Hacker Cinema
INVINCIBLE
2021 · TV series · 5 seasons
AnimationDramaScience FictionFantasyActionAdventure
Mark Grayson is a normal teenager except for the fact that his father is the most powerful superhero on the planet. Shortly after his seventeenth birthday, Mark begins to develop powers of his own and enters into his father's tutelage.
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18 comments on Hacker News
I really enjoyed this article. It was a very pleasant read. The author should write a book and or movie script. The original Doctor Who Silurian episodes were fun to watch. Makes sense to connect dinosaurs or the remnants of Silurian civilization to dragons and deities. Star Trek Strange New Worlds S04E01 deals with the dinosaurs and Mars @ 65 million years ago. The story is rather intriguing and fun to watch as well. Invincible S04E04 deals with the various ages that planet Earth has gone through and has a different take on the meaning of Hell and Satan and why they exist. Last episode of the Season 4 is rather interesting, as well as it relates to the possible next phase or not, of human evolution.
That list of movies is just the movies that Amazon Studios has been the distributor for via Prime Video. Amazon didn’t necessarily produce or fund all of the movies in that list. It’s a bunch of cheap movies that are likely meant to be loss leaders for Prime Video subscriptions, which is something that very much does fit the style of Amazon. Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV all have a similar list of D-tier garbage just to fill their catalogs.
On the contrary to your points, Amazon has put out some pretty solid and well received original series. The Boys, Gen V, Fallout, Reacher, Mr and Mrs Smith, Invincible, have all done really well if not been hits.
Games is pretty trash though. I think they’re also going for a loss leader strategy there, but the platform they’re trying to promote (Luna) just isn’t there.
When I saw NIN on PBS's Austin City Limits in 2014, I knew Trent had gone 'mainstream' in his maturity (with Robin performing too)..
https://www.pbs.org/video/austin-city-limits-nine-inch-nails-sanctified/
It only takes me 3-4 somber notes from a song in a movie or TV show these days to quickly identify it as NIN or Trent\Atticus. The latest was in the season 3 finale of Invincible...
https://fandomwire.com/invincible-season-3-soundtrack-all-songs-featured-in-the-series/
Episode 8: I Thought You’d Never Shut Up Every Day Is Exactly the Same by Nine Inch Nails
> The way I learned of Invincible was through a couple memes, which eventually lead me to research and watch the series
Seeing lots of Kingdom of Heaven memes lead me to watching the movie.
I sometimes see certain memes related to some corporate content pick up a ton of traction online and can't help but wonder if they're organic or manufactured. Spreading subtle ads through memes is probably still an under-explored area of marketing and it bypasses modern ad-blocking techniques. The way I learned of Invincible was through a couple memes, which eventually lead me to research and watch the series.
To give a concrete example of another trend: a few years back there was this group trend on TikTok of going to the theater dressed up in a suit to watch some animated movie. You would only need to pay a couple of large accounts to engage in this trend, and then others will follow along because they want to fit in.
Another dimension through which content marketing will probably expand in the future is by creating media that encourages people to take sides and engage in discussions, like Giant Monkey vs Giant Reptile, who wins? This trend is very popular within the political landscape, but it could probably be twisted for fictional IPs as well.
So it looks like Season 3 of Invincible is a go.
My two favorite hidden gems are Patriot and ZeroZeroZero. They also did Outer Range, A Hero (movie), Red Oaks, Good Omens, and Mozart in the Jungle.
The Boys and Invincible are both excellent, but more “mainstream” shows.
The Boys/Invincible are generally at the top of the Most Watched lists on Prime when they release new episodes.
gotta disagree on invincible, i thought season 2 especially has been pretty middling. a show that ironically you kinda have to pirate due to season 1 only being available on amc+ and season 2 being available through prime, but only in australia and new zealand is Pantheon. feels like something the HN crowd would eat up too.
>A sad thing, some what related to this is there's nothing worth pirating now a days. Every single movie or TV show is bad these days.
I get you, but I disagree. "The Boys" and "Invincible" are amazing shows IMHO. Great writing, great directing, great VFX, top cast delivering great performances. There's probably other great stuff out there but I don't have time to invest in finding and watching more.
It's mostly big-name Hollywood productions that suck nowadays because of their terrible unoriginal writing focused around present day identity politics(South Park's famous jab at Disney's focus to "put a black chick in it and make her lame and gay!") coupled with the lazy and excesive use of VFX, but there's plenty of gems coming from the European(Nordics, France, etc) and Asian cinemas than nobody ever hears about unless you go looking for them. Especially Korea has been knocking it out of the park in the last few years.
Foreign(from the US pov) cinema is killing it because they're not stuck chasing to milk existing franchises to death but cand afford to actually be original and take risks with new material, compared to Hollywood who's now the McDonalds/Starbucks of the entertainment industry, focused on selling bland predictable content at massive scale with insane marketing budgets, chasing profits.
Mid-show ads is more than enough to cancel Prime. Mid-video ads on youtube made me all but stop watching it on mobile. But I'll probably wade my way through S4 of The Boys and S2 of Invincible before doing so since they're both coming up in the near future. But this 100% explains the 2/4 premiere date for the last of Invincible episodes.
