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spurtle467 (1504)
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Spider-Man: Across the Di-Verse
Aliens: "We don't understand the concept of lying and therefore you can't be trusted"
Would the First Order have tolerated homosexuality?
What could go wrong?
How does the finger clicking to make people disappear work exactly?
Old man death and the mallet
The kids
Will the tornadoes increase in size and power as the film goes on?
The Thing facing Kurt Russell at the end
Two seasons of Jack Reacher fighting all sorts of big tough guys
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Yes covid I'm sure will have played a part, especially as it is the older members of the public more vulnerable and the target audience for this would be the older fans of the original movies. The younger age range must be the brunt of cinema goers these days. I can't explain how else those dreadful Transformer movies made so much money despite such lukewarm critical reception.
Obviously though if this opened to acclaim from critics it would have resulted in much better numbers, even despite the other issues you speak about. But without that people just didn't think it was worth it.
On the one hand I think a fifth Indiana Jones movie could have worked. You look at how well Top Gun: Maverick was written and its success at the box office with a much older Tom Cruise returning. Then on the other hand, it's a geriatric Ford playing essentially an adventurer, where action and physicality had very much been at the core of his escapades in the previous movies, unlike with the character Maverick. Only so much you can do with an 80 year old Indiana Jones I suppose.
So could it still have worked as well with the lead character being very old this time? Well I guess it could, although this already changes the tone and the direction the film goes in. It would require relying on good side characters to do some of the heavy lifting so to speak, and I don't believe we got them here. It was a problem with the previous film and it's a problem here as we're faced with a young, unlikeable woman patronising and undermining Indy, every which way. It's not what any true IJ fan wants to see.
Woke agenda and Ford's age aside, I just don't think it was well written enough overall. The action was generic and forgettable, the villains didn't feel threatening, it was neither as dark or tense as Raiders, nor as fun as Crusade. It just felt all too safe. If they'd done things differently it may have been the film Crystal could and should have been.
Whether it's woke or not, the quality does look like a drop off from MM:FR, visually speaking. Hard to know how good the writing will be, but if the standards have gone down in the visual department (and that was one of Fury Road's big selling points), then it's not that promising. This just looks like a lower budget retread. I even wonder how much Miller's heart was in it to do this compared to Fury Road.
It was a combination of things that led to its downfall: mixed reviews, the derailment of the franchise by the previous instalment, probably a lack of interest generally from a more modern audience for a character now being played by an 80 year old. Then there's the recent reputation of Disney producing quantity over quality and being overly woke.
In a way it might be fitting for it to end on a whimper, since a whimper is the best chance of it seeing its end. Had it been hugely successful, they'd already be thinking up what they can do with the franchise next.
I believe a rumour, and have no reason to suspect it's untrue, that the actor in question was Peter Dinklage.
I would say the one thing he does well most of all is his ability to create very good scenes of dialogue driven tension - Jules' and Ringo's confrontation at the diner in PF, Jules' and Brett's scene, the scenes in IB of the protagonists being interrogated, Candie at the dinner table in DU, and maybe the best of all which he didn't direct but still wrote, the scene between Walken and Hopper in True Romance. This is something that seems to be more absent in his recent films and from the sounds of this movie idea I'm not sure where they would fit in there either, so maybe just as well he plumps for another idea. You can bet your life savings that he would have fitted some close up shots of women's feet into it though.
Maybe he can play a trans character? It would be fitting considering his stance on the matter and I expect there will be enough wokeness to allow such a character to exist.
You can never properly tell from a trailer but I suppose when I saw that I did think there was at least some interesting imagery going on, so slightly more hope raised than when I saw the Exorcist: Believer trailer, which looked a bit more generic and reliant on fan service. That said, it's still surprising it's rated as high as it is.
The whole part about the aliens not understanding the concept of lying and fantasy really is rather stupid, not just considering how intelligent they're supposed to be and how observant of the human race they've been, but also because they've actually been tricking humans to see things that aren't actually there, basically masking the truth themselves.
It doesn't but it certainly helps paint an image of someone being more accepting of different people and cultures and therefore more likely to be good. Already we can say that the First Order aren't guilty of racism or misogyny. It makes it harder to buy that they are an evil organisation. They may as well just be evil for the sake of being evil.
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