Author Topic: Suicide Squad  (Read 17067 times)

Dev7on

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Suicide Squad
« on: August 07, 2016, 03:55:46 AM »
Since there is no thread about this movie I'm going to start this thread even though I haven't seen the movie but, I will someday. I know some of you guys want to talk about it. If you did see the movie what do you guys think even though Rotten Tomatoes bombed the movie.

Tenzhi

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #1 on: August 07, 2016, 07:16:21 AM »
Supposed to be seeing it Sunday night, myself.  Last I checked, the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes was decent, despite the grim critics' score.  And Andre the Black Nerd had enough positive things to say about it that I'm still giving it a chance at the theatre level...

https://youtu.be/Oov84ISkzvc
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Golden Girl

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #2 on: August 07, 2016, 01:14:11 PM »
It's another staggeringly awful entry in this catastrophic attempt by WB to make a DC cinematic universe - so the biggest thing that it has going for it is that it moves us another step closer to the reboot.
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Tenzhi

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #3 on: August 08, 2016, 02:30:47 AM »
Just got back from seeing it.  It was pretty fun.  I'd watch it again over any of the X-men movies I've seen.  Or over Nolan's third Batman.  The Joker was kinda crappy, but still more watchable than Eisenlex.
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doc7924

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #4 on: August 08, 2016, 01:57:31 PM »
What it is it that DC gets so wrong and Marvel gets so right making films?

And I mean Marvel films - not the films not made by them.

That being said - Deadpool was fantastic and I cant believe that came from Fox. The new FF was a great film about people getting super powers. Just wasn't a good FF film.

The Chris Reeve Superman films were fun and well done. (well most of them, ok two of them)

The Keaton Bat films were ok. The others - meh. I only loved the one with Mr. Freeze for the Cold Miser joke.

And its not because they stray from the source - most of the Marvel films changed a lot from the comic book source and they still work.

I think DC is trying too hard to catch up to Marvel and its screwing them up.

Could be also that Marvel films has Marvel people working on them. DC is owned by Warner but they probably don't have much say as to what goes in to the films.

At least DC does good TV. and animated.

hurple

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #5 on: August 08, 2016, 03:32:43 PM »
What it is it that DC gets so wrong and Marvel gets so right making films?

And I mean Marvel films - not the films not made by them.

That being said - Deadpool was fantastic and I cant believe that came from Fox. The new FF was a great film about people getting super powers. Just wasn't a good FF film.

The Chris Reeve Superman films were fun and well done. (well most of them, ok two of them)

The Keaton Bat films were ok. The others - meh. I only loved the one with Mr. Freeze for the Cold Miser joke.

And its not because they stray from the source - most of the Marvel films changed a lot from the comic book source and they still work.

I think DC is trying too hard to catch up to Marvel and its screwing them up.

Could be also that Marvel films has Marvel people working on them. DC is owned by Warner but they probably don't have much say as to what goes in to the films.

At least DC does good TV. and animated.


The main difference seems to be that Marvel put a guy in charge who loves the characters and wants to see them celebrated on screen.  Meanwhile DC has a goober who's on record as not liking the characters he's bringing to screen and wanting to "Watchmen" them up. 

Maybe now that Geoff Johns has been moved into position to help with the films they can get better.  Although, from the recent changes he spearheaded in the comics, I'm not sure, yet. 


hurple

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #6 on: August 08, 2016, 03:36:33 PM »
Oh... and I saw the film on Saturday and really enjoyed it.  It's exactly the chaotic mess that a Suicide Squad movie *should* be.  The characterizations were nearly all spot on.  And save for a moment with Amanda Waller, I have few quibbles with the story.  (Although, team member going rogue should not be the first movie)

And, I like this Joker.  He seems like the kind of psychopath that would cause a guy to dress like a bat to fight him. 

 ;D


doc7924

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #7 on: August 08, 2016, 04:13:50 PM »
Oh... and I saw the film on Saturday and really enjoyed it.  It's exactly the chaotic mess that a Suicide Squad movie *should* be.  The characterizations were nearly all spot on.  And save for a moment with Amanda Waller, I have few quibbles with the story.  (Although, team member going rogue should not be the first movie)

And, I like this Joker.  He seems like the kind of psychopath that would cause a guy to dress like a bat to fight him. 

