Sure, like I said, it would have been a bad movie without or without the “I can fly a jet” bit. For some reason, people are picking that as the hill to defend when it was just one more stupid moment in a film full of bad moments.
But that’s entirely the disagreement: saying that’s a bad moment comes across to me like saying it’s dumb that broomsticks could fly in Harry Potter. The movie had plenty of faults, but I don’t think this was one. It was a normal moment in a flawed movie. This moment didn’t make it worse.
My post that seemed to set all this off included a long list of faults, and had a final paragraph where I call the plane stuff “mistaken criticisms.” Folks who are choosing this as a hill to die on aren’t me :).
I laughed (literally) out loud during the ‘steal the jet scene’ simply because it was so implausible. Not to mention that being visually invisible does nothing to stop the transponders and things that put it on radar.
We had the invisible jet in the comics and in the cartoons - they could have handled it so many other ways it could have worked. as someone else said - had it be WW actaully flying the thing and Steve puking in an airbag (and then learning how to handle it to save her) would have been much better. THings like this just work if they ‘are already there’ vs trying to make them. (Tony Stank’s armor being the exception). Look how well the hellicarriers work in avengers - we accept them despite the insanity of them.
Had the rest of the movie been good, it would be a simply a laughing point for nitpickers. The problem is, as you say - “its just another example of an extremley poorly thought scene in a movie filled with poorly thought scenes”.
That’s fine. I disagree and think it detracted from the movie. In fact, I can definitively say it detracted from the movie (for me) because my wife and I turned to one another and said “uh, lolwtf?” instead of watching the movie. Which isn’t something we’ve done for numerous other superhero movie moments so “but it’s a superhero movie” holds no weight. But there were so many things that detracted from the movie that endlessly debating this particular moment feels silly.
That I was able to handwave with the idea that the jet wasn’t literally invisible, but rather it was hidden by the divine power of Zeus. Which would include radar and other methods of trying to locate it. But, see, Diana actually takes a moment to say “This is a trick from Zeus to hide things” instead of just “But comic books” so it registered as “Ok, obviously not a real world thing that happens but makes sense in this world for story purposes”. Steve flying the jet didn’t even try.
I think this is it right here. I see a thread with a list of problems with the movie, but this one, with the pilot and plane, is just one problem in a list of many problems. And in any list of problems, one of those problems will be the least compelling. So as the internet goes, the discussion focuses on the least problematic problem as it is the most arguable from both sides.
Loathe as I am to get back into this…
The issue, as I see it, is that several posters made a number of complaints about the movie. A couple of posters singled out one of those complaints, about a World War I pilot flying an F-111, as being illegitimate. Which created a broader argument, centering around this as the specific example, of what is legitimate criticism of a movie. It’s not even about whether it’s a problem, but whether it’s legitimate for anyone to even think it’s a problem.
Has anyone mentioned that WW achieved her victory by giving a speech? I think that is a pretty rare in a superhero movie. Maybe it was the screenwriters reaction to criticism of the final fight in the first movie.
The problem the screenwriters gave themselves was building a movie that would lead up to that speech. We had to care about the wishes people were making and their consequences while at same to getting the action scenes of a super hero movie. It might have worked if this were a much more focused movie. As it was, I never felt any invested in the wishes anyone made.
I once saw a TED talk from a woman who had asked people for their wishes. She said that overwhelmingly people wished for good health for themselves and their loved ones. That would be my wish. I think that Barbra’s wish was also realistic, being more capable/desirable. If everyone got their wish we would probably end up with a world full of very healthy, very capable, very attractive people.
One of the complaints I have seen is why Steve had to take over an existing person when nukes showed up out of nowhere. I suspect that they did not want to imply that an evil rock could create life it could only subvert it. (Similar to Tolkien’s problem on where orcs came from.)
I’ve loathed basically everything Harry Potter related that I’ve come into contact with, which is largely the first three, maybe four movies. I’m aware of the genre convention of kids lit that requires absent, incompetent, or malicious parent figures to justify the children being the ones to handle dangerous situations. But Harry Potter - at least the movies - handles the convention so badly it throws me out of the narrative. If, every year at a school, a couple kids die - you should really shut down that school. The one that really brought it home to me was the one - Goblet of Fire, I think - where there’s a competition between different school, and names to compete are drawn out of a magic cup. It’s a big deal when Harry Potter’s name is drawn, because lower grades aren’t allowed to participate any more, because too many kept dying. Which, right there, maybe stop having the fucking tournament if it leads to so many dead kids? Dumbledore’s supposed to care about them, right? And he can’t just kick Harry out, because they use a magic cup to pick names for some reason, and that compels him to compete. And when a major character is murdered in the middle of the competition, they don’t stop the competition. Which seems like a lot of death and magically unbreakable rules for what amounts to a cross-campus team building exercise. Maybe next time just do some trust falls and order a stack of pizzas?
