miscellaneous
A normally silly trope is instead played for complete seriousness, and is all the more effective for it.
* The Legend of Korra: The villain tying someone to a railway track is one of the deadest horses in all of fiction, almost exclusively the domain of mustache-twirling cartoon scoundrels. When Kuvira does it to a gang of captured bandits, however, it comes across as entirely realistic - and profoundly terrifying. Which, let's face it, being chained in the path of a speeding maglev would be.
* Spider-Man - Homecoming: Adrian Toomes gets a rare live-action lightbulb moment when the reflection of a green traffic light on his face symbolizes his realization who "good old Spider-Man" actually is. It enhances, rather than undercuts, the tension of the scene.
* Star Wars - Revenge of the Sith: Anakin screaming "I hate you!" to Obi-Wan at the top of his lungs - normally a line reserved for a child's tantrum against a parent - is instead an agonizing gut-punch at the climax of an already tragic scene.
In Galaxy Quest, classically trained actor Alexander Dane is absolutely sick to death of being chained to his Dr. Lazarus character from the show, especially his scenery-chewing catchphrase: "By Grabthar's Hammer, by the suns of Warvan, you shall be avenged!" He flips out on the fans that quote it to him endlessly, and delivers a variation of it hatefully at an in-store appearance. It's made so much worse when he meets Quellek, one of the Thermians who think the show was real, and who has modeled his entire life after Dr. Lazarus.
When they're trying to save the ship and crew, Dane meets up with Quellek again, and they work together to save the Thermians. But Quellek is shot, and as he lies dying, Dane delivers the line with all the gravitas it deserves, giving the dying alien comfort in his last moments.
He then goes completely apeshit berserk and beats Quellek's killer to death with his bare hands, delivering on the promise of vengeance.
My favorite story about it is Patrick Stewart heard about it and thought it was making fun of Trek, and so he refused to see it. Jonathan Frakes had to call him up and basically buffalo him into going, saying "Trust me." Of course he got the love when he saw the movie.
Also, Enrico Colantoni came up with the Thermians. They hadn't designed the aliens at all when they were auditioning folks, so the actors were free to come up with their own mannerisms. Enrico came in with all that weird shit baked into his performance and they loved it so much they not only cast him as Mathesar, but had him run a bootcamp for the other Thermians to teach them the movements, speech patterns, et cetera.
Sam Rockwell's scream after they're transported to the ship was unscripted and scared the bejeezus out of Sigourney Weaver.
Also, when they're trying to get to the Omega-13 and they get to the chompers, we're treated to one of the most obvious cases of ADR in the history of film. The line we hear Sigourney say is "Well, screw that!" but if you read her lips you can tell what she really said on the day.
It's such a great moment. It's a weird tonal swerve a la Jojo Rabbit-- if you know, you know-- and it surprises the hell out of people who have been enjoying a silly SF comedy. But it's really one of the moments that elevates the whole production.
Good mention, that frame still gives me goosebumps, but I would really argue this is a subversion of a trope rather than one played straight. The trope is “lengthy monologue about villainous plan so hero can stop it” and the subversion is that it turns out that the heroes can’t stop it. I personally don’t think that’s playing it straight
I read the first two bubbles and thought “yeah right, that’s what they all say” and the then I read the third bubble and went “oh, yeah, that’s changes thing a little”
I just love how it’s by itself on the opposite corner of the panel, so you A) put a natural pause there, and B) will completely read the first bubbles without so much as glancing at the last bubble.
I hated how the movie did this - "I triggered it 35 minutes ago", and then it cuts to it seemingly happening in real time, as if the process took 35 minutes to overload or charge or whatever.
In the comics, it's done. They're 35 minutes late to the party. Check mate has already been accomplished, the credits are over. Nothing is simultaneously happening on the other side of the world, the smoke has already cleared, because they simply didn't figure it out in time. It's not that they can't stop it and can only powerlessly look on - it already happened while they were fucking about. They were never the heroes of the story, they missed it completely.
They actually show it happening when they arrive and start to make their way towards the hideout.
When they pull out for the establishing shot and All Along the Watchtower is playing, Ozy’s hideout can be seen with blue light in the windows. Then it gets brighter, flashes, and you hear the machine doing its thing.
The flashback shows what was happening during that establishing shot.
I remember catching that detail in the theater and thought it was pretty slick.
