Comment by jodrellblank | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jodrellblank | Hacker News Reader

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I haven’t seen 2017 justice league, but I have seen enough modern day superhero films to be sceptical that’s why his strength is unthreatening.

Of course he’s going to be defeated, he’s the villain. Heroes don’t get injured. Every strength based character is infinite strong.

Superman could leap tall buildings in a single bound, then fly, then fly in space, then lift a continent made of kryptonite which is “Superman’s Kryptonite”, if you will.

Tobey MacGuire Spider-Man hurt his knee trying to slow down a train, Tom Holland held a flying aircraft carrier together with his hands. Yesterday’s Doctor Octopus would be no match for today’s Spider-Man and his small scale plots no interest. Even so, Alfred Molina’s Doc Oc was a good and threatening character despite having CGI assisted arms.

Hulk used to throw tanks about, now he punches alien spaceships into the ground.

Iron man was a guy in a cyborg suite, with hulk buster he’s hulk strong.

Magneto was a strategist who could push away wolverine, now he can lift sunken battleships and stadiums.

Wolverine was an eternal soldier now he can survive a hit from a nuclear bomb(!)

Batman was a strategist who worked out, now he’s strong enough to fight superman hand to hand.

Nobody gets injured unless they can walk it off, nobody dies unless they’re about to come back to life[mostly]. Nothing is damaged unless it’s background scenery buildings and cars.

Of course people aren’t thinking it’s hush stakes, it isn’t. That’s not CGI fault, it’s poor story telling papered over with CGI, bad character writing with CGI energy beam weapons instead of personality.

I think the really interesting counterpart to this is the anime One Punch Man. The main character, Saitama, can defeat any opponent, typically with one punch. It's the title for a reason; you know he'll always win, and it'll be disappointingly easy pretty much all of the time.

The point of the series is that you can take such an uninteresting overpowered character, in a superheroes vs supervillains setting, and still end up with an interesting plot. Of course none of the plot hinges on the question of whether Saitama will be powerful enough to win, that'd be stupidly bad writing.

Mainstream US superhero movies are mostly plots about whether their equivalent of Saitama will win. The action & graphics are the point, the plot is an afterthought.

I haven't seen any One Punch Man, but I don't doubt good writers can make any character interesting. Doctor Manhatten in Watchmen was basically a deity and didn't ruin the film with the snap of his fingers. Dr Who never loses and can still have good stories.

I was more going for: with Tobey Macguire's Spiderman, Doctor Octopus was holding Aunt May from a building and taunting Spiderman with dropping her; the world was not at stake, the city was not at stake, almost nobody else in the city knows or cares who she is. I didn't think Spiderman would lose, but I felt like it mattered and that it was in some way difficult for Peter Parker to deal with, he had to take a chance, risk something, "only just" caught her. CGI tentacles didn't look realistic because they aren't a real thing, and that wasn't a dealbreaker. Nowadays a cloud opens up into an interdimensional portal and a flood of metal-living-skeleton-alien invasion spaceships fly through and it couldn't matter less if it tried; they are a swarm of whocares for the Avengers to punch through, which they do easily and uninterestingly and they didn't miss out on anything happening really. CGI isn't ruining it, bad plot is ruining it. Building turns to dust as thing crashes and explodes, is so overdone that's not even interesting by itself.

Compare to early Hulk who was on his knees in a field against two(!) sonic beam tanks owned by the US Army, with only Banner's love of Liv Tyler to make him stand up and fight. Small scale and he was never going to lose, but this was the US Army against the unknown, Banner and the General's daughter, and it mattered. When Hulk threw the tanks, they were CGI and a bit unrealistic, but so what, that isn't immersion breaking. Watching Hulk fight now is like seeing Star Trek's Lt Worf punch a Romulan spaceship while it explodes over The Fonz jumping a shark on a surfboard. It's not the CGI which makes it bad.

On the YouTube Pitch Meetings channel, one of the recurring jokes critiquing films is the 'writer' describing the plot of a film and getting to a point where a character dies, and the 'executive' does a "who was that? Should I care, because I don't feel anything right now" reply. I don't need the hero to lose, or the CGI to be unnoticable. I want to feel like something is at stake which matters. CGI punchups may as well be watching a 2 hr demo of Street Fighter II.