Like I said, I get that the genre convention requires adults to act in ways that require the children to put themselves in danger. But so little effort was put into crafting a situation where the “good” adults were forced by circumstances to let the kids endanger themselves, I stop being engaged in the story, and start wondering if there’s a Wizarding version of CPS, and why hasn’t anyone called them on Dumbledore yet.
Or to put in another way, Quidditch is a stupid game with dumb rules, but that’s okay, because it really only exists to show kids doing cool sports on flying brooms. Except, me personally, I don’t much like sports, and the “flying broom” trope is kind of “meh.” So “cool sports on flying brooms” isn’t doing much work to distract me from the absolutely stupid rule set they establish to play the game. And by the time the Quidditch match shows up in a HP movie, I’m bored by all the other nonsense in the movie that picking nits about fictional sports is the most entertainment I’m getting from the film.
I haven’t seen WW84 yet, so I can’t comment directly on any scene, but you’re right, in other contexts, “I can fly one plane, I can fly any plane,” is a standard pulp genre convention. But genre conventions, like any other aspect of film, can be handled well, or handled poorly. A lot of people seem to feel in this case, this was a poorly handled genre convention. Which isn’t a “mistaken” criticism, it’s just as valid as pointing out the bad dialogue or poor pacing.
I don’t think that’s been mentioned in this thread yet. I agree, it is rare, and might well have been a reaction to the criticism about the climax of the first movie.
I liked that resolution. It didn’t quite make sense to me the way it was depicted, but the basic idea that Wonder Woman uses the Lasso of Truth to show everyone the Truth of what their wishes are really costing the world, and convincing them to give up their wishes for the greater good, was a refreshingly humane resolution. It felt more like the climax of a Doctor Who episode than a “traditional” super-hero movie, but that’s not a criticism. It certainly fits in with Wonder Woman as the Warrior for Peace.
I think I mentioned upthread, but one of the things I actually liked about the movie was that Max Lord wasn’t a true villain, and he got a redemption arc. I really appreciated that he was a somewhat neglectful father but that he clearly loved his son, and realized in the end that his son and his son’s love was more important to him than literally all of the power in the world. It was genuinely sweet.
I also liked Barbara’s arc, in theory, complete with at least a handwave toward redemption, when she…also renounced her wish? Maybe? Because she finally realized that all of that power could never make her happy, that Diana really was her friend, and that friendship was more important? Maybe? Which circles back to one of my major criticisms, that the movie had too many character arcs and plotlines, and most of them got shorted…
I thought Wonder Woman was fantastic, up through the run-up to the climax, with Steve Trevor’s genuinely good speech about “it’s not about deserve”, it’s about doing what you can, right now, to try to make things better. About how the war is big and complex and messy and it’s driven by complex, messy, flawed people making bad decisions in a big, complex, messy, flawed world, and you can’t end it by finding one guy and killing him. Then Wonder Woman ends it by finding one guy and killing him.
I thought WW84 actually did a better job of sticking the landing, but the run-up was just…well, see the rest of this thread.
That’s just silly. They weren’t linked to what the villain was doing, but of course they were linked to the plot.
I’d say that every single Marvel movie was far better than WW84, and even some of the DC ones. People aren’t hating on it because of a lack of spectacle, they’re ragging on it because it had an incoherent script, and squandered the good graces of the original.
If I saw say, Iron Man II on my home setup for the first time, I’d like it a lot better than this.
Yeah, I saw Batman v. Superman, Justice League, and Suicide Squad in the theater, and the big screen didn’t trick me into thinking those were good movies. On the other hand, I saw Aquaman on the back of a headrest on an airplane, and rather liked it. Not “great” by any means, but serviceable. And “serviceable” is a high bar for DC movies.
What’s funny is the other part of JohnT’s claim - that you can’t do superhero spectacle well on TV, is also disproven by DC, whose television department has been absolutely killing it for thirty years now, going all the way back to the best non-comic adaptation of Batman to date, Batman: The Animated Series.
I don’t think that actually is the genre convention. I think the genre convention is actually that if a major character is good at something, they are really good at it, with an unrealistically broad and deep knowledge, and if it’s even remotely plausible for them to know how to do something, if it advances the plot or just makes them look cool, they can. But that “remotely plausible” is still key.
