Hacker Cinema
Captain Marvel
2019 · Film · 124 min
Part of Captain Marvel Collection
Directed by Ryan Fleck, Anna Boden
ActionAdventureScience Fiction
The story follows Carol Danvers as she becomes one of the universe’s most powerful heroes when Earth is caught in the middle of a galactic war between two alien races. Set in the 1990s, Captain Marvel is an all-new adventure from a previously unseen period in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
5 positive18 negative2 mixed29 neutralfrom 54 commenters
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61 comments on Hacker News
I feel pretty confident that Captain Marvel, Emilia Perez, Spy Kids, Sausage Party, The Last Jedi, and Ghostbusters 2016 aren't at much risk of going over the heads of audiences, but you're entitled to your opinion if you think they count as avant garde cinema
> The fact that nobody would make a Doctor Zhivago or even a Back to the Future today is not something I can fix with all my searching.
What do you mean by that?
I'm not familiar with Doctor Zhivago so I had to look it up, the 1965 film is based on a 1957 novel, which seems to match just fine with the pattern of The Martian, The Three Body Problem, Game of Thrones, Fifty Shades of Grey, etc.
Back to the Future is a fun trilogy, but the first film was mostly set in 1955 (so if it had been done today the past would have been 1994, compare to Captain Marvel being mostly set in 1995), the second film was 1985's idea of 2015 (and we still get plenty of what-if fiction in the near-ish future, e.g. Blade Runner 2049, Cyberpunk 2077), the third was yet another wild-west Cowboys-and-Indians gunslinger (1885) — but if you mean to focus on the more playful and fun aspects of how it was put together, or the positive vibes of good people working to solve problems and where it's clear who the goodies and baddies are, BttF reminds me more of The Orville or Lower Decks. (And The Martian if you want to consider the environment/time travel itself, rather than Biff, to be the problem).
One thing that they kind gloss over is that rotoscoping is used a lot in films to separate objects.
For example, I did an exam on prince caspian (https://eu.southcoasttoday.com/story/entertainment/local/2008/05/15/prince-caspian-improves-on/52409998007/) to separate his hair from the forest. They didn't have green screen, and even if they did, it would obliterate his hair. (hair is translucent so glows green, and is removed by the software.)
I failed the rotoscoping part, but passed the painting section (where you remove markers, crew or other features not wanted in the final image.)
Whilst "a scanner darkly" is a brilliant example of rotoscoping, its not the example. if you look at this showreel towards the end you see captain marvel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sYWzFNobEo look at her hair, every individual wisp of hair that extends past her neck is individually masked out.
Good rotoscoping is often the building block of "expensive" looking VFX.
For computer vision its also important so you can get ground truth on tracking various object and training models like segment anything
They are propaganda, the CIA and Pentagon had/have their hands in many movies, Marvel's Captain Marvel is a prominent example [1]
[1] https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/is-captain-marvel-military-propaganda/
Brie Larson is a good actress she is believable in many of her roles before captain marvel.
Even in captain marvel she is consistent- the issue is the writing makes her a smug self-centered person with no growth other than gaining even more confidence.
Its exclusively a writing/directing problem.
The hate got directed at her because she was the lightning rod for the movie, and she had a couple of awkward interviews and made a few really alienating comments about the franchises core audience and their relation to the movie.
But she is a good actress.
That's so disappointing. Captain Marvel was a promising start -- good, if not great. Ms. Marvel was fascinating, and a great opportunity for a new and interesting take on the superhero genre. So I had really high hopes for the team-up.
It sucks that if it fails, it'll be XKCD 385 all over again ("Wow, girls suck at math"). https://xkcd.com/385/ Female-led superhero movies don't get to just live or die on their own; they end up risking the entire genre every single time.
The defense of “you shouldn’t change anything about my beloved series” is pretty flimsy.
If you don’t change anything, then what’s the point of watching/reading/playing the same thing over and over? Doesn’t any series just get incredibly boring without variation?
Great literature, TV, and films say things. Sometimes you might not agree. But at least it makes you think. Ideally, each entry in a series should say different or evolving things. Just look at how The Wire explores different aspects of Baltimore’s crime epidemic in each season as an example.
And I’m not saying Captain Marvel is great or even good by the way. I thought it was just another boring superhero move, and a D or F tier at that. Same goes for a lot of your other examples.
But I do think even beloved series have to have room for adaptation and experimentation. Because otherwise, they stagnate and can get to a point where they’re no longer worth watching.
Just look at Mission Impossible for example. Each film is well made and has fun action. But do we really ever need another one? Doesn’t essentially the same thing happen every time? Isn’t Ethan Hunt always going to save the day and risk everything for his friends and the mission?
RT does stink but their diagnosis as to why is hilariously wrong. It stinks because they DO try to put verified "critics" above the general public.
I had to laugh at this - "Every review carries the same weight whether it runs in a major newspaper or a Substack with a dozen subscribers." Yeah, and that's a good thing. Why should subscriber base give your review more weight? I can read that individual's review if I want to know what they think, I don't need to get a higher weight for the total review from everyone.
Then this was just as laughable - "Misogynist trolls had hijacked the platform, coordinating to tank women-led movies like Captain Marvel before they opened." No, it was an objectively BAD movie with an actress that acts like a stiff unenthused robot delivering her lines.
In conclusion, this author thinks RT needs be fixed because it's not reflecting his bias that the movie industry needs to be more "inclusive" and no movie that includes that "inclusivity" ought to ever receive a poor rating because obviously all of those ratings are racist, misogynist, -ist this, -ist that etc.