 ;D

I haven't seen it yet but I love that each Joker actor does his own thing. The 1966 TV Joker was more clown then menacing and Ledger's Joker was the other way around.

It would be boring if every actor just played him the same way.

Tenzhi

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #8 on: August 08, 2016, 04:17:18 PM »
I could have liked the Joker... sans the metal teeth and with some humour added.

The main problem I had with the plot, is that the Squad was sent to take care of a problem that, ultimately, was caused by the very formation of the Squad in the first place.
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hurple

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #9 on: August 08, 2016, 05:12:10 PM »
I could have liked the Joker... sans the metal teeth and with some humour added.

The main problem I had with the plot, is that the Squad was sent to take care of a problem that, ultimately, was caused by the very formation of the Squad in the first place.

Yeah, that should not have been the first movie.  Or, their first mission. 


Taceus Jiwede

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #10 on: August 10, 2016, 03:38:41 AM »
Just got back from seeing it.  It was pretty fun.  I'd watch it again over any of the X-men movies I've seen.  Or over Nolan's third Batman.  The Joker was kinda crappy, but still more watchable than Eisenlex.

I haven't seen it yet but part of my concern is how the handled the Joker.  I get the Heath Ledger did an awesome job doing a darker Joker, but he still very much captured the essence of the Joker.

From what I read of Jared Leto's Performance of the Joker is that he just took the dark and psychotic part too far and didn't focus enough on the Jokers real function which is "Everyone is one bad day from being the bad guy." its such a pure and simple character - I am here to ruin sh**, with a smile. 

Anyway my concern is that he wasn't able to capture that, would you agree?  I'll probably see it in the next day or so before I actually bad mouth the performance of an actor I haven't seen yet :p  but that is what my gut is telling me.

Tenzhi

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #11 on: August 10, 2016, 04:47:28 AM »
Yeah... he was just psycho violent guy.  It's a shame, because there was a moment or two with him and Harley together that were pretty good, but they're gone in a flash and it's back to generic psycho trying to get by on a zany aesthetic.
When you insult someone by calling them a "pig" or a "dog" you aren't maligning pigs and dogs everywhere.  The same is true of any term used as an insult.

hurple

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #12 on: August 10, 2016, 01:00:25 PM »
Yeah... he was just psycho violent guy.  It's a shame, because there was a moment or two with him and Harley together that were pretty good, but they're gone in a flash and it's back to generic psycho trying to get by on a zany aesthetic.

But, to be fair, there really wasn't much else that he could have done with the little time he was in the film.  I thought there was plenty of "zaniness" to get the point across (like the funny costumes for his henchmen) overall.


Tenzhi

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #13 on: August 10, 2016, 04:57:54 PM »
He could have smiled more, since they unfortunately didn't give him the slightest attempt at a permanent grin on his face.  And his lines could have been funny, or at least twisted attempts at humour, but that's not the actor's fault.  In short: Why so serious?
When you insult someone by calling them a "pig" or a "dog" you aren't maligning pigs and dogs everywhere.  The same is true of any term used as an insult.

RGladden

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #14 on: August 10, 2016, 05:05:47 PM »
"I'm going to make this pencil....disappear."

saipaman

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #15 on: August 10, 2016, 07:54:59 PM »
Who thinks 'Sausage Party' will be better than 'Suicide Squad'?

Tenzhi

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #16 on: August 10, 2016, 08:58:04 PM »
Who thinks 'Sausage Party' will be better than 'Suicide Squad'?

I was disturbed the other day when it was 100% fresh on rottentomatoes...  I had little faith in critics before, but that rocketed it to nil.
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Arcana

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #17 on: August 10, 2016, 09:31:17 PM »
Overall: 6.5/10 if you're a comic book fan, 4.0/10 if you're not.

The good:

Margot Robbie does a spot-on Harley Quinn that's actually an interesting in the movie itself.  Will Smith does a passable if not noteworthy Deadshot.  Viola Davis adds necessary gravitas to Amanda Waller that the script itself doesn't provide enough of.


