Amazingly great image ganked from the amazingly great Twitter feed of @DieRobinsonDie!
00:01-1:23:04: Greetings! We don’t beat around the bush here, we just get right in to talking about Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a.k.a., The SnyderCut. (It’s tempting to say we don’t because with its four hour running time, the SnyderCut has already thoroughly beaten ever bush in sight.)
As you might guess knowing us: FULL SPOILERS. SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS. We go on to discuss this movie at length which means if you haven’t seen it and don’t want to spoil the, uh, remarkable directing and storytelling choices Mr. Snyder with his here cut, you should jump ahead to either (a) our discussion of Falcon and the Winter Soldier; (b) Graeme’s discussion of The Green Lantern Season Two; or (c) just shelve this episode until you have seen the SnyderCut. (P.S. I wrote all this while listening to the part where Graeme tells Jeff there is yet another cut that is going to be released, the Justice is Gray version which….oy.) So get ready for a rolicking discussion of Justice League The Snyder Cut compared to Justice League the Whedon Cut compared to Jeff’ take on some of Snyder’s other films to…oh so much more. It is a full hour-plus of discussion on a full four hour film! (Oh, and in case you want the reference for the story Jeff repeats herein about the suits telling Patty Jenkins Ares had to be in the Wonder Woman finale, here is the link.)
1:23:04-1:39:10: And from there to the other big superhero not-comics thing: Graeme saw the first episode of Falcon and The Winter Soldier on D+ and he was alternately underwhelmed and a little troubled? I don’t know if it’s a full-spoiler thing but Graeme definitely discloses the reveal at the end of the first ep. at the 1:26:25 mark so that’s a thing to be wary of if you don’t want to be spoiled? Jeff asks Graeme to contrast the experience with Wandavision and what his expectations had been for each, and we go from there.
1:39:10-2:03:10: Ninety-eight minutes into a comic book podcast and Graeme decides to talk about comic books? The man is A MONSTER…but he’s also a monster who’s read all of Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp’s The Green Lantern and he’s got some very interesting things to say about it and what Morrison is doing.
2:03:10-end: Closing Comments! It turns out Graeme is excited about Godzilla Vs. Kong while Jeff is…lukewarm? Up is down! Black is white! What has this Snydercut wrought?! Oh, but fortunately some things never change: look for us on Stitcher! Itunes! Instagram! Twitter together and separately: Graeme and Jeff! Tumblr, and on Patreon where a wonderful group of people make this all possible, including Empress Audrey, Queen of the Galaxy, to whom we are especially grateful for her continuing support of this podcast (and if you want to read the article Jeff references in his comments, here it is!
Next week: Skip week! Join us two fools in April for another episode of Wait, What?
Need the link to cut, paste, and/or turn into a four hour version with two different epilogues?
https://theworkingdraft.com/media/podcasts4/WaitWhat315.mp3
Unlikely that I’ll ever admit to seeing the Snyder Cut in conversation. While I agree with everything Jeff said and all due respect, I think I’ll just be like Graeme and take a hushed approach and let them get it out of their system. Less said about Snyder’s DC work, the better. More for everyone else.
Falcon and Winter Soldier felt like a glorified Agents of SHIELD episode. Marvel Studios is realizing the precise comicbook business model with such hits as writing for the trade, as Jeff mentioned or how about that favorite, why end a story when you can seed 3 more? Weekly installments?
I noted the killing here as well and had to chalk it up to the standard cultural deference to the military-industrial complex and that the battlefield was a remote non-urban location? Batroc and company are exchanging deadly force with Sam Wilson but there aren’t buildings full of people being demolished by ray beams out of someone’s hands. While the parademons in Snyder Cut JL are described as basically Borg (which has its own moral conundrum), this dynamic of being somewhere remote works in even Snyder’s murdery superhero battles because they are mostly fighting in an abandoned reactor chimney.
I would like to see someone do a deep dive on the issue of cinematic superheroes killing their opponents. It’s something I see a lot of fans bring up, but it feels as if those fans are holding the films to a standard that isn’t borne out of the films themselves. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there isn’t a moment in the DC or Marvel fans where a character says “we don’t kill people, it would make us as bad as those we fight.” If Falcon were to say that to his military bosses, they would laugh him out of the room.
Also, did we come to the idea that superheroes shouldn’t kill in an honest fashion? For decades, superheroes have been developed under the Comics Code Authority and the perception that a large segment of the readers are children. The “no-killing rule” likely arose from those restrictions, both real and imagined, as much as it arose from genuine dramatic purposes. Should the cinematic version of these characters be under such restrictions?
I agree that the first episode of F&WS was kind of dull, but I think there are some themes that might be interesting if handled well. Sam’s alienation, the ceremony at the beginning was just a ruse so the government could put the shield on some white guy; he can’t get a loan and is apparently not paid well or at all for being the military’s murder man despite their seemingly bottomless funding for PMCs. The Flag Smashers stated goal of a borderless world, I mean that would be good thing! Borders is just a way for the powers that be to control us serfs and have us killed in wars to control resources. Bucky’s PTSD rehabilitation. Mackie and Stan has had good chemistry elsewhere so once they actually get together on screen that could be good.