Again, going back to Wonder Woman, early on Steve Trevor steals a Fokker E.III fighter. It’s at an operational airfield, where we see ground crew and pilots running around refueling and refitting planes, and Steve takes out the pilot that’s getting into the Fokker he steals. The film clearly establishes that the Fokker is flight ready and fully fueled and it makes perfect sense within the context of the scene. And it makes perfect sense in that context that Steve knows how to fly it because the whole set-up is that he’s undercover as a German fighter pilot.
Later, in the climactic scene, it’s a key plot point that the German bomber is flight ready and fully fueled - they only have minutes to stop it before it takes off to gas London. It’s not really realistic that Steve is able to just jump into the cockpit of a fully loaded prototype long-range bomber that he’s never even seen before and fly it expertly. But, it’s at least remotely plausible that he has some experience with other super-heavy aircraft of the era, and that the controls and handling characteristics aren’t too different for an ace pilot to quickly figure out. That’s the genre convention - he’s a pilot, so he can pilot anything that seems remotely plausible even if it’s not actually realistic.
But a display aircraft at the Smithsonian Archives is just sitting around flight ready and fully fueled? And the World War I pilot just jumps into the cockpit and cold-starts it and then expertly flies with with no more than a few seconds of fiddling with the controls? That, to me, is outside genre conventions.
It’s also outside the conventions of that specific franchise. The first movie spent a lot more effort to set up Steve being able to jump into a cockpit and take off, in situations where it was far more plausible to begin with that he’d be able to do so.
That’s basically what I was trying to say, but much better phrased. But even “plausibility” can be bent if it leads to a cool enough outcome. In Independence Day, Will Smith being able to pilot an alien fighter is not remotely plausible. However, it leads directly to Will Smith shooting down a whole mess of aliens, which the audience has been looking forward to for the whole movie, so they generally go with it, and just make jokes about it afterwards.
And, of course, there’s deliberately playing into the trope as satire. The scene in Spiderman 2 where Doctor Octavius runs through the huge list of enormous breakthroughs he had to make in vastly disparate fields just so he could start on his clean energy project was lampshading the “scientists know all the sciences” comic trope.
I think the real sticking point here is that a couple of people are trying to tell other people why their opinions are invalid. Then we wrapped a crappy movie around the argument and lost the forest for the trees.
So, back to the movie thing - I watched the original Wonder Woman last night while folding laundry. (I had a lot of laundry wanting folding.) It’s difficult to believe the two movies were directed by the same person - it was really well-done! Even Gal Gadot seemed like a better actress. It seems like a good script can really make a difference in everything else that flows from it.
I wanted Diana to be able to fly it, “I haven’t been sitting on my hands for 70 years.” She could even have said something like she learned how to fly, but just doesn’t have a great feel for it, and then the “wind and air” light bulb moment.
I did appreciate that he didn’t hit on Diana at that moment.
Well, he doesn’t have to be undercover. He IS a pilot, and a German aircraft in 1916 would have worked pretty much identically to an Allied aircraft.
For a WWI pilot to fly a modern jet fighter - I am not sure what kind of jet it was but it kind of looked like a Panavia Tornado - is preposterous. He would not have even know how to turn it on.
It was an okay movie though.
Which gets back to my point that the first movie spent a lot more effort to set up Steve being able to jump into a cockpit and take off, in situations where it was far more plausible to begin with that he’d be able to do so.
It’s been identified in another thread as an F-111, and so far at least no one’s disputed that identification. I tried to google it, but all I could find were articles discussing the history of Wonder Woman’s invisible plane (the Internet Movie Plane Database, which is totally a thing, doesn’t have an article on WW84 yet). The F-111 has a side-by-side cockpit, as shown in the movie, while AFAIK all of the Tornado variants have a fore-and-aft cockpit. I’m not nearly a good enough plane spotter to identify which plane was actually used.
Agree to disagree.
Assuming you are including me in this, I am certainly not saying that it is invalid to dislike a movie. However if you give a reason I get to have an opinion on whether your reasoning shows good judgment. If someone says “X is good because of Y” I get to say “your reasoning is faulty and doesn’t support your conclusion.” And I get to conclude that I can give your opinion little weight. Maybe there are other valid reasons to support your conclusion and maybe you have or have not offered them. That might be a separate point. But if you say “WW84 is dumb because Steve figured out how to fly a jet” I get to conclude that you’re not a good judge of the movie.
Actually you posted how many times on this one minor complaint? (17) Almost all the posters in this thread have listed many reason why they don’t like this movie or didn’t enjoy it. A few posters, you being one, have turned it into the Jet issue.
Thanks for derailing my thread. Maybe you can please stop now?