Here's my prescription: Just watch the movies and make your own mind up. If you have to go to a site like RT, ignore the critic reviews completely because almost all live in a bubble and can't relate with common movie goers.
Honestly it’s easy because a directors job is harder to replace than an actors job. The studios weren’t losing much.
So far, in the last couple of years we’ve already seen what are basically CGI actors - current actors de-aged in three major movies - Samuel Jackson in Captain Marvel, Will Smith in Gemini Man and Harrison Ford in the latest Indiana Jones.
Not to mention Mark Hamil in the Mandalorian.
How are you going to replace Steven Spielberg, Kevin Feige, etc?
That's ticket sales, not profit. And it also counts the enormous volume of tickets actually given away by the PR company. People figured out how this all works with Captain Marvel, a dull film which was pumped artificially in any number of ways. It's simple Hollywood accounting.
> Marvell Technology: Kree
More likely a reference to the recent Captain Marvel movie.
I used to not take people who grouse about capeshit too seriously. I would go okay, maybe this whole superhero thing is starting to get played out, but I'll go see the next Marvel just to be sure.
Up until Captain Marvel (2019), the Marvel films were solidly entertaining if not great, and very respectful of the characters. There were still some Marvel films like that after that, but most of Phase IV has been a hard skip for me.
Now I'll sometimes watch anime or science fiction on streaming, but the last movie to make me really want to go to the theaters was Maverick.
Seems like a stretch. There have been many characters using the name Captain Marvel, male and female.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Marvel_(Marvel_Comics)
Miles morales is a different person. He is not Black Peter Parker. They coexist in context dead or alive or across universes or whatever.
If you watch a marvel movie you’ll see it’s mostly character drama, not superhero theatrics. The superhero alias is not the character.
The MCU captain America is currently the Falcon, a black guy, who is objectively much weaker (not a super soldier or powered in any way. He does have fancy flying tech but they’ve tried to convey that he’s clearly inferior). One of the more nuanced and better MCU entries directly addressing the inherent supremacist nature of superhero culture and the cultural implications of just switching the race of a cultural icon. Imo, those are actually important relevant themes to drudge through. They’re not forced woke ideas forced upon people. It’s very problematic if you can’t explore such ideas without criticism for trying to do so rather than critical responses to the ideas themselves.
I don't agree with the parent commenter, but wasn't Captain Marvel originally male? The female character of Captain Marvel in the movies was known as Ms. Marvel in the comics (until 2012): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Danvers.
Similar story with Spider-man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Morales. There hadn't been an African-american spider-man until 2011.
I'm not a comic book nerd, so I'm probably entirely wrong about this.
For example, She-Hulk had a scene where I'm quite convinced that it's hurting women, despite contrary intentions. The male Hulk had to overcome plenty of challenges to become halfway stable. The female Hulk skipped all that.
But that is the plot of pretty much every story about a woman in a role traditionally held by men, see for example Captain Marvel.
She-Hulk skips that part because that's not what the show is about; there are literally hundreds of shows or movies you can watch if that's the plot line you're looking for.
Or they simply watched everything they were interested in watching on the first service so there was no point in keeping the subscription active. It's not like it takes any effort to cancel. They will come back to it later (it's easy at most to reactivate a dormant subscription) when it has accumulated enough new stuff.
That's what I've been doing for the streaming services that aren't bundled with something else I have for reasons other than video streaming (Prime Video because I have Amazon Prime, Hulu because I have Spotify, Peacock Premium because I have XFinity as my ISP, and Paramount+ because I have Walmart+).
For example a couple months before "Avengers: Endgame" was released I realized that I had to see it in theaters. My previous approach for Marvel movies of waiting until they showed up on some non-premium cable channel like FXX meant I was a couple years behind, and I realized there was no way I'd be able to avoid major spoilers while waiting to see Endgame that way. So I got a month of Netflix (they had all the Marvel movies back then) and caught up on Marvel, and a few other things, then cancelled.
Later I got Disney+ for a week (free trial) and caught up on Disney and Pixar animated movies (Coco, Incredibles 2, Toy Story 4, Frozen II, Onward), watched Captain Marvel, rewatched Endgame to see what I'd missed on my bathroom break when I saw it in theaters, and watched the Star Wars trilogy that starts with The Force Awakens, watched Rogue One, and cancelled.
Right now, a couple years later, I'm back on Disney+, because they sent me on offer for a month for $1.99. I've caught up again on Pixar (Soul, Luca, Turning Red), Disney animation (Ralph Breaks the Internet, Raya and the Last Dragon, Encanto), Marvel (Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, the Loki series), some Simpsons shorts, and am trying to decide if there is any new Star Wars that interests me. When the month is up I will rewatch Luca once or twice, and then cancel.
I'll be back on Netflix for a month probably next year to watch Lucifer.
I'll also probably at some point do a month of HBO Max for South Park.
I think the trick with some of these debates is just stepping back from the media cycle. I really noticed this with Captain Marvel where for a few months any criticism was suddenly seized-upon as evidence of the person undermining the future of girls/women worldwide, but now, a few years later, nobody thinks that the movie needs defending so vigorously.
As an aside, I noticed a couple days ago that in the live-action Lion King, the person voicing Simba sings, "everywhere you look, I'm standing in the spotlight" in place of just "I'm standing spotlight" in the older version, which is almost a metaphor for the differences since that little verbal error in the animated version feels more humanistic
I'm seeing the same pattern I saw with Star Trek: Discovery (race and gender) and Captain Marvel (gender) - a critic would say 'I don't like the plot/logic/world/strength of the hero' and be accused of racism/sexism/not liking strong female characters, where this was untrue and just used to dismiss valid criticism. On the other hand, there was a contingent of people who did dislike it based on somewhat sexist or anti-woke reasoning, but as far as I could tell this was overall a small group. A bit of conflation later and, well, you get the worst of all worlds: critics who feel like they are being censored (or who are), and fans who will not accept the slightest criticism without slinging accusations of racism/sexism/whatever, along with a contingent who is deserving of the latter criticism but is more likely just laughing at the total chaos.