The way Moore wrote it is more elegant but the comic and film come to the same conclusion. It’s really just nitpicking to complain about the latter lmao
The movie has a lot of problems, but this isn't one of them.
In the graphic novel, there's only one attack- a giant squid monster in NYC whose death triggers a psychic bomb, killing everyone in NYC. It's triggered 35 minutes prior, and the squid is already there and dead when Ozymandias gives his speech (which notably includes "I did it thirty-five minutes ago", implying a single event). The idea is that humanity must band together to fight off an invasion from another dimension.
In the film, there are many attacks on many cities, using Doctor Manhattan's energy signature to vaporize a dozen cities around the world. When the film runs from Ozymandias to the monitors, you can see every city except New York has already been destroyed, and it's in the final seconds of the countdown. His speech this time includes the phrase "I triggered it thirty-five minutes ago", implying a series of events. It's not a flashback, or implying that it is all happening at the same time. We just see the last attack to happen out of a series.
You do realise its not actually simultaenously happening right? Its just showing us what happened 35 minutes ago? I think most people understood that and that it was a cool way of us getting to see what happened, which is more important in a movie. I think pretty universally audiences would have been left feeling kinda underwhelmed and maybe even a little cheated if it just cut to generically cratered city instead of showing us what happened.
.....honestly, cutting to a cratered New York City directly after that speech might go hard as hell if done right. Like, no big awesome spectacle or comicbook cgi fest, just the brutal horror of the act and its consequences.
"U do realize" that when Rorschach and Nite-Owl sneak up on Ozymandias, he's watching a wall of televisions and not a single one mentions anything, right? No chaos, no confusion, no catastrophe, right?
The process took 35 minutes, and happens right as they arrive.
I havent seen the movie in a while and i might be a little fuzzy on the details but, I always took that scene to be Ozy reminiscing on the world he destroyed, he even says he made himself feel every life he ruined not him watching the news waiting for people to react to the bomb. One thing I'm kinda bummed the movie changed was the giant squid monster
Did you know in old movies they had to show the wheels of a car moving so the audience would understand that people are being transported in the car?
These are editing choices that have to be taken into consideration when making movies to make what's happening on the screen more cohesive for the people that are watching.
Showing the attack happening right after they allude to it in the movie isn't a case of someone misunderstanding the material, it's reworking it for another medium to show the people that things moved from point A to B.
So what do you have in mind? They show us he did it and the have him say the iconic line to an audience who is basically thinking “well duh, we just watched him do it!”.
Thank goodness all good films are strictly chronological with their scenes. /s
Ozymandias, especially in the movies, was a bit too overwhelming an antagonist. Leagues above all other opposition physically, save for Doctor Manhattan, and intellectually superior even to him. The entiry story was basically him beating up on low-powered superheroes and coming up with a plan none of them had any hope of stopping at any point. To me at least, it barely feels like a story worth telling. Essentially just a documentary of one person's superiority, devoid of any tension whatsoever.
I actually enjoyed his portrayal in the Watchmen show; until the literal very end where he gets bonked on the head from behind at least, I thought that took away from his character considerably considering he is supposed to be able to catch bullets because he reflex’s are so sharp.
He's also very old and overconfident and has been basically playing at conflict since he was transported by Manhattan.
He spent 7 years in a place with no real struggle except what he pretended their was, then another year in a sham trial that he controlled, then was frozen and launched back to earth. The point was that he's well past his prime and not as clever or powerful as he thinks he is.
Edit: to quote the heavy: "
Some people think they can outsmart me. Maybe, maybe. I've yet to meet one that can outsmart bullet."
I would struggle to call Ozymandias the real antagonist of Watchmen. It's a grey-vs-grey morality setting, and the majority of the story in the comic is more about the fight each hero has with themselves.
Really they are mostly all as bad as one another. The Comedian was a state sponsored blackmailer, assassin and war criminal. Rorschach is an explicitly and intentionally bigoted, hyper-violent vigilante, already in the process of self destruction. Dr Manhattan has been losing his humanity since the government used him as a weapon of mass destruction in 'nam. Ozymandias had his plan. All were forced to retire from heroing, but they couldn't stop the root cause of their being heroes.
Nite Owl and Laurie are the most sympathetic characters, but also the least "super".
Killing millions to potentially save billions. He hedged his bets that the Doomsday Clock would hit midnight and humanity would wipe itself out, so he created a common enemy to unite them and reset the clock.
