I wanted to ask this after I saw the newest Marvel movie. Am I alone in just thinking that its just pretty bad? I thought it should have ended at Endgame.
I seriously do not understand the Marvel movies hype. I’ve tried watching them, but I find them so incredibly boring and predictable that I have only managed to sit through two of them (after several tries! Because I like liking things). The “witty” quips aren’t witty, the plot is uninspired, and the writing in general just feels like it was written by an algorithm to create the most inoffensive, common denominator crap. It feels soulless and corporate, and I can only see them as cash grabs, not actual artistic creations (although I am sure there are lots of passionate, talented people behind the scenes, any genuine expression is, at least for me, totally drowned out by the polished Hollywood vibe of it all)
It’s basically the same issue I have with all capitalist media, but it’s not usually as overpowering with smaller productions. Big deal shit like the Marvel movies are just the most obvious.
Same. Watched the first couple Ironman, Cpt America, Thor and main Avengers films. Not even sure if it was the CU at that point. Don’t think I’ve seen a single one since like 2015 or something like that. Like every single one of them is them same. Ancient/alien big bad that’s evil for evil reasons shows up, heroes have to get the Mcguffin to beat them, dramatic boss fight, rinse, repeat. How in the world they made like 20 of them and had people hooked anyway, no idea.
To me it’s the worst excess of the franchising hype leading to endless, brainless sequels, prequels and spinoffs not for any artistic reason but to keep the cash flowing. Soulless, heartless, uninspired, generic, shiny crap.
Just movies made to justify more movies.
The fucking witty quips. At this point it feels like they’re the new laugh track to indicate you should laugh at nothing.
You forgot to add that everything is CGI. Costume, hair, sets.
I’m not a filmbro but I feel like I’m watching Peppa Pig with the MCU. How are these movies so popular among adults.
I enjoyed it when I was a kid, and I liked some of the shitty Sega games that were “based on the movie” and had nothing to do with the movies. But yea once it got past like Avengers I was pretty bored of it, I literally can’t even remember how many movies they’ve made so far. My guess is somewhere in the 30s or 40s or something, they have like 2-4 movies per character and they keep tacking on new ones that nobody cares about
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Wasn’t there a movie where the avengers got in trouble for killing civilians and destroying cities and the movie was like: lol, you’re now the villain random citizen
Tiring/infuriating/depressing:
- forcing shit political takes into otherwise good content
- severe exploitation of workers (crunch in game development, etc.)
- celebrity/brand worship
- fucking ads everywhere
- very prevalent anti-communism
- too much garbage content to sift through
- for software (if it counts as media): spyware, tracking, DRM, etc.
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Haha, I added an item to the list and now your comment is outdated
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I’m sorry, I went way too far. Looking back on it – it feels like it was just yesterday – I really can’t believe I would do such a thing. This is not who I am.
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Fucking ads man. Forget media. I’m talking about the billboards. It’s before music, before videos. Fucking pumping gas. People wearing billboards (brand name clothes).
I will say me and my gf sometimes watch live TV commercials once or twice a year or so just to see what the regular people’s brains are getting cooked by.
Even before becoming an ML, I’ve pretty much given up on media. I don’t enjoy a vast majority of it. It’s either really dumbed down and generic like MCU or depressing sadness porn basically. Every time something has been recommended to me I’ve felt it falls in one of these two categories.
Yep. SO much media is boring. I could ignore it and still enjoy media if just media made by corporations was bad; but indie media is also lack luster.
I wish someone would make a vexillology/vexillography manga; a marxist-leninist isekai; something that isn’t poorly made. It’s not bad to copy ideas; it’s bad to plagiarism them.