The actual quality of the show, on the other hand, almost ends up being irrelevant. Personally I usually wait about two seasons before judging a TV show.
Like you mentioned near the end, all this has been possible with photoshop, with amateur level skill. Hollywood can CGI the entire Captain Marvel movie, so as far as state-level efforts go, AI can really only be an incremental improvement at best.
I think this is all just trendy popular sentiment moralizing AI.
OK, take Captain Marvel, which is part run-of-the-mill Marvel movie, part lecture. A lot of people tune out because of that.
Whereas they don't have any issue with a strong, feminist female lead like Ripley (were men are usually the laughing stock, and all die in the hands of the xenomorph due to incompetence).
For some time YT was convinced that guy was the main thing I needed to watch (other than cooking), so I have seen a fair amount. He's generally right about plots. I wanted to think some of the more obnoxious stuff was mostly a joke, but eventually I decided he's serious about it. He may not actually be a racist, but he has convinced me he is actually a sexist. Given that, his judgment seems a bit less accurate than I thought initially.
Others may disagree. The last straw for me was his review of "Captain Marvel". Granted, that is not a great movie. I watched it after seeing one or more of his five reviews of the film (at this point I'm not sure which it was?), however, and his complaints didn't really seem to apply. Or maybe they applied, but not really in the emphatically gendered way he seems to think? Annoying male characters are just annoying, but somehow annoying female characters are the downfall of society? Really? You do realize that typically the same writer is writing characters of both sexes?
Euphoria? Excellent show.
Reservation Dogs? Excellent show.
Dear White People? Woke Garbage.
Kill Bill? Excellent movie.
Captain Marvel? Woke Garbage.
You're demonstrating nothing but your own hyper-fixation on superficial identity characteristics by failing to recognize that there are plenty of "women, LGBT, PoC, etc" in all kinds of media beloved by those who are sick and tired of woke media. You think that these characteristics are sufficient for people to dislike this media, whereas the precise inverse seems to be true, wherein pro-woke people seem to be perfectly happy accepting garbage as media so long as these identity groups and messages are present.
I'm not interested in continuing this conversation by taking some kind of boomer position on wokeness, I just think that you're willfully arguing in bad faith, but you already know that.
>Do you mean female lead characters, or female leadership on the movie project itself?
Female leadership on movie projects isn't an issue. Female lead characters aren't an issue. I think girl-boss is a type of narrative in a film where they write unlikeable women that don't register as real people for the purpose of creating "powerful" female characters that aren't interesting or successful.
Examples - Rey/Admiral Holdo/ from Disney Star Wars, Wonder Woman 1984, Captain Marvel, the female terminator reboot, the female ghostbusters reboot, the ocean's 8 female reboot, etc etc etc
I fully expect the newest Thor movie with new female thor to be another girl-boss film, and from the trailer same thing with the upcoming Miss Marvel movie. The new Indiana Jones movie is at risk since it seems to be about Indy passing the torch to a young woman and Kathleen Kennedy is involved - we've seen her record on star wars. We'll see if any of that happens.
>Apart from that, I'm not sure Disney really cares about social policies themselves one way or another. I think it's much more mercenary than that
I disagree. The leadership and many of the creatives in Disney are the people who want to push particular political opinions on to other people.
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1508912865293619202
>Unfortunately for Disney, a different part of their audience doesn't want to see them take a stand on issues. Or if they do, that it should be a different stand. Disney is finding out right now that it simply can't satisfy everybody.
Disney thought there was nothing anyone could do about it - since they're a private company and they can do what they want. They forgot the government they were picking a fight with also had the ability to take back privileges disney had that allowed them to be their own government in their district.
They don't need to satisfy everyone, but they want to be political activists with a direct line to your kids eyes and ears in your home. Disney is a platform for their politics.
The movies you listed fail in a different way. There are plenty of explosions and fight scenes in The Last Jedi and Captain Marvel. What they do share is that the main character is an underdeveloped Mary Sue, without character flaws, without weaknesses they must overcome. They're just made awesome from the start. It probably stems from the inability of current Hollywood to portray female characters as having any weaknesses at all, that would be heresy. The result is that it's hard to empathize with and care about the main character. They don't have any dimensionality.
Of the ones you listed I watched The Last Jedi and Captain Marvel. I know what I wrote is also true for Mulan thanks to friends who watched it and the Critical Drinker. He has a couple good films on YouTube actually demonstrating this aspect of modern films:
- Mulan: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIH-eFqBLP4>
- Star Wars: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSj6wEm4zZY>
- Captain Marvel: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKHEjpFF6J0>
Yes, absolutely. From Rotten:
Mulan - Critics: 73 - Audience: 47
The Last Jedi - Critics: 91 - Audience: 42
Captain Marvel - Critics: 79 - Audience: 45
It's clear that audiences - and you can read this as "people who like movies and are willing to leave a review" - and critics are miles apart. This prompts the common retort: "so what?" I continue to argue that the purpose of movie critics, for many decades, has been to tell the broad audience if they will like the movie. That's it. It has not been to, for example, critically deconstruct the abstract themes of power dynamics in inequitable social system. This kind of analysis appeals to a small minority of viewers. It has its place, but it should not be the majority of critics using this kind of lens, which it is.