I think we're sort of aggressively agreeing with each other. It's not the CGI (or lack thereof) that makes the modern superhero films bad (except as a sort of demoscene-with-infinite-budget visual spectacle where they're great). It's the writing. To a lesser extent the cinematography is poor, which makes it hard to really feel what's going on. There's lots of unnecessary camera movement, frenetic jump cuts during fights, and all the colors are dull and muted.

Every Frame a Painting has a good video on Kurosawa's use of movement in his films, and actually uses The Avengers as a contrasting example and how the cinematography & direction makes the scene in question feel meaningless.[1]

So I agree that it's not the CGI that's the problem. It's the writing, the direction, the cinematography, the editing, the music[2] (though they improved since the linked video came out, directly in response to it), etc. The films are bad in many ways, but the CGI isn't really one of them.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doaQC-S8de8

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vfqkvwW2fs

I've been trying to figure out why I don't like the new Star Trek shows and I think your thoughts explain it. The old shows had plots. The new ones are just pretentious and try to get us to like them because "look, I mentioned Picard and Voyager, so I'm cool, right?".

Spiderman: Aunt May is at risk Avengers: New York is at risk Avengers 2: The Earth is at risk Avengers 3: The Universe is at risk (The Snap) Current Marvel era: The MULTIVERSE is at risk (ie all possible universes)

Where can you possibly go from here?

One Punch Man originated as a very poorly drawn web comic (as in, the author had no training in arts whatsoever[0]). Its claim to fame is that it's a parody of the superhero genre, in which most characters worry about status, except the overpowered-but-low-key main character.

I'd argue the plot of one punch man is about as predictable as it gets, (it's basically a series of boss arcs where side characters struggle and Saitama saves the day but somehow doesn't get the credit). Notably, Saitama has just about zero character development throughout the series. What makes it interesting is the comical relief provided by the constant social commentary on the notion of "strength = recognition".

Interestingly, among superhero movie fans, it is often said that DC movies are worse than Marvel movies, because DC movies lack character development. Infinity war notoriously doesn't even have a happy ending. So I think saying that american superhero movies lack substance isn't necessarily accurate.

[0] https://www.looper.com/img/gallery/the-untold-truth-of-one-p...

One Punch Man includes tons of close fights, however. It's just none of them involve Saitama.

> Nobody gets injured unless they can walk it off, nobody dies unless they’re about to come back to life[mostly]. Nothing is damaged unless it’s background scenery buildings and cars.

This is probably the biggest thing. The biggest mistake of hero films is that characters who are strong are not very strong. They do big hits but its all clearly irrelevant. It doesn't really matter how strong they are absolutely. Getting thrown into walls is my particular pet peeve of damaging moves that never matter. There's an over reliance on suspense where its not really deserved. I feel Captain Marvel and Thor Ragnarok did this decently. They just shrugged and made it explicitly clear that the heroes were 100x stronger than the trash mobs and released any tension in the fights to just have a good time with them.

I will grant some of what you've said, and so I will take a different tack.

I have not seen a Daniel Craig Bond film that didn't have noticably CGI elements bringing me out of the moment. Some of the old (especially Roger Moore) bond films had pretty dire effects where it is obviously a man in front of a video screen, but I don't remember finding them as immersion breaking at the time.

But, hard to say what is recency bias. I will say that Bourne stands out as having no such issues where CGI was obviously used... but maybe it was done better

It reminds me of the old EE 'Doc' Smith (Science Fiction) set of seven Lensman books. The last is an outlier, but for the first six books each feels like it is a similar tale as the previous ones but with the scales, powers, and threat levels turned up a notch.

Almost like having used up the ideas available, the only place to go now is incrementally growing the constituent parts. And that's how I feel about most modern action/adventure/fantasy/scifi stuff - to quote another genre: "this one goes up to 11".

But I don't want it going to 11. Even for my SF/Fantasy I want it to feel real. For me (and I know it is subjective) the author makes a good point.

