstay its welcome to the point of inadvertently spoiling a later plot point. My girlfriend sniped the (arguably) most important reveal of the game, which is left for the tail end of the final epilogue (!), in the first hours of watching. The symbolics and allusions were just too plentiful where they should have been more subdued. I am DYING to provide examples here but I’m keeping it spoiler-free. Again, if this is a Kojima-ism, too bad; but it’s not a catastrophic failure of storytelling by any means. There are very few masters of this thing working today. But what can be easier to navigate, I think, is...

2. Nuance - this kinda goes hand-in-hand with the upper point but is a bit more important to me and applies to what SPECIFICALLY you decide to heighten in order to slap us across the face with your deeper meanings. Certain characters - not all of them - feel like caricatures. The silly names and overt metaphors (wearing a mask means hiding something! connected cities all have ‘knot’ in their name!) are honestly, genuinely FINE as long as their function isn’t betrayed, but the lean into metaphor worship can sometimes wade into SERIOUSLY shitty territory as contemporary implications are ignored altogether, and that ties into my fourth point, which I’ll address before looping back to the third; needless to say, approaching sensitive subjects with broad strokes is not exactly the way to go. But broad strokes is almost exclusively what this game does, forgetting to incorporate...

3. Social context - and I feel like avoiding examples here will be difficult lest I end up sounding like a dogmatic asshole; but there is a right thing and a wrong thing to do when co-opting IRL concepts to fit fictional messaging/storytelling. I feel that a character “curing” themselves of a phobia by experiencing emotional growth that vaguely corresponds to what the disorder could have symbolized is a wrong thing. And I don’t even want to get into all the wacky revisionism the lore ended up twisting into, which was mostly honestly entertaining (the ammonite will be a good hint to those who’ve played it), until it decided to, again, lean a bit too hard into painting today’s reality as a crisis of human connection and imply some questionable things about why, uh, asexual people exist, for example. Yes it makes some sense within the context of the lore and what’s happening in the plot, but it’s completely lacking in social know-how of the here and now. In other words: a Bad Look. To me, this type of wayward ignorance is a much more serious issue that can historically snowball any piece of writing into a witless disaster. I don’t know if it quite does it here, but it’s not really my place to say. Still, you can have wacky worldbuilding that has no sense of dramatic tension, nuance, or awareness towards the audience, and yet containing one last vital glue holding it all together, and that would be...

4. Strong authorial position - or intent I guess, to speak in literary terms - and I still have trouble pinpointing how and where this exists in this game. A bullshit stance you say, and I hear ya; cause this here is a video game very pronounced in its pro-human-connection messaging, painting the opposite outcome as an apocalyptic end to our species. And as I understand the gameplay is all about connections too - leaning into that theme so hard it even renders itself unapproachable to most capital-g Gamers. I honestly respect the balls of that. But really, as an author who headlined the creation of this thing, what was it really about? What were you trying to say?

And beyond “human connection is real important to beat apathy” I got nothing, and I think that’s because of points 1 and 2 failing in succession, and then point 3 souring the taste. It just had to be apparent the moment the curtain fell, is what I find. You just have to “get” it immediately, get what it was trying to say, but that will happen only if it’s been articulated incredibly well up to that point. Maybe the entire punch of that message REALLY depends on you spending dozens of hours ruminating on the crushing cost of loneliness as you haul cargo across countries on foot and connect people to your weird not-internet? If so, I’ve missed a vital piece of context, and with this being a videogame and all, it’s honestly a fair assumption. But otherwise.. it felt like a hell of a lot of twisting and turning and plot affectations that only led to more plot affectations and sometimes character growth (which had its own bag of issues from point 3) and not a hell of a lot to say about human connection beyond the fact that it is. good and useful. It felt like a repeated statement instead of being an argument. Does that make sense? I understand the story optics here are zoomed waay out and set on targeting the human condition as a whole, but like.. if you’re committing to a message, you have to stand by it.

Why is connection good? it’s a dumb question without a DOUBT but since the game has set out to answer it then it.. should? Did I miss the answer? I may have, I honestly can’t exclude the possibility. My lens was warped and my framework of consuming storytelling is a bit rigid in its requirements (the four points I mentioned), so maybe I’m just too grouchy and old to understand. 

I just think Pacific Rim did it better and took about 7 hours less to do it! And yet, it, too, involved Guillermo Del Toro. Curious.