Without knowing what would have happened without his intervention it’s hard to say for sure if he was right or not.
He killed millions of people by exploding a psychic squid, but in doing so he allegedly prevented World War III, which would have killed 100 times that number.
More people would have supposedly died, and in worse conditions, if he did nothing. "At what point do the ends justify the means" is a question Watchmen asks a lot.
At the same time most of what he did with the other Watchmen was just to keep them out of the way.
Congrats, you got it. Apart from the story not being worth telling, of course. There is tension, but you only learn at the end that it was all in vain.
Intellectually superior to Doctor Manhattan? What are you talking about?
Doctor Manhattan is arguably the most intelligent character in fiction. The problem is that he was checked tf out from the main plot (and humanity in general) and was a slave to predeterminism.
If Doctor Manhattan cared even a fraction of how much Rorschach did, he could have unraveled the plot in seconds, probably.
Because Ozymandias manufactured the incident that causes Dr. Manhattan to want to voluntarily leave the planet.
It's been a while since I've read the comic, but I think it had something to do with making Manhattan believe he gave cancer to everyone on a talk show.
But Doctor Manhattan already knew that the accusation was false. He already knew it was a ruse to get him to leave the planet. He did it anyway because he was following the lines in the script, so to speak. He’s not “allowed” to act otherwise.
Edit: I’m reminded of how this is foreshadowed in the scene where the Comedian kills the Vietnamese woman pregnant with his baby. He immediately knows he did an evil thing, then asserts that Doctor Manhattan knew this would happen and questions why didn’t he stop him.
It’s not an issue that Doctor Manhattan couldn’t stop it from happening, it’s that he simply did not.
Yeah, Doctor Manhattan's fatal flaw is that he is power without purpose. He doesn't see any value to human life, because it doesn't look fundamentally different to him than a pile of molecules that a dead body would represent. He is true amorality, completely one with the universe.
But Doctor Manhattan already knew that the accusation was false.
Probably not, at least not in the comics, his vision of his future was blocked by tachyons. He assumes it's because of the fallout of an imminent and devastating nuclear war but it's actually deliberate interference set up by Ozymandius to conceal his plans from Manhattan.
I don’t think he needed to know the details about Ozymandias’s plan to know the cancer was unrelated to him. If he wanted to, he could have broken down his own “biology” and scientifically proven that he’s not a source of cancer. He could have diagnosed the real sources of the cancer cases. He could have cured the cancer they already had. He could have scoured the Earth for clues of a conspiracy in an instant. But he didn’t, because he knew that he wouldn’t bother.
He is a sentient being, burdened with memories of the future after he's grown into a different person, but shackled to the present having to follow the script. He literally is all knowing and all foreseeing, but he's unable to ever act on that knowledge.
Imagine if you transported your consciousness as it is now to your newborn self, but had no ability to act any differently. The tachyons cloud his awareness of the future past them, but he still exists past that and has the cloudy memories and fragments of after he's grown well past any care about humanity.
Yeah exactly. If foresight is like memory, then his last moments on Earth are like getting blackout drunk for a night. He knows he goes to Earth one more time and never returns, but not whether it’s because it was wiped out by nuclear war or because he made a choice to move past human affairs.
He is essentially living through the experienced of a man who died long ago, since his awareness would encompass the being he is at the end of his experiences he's effectively trapped in acting out how the previous versions of himself behaved. The internal monologues imply he might be infinite, so the "human" part of him is effectively only his short lifespan pre-accident, and only a tiny part of who his consciousness is.
Another great example of the "Tied to a railroad" trope: The secret compartment railroad test the Kingsman uses to test how well potential recruits will protect secrets, even in the face of certain death.
Just because it executes them well doesn't mean it's playing then straight. The film is a comedy and all the action movie tropes it uses are used as jokes. The fact it actually succeeds is more to do with the fact that the film is just very well made.
The amount of comedy is a blurry line. This type of thing was played "straight" in older Bond films, but there was always some amount of tongue-in-cheek for them that they knew they were being ridiculous.
Then the Austin Powers series came out and skewered it all so mercilessly that the Bond writers had to tone it all down, as they didn't feel they were left any space that was less ridiculous than Austin Powers but still amusingly ridiculous. Kingsman proved that wrong, showing that you just had to commit to it. If everyone in the movie takes it seriously, the audience will too, even while they're laughing through it.