This leads us to today, where critic reviews are functionally useless for the broad audience. Said movie minority are of course very happy with the entire critic industry catering to their needs, and they argue vociferously to keep it this way, using all kinds of condescending arguments about our lack of culture and refinement. Sometimes I just want to see cool explosions and fight scenes, and there's nothing wrong with that.
You probably need to do some data cleaning and validation before drawing any conclusions. A fair number of critical darlings are somewhat topical movies about current relevant social issues and they can be subject to review bombing by audiences, often audiences that don't even see the film. I'm not sure if IMDB really does much about that. Rotten Tomatoes at least stopped letting you review a movie before it was possible to see it after Captain Marvel had thousands of bad reviews before it even came out, but they still don't verify you saw the movie. They surface verified reviews closer to the top, but the ratings from unverified raters still count.
This was, of course, much less of a thing in 2000 than in 2019.
Mostly just precedent. Male action heroes tend to be fighters. Even clever Odysseus just straight up murders all of this foes when he returns to Ithaca.
Female action heroes are generally few, and many of them that are, are either more tricksters or agile or just kind of oversexualized replicas of the male variety. Many of them tend to be physically weaker than their opponents even at the climax of their films and overcome it through other means whereas male action heroes will more frequently prove themselves to be superior in a pure battle of fisticuffs, sometimes even sacrificing an advantage they have so that they can "fight like a man". Consider, perhaps, Ripley from Alien and Aliens. Always underpowered. Uses a loader suit for her final confrontation.
Captain Marvel is undeniably aware of the gender connotations here. It's a pretty explicitly mentioned barrier when they discuss how women couldn't be fighter pilots. She's unusual in that she's just a powerful bruiser kind of female and is way more powerful than her foes.
Would it be entertaining to watch a bunch more female (or male) led films that take this same approach? God no. Fights are fun. If you want to subvert that for an interesting message it's got to be somewhat novel each time.
Though personally I think fights are more entertaining when they're not clearly aligned with any moral message. John Wick, perhaps, as a counterexample.
I think it's more about the stakes, obstacles, "psychic wounds" etc, than the actual superpowers. Being born with superpowers isn't that big a deal, if you're in a film where every other significant character also has superpowers.
Spider-man lets his uncle die because he's busy showing off. Batman in The Dark Knight "has no cartilage in his knees, scar tissue on his kidneys, concussive damage to his brain, and a host of other issues". Bruce Banner is subject to fits of uncontrollable rage. Logan is dying and in constant pain. Doctor Strange's hands are mutilated due to a car crash caused by his own arrogance.
IIRC Wonder Woman has a naivity due to growing up on a remote island populated by women, but she's basically confident and hypercompetent throughout. Captain Marvel's big issue is she's forgotten she has galactically important superpowers. Black Widow's character has a bit more going on, and I liked the film better than the other two. But, I think there is a difference between the amount of freedom big budget movie screenwriters have with male and female characters.
At lower budgetary levels, you're more likely to see women with less straightforwardly heroic characters, facing more interesting or engaging stakes.
Before Captain Marvel Brie Larson was doing great indie flicks like Room and Free Fire. She's said she was quite conflicted about taking the role, and I can't blame her for taking the money but I think I understand her hesitation.
,, I think captain marvel is an interesting one on this note. It is a problem in recent films that writers want to overpower women to make things fair, and they do a disservice to the women by doing so’’
It’s about making money: social media gives young pretty women more power than any other large group of people ever in human history (especially if they give up their morals), and of course many of them want to believe that that power is not going away, and they don’t have to do anything to keep this power.
In the past 30 year old women were very responsible, but nowdays I know people who just optimize their poses on instagram to hide the weight that they gain by partying and getting drunk every night.
Of course it’s just some poeple who this kind of life, it just got much easier to do using internet, so the temptation is much stronger.
> A character who is put down, becomes angry, then becomes powerful and carries that anger forward.
But... that's the opposite of what happens. It is addressing this exact concept and doing something different. He's literally asking to fight like a gentleman.
The dialogue in this scene is literally "can you keep your emotions in check long enough to take me on, or will it get the better of you?" And she rejects his cliche premise entirely as a false dichotomy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KK1Kv0IzUg
male centric story telling often uses combat ability as a metaphor for personal growth. Usually with literal dialogue or reflections on moral lessons used to emphasize this relationship with the tide of battle turning when the lesson is made clear.
I thought it was great to show that, while captain marvel's growth arc is not acquisition of strength but in deriving her self worth from herself rather than from her officer.
I agree it will be hard to make more captain marvel movies because there's very little that can challenge her, unless they're willing to make a movie without a significant violent conflict. Not easy.
Captain america is a great character concept too. I liked the falcon's series dissection of it. He's explicitly not a supremacist, while acknowledging the ease with which his circumstances could allow that- and do create that within other superheroes.
I think captain marvel is an interesting one on this note. It is a problem in recent films that writers want to overpower women to make things fair, and they do a disservice to the women by doing so.
Captain marvel seems to address this directly and in a more mature way. Her character does start weak. She is shown losing repeated to her officer in physical fights and feeling inferior. Later she becomes the most powerful person the MCU has ever seen and the officer turns out to be evil.
The climax of captain marvel's character arc in her movie is him trying to bait her into fighting him on fair, unpowered terms and she basically says fuck you and blasts him with a laser. It's not explicitly a gender thing, but making a firm statement that she isn't intrinsically better than the guy without her powers but that she won't be defined by those metrics. It felt like a much better way to handle this message.