As for MCU heroes murdering people willy nilly, even if there isn’t a no kill mission statement, it doesn’t make them very sympathetic does it? Besides Ant-Man, Spider-Man doesn’t want to kill people either (yet Tony, the true villain of the MCU, keeps handing him borderline WMDs), Dr Strange was pretty aghast at having killed that mook in spectral combat.
Dr Strange had that whole ‘do no harm’ oath in place already, apart from superhero traditions.
I almost fell off my bike when you launched into the Snyder Cut discussion immediately after the self intros. Usually you give us a build up to that kind of big discussion. But this time, no Graeme regaling us with work story of a co-worker who couldn’t sign up for HBO Max in time, or Jeff lamenting how the couch fell apart just as he sat down to view the Snyder Cut. Just raw, unfiltered discussion from the get go.
(Disappointed that we didn’t get a reprise of Jeff singing the beloved “Snyder Cut” song, but you can’t have everything.)
I don’t know how much of what I’m about to type relates to the issue of superheroes murdering, but all the talk about Marvel Studios basically shilling for the U.S. military has got me thinking about the use of SHIELD in the comics. (No, I’m not going to put in the periods every time I type it. There are enough demands on my time as it is.) I remember The Ultimates really tying up the Marvel characters with SHIELD as the Ur-Avengers of which the Avengers themselves were just the super-powered arm of the same organization. I didn’t really like that, but, hey, it was an alternate universe from comics being written in a post-9/11 landscape and Mark Millar is a fascist apologist, so what can you do? But then Bendis introduced that dynamic into the regular Marvel Universe, and that is where I think things went downhill and fast. Prior to the 21st century, SHIELD was always this organization that existed on the fringes, but never as the locus of the Marvel Universe. Nick Fury would show up to chew scenery and make sure the heroes weren’t getting out of line, but you got the feeling he couldn’t really do anything about it. SHIELD seemed contented with dealing with the Hulk because the Hulk was more of a public threat and, despite Avengers #1, was not really affiliated with anyone, at least not anyone that would vouch for him. Even when Fury would meet up with Steve Rogers, it always came off as Cap respecting Fury b/c of WWII, but not really liking the fact that he worked for the CIA on steroids. But Bendis really pulled hard for making SHIELD the center of the MU, and Millar’s “Civil War” and the wake of that fiasco cemented SHIELD’s position. As a kid, I could count on one hand the number of time SHIELD showed up in Marvel Comics. In the 21st century? You could find a SHIELD helicarrier in the fore/background of every establishing shot of any comic taking place in NYC. SHIELD is just Super CIA/Super Military, and unless they’re fighting Nazi fugitives, the heroes should not be interacting with them. But now you get MCU movies that are paid commercials for the army and superheroes killing people and it’s never questioned.
I’ve never seen the Justice League movie, and won’t be watching either of the new cuts, but I kind of hope they keep putting out a different cut of this movie every month for several years. Just constant remixes of the source material that get stranger and stranger.
I watched both the Snyder Cut and Falcon and the Winter Soldier; neither were great but I strongly preferred the latter. The argument that the Snyder Cut has value despite it’s flaws because it’s a singular vision really doesn’t work for me. It’s like arguing that you’d rather be murdered by one of those artful serial killers like Hannibal Lecter rather than stabbed during a mugging or gunned down at random. I thought the Snyder Cut was better than the Whedon Cut, but that doesn’t say much. Both are bad films from bad directors.
I really enjoyed the opening action sequence of Falcon and the Winter Soldier. It was a good match for Falcon’s powers and I’m not really worried that he was murking dudes left and right. There’s only two superheroes that I strongly believe shouldn’t kill: Superman and Spider-Man. Everyone else, I can see a case either way. The rest of F&WS was a bit slow and (to steal a comparison from the Cinematic Universe podcast) chunks of it felt like they were from a basic cable TV show about the lives of FBI agents or whatever: the kind of thing I’d never ever watch. But because this is about Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes, I’m going to watch it because I care about those characters. I’ve been seeing them in movies for nearly a decade, so there’s something enjoyable just about having some time for them to have character moments.
Oh, and Kong: Skull Island totally whips ass. One of the few recent non-MCU big blockbusters that knew exactly what people like me wanted and gave it to us uncut. My only complaints are Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson. They don’t add much and I think it would have been more fun with no big stars, just top tier character actors. Both of the new Godzilla movies were total dog shit that seemed to miss all the appeal of Godzilla. I’m still hopefully about Kong V Godzilla: Dawn of Monsters, though.
Those of you who enjoy manga, could read Asadora!, if you haven’t already.
Jeff
It would be great to get an episode with your views on twin peaks the return. So much to unpack there!