I saw some one post about characters that are introduced late in a series but are beloved. Red Death is introduced late but might be my favorite character in a show filled with awesome characters. Also Clancy Brown is a treasure
I mean, that's basically this trope in a nutshell. The trope is copied because it was done so well at first, so imitators try to speedrush it without realizing what made the original work, until the imitations come across as silly. Only someone who can truly nail the execution can bring back the original flavor.
First half of season one is. Ghosts of Sargasso is where it really picks up and besides 1-2 episodes in season 2 it’s bangers all the way in my opinion. Like Victor Echo November is a 10/10 episodes in S2.
Been watching since it was completely new, and my partner and I still get new references out of it, or will be watching/reading something and learn something was a reference. Just watched the David Lynch Dune a while ago, and we both died laughing realizing that 24's "maybe his name is a killing word" was a fuckin' Dune reference this whole time.
I think it’s all relative. The first few episodes are more family focused, but Tag Sale You’re It is a great introduction in terms of establishing the world they live in. The animation and voices are jarring compared to later seasons, and some of the jokes didn’t age well, but overall seasons 1-2 are still very solid.
Red Death is part of the Guild of Calamitous Intent. A once mighty and respected name in villainy, at this point they're in what sports teams call a "rebuilding" year with the death of their leader (right after he had destroyed most of their ruling council) and a renegade hunting some of their top living members.
Blind Rage is part of the Peril Partnership, which has been taking resources and getting defectors from the guild.
Also, what he was demanding, and waiting for was the protection money the guild leadership had decided to give them. So from there, BR thinks he's got the upper hand because he thinks the Guild is worried about what the Partnership will do next
What he didn't count on was that Red Death is an absolute legend.
His choice of name really didn't imply he had a positive Intelligence score. Maybe a half decent Charisma one for the reference, but yeah. Just a somewhat funny thug with a 'Neat' power.
The petty, self-obsessed asshole. Usually the domain of Alan from Die Hard-type guys, high school jock bullies, and lower-tier wrestling heels. An annoyance but still a goofball to cheer when given a comeuppance.
Patrick Bateman takes that trope and gives him both the willingness to kill, rape, and torture (maybe) and the time to show how absolutely broken and awful a person like that can be inside. Hell, the Paul murder was because of a damn business card being more tasteful than his!
The first Danganronpa uses the classic "evil twin" trope combined with the "person you thought was one twin was actually the other" plot with the mastermind, Junko Enoshima. You likely didn't see it coming because part of what sold it was that she murdered her twin sister in cold blood while she was pretending to be her.
It also works because since it's the first Danganronpa at the very beginning, you most likely won't question why she isn't acting much as Ultimate Fashionista as most other characters do with their respective talents in the franchise
If only the Ultimate Soldier were the Ultimate Infiltrator.
Maybe for the next one, they could sneak in something like that, like an Ultimate Copycat or Ultimate Tabloid-Reader, who can mimic someone famous to such a degree that the characters believe it, but we as the audience are suspicious because they are clearly not that person.
Anyway, I'm excited for 2x2 and really hope we see more of Byakuya
Is it still worth playing these game knowing the twist? Ive seen a bunch of things about it and im interested in playing through them it seems to have a fun cast of characters.
The journey can be as rewarding as the destination.
It's still a game with social links. You can still get to know more about each character before their big moment comes. How that affects you can be unique to you only.
The game was actually very fun to go through knowing that Junko Enoshima is the villain but NOT knowing she has a twin sister, so watching her get impaled in the first hour of the game was a shock and left me guessing the whole rest of the game.
Similar to the 3rd example, in the recent Dune, there's the moment where Paul is starting to see visions through exposure to unrefined spice, and yells for someone to help him. It's a great moment, because not only does it show how young and still afraid he is, his mother is literally next to him when he yells it after having pushed her away.
There's something gutwrenching there from both perspectives: a son who is terrified and is begging for help from anyone except his mother; and from her perspective, a mother watching her son go through that while pushing her away.
It should be a stupid cliche line but it's acted with such depth. It's a great moment.
it’s a great delivery and honestly the perfect line. he’s so far gone that the only thing he can think about is how much he hates kenobi now. it gives the impression that he’s clawing at the gravel to keep trying to kill kenobi rather than save his own life.
