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Notes -
Why are blockbuster movie scripts so... bad?
I've been going to the movies more in the last year than I have in the previous decade, because I have a coworker turned friend that likes to watch films in theaters and it is a cheap way to hang out with him (protip: bring your own snacks and drinks in a backpack instead of buying from the concession stand and watch the morning matinee instead of purchasing the more expensive evening tickets). And what I keep noticing is that, while they are very pretty, the writing in them is absolutely, uniformly awful.
I'm not even talking about politics here. I'm talking about how nobody in Mufasa ever stops to think about "wait a minute, how do I know that Milele even exists?!" the way a level 1 intelligent character would. I'm talking about how half the runtime of Jurassic World Rebirth is pointless action sequences that contribute nothing to the plot. I'm talking about how Brave decided to waste its amazing prologue by focusing the movie around the mom turning into a bear.
If you are already spending $200 million dollars producing a movie and a similar amount marketing it, why can't you just throw in an extra million to hire Neil Gaiman or George R. R. Martin (or, hell, Eliezer Yudkowsky) to write your script for you?
But... it doesn't seem to be a question of money? It is certainly possible to find much better writing in direct to video films than in theatrical films, despite their much lower budgets. Everybody agrees that the DCEU was a pile of crap, while there were have been some very solid entries in the DC Universe Animated Original Movies series. I recently watched Justice League: Gods & Monsters, and I was hooked from the first scene of General Zod cucking Superman's dad to the end credits; I wasn't looking at my watch wondering how much longer the movie is going to last, the way I do when watching a blockbuster.
Previous discussion.
The Zach Snyder DC movies are good actually. People love to hate on Lex Zuckerberg for some reason. Maybe because every line he speaks sounds like a cheesy villain monologue, but that’s the point. Killing Superman is less fulfilling than making Superman read your tweets and watching him squirm because he doesn’t have a good response.
In the source material Superman is esoterically Jewish-coded and Lex Luthor is Aryan-coded. Zach Snyder reversed this in his interpretation of Superman, but it looks like James Gunn's interpretation will be closer to the dynamic in the source material.
Superman was created by Jews, so it's not surprising if there are elements of Jewishness to him. I don't really see much that is specifically Jewish about him, though. For example, the notion of "really powerful being who is orphaned in a foreign culture and has to discover the powers he has by virtue of his birth" has as many examples in European cultures as it does in Semitic cultures. Kal-El does sound Hebrew, but that's a minor thing. What kinds of Jewish-coded characteristics do you have in mind?
...does it count that he's a journalist?
A little bit, but I doubt it's very significant. Granted, I don't know much about the comics, but from what little exposure I have to Superman, I've never seen any reason to think that the way Superman behaves as a journalist is particularly Jewish. If an Irish-American guy wrote a story about a space alien who comes to Boston and becomes a cop, I wouldn't view the cop as particularly Irish-coded unless he did, well, Irish-y things as a cop. But like I said, I don't know much about the comics, so I could be missing something.
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