Being explicit that other people's (traditional male) competencies don't get to define your self worth.
It's a flip on the "Let's Fight Like Gentlemen" movie trope and frankly I thought it was a solid message which helped avoid this narrative pitfall even though captain marvel herself is by far the most overpowered female example of late.
> Nobody gets injured unless they can walk it off, nobody dies unless they’re about to come back to life[mostly]. Nothing is damaged unless it’s background scenery buildings and cars.
This is probably the biggest thing. The biggest mistake of hero films is that characters who are strong are not very strong. They do big hits but its all clearly irrelevant. It doesn't really matter how strong they are absolutely. Getting thrown into walls is my particular pet peeve of damaging moves that never matter. There's an over reliance on suspense where its not really deserved. I feel Captain Marvel and Thor Ragnarok did this decently. They just shrugged and made it explicitly clear that the heroes were 100x stronger than the trash mobs and released any tension in the fights to just have a good time with them.
> Captain Marvel exists to sell the Air Force to women
That seems like a ridiculous claim. Carol Danvers was an Air Force officer when the character was created in 1968. No one was trying to sell the Air Force to women in 1968.
Marvel, both the comics and the movies, has been more anti-military than pro-military. The military, specifically the US military, is often the bad guys.
For example, it was the military that led to the creation of the Hulk, and are generally the bad guys in both the comics and movies when it comes to things related to Hulk.
If in a Marvel work the military shows up, it is almost a cliche that they are going to be the bad guys unless it is a military vs. military situation such as with Captain America. And even the first Captain America movie didn't portray the US military all that favorably--they create the first super soldier and then just want to use him as an entertainer!
You clearly don't watch any political videos if the ratios you're seeing are universally that favourable. Almost all mainstream news content was heavily downvoted. More recently content promoting vaccines, LGBT politics, diversity / BLM related topics, etc have all come under significant fire from viewers and is very often downvoted.
I strongly suspect YouTube is having the same problem rotten tomatoes has been having in recent years... In their case we've seen films such as Captain Marvel do very poorly with audiences, while largely receiving praise from critics. What's the problem with that? Well, if you happen to land on a certain side of the culture wars you may start asking if the film's audience review is actually a reflection of the films quality or if it's just a reflection of it being vote bombed by misogynistic trolls. If you think it's the latter then you might feel the need to take action, and in the case of rotten tomatoes you might start altering and deleting audience reviews to ensure the audience score is conforming with what you know to be their true opinion of the film.
I'm not saying YouTube did remove the dislike button for political reasons, but their reasoning for doing so certainly doesn't make any sense. If creators are being harassed by the dislike button they can just disable it as many creators had been doing. And if you disable the dislike button you're only encouraging hate in the comments, which is probably worse for a creators mental health, and already enough of a problem on YouTube as it is. The timing of this move is also extremely suspicious. Nowadays my YouTube homepage seems to be full of mainstream news channels which I haven't subbed too often pushing the mainstream narrative in regards to COVID vaccines or some other hot culture war issue.
Right now I have 6 mainstream media videos being shown on my homepage none of which I have subbed to, 5 of which are COVID related and the other is about Ghislaine Maxwell. I have absolutely no interest in this content, in fact I actively try to avoid the news but YouTube for whatever reason has been pushing these videos onto my feed recently and therefore if I do end up watching them I'm likely not going to enjoy it much and am probably quite likely to downvote them.
I guess I'm not saying big tech have an interest in controlling what information you see and how you perceive it, but it certainly looks a bit suspicious.
Couple of thoughts:
1. I'm not really sure what making this so interactive accomplishes. The result seems akin to a listicle: "X Great Movies to Watch When You're Feeling Y", except with a lot more clicks required and, importantly, no curation. I think I would prefer to see a static list of recommendations with a "random" button and a cool blog post linked about how the recommendations were generated. Furthermore, it seems fairly safe to say (?) that the site isn't dynamically generating recommendations because the list exhausts rather quickly, after 10 or so. Just make a list!
2. The lack of curation leads to a lot of strangeness in the recommendations. For example, my first choice was feeling "weird". I got a bunch of blockbuster action films: Justice League, Avengers: Endgame, Thor: Ragnarok, Interstellar, Black Panther, Captain Marvel.
I would comment as follows.
Iron Man - sort novel for setting marvel tone but mostly banal action movie
Iron Man 2 - banal action movie
Thor - banal action movie
Captain America: The First Avenger - particularly banal action movie
Marvel's The Avengers - banal action movie
Iron Man 3 - banal action movie, sort of interesting to see protagonist suffering PTSD anxiety from being a superhero
Thor: The Dark World - banal action movie
Captain America: The Winter Soldier - first interesting take. Patriotism is not the same as government obedience. Real fight choreography approaching a soft john wick.
Guardians of the Galaxy - Early rock and roll aesthetic pretty interesting
Avengers: Age of Ultron - banal action movie, perhaps mcu lowpoint
Ant-Man - superhero heist movie, literally deconstructs larger than life superhero tropes. I think thumbs up
Captain America: Civil War - by this point doing the mcu's own thing, which is novel, but probably not interesting outside
Doctor Strange - banal action movie
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 - aesthetic still feels mostly fresh.
Spider-Man: Homecoming - super down to earth high school drama, frustrated working class villains suffering the fallout of superheroes, seems interesting to me
Thor: Ragnarok - great film, very genre savvy. Rare achievement to make godly strength brutes feel really engaging to watch. Taika Waititi is a genius.
Black Panther - pretty good. interesting aesthetic. directly addressing racial tensions.