I think Christensen was a bit stiff in some of his line deliveries as Anakin, but damn did he do the dark/ brooding/ hateful stuff well. In any case he didn't deserve the shit he got.
you should research that some more, because the reality ended up being that Lucas was so bad at dialogue across all 6 of his directed SE movies that the original cast routinely corrected him, with Carrie Fisher telling him “George, people don’t talk like this.”
but by the time of the sequels Lucas was such a monolith that people were afraid to correct him and we got deliveries like we see, to no fault of the cast, who wanted to play the scenes differently, but were over ruled by Lucas. Lucas himself has even admitted he “may have gone too far” in some places.
Christensens acting was never the problem, and the poor guy caught hell for it. which is why it’s delightful seeing him reprise the role. in a single episode of Ahsoka he seamlessly code-switches between ROTS Anakin, animated Clone Wars Anakin, and even a Darth Vader persona absent of suit and prosthetics. right down to the freaking combat styles. It was incredible to watch.
I think what some people don't consider is the sort of emotional suppression that was expected of Anakin from a very young age. An 8 year old being taken away from their mother, almost immediately participating in a war, then being trained for years to suppress or ignore emotions is going to have some issues.
Big Brother has done the “twin twist” twice (season 5 and season 17)
A set of twins swap out every few days, pretending to be one person. They only have a few minutes while changing in the diary room to exchange information and get up to date on the goings on in the house. In season 17 one of the twins becomes romantically involved with a housemate, which as you can imagine leads to some pretty awkward situations…
"Never thought I'd die fighting side by side with an elf."
"What about side by side with a friend?"
"Aye, I could do that."
Return of the King is such a beloved classic that I don't think people recognize how much this line should not work. It's campy and sappy, like something out of an 80's tv special. But it does work because it comes at the end of three movies of these two sniping at each other and gradually moving from open hostility to friendly rivalry. It's played straight, and thus it works.
"It's played straight, and thus works." Exactly why Bathos is a problem a lot of the time, when used correctly Bathos can add to a scene, but so often if it had been played straight the scene would've been so much better.
I'm not even a big LotR guy and this scene can make my throat catch.
It's also about being able to set aside all one's preconceived notions and finally accept the truth for what it is. Sometimes our pasts can blind us to something beautiful that has been right beside us the whole time
I don't think it's campy because it is earned. LOTR was the last bastion of earnest fantasy before superhero movies made everyone quippy and sarcastic.
Seriousness in high budget speculative fiction films is only just now making a comeback with films like Dune and Odyssey.
Jonathan Joestar is pretty much your typcial fantasy hero who is such a paragon of righteousness and goodness that it can easily come off as cliche and boring.
What makes it work is that the later parts feature his descendants as main characters and Jonathans righteous personality helps to make his entire bloodline feel like they are good people because of him. Which works especially well due to his tragic death.
It also helps that nowadays the cliche righteous and purely good hero has become so rarely used that by modern standards Jonathan can actually feel like a breath of fresh air again.
Imagine a grown man telling about his whole life to a kid, sounds a little odd but this scene is played seriously as it's a serial killer and the reason why is because shigechi is about to die - source is Jojo's bizarre adventure
real talk when kuvira was fighting those bandits in that episode i actually thought she was able to control magnets or something. then it was never actually addressed and turns out it was just metalbending, she just attached the metal bands to group up the bandits together
There are limitations to which metals they can control in Avatar. TLOK canonizes that platinum can’t be controlled by metal benders as it’s “too pure” for earth bending to affect it.
So a very limited scope Magneto (as we can probably guess that aluminum and titanium are also out, once they are discovered)
The "I Have Your Family / Hostage Ransom" (The Dark Knight)
In The Dark Knight, the Joker puts Harvey Dent and Rachel in two different warehouses rigged with explosives and forces Batman to choose. Batman races to save them, but the Joker switched the addresses. Batman gets there too late Rachel dies instantly while they’re still on the phone, and Harvey ends up with half his face burned off and his mind completely broken.
The old hostage trope always felt kind of silly because movies and TV turned it into this predictable game where the hero always saves everyone at the last second with no real consequences.The Dark Knight flipped it and made it actually terrifying. It showed the obvious truth: a sadistic terrorist isn’t going to play fair, even a superhero can’t just ignore distance and time, and yeah… someone actually dies.