If you made it this far and are interested in my thoughts on the technical execution of it all as well, uhm, it’s pretty much spotless? Decima is utilized beautifully, the Hideo vanity squad of celebrities all do their very best with the often clunky dialogue, the music is great, the aesthetic and visual design is immediately arresting, and it certainly does an all-around great job at standing out from the rest of the flock. I fell in love with the BB a little bit. It is also a game that is incredibly horny for Mads Mikkelsen, which almost fully supplants the expected real estate for run-of-the-mill male gaze bullshit. It is. A change.

That’s all I got folks

[aion-rsa]

Zack Snyder’s Justice League: Why It’s Better Than the Joss Whedon Cut

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This article contains spoilers for zack snyder’s justice league.

The long-awaited Snyder Cut is here at last. After nearly four years of rumors, innuendos, hints, allegations, online harassment, and everything else that’s good and bad about fandom, Zack Snyder’s Justice League has been willed into existence by the filmmaker and his legions of fans.

Four hours long–one for each year you’ve had to endure the clamor of Snyder acolytes demanding the filmmaker’s vision be restored–Zack Snyder’s Justice League is the ultimate version of the movie that Snyder never completed in 2017. Instead the version of the film that reached theaters was a truncated, patched-together mess that nearly stopped the DC cinematic universe in its tracks.

If you detect a bit of snark in the preceding paragraph, you’re not off-base. The very notion that a vocal contingent of fans could make enough noise to actually get a version of a piece of art or entertainment in their preferred format opens a proverbial Pandora’s box. Everyone treats whenever fans sign online petitions to get movies, television finales, or the like remade as jokes. But a cynic might wonder if the Snyder Cut gets us closer to that happening.

There is of course a key difference between Snyder finishing his passion project and other flair ups between fans and creators: The Justice League that came out in 2017 was a Frankenstein’s Monster of a movie, with half of the finished picture rewritten and reshot by a director (Joss Whedon) with a completely different tone and approach. This occurred after Snyder had to abandon it due to a terrible family tragedy–which, in the most cynical version of this tale, the studio (Warner Bros.) saw as an opportunity to hijack the film and retool it to their liking.

So now that Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a thing, with the original director restoring hours of footage that he shot (and adding some freshly filmed material at the end) while throwing out everything he didn’t, there is one question that burns as fiercely and brightly as the raging eyes of Darkseid himself: Is it better than the 2017 theatrical version, aka the Whedon Compromise?

The answer is unequivocally yes.

Now that doesn’t automatically make ZSJL a good film. Nor does it necessarily make the Whedon version a wholly bad one–but there’s no question that the 2017 version suffers greatly and is diminished by comparison. In fact, it’s almost not fair to call that version the “Whedon” one; regardless of the man’s personal controversies, it seems apparent that he was put in an almost impossible position when he was recruited to finish Justice League back then.

Whedon was tasked by the studio to make a movie more like his own The Avengers out of material that couldn’t be more different in terms of tone, visual style, pacing, and structure. He was also asked to recreate what Marvel had taken six movies to do: introduce and assemble a team of superheroes all in a single film and in less than two hours (minus credits). And he did that by stitching together footage that was already shot by a different director with scenes that he had to craft almost on the fly, all with a desperate, panicking studio breathing down his neck. Whedon could have summoned Scorsese, Coppola, and the ghosts of Hitchcock and Kubrick to help him solve it and it still might have defeated him.

The result was a movie that was the soulless, corporate product that critics accuse all Hollywood blockbusters, particularly superhero movies, of being–but which most are decidedly not. Whedon’s own The Avengers is proof that a studio can make a heartfelt, earnest, charming, and still awe-inspiring spectacle with the right people, story, and vision in place. The vision behind 2017’s Justice League–which does have its lively moments and does benefit in some ways from better pacing (but is ultimately hurt more by its shortened running time)–is a vision only of bottom lines and quarterly profits.

So, yes, ZSJL is the better movie. For one thing, it’s clearly a personal work. Whatever one thinks of Snyder’s directorial vision and peculiar take on superheroes, it’s all there on the screen and unashamedly his, just as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and, to a lesser extent, Man of Steel were. The fact that the DC film franchise has long moved past his approach doesn’t necessarily factor into ZSJL. It stands alone.