Same day and overnight delivery are something I never needed or wanted. 2-day delivery was nice, but now it's random. Amazon prices are no longer all but guaranteed to be competitive and buying directly from the manufacturer is often the same or lower price. Prime(sic) goeth before the fall I guess.
Terrible example- Amazon has nothing AAA.
Rings of power looks and is written like a cheap SyFy series. No-name actors, shoddy costumes, horrendous writing. I have no idea where their money went, but money!=quality.
The boys was good and went to shit.
Invincible was alright, supposedly season 2 is coming 'some day'.
By the time they bought The Expanse it had fallen off a cliff.
Netflix and amazon are not worth the subscription to me and haven't been for a long while.
I know, right? This line in particular got stuck out at me:
> They are mortally offended by the suggestion that Marvel might be somehow less good than Chris Marker, or that K-pop might be worse than Rimsky-Korasov.
Never heard of Chris Marker or Rimsky-Korasov, had to look those up. Chris Marker looks like an indie French filmmaker who 60 years ago made a 27 minute time travel film called La Jetée, using only still photographs, that William Gibson apparently considered one of his greatest influences. So yeah, this sounds like something that most mainstream people wouldn't be aware of or into and exactly the type of thing a film nerd or film hipster (who he said in the opening paragraphs were all killed because of how annoying they are) would be into.
And Rimsky-Korasov is a Russian classical music composer who's been dead for over 100 years. Someone that only a music nerd would probably be aware of nowadays, or go see a concert for.
If he didn't want to be such a hipster about it, he could have used like Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick and Mozart or Bach or even Debussy or something, a name most people would probably recognize, instead of these less recognizable names, especially in an article where he's making fun of nerds for being into obscure shit (while "their" movies have been dominating the box office for well over a decade at this point).
I'm not trying to defend Marvel here either. I don't think they're the best movies ever made (I thought Everything Everywhere All At Once was the best movie I've seen since Parasite, and considering it pretty much swept the Oscars this year, and Parasite did a few years before that, critics seem to agree with me there).
Another quote that stuck out:
> The culture we produce on Planet Nerd has nothing to do with desire whatsoever. Everything is sterile, mercilessly unsexy; no eroticism, not even visual pleasure.... Nerd culture, meanwhile, is basically quite boring to consume. Instead of the sadistic fantasy of being a superhero, doing fantastic things that ordinary people don’t get to do, the Marvel movies are about nothing more than themselves.
Sounds like someone needs to watch The Boys or Invincible. You'll get your sadistic power fantasy there. (I mean, just watch The Boys episode about 'Herogasm').
Marvel can't do that because it has to get parents to take their children to see them to make all the money. You don't see sadistic power fantasies about being a wizard in Harry Potter either, or overly sensual things with any Disney movie, barring the hidden 'SEX' in flower petals in Lion King.
> Some recent ones that come to mind were Tenet and the Invincible tv-show.
It is a known issue: [1]
> Every time a new Christopher Nolan movie comes out [...] one complaint which seems almost universal at this point is that the sound mixing in many of his movies has resulted in dialogue that is frequently muffled and sometimes even downright inaudible.
[1] https://www.slashfilm.com/577777/christopher-nolan-sound-mixing/
I mean, they are on thin ice - can you imagine the ruckus parents would do at anything but cis? or the ruckus blogger would do if every "mature and healthy" relationship gets portrayed as necessarily cis? I see them using tropes also as a quick way out.
albeit there's some interesting takes if you search around, like in the amazon "invincible" - but I guess a miniseries has more space for it, and it's for a more adult audience to begin with.
>But there have also been some recent examples (ca this century) that I found quite impressive, usually characterized by a short violent burst of crazyness and then everybody is dead, heavily inured or routing, and maybe slowly beginning to consider that perhaps they haven't actually lost.
I enjoyed the fighting scenes in the animated show _Invincible_ much more than any fight scenes I've seen in a Marvel film for this reason.
Explosive and (usually) consequential.
> Most of the new prime video content, that I've seen, seems to have a very safe tone to it. Yes, it's new but it's safe. No one will be surprised or insulted by it. It starts to get boring very quickly.
Overall I agree with your point and I'm extremely confident Amazon buying MGM will completely and utterly fuck over any creative potential that company has (similar to what's happening with AT&T and HBO), but - if you're looking for something good to watch on Prime, take a look at Invincible. I was actually about to give up on it and then I got to the end of the first episode and I binged the rest of the show in less than a day.
It's the first time in years I've looked forward to the next season of a show that isn't a comedy.
> Even today, adult American cartoons are almost entirely "sitcom" format. They don't want to ever end, and they do not want to tell a story, they want to make more episodes.
Check out Infinity Train for something different. Ostensibly aimed at kids, but, uh, honestly, I seriously question that based on some of the content in that show [0]. Between that and Over the Garden Wall, Cartoon Network's contributed some great work to American animation in recent years.
Amazon's Invincible is having a good run so far, on the side of things definitely made for adults.
[0] MASSIVE MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUgeSJhXNeQ&t=64