The bad:

If you were not Waller, Deadshot, Harley, Joker, or Diablo I have no idea why you were in the movie at all.  Compared to, say, Civil War or even Star Trek Beyond, this movie does a horrible job balancing its ensemble.  In general, only Deadshot and Diablo have any sort of character arcs at all.  Flagg in particular was ... disappointing.


The ugly:

Some of this is a matter of taste, but objectively speaking Jared Leto's performance did not live up to the hype surrounding it.  Granted its not easy to portray the Joker.  Heath Ledger did a uniquely admiral job trying to reinvent the character from its Jack Nicholson iteration and you can't expect that every time.  But Jared Leto's Joker's biggest crime was that in my opinion it was boring.  Nicholson's Joker was an over the top PT Barnum meets Al Capone showman, infused with a healthy dose of Jack Nicholson (all of Jack Nicholson's performances are infused with an awful lot of Jack Nicholson).  Ledger's Joker was concentrated psychopath wearing a Ledger suit.  Jared Leto's Joker felt to me like Travis Bickle cosplaying as the Joker minus Robert De Niro.

Also, the plot.  Without spoilers, the plot nullifies the emotional reason for the Suicide Squad to exist.  I didn't care for that at all.  It was an unnecessary weakening of the premise.  Also, it inevitably turns Flagg into a character I never want to see again.  Not because I hate the character, but because literally: ugh.


The stinger:

Yes, there's a mid credit stinger.  I'm not sure how I feel about the stinger.  On the one hand, I think it makes one particular character far weaker than I think fits the character.  On the other hand, that seems to get almost repaired at the end of the stinger.  50/50?  Overall, I felt it was the DC version of the moment at the end of Iron Man when Fury approaches Stark in that movie's stinger.  But I didn't get the same level of excitement from it, because ...?  Not sure really.  Just didn't.  Maybe because I know Suicide Squad is ultimately not central to the Justice League core movies.


Overall, if you're a comic book fan I think there's enough in there to make an enjoyable popcorn movie that has about the right tone for a Suicide Squad movie.  The characterizations aren't bad, the action is pretty good, and the pacing is reasonable.  Its a reasonable interpretation of the characters you already know.  If you're not a fan and don't know who any of these people are or why you should care, I probably wouldn't recommend it to you.  The plot will seem nonsensical, the characters a bit wooden and two-dimensional, the critical jump-moment of the plot will probably be unnecessarily confusing, and you won't understand why Waller is supposed to be capable of corralling this bag of lunatics.

Arcana

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #18 on: August 10, 2016, 10:10:45 PM »
What it is it that DC gets so wrong and Marvel gets so right making films?

They do a lot of things better.  Marvel has patience.  Look at the arc of the three Iron Man movies, the three Captain America Movies, the three Thor movies.  Since the first Iron Man movie, we've been watching these movies for eight years now.

Marvel movies also tend to be very character focused.  The Iron Man movies is not about Iron Man, they are about Tony Stark.  The Thor movies are about Thor the person not Thor the thunder god.  The Captain America movies are really about Steve Rogers.

The Avengers movie profited from both good things.  Patience let Marvel develop the characters in stand alone features that focused on the specific characters so we would know and care about them.  So when the Avengers movie comes out we don't have to develop these characters from scratch: we already know them.  We already know the prime antagonist Loki.  We already know the core heroes and Nick Fury.  We can just let the story flow organically.