The term for this trope is “power spiral” and Gurren Lagaan is a fantastic satire of it. The main character’s power is literally “spiral power” (a drill) and the plot revolves around the fundamental danger of exponential growth. Spoilers: the series ends with the main character piloting a mech that’s piloting a mech that’s piloting a mech that’s piloting a mech that’s throwing galaxies at the bad guy.

TIL. Thanks.

I never noticed this, and now it seems obvioous: superpower inflation. Thanks!

The last of these recent years’ superhero movies I saw had the protagonist fly from the ground on earth into space and fly through a fleet of supposedly extremely advanced and capable and enormous spaceships in order to win the fight. Literally, simply flying through as if playing a connect the dots game.

One was left wondering how there could be any further movies with this person available to fly through anything.

They are typically just written out of the conflict. In this case I assume that you are talking about Captain Marvel whom I believe is always needed on other planets in other galaxies except for the rare occassion when the writers needs a deus ex machina.

Same for the Green Lantern Corps. They are always needed but there's far too few of them so 99.999% of the time the heroes in these stories kind of hold the front until a GL shows up and beats the threat relatively easily.

I quite enjoyed that universe for a bit of time but the ever-inflating (and absurd) power levels and lack of actual stakes eventually ruined it for me. As it did with most mainstream superhero movies.

I think the term for this is power creep and it also applies to games

This is cherry-picking. There are countless characters from comic books who are so powerful that they would be considered laughable in modern superhero movies the same way you seem to think a few cherry-picked modern superhero movie characters are laughably overpowered compared to a few cherry-picked characters from older superhero movies.

That misses the point of what I was saying. I was replying to a claim "X character is so strong they should be threatening, and it's CGI's fault that they aren't" with a counter claim "they aren't threatening because so many characters are so strong and their strength is written to be meaningless and inconsequential, bad writing not CGI is why X character is unthreatening". Powerful characters are not what I objected to, as evidenced by my comment mentioning Dr Manhatten. Poorly written characters where their strength is incredible but also uninteresting are what I object to.

In Game of Thrones, The Hound outpowers all normal people and can take damage no ordinary human can, and is still threatening. He has his own demons and is outpowered by The Mountain. He is taken down by poison and becomes Cersei's slave, she uses him to demonstrate that strength isn't power, "power is power". The Hound sacrifices himself to kill The Mountain. What would be bad - and more like some of the stories I cherry pick from - is if The Hound had been blessed by the Lord of Light followers and was now borderline invincible, had taken out The Mountain in a 2 minute flashy punch up, then one-man-army'd his way through Ramsay Bolton's army, then Daenerys flies in and inexplicably Hound is now immune to dragon fire and punches a dragon to death, then goes to the thousand foot high magically reinforced Ice Wall and pushes it over, and then is inexplicably immune to the zombies and...

In one of Christian Bale's Batman films, there is a setup of two passenger ferries full of civilians who are stranded and rigged with explosives. Each boat has the detonator to the other boat. The civilians are put into a Prisoner's Dilemma situation by The Joker. The options are: do nothing, Joker kills everyone. Blow up the other boat, Joker lets your boat live. Both groups rush to do that, everyone dies. We don't know these people, neither Joker nor Batman is enormously strong, but the scene is good. Now Affleck's Batman fights and guns down a stream of generic villains like any scene from The Matrix or John Wick or a Jason Statham movie, and then fights Superman, and the scenes aren't good. It's not his increased strength which makes them bad. Dr Strange is hugely powerful, I've only seen one movie with him in it but it was decent - he was struggling against his demons of losing his great surgeon skills, humbling himself, rising to the challenge, etc. etc. and he defeats Dormammu in a way that is more clever than forceful (yet requires a high power level to even try it).

Speaking of The Matrix, Morpheus vs Agent Smith, Neo vs Agent Smith, were good scenes with inhumanly powerful characters and CGI. Later on, a zillion CGI Neos fighting a zillion CGI Agent Smiths were dreadful scenes with boringly powerful characters where nothing felt tense, nothing mattered, and CGI.*

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