Avengers: Infinity War & Endgame - Mostly fan service and not too surprising but honestly still novel.
Ant-Man and the Wasp - Ehhh I really don't remember
Captain Marvel - Beginning had some great hard sci fi imo. Thought the ending message of newly apotheosizied female not needing to prove herself to her evil male mentor was a solid take, whereas a classic "mano a mano" kind of showdown would be so typical of the genre
Spider-Man: Far From Home - Villain emphasizing themes of the power of deceptive media? heck yeah.
Wandavision - Really bizarre and interesting start. Unfortunately non-self-aware conclusion
Falcon and Winter Soldier - Active discussions of race and the problematic nature of superheroes being supremacists? Very good.
Loki - kind of a super cliche topic (time cops) that is also somehow really rare? eh.
honorable mentions for Logan and Deadpool for being just great; and the Amazing Spiderman for its excellent aesthetics despite terrible writing.
Of course role models don't have to be the same gender or race or culture. Plenty of white people find Bruce Lee's life story inspirational, and likewise there are plenty of black kids that are Batman fans. This is normal and healthy.
It's still reasonable to wonder why the vast majority of role models are white men, and think about redressing that a bit. The problem is we sometimes get dreck like the Batwoman TV show or Captain Marvel where diversity became a creative shackle; but then we also can get the Wonder Woman* and Black Panther movies where diversity was realised as a creative opportunity. The important thing is to maintain artistic integrity.
* And yes I'm aware of the irony given the origins of the character.
I second this. With so many movies in the epic, they'll still be fun to watch 30 years from now.
Vision really disappointed in the penultimate. I think his character was hyped up a lot in Age of Ultron. Became disappointing seeing him go so easily.
Older Thanos was a really well-thought and played villain. One which many people got to identify with (based on his goals in the movie). Captain America delivered when he proved worthy. I think Captain Marvel was an arrogant addition that needed to fill in pieces to the story, like how Stark and Nebula get saved.
It's going to be a classic series in the decades to come. Marvel delivered.
I thought four-walling was a conspiracy theory invented by racists, incels, and Russian bots that is supposedly what Disney did in order to boost the box-office figures for that totally amazing, legitimately groundbreaking movie about Captain Marvel.
I don't think this is a sustainable criticism.
Iron Man 3 is all about PTSD. Black Panther has a atrong theme about the damage done to children when they are abandoned. Captain Marvel is about the way women are taught to keep their strengths in check. Endgame has Thor's whole plot being about dealing with dismal failure and depression, and how this doesn't have to define you as a person.
I mean, sure, they aren't incredibly deep approaches to these topics. But there is definitely a thread of emotional, psychological experiences running through the Marvel movies.
Not necessarily to save time, the first one was because Captain Marvel was a late entry and they had to shoehorn her into the plot somehow. All her appearances in that movie had an alternate and more cohesive way It could have went, such as Stark and Nebula finishing the rudimentary repairs they were seen doing and limping home on their own power.
Time travel was also mentioned in the Ant-Man and the Wasp stinger, so it didn't completely come out of nowhere. Stark didn't invent it, he invented a navigation system.
> Is there are second example?
Captain Marvel ends with a fight, but the entire point of the movie is that the people we are taught to fear as an insidious infiltration into our society are, in fact, only trying to make a home for themselves, and lash out only when terrorized by an imperial power. The hero of that story is a soldier who realizes she has been used as a weapon against innocents, and who then sets out to make amends.
Thor is about someone with the powers of a god and the simplistic morality of a child, and his entire first movie is about learning restraint and the importance of peace.
Iron Man is about an arms dealer who realizes, quote, that he has more to offer the world than things that blow up. This isn't the best example, because he's still better known for making things blow up, but he also becomes the world leader in clean energy. Iron Man also creates a rampant AI and learns that even though he's a genius, he can't build a suit of armor around the world, especially without the world's permission.
Black Panther has some reasonably complicated things to say about imperialism and the White Man's Burden. And, I guess, the stupidity of placing the world's most advanced technology and weaponry into the hands of a man who can win a fistfight about it.
Didn't tear up per se, but they are extremely well executed movies. The characters mostly have a distinct character arc (except for Captain Marvel), and their actions follow their character development. Weaving so many movies and so many characters together into a cohesive story line is an impressive feat. Some of the choices seem obvious now, but were really risky. Like a sci-fi movie featuring a talking racoon and a walking tree. (Closest I got to a tearing-up moment was when Starlord's mom gives him the mix tape.)
Ending Infinity War with Thanos triumphant rivals "Luke I am your father" as the emotional twist to a major blockbuster movie. (Even knowing from the comics what was going to happen, it was still a weird emotional state walking out of the theater after that.)
I think the reason the success of the Marvel movies was so universal was because even people not normally interested in comic book stories still recognized they are executed so well.
Ken Loach said this of superhero films: "They're made as commodities like hamburgers, and it's not about communicating, and it's not about sharing our imagination."
Superhero films are just a genre, like any other. It's a constraint that lets you better express other themes or ideas.
Think about the best superhero films vs the worst ones. The good ones were all about something, not just people running around in costumes. And all the bad ones were just people running around in costumes.
Nolan Batman: does power make right? (all) who has the right the enforce justice? (bb and dkr) does peace by force breed a worse evil? (dk) how far can you push people before they embrace their darker haves? (dk and dkr)
Captain America: what is patriotism? (all) can you trust authority? (WS) the risks of concentrating power (WS) is rehabilitation viable (WS and CW) is safety more important than liberty? (CW)
Wonder Woman: is it better to be a part of society or apart from it? is the world worth saving? do woman have the power to shape the world?