On its own terms, it hits all the marks that Snyder probably wanted to hit. The story and several of the characters are developed much more than they ever were in the 2017 edition. True, a lot of exposition is needed to make that story more cohesive and complete than it was before, but there are plenty of new visuals to go along with that foundation building as well. There is much more representation here of the full breadth of the DC universe, from ancient gods to Jack Kirby’s Fourth World.

The back story of Darkseid and the Mother Boxes, and the first battle for Earth with the Atlanteans, the Amazons, and everyone else somehow seems better articulated and executed. The connective tissue joining Darkseid’s quest to that of his lackey Steppenwolf–tying it all to the death of Superman, whose removal from the board cleared the way for Steppenwolf to return–is strengthened. Bruce Wayne’s quest to put together the team to defend the planet takes longer and has more steps to it, making it feel like much more of a challenge than it did four years ago.

Warner Bros. Pictures

Some of that team are given much better treatment this time, with Victor Stone/Cyborg getting the most out of the deal. He truly does become the heart of the picture in many ways, getting two extensive flashbacks that are equal parts elegant and clumsy but do a lot to round out a character who was little more than a special effect in 2017.

Ray Fisher’s performance is assured and graceful, and one can now see why he is so angry about what happened with the theatrical cut: it’s quite possible that some backroom studio committee meeting came up with a variation of “we can’t have an unknown take up so much space in a movie starring Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman.”

Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen/the Flash also has more to do than make jokes, although the much-ballyhooed introduction of Iris West (Kiersey Clemons) is little more than a walk-on, seen once and never heard from again (there’s a bit of that going around in this picture). Similarly, Lois Lane’s grief over the death of Clark/Superman is explored with somewhat more depth, although an otherwise poignant scene between her and Martha Kent (Diane Lane) is nearly ruined by a pointless twist.

Aquaman (Jason Momoa) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) are less developed here, and their characterizations clash with what we’ve seen since in their standalone movies. There is a much more melancholy resonance to the absence of and longing for Superman. And although he’s still no Thanos in terms of complexity and nuance, Steppenwolf at least has a clearer motivation in this film. He just wants to get back on the boss’ good side, which kind of makes him weirdly amusing in a movie notable for its almost complete lack of humor.

All the banter that Whedon wrote and shot–the flirting between Bruce and Diana on the plane, Aquaman sitting on the Lasso of Truth–is gone. There are still some laugh lines in the movie, but ZSJL is as self-serious and grimdark as Snyder’s previous two DC entries. That makes it feel heavy-handed, as does Snyder’s deployment of agonizing slow-motion for so many scenes that it feels like he could have lost an hour just by speeding up the film. The colors are murky, mostly brown and gray, and while a number of visual effects are pulled off handsomely and seamlessly, this is supposed to feel mythic but ends up feeling just artificial more often than not.

But most importantly, the story and characters in this Justice League are still ill-served by the way the film was conceived in the first place. Even though our heroes are overall given more to do, this is still a movie that has to introduce three of those heroes, their backstories, and their worlds in one fell swoop. There’s no sense of culmination or victory in seeing them together, like there was in The Avengers. And in the end, Steppenwolf’s pursuit of three magic boxes just doesn’t carry the entire four hours.

Read more

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For all the world-building that Snyder (and screenwriter Chris Terrio) do, the placement of the “Knightmare” epilogue and its Joker cameo undermine everything that has come before, and undermine the character of Superman again. By the time the movie’s ending rolls around, Snyder is still basically saying that our heroes are going to keep letting us down–especially poor Superman, who’s going to turn evil in the future after being killed off and brought back once already as a rage monster. The addition of a Martian Manhunter cameo (his second!) at the very end is also superfluous, pointless fan service.

It certainly seems as if Snyder put every scrap of footage he shot into this version of his magnum opus, and perhaps that is what it took to give him closure, both for the film and for the unspeakable loss he endured while making it (there is a poignancy now to the movie’s major plot point of trying to bring back someone from the dead). But just because he could do it doesn’t mean he should have. Incredible as it seems, there may be an even better two-and-a-half or even three-hour cut of this Justice League that we’ll never see.

As it stands though, this one we now have will be the one spoken about in the years to come. Meanwhile the 2017 version will fade into history as an oddity. And that is, in the final analysis, the way it should be.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is now streaming on HBO Max.

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