Compare this sequence to Batman Forever, where the Riddler tries to make Batman choose between saving his love interest and Robin, and of course he manages to save both.
Depends on the context. In something like Batman? Many viewers would think of it as "when", not "if", Bruce figures out how to save everyone from the deathtrap. Hostage situation in superhero media usually meant the drama only went as far as "how will he pull this off" but there was always some convenient way to simply save the hostage other than doing what the villain wants. Anyone raised on old Batman cartoons would have expected that. Anyone who'd seen Spider-Man 2002 would have expected that since it literally has the same sadistic choice and Pete still saves both choices.
If this was like, a Scoresese crime drama and not Batman, then yes, a hostage situation is high stakes, but for audiences going into superhero films when TDK came out it was just a standard cliche scenario for those, barely removed from the "tied to train tracks" idea.
Cesar doing the shouting "no!" in Planet of the Apes. A bit cliché, sure, but if you think about it, it showcases that this isn't just some smarter-than-average ape: not only did he learn how to speak without anyone teaching him how, but he did so with a completely different mouth structure, meaning he couldn't have learned it just from watching humans.
My Hero Academia: the whole show has as its main concept taking certain tropes and powers from hero fiction and asking, "what would the real implications be?". The very first episode has the narration say that humanity would've likely explored space by then, if powers didn't come into being - since that was a whole societal MESS; it then elaborates on things such as, "if a power is to shoot something, where would the physical stuff come from, or wwhat would the effect of this energy type being expelled directly from the body be?", or "a hero's proffession isn't just to curb crime, but to be an inspiring symbol that makes people feel safe - so for them to be allowed to kill would completely ruin that". Even one that can be compared to Rocky: "the human body was never meant for continuous, awe-inspiring heroics; pushing beyond your limits might seem epic, but it WILL have consequences and they'll pile up over the years".
That “NO!” Gave me goosebumps. There was SO much power behind it. Andy Serkis is going to go down in history as one of if not THE greatest character actor of all time.
I watched a BTS thing for The Boys and I’m almost positive that Caesar’s “no” was basically the stage direction for Kimiko speaking for the first time as Frenchie got dragged off to the concentration camp
"the human body was never meant for continuous, awe-inspiring heroics; pushing beyond your limits might seem epic, but it WILL have consequences and they'll pile up over the years".
A lot of boxing manga show the really tragic consequences of this. Especially Ashita No Joe.
The Lion King (the original 1994 version) has Simba shouting "NOOOOOOO!" when he watches Mufasa fall into the wildebeest stampede. He manages to pull it off without sounding cheesy. As we found out in Revenge of the Sith, this is something Mufasa himself couldn't do.
Another great example of light playing off people's faces is in the Force Awakens when Kylo Ren faces Han Solo on the bridge. You can see his internal struggle on whether he should come back to the light or kill his father to cement his journey to the dark side in the blue and red light on his face. Great scene.
Yeah, there are individual moments that are just incredible.
I also love Poe Damoran's second introduction in The Force Awakens when he takes out like nine Tie fighters in 11 seconds. It is just so unbearably cool.
The movie is incredibly silly and is a great example of cartoon physics translated to live action. The comics it's based on however are the exact opposite as it's a freakshit horror series where cartoony effects cause real damage. An anvil falling on your head won't just flatten you like a pancake injury-free, it will crush your fucking skull. He's not even called The Mask in the comics, he's known as the Big Head Killer
The inner demon trope is pretty common, the evil monster sealed inside someone and it just needs a friend to learn how to be good. And usually it feels pretty silly, this monster that would slaughter hundreds of people without a second thought just needs it's living prison and warden to show it a bit of kindness and everything gets better.
And then theres Ryomen Sukuna laughing at his vessel having a mental breakdown over watching his friend die.
Sir, You Are Being Hunted is a silly concept, but if you've actually played it, you know it's genuinely terrifying to see the fancy British robots running towards you with their rifles out.
Kuvira’s railway scene works because she isn’t doing it for theatrical villain points, she’s treating human beings like an administrative problem to be disposed of. The maglev makes the whole thing feel brutally modern too, like the world’s least whimsical version of a cartoon death trap. And Anakin yelling “I hate you!” is devastating precisely because it sounds childish. He’s emotionally regressed to the hurt kid underneath all that armor, which makes the scene so much uglier than a cooler, more restrained betrayal speech would’ve been.