Captain Marvel: can a woman succeed in a hero role without a male romantic/sexual interest to feminize her? also, the power of propaganda to literally shape how we view others (and especially, "The Other")
Black Panther: can black culture be identified with modernity and success? what is the role of tradition and culture in modern society? does our true power come from external sources or from within?
Spiderman (HC, FFH, IS): how much would the events of the Avengers films actually affect daily life? (HC, FFH) what are the consequences of casual implementation of government policy? (HC) what does it mean to be a superhero? (IS) what is identity (IS) how much of life is driven by deception (FFH)?
X-Men: what does it mean to be an outsider/The Other? (1, 2) can The Other become part of society (2, FC, DOFP)? Contrast with the universally derided 3, Apocalypse, and DP, which don't appear to have any driving themes.
Aquaman: can man and nature exist together in a non-destructive state? can mankind save itself?
Joker: what is sanity? how thin is the line between thought and action? does inequality justify class-based warfare? does abuse justify retribution?
Contrast with the DC Justice League ensemble films, which don't have any themes. They just have people in costumes stand around a fight CGI villains. Snyder's Superman films have a concept (what if Superman killed?) but no themes (since they backed away from actually exploring any of the religious themes likening Superman to Jesus).
For those of you who haven't had to suffer through Ken Loach's works: they're all pretentious, insufferable dramas that claim to be about something. But they're trying so hard that they have to hit you over the head over and over and over again so that you know that they're supposed to be about something. Because if his works didn't explicitly tell you they were about something you wouldn't know from the play/show/movie that it was anything deeper than the poorly directed, poorly acted crap in front of you.
Except that it's all true - Captain Marvel is for example the new example of US Air force using a hollywood movie to drive their recruitment.
(It's kinda funny really - in the movie the hero returns to earth disgusted because she had to help with operations colonising neutral worlds. And then joins the Air Force.)
You are right in regards to building on stuff that they already own. All the movies this year that have grossed over $100 Million have been based on older content.
1 Avengers: Endgame
2 The Lion King (2019)
3 Captain Marvel
4 Toy Story 4
5 Aladdin (2019)
6 Dumbo (2019)
Coincidentally, I recently got into an interesting argument with my father. He'd just seen Captain Marvel and got defensive when my friend referred to it as a superhero movie; he insisted that it was a science fiction movie.
I probably shouldn't enjoy being empirically correct so much, but this dispute gave me the opportunity to demonstrate that he was, quite simply, wrong.
Disregarding the movie, it's the attempt to identify sci-fi that is interesting. In the same way the judge couldn't define pornography "but knows it when I see it", there is not one standing definition. However, the greats who established the genre agreed on some important basics which hold water today. Cribbed from Wikipedia:
Heinlein: "...realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method."
Wells: "...a conscientious attempt to be faithful to already known facts (as of the date of writing) was the substrate on which the story was to be built, and if the story was also to contain a miracle, it ought at least not to contain a whole arsenal of them."
Shippey: "...the basic building block and distinguishing feature of a science fiction novel is the presence of the novum... a discrete piece of information recognizable as not-true, but also as not-unlike-true, not-flatly- (and in the current state of knowledge) impossible."
It's Wells' point that led to me leaving this comment. Don't get me wrong - I get genuinely excited every time REDACTED shows up in a Stephenson novel... but his immortality is, for me, uncomfortably close to a miracle.
Now, sometimes this is preferable; hands up if you would prefer to not know the word Miti-chlorian.
Netflix made over $4.5 billion in revenue last quarter and has been consistently growing it every year at insane rates. Disney? Not so much.
Disney’s revenue was three times that and they just added Fox.
Revenue means nothing without profit. Netflix’s total profit last quarter was less than that of either one of Disney’s last three Marvel movies.
Netflix is quickly reaching the scale to compete there though and they have demonstrated the ability to hire away talent from all the major studios and quickly put out content that viewers demonstrably spend time watching.
It’s not about the talent. Both Black Panther and Captain Marvel were made by unknown producers. Disney has multiple franchises that have been popular for decades.
It seems like half the bull case for Disney + is Endgame. How many people are going to pull out their wallets to sign up for a subscription to stream a six-month old movie that they've probably already seen if they're that excited about it? Seems like a stretch to me.
People are still buying Disney movies from decades ago. Kids will watch the same movie repeatedly. A lot of Disney movies are considered classics.
I quit most social media a few months ago and have always blocked ads the best I could, and I completely agree. A sense of alienation is felt.
What's more, is that I "realize" that none of the things I was missing really matter. I do not care, at all, that I missed Captain marvel. Nor that I missed my favourite TV show -- I can always watch it later, if I really want to.
Seeing other people then care about such trivialities is a novel experience too.
Nowadays, the source of most of my pop culture current events is my SO. She applies her own hereustics, and (mostly) genuinelyy interesting pieces of info are what pass through her to me. She's getting it via top Instagram/Facebook/YouTube posts anyway. I find this system much better than the earlier one.
> That even happened on RT for the Captain Marvel movie because of the female heroine, many "snowflakes" got offended and gave a movie that wasn't even out yet bad ratings.
Alternatively, they were using the "Want to See" feature on Rotten Tomatoes exactly as it was intended to be used. People didn't like aspects of the marketing campaign for Captain Marvel and made their opinions known using a tool Rotten Tomatoes provided specifically for that purpose.
There are many female-led films listed on Rotten Tomatoes that have very high approval fan ratings. By dismissing the public reaction to Captain Marvel merely as trolling by snowflakes, you're actually proving the point many people on this thread are making about partisanship and tribalism in news reporting.
