roystgnr
22hr ago
attempts at relatable humour in impressively dire and panic-inducing situations
I think it's not the direness of the situation that doesn't fit. When a situation is utterly dire, with nothing to be done to escape the worst of it, gallows humor (see the Real Life tab) often kicks in. Later when a dire situation is over, for better or worse, the people who worked on the situation are also often prone to humor: consider the facetious "towing bill" Grumman sent to Rockwell after Apollo 13 for an example of "better", or Giuliani's SNL appearance after 9/11 for "worse". A situation which merely may become dire isn't an exception either; the disastrous explosion on Apollo 13 wasn't the first "bang" the astronauts heard, because Haise thought it was funny that he could futz with the cabin repress valve and his cabin mates would feel "our hearts jump in our mouth".
I think it's the precise timing of the humor where modern writers fail. Loads of people joke about dire situations when they're fine afterward, joke when they've merely survived afterward, and even joke when they're doomed not to survive and there's nothing to be done, but I'm having a hard time finding good examples of people being jokers in the very middle of dire situations in real-life, at the points when every second counts and the outcome is still up in the air ... and yet that's exactly when too many e.g. MCU writers think it's the perfect time to balance out the tension with a quip.
Problem(s) plural ... I think. It's hard to give a movie a fair watch after reading the book, because you just naturally fill in the blanks yourself, so maybe I'm underestimating what the average movie-only audience would have picked up from the film alone.
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