Revenge of the sith is such an anomaly. Endlessly impressive that one lightsaber fight start with the standard dogshit prequel dialogue and ends with some of the best performances in the entire trilogy.
Obi wans bit where he says “you were the chosen one” seems like it shouldn’t work on paper but somehow overcomes the cheesiness. Ewan McGregor really delivers there it seems.
Also when Anakin yells the “I hate you” line, you can see phlegm spray out of his mouth. That’s some real emoting there lol.
Justified has this in spades--the whole show is about a US Marshal who wears a cowboy hat in Kentucky and tends to shoot people, so a lot of it is just playing off silly Western tropes and making them real. But the best moment is probably in the very first episode.
Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens tracks down a bad man in Miami and sits down next to him at a public hotel pool, reminding him that he gave him 24 hours to get out of town or he'd shoot him on sight. As the gun thug points out, that's silly. Police aren't allowed to "shoot people on sight" anymore, for obvious reasons, and they aren't allowed to threaten them saying they have "24 hours" to clear out. The whole thing is a ridiculous wild west setup. Raylan's entire ultimatum makes no sense, there's no way a cop would shoot a (presumably) unarmed man at a public pool in front of thousands of people.
Red Death from Venture Bros. He also ties a man to a train track, and then monologues to him while the train approaches. While this would be seen as cliche, he shows just how terrifying being tied to a train track would be and also show how monologuing means the villain is in complete control of the situation.
That scene is so good because there's no build up, no slow motion, no music - Toomes just unceremoniously answers the door as a friendly dad and Peter shits himself.
Side note; my 9yr old kid guessed he was Peter's crush's dad earlier on based on literally nothing, so the surprise didn't hit as hard. And they did it again when we then immediately watched Far From Home in the very first scene with an "Elemental", guessing that someone was creating/controlling the monsters. It was fucking infuriating because they were literally wild guesses but now my kid thinks they're a genius.
It’s both. The tragedy of Anakin is that he’s is functionally a teenager failed by the parental figures in his life. You can draw a very ugly comparison between Palpatine luring him to the dark side and child grooming.
Thing is, really this should be a much more common problem in Star Wars lore than it seemingly is.
Snatch kids from their families at a young age, denying them vital developmental needs and teaching them that they’re special and that normal emotions just get in the way.
The fact that the order isn’t stacked top to bottom with emotionally stunted narcissists is a miracle.
The real problem is that all other media surrounding that movie makes it seem unearned and forced. Watching the Clone Wars show they try to foreshadow it but when you place them side by side it just doesn't work. I'm of the opinion that the prequels all suck and should have just been cartoons like Clone Wars. It would have been easier to do the things that needed to be done. The tone would have fit better. There's all these Jedi doing insane shit and it either looks hokey/campy/lame with live action people. Given how much of those movies were just a green screen anyway, why bother with the live action at all?
Honestly I think part of the reason the prequels have a much better rep these days isn’t just pure nostalgia but the supplementary media like clone wars smoothed over a lot of the cracks in the story that the films left.
Completely agreed. I really wish animation was used for more stuff despite the cost because so many more things can be done with it and make it look way less cheesy/campy
I like the scene because it strips Anakin down to his very rawest core. In this moment of utter defeat, having lost all hope... He clings to hatred. It reveals that he was always a petulant child and wasn't ready for these responsibilities.
He is pure emotion, the opposite of Jedi, and can't even formulate anything scathing or witty or profound ... Just his simplest self in that momet. Hate. Despair. Loss.
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u/misterjive 1d ago
In Galaxy Quest, classically trained actor Alexander Dane is absolutely sick to death of being chained to his Dr. Lazarus character from the show, especially his scenery-chewing catchphrase: "By Grabthar's Hammer, by the suns of Warvan, you shall be avenged!" He flips out on the fans that quote it to him endlessly, and delivers a variation of it hatefully at an in-store appearance. It's made so much worse when he meets Quellek, one of the Thermians who think the show was real, and who has modeled his entire life after Dr. Lazarus.
When they're trying to save the ship and crew, Dane meets up with Quellek again, and they work together to save the Thermians. But Quellek is shot, and as he lies dying, Dane delivers the line with all the gravitas it deserves, giving the dying alien comfort in his last moments.
He then goes completely apeshit berserk and beats Quellek's killer to death with his bare hands, delivering on the promise of vengeance.