So, your concern is not the complaint that the film is unoriginal, your concern is that somebody is mistaken about the source the unoriginality is cribbing from?
Sure, OK.
I mean, that bit isn’t even the low hanging unoriginal fruit.
Little Arthur in the aquarium = Harry Potter with the snake
My estranged relative/trusted advisor usurps my kingdom and then attacks everybody = Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and a great deal of European history
Good guys undertake a Very Important MacGuffin Retrieval Quest by going from place to place to collect the next plot coupon = National Treasure, The Consolidated Works of Dan Brown, and every shitty D&D campaign since 1982.
Arthur gets to be the leader because he has the trident = Mjolnir, Excalibur, Nothung
And I haven’t seen the film. That’s just off the top of my head based on what’s in the trailers.
Everything creative work steals from something else. That doesn’t speak to quality: Shakespeare didn’t come up with an original plot in his life, and most people think his stuff is pretty good. Taking an idea from another source (in a comic book movie!) isn’t the problem - the problem is taking ideas and doing nothing new or interesting with them, so that it’s obvious even in the trailer that the stuff you’re cribbing from is a better story.
Right? I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that I’m not enjoying the “Superhero-origin-story-where-a-guy-named-Chris-plays-a-character-named-Steve-who-takes-a-multinational-band-of-misfits-behind-German-lines-during-a-World-War-on-a-secret-mission-to-sabotage-the-advanced-weapons-program-of-a-rogue-German-officer-but-then-dies-to-destroy-an-anachronistically-large-bomber-to-prevent-massive-civilian-casualties” film genre. I’m just saying it seems really specific.
Snyder didn’t make Aquaman. It was directed by James Wan and Snyder is only credited as an executive producer. Doesn’t neccisarily say much for the movie. But it does mean that anything not rolling out of the movies Snyder did make can’t be layed at his feet.
I haven’t seen it. MOS made me angry in a very deep way. I couldn’t even make it through BvsS, and could barely follow what was going on in the part I did watch. And I wasn’t impressed with “the good one” that Wonder Woman was supposed to be. So I’m not wasting time on these till I’ve got a plausible reason to believe one of them is worth watching. This Joker thing looks more interesting than expected, I’m curious how well Jenkins will do with a more free hand, and James Gunn might be able to correct suicide Squad. But I’m still very much in “We’ll see” mode.
Jenkins directed the first one as well. And the fact that she made the first DC movie that didn’t make audiences cry blood, and very likely the first one to turn a profit was the first step in Snyder’s down fall.
He did have a hand in writing it, and apparently produced (like produced produced, not name is on it as a technicality produced). Which I think says a fair lot about where that movie’s short comings came from.
I pointed out that the trailers portrayed a film whose central conflict and entire plot structure seemed painfully derivative and offered nothing I hadn’t seen done far better in other films. No discussion I’ve had with anybody who has seen it has suggested otherwise. When IronEdithKidd pointed out Aquaman’s lack of originality, you didn’t refute that; you just said it was stealing from a different movie. (And it’s not like HTTYD2 invented the “your long thought dead parent is alive and now a major plot point” trope: Pirates of the Caribbean, TRON Legacy, Stardust, GotG2, Empire Strikes Back, most Greek mythology…)
Which is why I didn’t see it: unimaginative repeats of other stories = nothing new = not worth my time. I’m not sure how my not having seen invalidates the reason I didn’t see it. If I’m really missing out on a good story because the trailers were lying to me about that, then please, convince me I’m missing out and should see it!
That might be a bit recursive. The whole Joker starting out as weak, failure prone, and ineffectual. Along with the whole psychological break bit. Is rooted in Alan Moore’s The Killing Joe. Which was published in 88. Along with Ledger’s Joker (and a lot of other things) your alt right douches, incels and MRA types have glommed onto and identified with these things to a pretty heavy extent. Even where something like The Killing Joke where it’s to build a whole “one bad day is all of takes” thing from the Joker that turns out to be wrong, Joker is still portrayed as awful, and it’s heavily implied the story is not true.
DC has almost put themselves in a feedback loop with those types. They spent so long pushing dark and gritty and catering to so called true fans, and even explicitly chasing the bitter teenage boys that even where they try to rejigger it ends up getting swallowed. DC has become the terrible online white dude hill to die on, and even if this movie turns out to be a direct indictment of these groups they’ll get a new version of their mascot. And the rest of us just won’t be smart enough to get it, or part of the roving conspiracy meant to destroy these amazing excellent movies for the sake of Marvel and Disney who are deliberately destroying our childhoods.