How could the reviewers know the "politics pushed by the movie" prior to having seen it? What are the politics pushed by the Captain Marvel movie? Can you point to specific scenes/themes that are "white male hating"?
> “You could not pay me to see this SJW laden white male hating worthless POS movie,” commented one user. “I am sick of this identity politics taking over pop culture. Brie Larson could get hit by a bus and I would not shed a tear.”
https://www.inverse.com/article/53523-captain-marvel-rotten-tomatoes-review-bombing-explained
Does that review sound like someone who is upset with a movie studio because they created fake outrage, or someone who is upset about a movie's female lead?
Plenty more examples: https://twitter.com/camethedawnxp/status/1097593187621842945
>> I have seen absolutely no evidence that “Captain Marvel” is a feminist film or that there are any more or less moral lessons in this Marvel movie than others.
Well I was referring to the article "Before the film’s release, Ms. Larson told “Entertainment Tonight” that she had spoken with Marvel about making the film “a big feminist movie.” "
>> The controversy has nothing to do with the actual content of the film.
That's a reasonable point. I agree that it's presumptuous to review a movie before you see it.
That said, I think that's distinct from the larger point. I imagine most of those people complaining would still have the same complaint after they saw it (just like they may have about Ghost Busters 2 or Black Panther).
And if they did see it, and then hate it afterwards, I think that's an entirely valid personal experience. Or if they refuse to see it (and indicate they aren't excited to see it), because they felt burned by past movie experiences, that's a valid choice too.
I have seen absolutely no evidence that “Captain Marvel” is a feminist film or that there are any more or less moral lessons in this Marvel movie than others. In fact, the backlash began before people had even seen the movie and able to make an informed judgement on the feminist or moral content of the film. The controversy has nothing to do with the actual content of the film. The article explains it seems to have started because Brie Larson publicly talked about discrimination and representation in the entertainment industry.
Maybe I'm desensitised from political agendas in films now, but from Captain Marvel I really didn't get a overwhelming feminist agenda that I felt impeded it from being a genuinely entertaining movie.
I'm disappointed about Brie's comment about Wrinkle in Time, however. It really wasn't a great film. The single feminist angle of 'girl saves boy' doesn't make it a great film. All I got was an "evil is a alternate entity you can defeat and bad actions aren't your own fault" lesson. This I thought was quite dangerous for children.
It's unfair to discard people's opinion just because they're white and 40. Just as much it's unfair to review bomb a movie because the actor said something in an interview.
I fully get this article for defending this movie and I'm also upset by the disproportionate ratings we're seeing from critics and audiences (see Orville vs Star Trek: Discovery). But something else stinks about this article.
We went to an early Sunday matinee of a kids movie and the sound was unnaturally loud so we asked the attendant and they said: "Oh yeah, we had it turned up for Captain Marvel last night. We'll go turn it down."
So, at least anecdotally you're not wrong about the superhero and big-budget action movies being louder.
It's funny that this popped up because I just got home from watching Captain Marvel. I know I have at least some tinnitus because my world sounds like the descriptions of it, but it's not so bad that it really affects my hearing. That said, I have noticed that some movies--particularly Marvel explosion ones in IMAX--sound much louder to me in my mid-30s. The higher sounds come across to me as sharp or shrill.
One nice thing about going everywhere with a backpack is I'm used to having earbuds with me so now, I just don't take them out of my ears when I get to a movie. I still hear everything and it doesn't sound muffled, merely...turned down, I guess, to a "good" volume.
I first hit on this when I forgot to take my earbuds out prior to, of all things, a Weird Al concert (his "Vanity" tour at The Moore in Seattle). I'd ridden the bus down there and had VIP tickets for the pre-show stuff so I sat and watched it with my earbuds in for listening to his music during the lulls in the pre-show activities. When Emo Phillips started, I forgot to take them out and realized after the show that my ears weren't ringing (louder than usual) and I didn't have the beginnings of a headache.
Captain Marvel seems to be a reoccurring cosmic title like Green Lantern, it seems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Marvel_(Marvel_Comics)#Publication_history
The version in the upcoming film is also called Ms. Marvel.
I guess the second part of Infinity War, coming up next year. Filming of that one has long been completed. But I'm not up to speed with the MCU at large, so there might be some other minor movie. EDIT: there is Captain Marvel too, already wrapped; and there are rumours that others might have already been filmed, for projects further down the line.
"Those movies — including “Captain Marvel,” “Dumbo,” “Toy Story 4,” “The Lion King,” “Frozen 2” and a new “Star Wars” installment — will now be key selling points for the new service Iger has referred to as “Disney Play.”
Sounds like the successor to DisneyToons, the crap sequel division of Disney. Should be called "Disney Replay".
Meanwhile, Amazon is coming out with new stories.
Ah, that makes more sense. I don't think that's an issue unless there are no "jumping on points", and if there's one thing Marvel is good at, it's creating artificial new starting points...
And there's lots of jumping on points coming up, with Dr Strange, Spider-Man Homecoming, Black Panther and Captain Marvel having mostly characters new to MCU and seemingly being relatively disconnected. Thor: Ragnarok might qualify as well depending on how they do it. Ant-Man and The Wasp might too - there's not much of the back story you need to catch up on.
Marvel has a large enough stable of characters to keep on churning out new standalone movies for a very long time. Though they'll need to start dipping into less well known characters, their ensemble movies and TV series will presumably let them test characters.. Then give the top performers sequels...
If they manage to get back control over e.g. X-Men and Fantastic Four too, they'll have characters to draw on for the next couple of decades at current rates...
At which point they can start all over.