My Own Little World

While watching Justice League , I couldn’t help comparing it to The Avengers . The two films are trying to do very similar things with their respective teams, and they both have very similar story beats (not unreasonable to expect given Joss Whedon’s heavy involvement in both). Honestly, that comparison does Justice League a lot more favors than you might otherwise expect: they both are fun, entertaining, bombastic blockbusters with characters the audience can get behind. Of course, Justice League is not in a vacuum, and neither is The Avengers . And that is where the problems start to show. The biggest problem I have with Justice League is its lack of character development. Now, this actually doesn’t come from this film itself, as all of the new characters (Cyborg, The Flash, and Aquaman) are enticing as presented here. The problem is that we haven’t had the prior experiences with these characters that we had in the Marvel Cinematic Universe before The Avengers came to ...

DC Comics' attempt at a cinematic universe hasn't been the best so far. Every one of the three films they've released has had narrative problems that range from fairly noticeable to downright awful. Only one of them has actually established any kind of concrete tone for the franchise. None of them, from my perspective at least, are films I would consider buying based on quality alone. When you're putting as much money behind movies as Warner Bros. is behind these new DC Comics films, that's never a good thing. That being said, they're still figuring things out, so I decided to give them another chance by seeing their newest release Wonder Woman . And you know what? I'm incredibly glad I did.  This is a really solid comic book film and an incredibly enjoyable thing to experience in a theater. Wonder Woman  has all the components of a good film and simply puts them loosely over a comic book aesthetic and branding, and that makes it work better than c...

Many of you know the high regard in which I hold film critics. Quite often, that Tomatometer score is my deciding factor as to whether or not I want to see a movie. It might be a bad idea to put so much weight on other people's opinions, but it typically works quite well for me, so I haven't changed the way I choose what movie to watch. Why am I telling you this, you ask? Because I want you to know how hard it is to say that I enjoy a movie that critics hate... ...like Batman v Superman . I liked this movie. Yes, there were some elements that made me a little uneasy at times, but on the whole this is a great example of how to make a really fully stuffed superhero film. That being said, there are some gripes I have with Batman v Superman  that make me dock it more than a little bit, and there are still others that I'm not decided on yet. In light of that, I'm going to try a new format for this review in which I'll separate the different aspects of this film...