Well, my 30-year-old copy is right here, and I honestly don’t see any mention of whether it was reduced-strength kryptonite, or regular-strength kryptonite – or, for all I know, extra-strength kryptonite; he doesn’t seem to say anything about it.
I was going to say. I pulled my copy off the shelf to check that as well. Wiki is full of it, as usual.
Batman’s general attitude towards Superman in that fight can be chalked up with “He’s a tough guy. He can take it. smirk”
This story reminds me of the old pro wrestling story lines where the characters often switched between good and bad. A good guy would betray his wrestling partner. He’d turn heel and feud with his old partner for a few months. Then return to being a good guy again. Hulk Hogan is an example.
Batman has always had a dark side. I’m guessing he’ll be the more “evil” in this feud with Superman. But thats just a WAG.
Why not create a new bad guy for Batman to fight? Are the writers out of ideas?
Yeah, and why use Batman? Can’t they just make up a new superhero?
What was the last succesful DC superhero flick that did NOT have Batman or Superman in it?
As I see it in the DCU it’s kind of ordained that a serious Kent/Wayne confrontation will happen at one point or another in order to make an “established order” vs. “individual action” point w/o using villains, plus of course to show just how awesome Mr. Damaged, Dark & Brooding can be “When He’s Prepared” and to feed the All-American corn-fed Good Boy from Kansas some gritty underbelly humility. The debates are as to at what point in the character arcs this happens and what greater point is it that the confrontation stands for. So it’s a challenge to write it so that it makes sense for it to happen *at the start *of the arc, as opposed to the middle or the end where you can accumulate more explanations of what led to it and of why Superman wouldn’t just *&^%$ use his superspeed and strength to drag Bruce Wayne out of the shower and wrap his naked body in duct tape and steel cable from neck to ankle in one ten-thousandth of a second, and then hand him over to authorities.
I rather liked Watchmen, though I don’t know how many other DC superhero films there have been in the last 10 years or so.
One of the Batman comics has this line summing up their relationship in any given confrontation:
[QUOTE=Batman]
If Clark wanted to, he could use his superspeed and squish me into the cement. But I know how he thinks. Even more than the Kryptonite, he’s got one big weakness. Deep down, Clark’s essentially a good person… and deep down, I’m not
[/QUOTE]
Isnt that batman quote essentially what the Joker says about batman as well?
Something about - “you follow the rules, I don’t”
There are a few of reasons for me to not be excited, amongst them:
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Zack Snyder is involved and I rather [greatly] dislike him and his movies.
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I can’t even remember the last good superman movie.
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Superman as a superhero is kind of boring (coloring number 2)
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I personally hated the trailer.
However…The reasons to be excited outnumber the not list.
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Executive produced by Chris Nolan
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One of the writers (Chris Terrio) wrote Argo
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Batman is involved, my favorite superhero
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Affleck has made good choices lately, with the notable exception of cheating on his wife.
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The Buzz has been surprisingly good.
Overall the Zach Snyder aspect colors things quite a bit but the great buzz from those having seen the movie is starting to win me over, which a few months ago I thought extremely unlikely.
To be fair, I don’t think Batman and the Joker are talking about the same set of rules here. And there’s a world of difference between being good or bad and following the rules or not. After all, Lawful<–>Chaotic and Good<–>Evil are considered entirely different spectrums in role playing for a reason.
Returning from the diversion about how much of a dick Batman has to be in order to defeat an actual superpowered individual…
One of the thing that distinguishes the Marvel Cinematic Universe films from other superhero franchises is that while the protagonists are have superpowers (or are augmented in some way, e.g. the Iron Man and Ant-Man suits) the films themselves draw heavily from other genres. Sometimes this is blatant, such as Guardians of the Galaxy (space opera), Ant-Man (heist), and Winter Soldier ('Seventies political thriller). Sometimes the tropes are in a more subtle subtext, such as Thor (Shakespearian tragedy), Iron Man 3 (film noir), The Dark World (gothic horror/possession). Most people don’t realize how prevalent the tropes of romantic comedy are in Iron Man until they are laid out end to end. (The same is true of the Richard Donner Superman film and Burton’s Batman, and of course was a running theme in the Raimi Spider-Man films.)
Contrast this to films like Nolan’s tedious Batman Begins or the yawn-fest that was Man of Steel, which are totally conventional origin-story-and-conflict-with-the-villain movies in which the love interest is merely a fungible plot device and the focus is on the powers/equipment. There is zero tension in such movies because you are assured that the hero will succeed and vanquish the villain, and the typical effort in the sequel is just to add more villains to complicate the plot rather than make the story more compelling, which is why few superhero franchises make it past a second installment without floundering, e.g. Spider-Man 3.
The Marvel films, by playing with the conventions of other genres, at least give a sense of surprise, and the possibility that some protagonist might actually die (though they’ve never actually paid out on that yet; the closest being Agent Coulson in The Avengers, who was later brought back, and Quicksliver in Age of Ultron, who wasn’t around long enough for the audience to care about him). The Avengers was relatively straightforward in concept but got a lot of mileage (and humor) out of playing the members against one another; as good as Tom Hiddleston is as the villainous Loki, he really just served as an impetus to force the Avengers to confront one another. The original Captain America: The First Avenger and Age of Ultron were the closest thing to a conventional superhero movie and sequel, and were arguably the weakest films in the MCU to date (if we ignore the uneven Hulk and the jumbled mess that was Iron Man 2). Civil War is being promoted as a psychological thriller (albeit one where a significant amount of scenery gets demolished) and given that the previous Winter Soldier, directed by the Russo Brothers and written by Markus and McFeely, was one of the best films in the MCU, we can hope that this film will be similarly entertaining, provided that the studio management avoids trying to use it so shoehorn references to future films.
