• Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago

    The scene where the 8 year old tells him how to operate the LAW rocket launcher is a classic cinema moment.

    They were trying to take the audience on a journey from “this guy is a righteous badass who has been pushed too far” to “this guy was fighting across la to murder-suicide his wife and kids, he’s the bad guy” but it really didn’t land. Folks remember the cool violence, not the end.

    Same genre of missed satire or critique as fight club, taxi driver.

    • Diuretic_Materialism [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      5 months ago

      I watched this in my pre-woke period and surprisingly, it’s one of the few examples of the satire NOT being missed on me. Like I just saw a grumpy divorced boomer bumbling around LA and being a dick. Sometimes to people who kinda deserved it but often just to random people. He doesn’t do anything badass he actually gets owned several times, and the movie ends with him dying rather pathetically, getting shot by a guy who just owned him in a debate about ethics.

      I think there’s a reason your usual reddit edgelord doesn’t cite this film as an inspiration unlike Fight Club.

    • nat_turner_overdrive [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      5 months ago

      Starship Troopers too. You basically can’t make satire of this type without a huge proportion of the viewers going “whoah, cool shooty guns! wow! I’m just like the protagonist!”

      • DragonBallZinn [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        5 months ago

        It’s settled, after the revolution we need to make a reverse Haye’s code where the main rule is that the villains cannot be too cool, too sexy, or whatever.

        I think a good 30% of CHUDs under 45 are CHUDS because they want to emulate the cool supervillains from media.

      • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        5 months ago

        That’s not the fault of the people making the movies, that’s the fault of dumbasses not being able to actually understand things and don’t understand the concept of “show, don’t tell”. Like Fallen Down, Starship Troopers, Fight Club, Taxi Driver, etc are very heavy handed and obvious in terms of satire. They clearly show you why. The only way for these movies to be more obvious would be for them not to be satirical.

      • Sephitard9001 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        5 months ago

        Fucking hell the recent discourse around the movie drives me up the wall. All the chuds that think they’re vindicated because the director said the “bugs launched the meteor” in the director’s commentary or whatever despite the movie itself directly contradicting this.

        We see them ram the fucking meteor and change its trajectory. Rico’s sitting in the barracks after quitting service talking with his parents on the telephone when the call suddenly drops when the meteor lands. Rico grabs his bag and walks out of the barracks to leave. Then the big fucking jumbotron outside starts playing a fully cut, edited, and narrated propaganda reel complete with rising death toll showing how Buenos Aires was destroyed by a meteor, they already determined it came from Klandathu and didn’t arrive by chance but was launched with purpose, and the council already convened and decided on war. Shortly after this, they have another fully edited and narrated reel with footage of the destruction wrought by the meteor, complete with literal crisis actors rooting through burned out houses shouting jingoisms at the camera about the damn fucking buggos.

        The movie does everything it could reasonably do to show you that it’s a false flag without saying it out loud. Rico is perhaps the only fucking person on Earth with the knowledge to deduce this is a government plot, and he still signs back up with fervor to join the war effort now that his family and home is destroyed.

    • TheBroodian [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      5 months ago

      Basically I think this comes down to people being incapable of dissociating themselves from the person the camera follows most, or who is given the most camera time to portray their self in their own words.