Unfortunately with the way things are, where plastic garbage is level 1, sadness porn and general doomerism is the natural level 2 and most of the smartest and most soulful people never get far past some variant of 2. We need stuff that’s sincere and holds no punches but doesn’t merely trade one end of an unrealistic perception binary for another, grimdark always seemed so…half wise to me. Like yes ugliness ugliness. But there is also beauty
The absolute lack of imagination. At least in its better days, there was actually inspired, original pieces of art coming out of the imperialist core, such as Lord of the Rings or Star Trek, whereas nowadays we rarely get anything beyond prequels, sequels, and live-action adaptations. If I didn’t know that there was a whole other world beyond the West, I might have supposed that the power of the human mind had in general come to a standstill. My particular gratitude extends to the brilliant Liu Cixin, whose superb Trisolaris trilogy proves the contrary.
Saved
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You reminded me Strugatsky’s book “Predatory things”
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I’m noticing it more and more, but I hate that superhero stories aren’t allowed to propose real solutions to problems because if anything threatens the Capitalist machine it’s censored. So we’re stuck with Batman fighting clowns and vaguely donating to “charity” instead of using his tech for something truly noble.
You are far from alone in this. But Disney wants money and has a free IP farm, so they will milk it until they crack.
On a more general note - the modern media just seems boring. Capitalist programming aside, it’s just plain boring.
Literally only NPCs watch new Marvel movies, it is insane.
It’s pretty samey. Not just ideologically. If a popular video game has X feature, suddenly every title has to have some variation of X feature. Capitalist buzz chasing in a medium that isn’t constrained by practicality in the same way as handheld drills or whatever are.
After Avatar, Sam Worthington (an Australian who doesn’t do any other accent) was seen as the ideal actor for American servicemen for a while. Absolutely bonkers.
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Its fucking souless most of the time, its made with the single mindset of making money and being marketable, thats why there is so much garbage on the market, that just try an shitty formula everytime but fail because of lack of budget, marketing and famous actors.
I really like Marvel, and yeah, I know they are really dumb movies.
For example the new Spider-Man is basically “look! 3 spider-man” the movie is ugly as fuck and the director does a shitty job but thats it. It’s fine, just dumb fun
But if there is one thing that I absolutely HATE is when these movies try to be super thoughtful and try to make social critiques. Everytime they go political is cringe and really hard to watch - and I say this not just because now I’m a ML, back when I wasn’t I still cringed everytime captain americaTM opened his mouth
It’s always “muh freedom authoritarianism bad :((”
Not only that but the whole “villain is right but their methods are worng1!1!1!!!” is horrendos. This shit is demobilizing and I wouldn’t be surprised if a revolution happens somewhere in the western world that brings free healthcare, free housing and many other things americans are thirsty for, libs condemned the revolution bc “THEIR METHODS WROONG!!! 😭😭”
I’d love a ML super hero movie that beat the shit out of western heroes, copium would be even more insane than when China made the Korean war movie beating americans
Maybe we didn’t do that yet bc our heroes actually exist, unlike Batman
pic related
Gonna go with a different response and it’s the people who like a movie for a dumb reason (protagonist is cool, big explosions, reaffirms preconceptions and doesn’t challenge beliefs, makes references to pop culture and cultural touchstones) but cannot admit that to themselves and so they feel compelled to claim that the show is great because of the deep political satire of it or because of the philosophical implications of the narrative or because of the worldbuilding or some shit.
Please. You don’t have to turn something that appeals to you into a post-hoc haute couture masterpiece. You can just like stuff because it’s silly or fun or relevant to you, it doesn’t need to be super deep to be enjoyable so stop trying to justify your taste to strangers on the internet.
One thing I have noticed for video games is that if you try to gather consensus from professional “critics” you’ll see that they tend overrate games a lot and ignore the fact that 90% of games are unfinished garbage. This makes sense if you consider the fact that their livelihood is indirectly but heavily dependent on you continually consuming media despite how garbage it is. Once I noticed this all critics started feeling super fake.
You can go to albumoftheyear.org and see this in action with the users typing nonsense in their album reviews and being able to tell that an album is deserving of 63 points instead of 62 somehow.
The constant output of sequels is tiresome as new concepts exist, but it’s always a safer proposition for the capitalist to fund a sequel since it already has an inbuilt audience.