But I think maybe the least appreciated thing Marvel does well is something it does because it was forced to.  Marvel couldn't make movies about its most popular characters and strongest properties.  It couldn't make Spiderman movies or X-Men movies or even Fantastic Four or Hulk movies because of licensing issues.  It couldn't make movies about the characters people knew the best.  So it had to go to the well and pull up less well-known characters.  Which is not to say that Captain America or Iron Man are unknowns, but compared to Spiderman their backstories are less familiar.  So Marvel couldn't rely on people just knowing who these characters were, and had to invent them for the movies.  Captain America and Iron Man have decades of twisted conflicting backstory.  Marvel had to reduce that down to something simple they could convey on-screen.  Marvel seems to be extremely good at taking a character like Captain America and distilling it down to something simple that movie goers can understand.  He's a naive eager boy-scout that just wants to fight for his country, and is gifted with the ability to do so but finds the politics of it to be something he didn't expect.  He's a straight arrow in a crooked world.  Tony Stark is a rich genius with engineer's syndrome: he thinks he can fix anything with technology.  But he also has PTSD (from multiple trauma) and guilt (also from multiple instances).  Tony Stark is easy to understand: he's tech-smart, but emotionally stunted.  His heart is in the right place but he doesn't have the morals or the boundaries that would prevent him from throwing gasoline on a fire to try to put it out.  Even Thor is someone audiences can relate to.  He's kind of a spoiled child trying to live up to his strict uncompromising father.

Marvel takes comic book characters with fifty years of history, waves a magic wand, and turns them into blank slates.  Then they try to extract a core nucleus of character and backstory that neophyte audiences will be able to appreciate and relate to, and then rebuilds their world around that core.  Asgard is what it is specifically because it serves to understand Thor.  SHIELD and HYDRA exist specifically in the forms they do because it is the world that creates the best opportunity to tell interesting stories about Steve Rogers, super-boy scout.  And in a synergy that feeds itself Marvel builds worlds to suit its characters, then adapts its characters to fit that world.  Ant-Man is the version he is because that fits into the MCU.  Spiderman very obviously is going to be an iteration of Spiderman that fits into the MCU with specific ties to the MCU version of Tony Stark.  I have faith that magic in the MCU will be explicitly a version of magic that fits the MCU and provides the best opportunity to tell an interesting Doctor Strange story, and the version of Doctor Strange we get will explicitly be the one that they can tell the best story about within the current MCU.

I guess if I had to summarize all of that, I'd say what Marvel does well that DC hasn't done well or even at all is they are really good world-builders.  The characters fit the environment and the story, the environment shapes the story and the characters, and the story serves the characters and the environment.  They set reasonable goals for the next step in world building, then execute that goal very well.  They do not try to do more than what their world can contain, but they always try to push the envelope of their world outward for the next set of movies to inhabit.

Notably, people complain that the Batman we see in BvS or the Superman we see in Man of Steel aren't the characters we know.  But actually, the Tony Stark in the MCU isn't really the Tony Stark we knew either, neither is the Thor or the Cap, taken literally.  But you know what?  We *like* the MCU Stark and Rogers and Thor.  And because of that, we see those characters through a prism where we can see how they touch the comic book material in certain places, and we forgive the fact that they aren't exact replicas because we think that the limited parts they did borrow connect the MCU versions of the characters sufficiently well.  We allow that the MCU Thor was "inspired by" the comic book Thor.  But that only works if you start with a character worth liking in the first place.  I think that's why many fans seem to simultaneously hate all the killing that Batman does in BvS and yet praise Ben Affleck for portraying the character.  We like Affleck's portrayal of Batman so we can forgive *him* the fact his Batman does things we think are out of character.  We aren't as crazy about Superman's characterization, so we are much harsher about the "fidelity" of that portrayal.

Dev7on

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Re: Suicide Squad
« Reply #19 on: August 10, 2016, 11:01:26 PM »
I just came back from seeing Suicide Squad and I don't like the new Joker. He's like the new gang leader of the Skulls in City of Heroes. Jared Leto's Joker is a Thug with Thug Mastermind pets.

The movie is colorful, I loved the colors they add in the movie. It reminds me when Issue 16 was introduced in City of Heroes that Paragon Studios gave us the option to change the colors of the powers, you form a team and you get to see the beautiful colors other players had put their creativity into their powers.

There is a lot of eye candy.  ;)

I love the characters they're funny. El Diablo and Harley Quinn is my favorite.

I was more distracted with the pop songs they added in movie more than the actual movie itself. Some songs worked well in some scenes and some of them didn't.

What I don't like about the movie is the editing, the story, and the villain. I got a feeling this movie will also have an R-rated extended version when it's released on DVD to understand the plot a little better.

So my overall will be 5.8/10
« Last Edit: August 10, 2016, 11:16:40 PM by Dev7on »