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, on the other hand, just looks terrible and overwrought despite the fact that Ben Affleck has spent his adult life preparing for the role of an entitled, wealthy, aging jackass, and Henry Cavill actually seems to be some kind of alien who is only passingly familiar with human customs, brought together by hyperkinetic Mark Zuckerberg. Dream casting, terrible actual movie.
Stranger
To clarify, are you talking about Hulk or The Incredible Hulk? As far as I know, only the latter is in direct continuity with the MCU, although the events of the first one are implied in a “broad strokes” fashion with the latter.
Iron Man 2 works best as a continuation of the first film’s themes, I agree that it doesn’t really stand on its own.
No, it’s about Zack Snyder trying to cram in as much property destruction and fight scenes as he can, whilst meanwhile having no idea *who *is Superman.
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Absolutely. Horrible, horrible choice for a Superman film.
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Superman, the movie. (1978) In the top three superhero films of all time.
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See #2.
Where on earth are you getting “psychological thriller?”
From the Russo Brothers themselves, whom I can only assume are still “on earth”: Russos Talk Captain America: Civil War Influences, Call it a ‘Psychological Thriller’
*“In general, just as a framing we always thought about Winter Soldier very specifically as a political thriller,” Anthony Russo says. “This movie we think of more as a psychological thriller. It’s connected to what we’re doing in Winter Soldier, but it evolves into a more sensitive, complicated character thriller. Again, I think based upon the fact we’re dealing with our protagonists clashing with one another.”
“The movie we’ve been referencing a lot on this one is ‘Se7en,’ weirdly,” Joe adds. “We like smashing genres into each other, so if you can find something that’s really idiosyncratic in respect to superhero genre and you can smoosh it into it you usually wind up with something fresh and different. ‘Se7en,’ ‘Fargo,’ just as far as we’re not making comparisons in terms of quality, we’re just talking influences. ‘The Godfather,’ because that’s a sprawling film with a lot of characters that tells very intricate stories. Each character has an arc.*
Stranger
Wow this thread really took off!
I almost don’t like any, especially when the relationship is totally not established. Why do you think I still like Bollywood? No sex allowed = we have to build up the romance and establish that the two *like *each other. American movies are way too fast to get to the fucking, and there were three episodes back to back that kept spending time on SEX SEX SEX CONQUESTS OF A STUD MONKEY.
I do intend to finish Jessica Jones. Sometime. Eventually. I would have been OK if the sex had come at the end of the series run. As it was I just rolled my eyes.
And I get really pissed when there is sex in my action movies or in my comic book shows!
I know, I know, everybody likes sex. But I feel like people just jump into bed too fast in these movies/shows.
This, exactly. Someone (I think Little Nemo) said about how these movies are all about the real life issues of superheroes getting registered. Maybe that might be interesting. More likely it will be depressing as fuck, as humans act like assholes and superheroes are (rightfully) assholes right back.
The Nolan movies were depressing as hell and for the first time made me realize what an upstart, rich, white-boy Rockefeller Batman really is. The only good part was the Joker - Heath Ledger was phenomenal (may he rest in peace :(). It’s been long enough, and I haven’t watched the movies for a long time, so I am regaining some of my fondness for Batman, but it will never come back to where it once was. He is no longer my favorite!
And Jessica Jones was pretty goddamn dark, too, with issues of rape, assault, mind control, and other trauma. Now Daredevil was dark but I still felt like Daredevil was trying to do something to fix it, and I think that if I had been able to finish Jessica Jones I’d probably feel better about it, too. I will eventually finish at least the first season. I promise.
Plus, I admit, on the shallow side, Charlie Cox has a truly magnificent ass. See? I like sex appeal too! I *wanted *him to sleep with the Night Nurse…but AFTER a good relationship was established! (I can’t care about Krysten Ritter’s ass.)
I did forget to mention Wonder Woman, I am looking forward to seeing her.
So…they’re going to Wesley Crusher him? HOW IS THAT BETTER? Nope, I hate Spiderman and will continue wishing a thousand fiery deaths on him! 
Ironically this thread has switched around all of my feelings. Before I was kind of looking forward to Civil War and completely ambivalent about B vs. S. Now I think the latter might be fun and I am totally ambivalent about Civil War. I watched this video which helped with the ambivalence:
Marvel’s Civil War animated in 4 minutes
Well. At least there’s plenty of eye candy in all of the above for us female-types.
It’s not the bitchin’ dance moves?
See, that’s why you should have stuck with the show, because it agrees with you. One of the recurring character notes about Jessica is that she makes really, really poor life decisions. This explicitly includes almost everything about her relationship with Luke - including the speed with which they fall into bed with each other.
Also, you’re so wrong about Spider-Man that they’re adding another definition to the word “wrong” in the dictionary. It’s just a picture of you, making a face at a Spider-Man poster.
Will watch SvB, just curious how it would be.
But just so so psyched for Captain America. I watched Age of Ultron 1st time via rental, was thinking, ehhh ok movie, but watching on repeat, really began to appreciate it.
Just heard this said about BvS:
“It’s like a combination of Phantom Menace and The Amazing Spider-Man.”
Goddamn, that’s harsh.