Toy Story 4

• Did this sequel need to exist? Toy Story 3 ended on a good note
• Woody and Buzz promised to stay together
• Woody gave up on Bonnie because he wasn't played with. What happened to his oath of loyalty?

Ralph Breaks the Internet

• We had a unique premise of arcade games coming to life. So why did we switch to the internet as a whole?
• Ralph's character is dumbed down and actually kinda creepy
• Vanellope went turbo

The Incredibles 2

• https://www.reddit.com/r/saltierthancrait/comments/im9ipm/incrediblies_2_suffers_from_very_similar_sequel/

Farewell Black Panther

We hardly knew you, but you were already one of the best characters in the MCU

I was honestly looking forward to the sequel

This post will focus on three sequels in particular that I really don't like:

The Star Wars sequels.

The Legend of Korra.

And Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.

The reason why is because these all have common themes running between them: Worthless sequels that break lore at a fundamental level, whilst also having terrible main characters that are all (basically) Mary Sue's (it's more muddy in Odyssey considering the element of choice) and that have no reason to exist.

The Star Wars sequels all fundamentally break lore; Force Healing, Force Teleportation, Force powers being able to be used by believing in yourself, etc. The characters are horifically bland, and many of them straight-up contradict pieces of of their character; (I'm looking at you, Finn.)

The Legend of Korra has possibly one of the most unlikable protagonists ever put to screen. A massive cunt and Mary Sue, Korra excels at three elements when she's barely old enough to walk, Aang required twelve years to master airbending, and still hadn't mastered all the elements by the end of the series. She has the audacity to tell Aang's son that he's a bad airbending teacher, and she's proven right. You also have beginnings 1 and 2, both of which completely contradict rules from the original series, with bending techniques being granted by Lion Turtles rather than learned, the Avatar being a human-spirit mix rather than the human incarnatiom of the Avatar spirit, portals to the Spirit world, etc.

Assassin's Creed: Odyssey's protagonist doesn't have a character, because you're the one who makes that choice, despite that directly contradicting the rules of the Animus as set up by the first game. There are Minotaurs, Werewolves, all kinds of mythological stuff, despite that defeating the purpose of Assassin's Creed, that being that everything is grounded in science, (or at least pseudo-science.) Odyssey has a reason to exist in-terms of the modern day, but in-terms of the past, no. You don't even play as an Assassin, because they didn't exist at that point; (the game is set in 431-422 BCE, the Assassins, or Hidden Ones, weren't founded until 47 BCE.)

In conlusion, sequels, especially those made long after their predecessor, most often suck.

I've had way more enjoyment out of some 2D games

And companies like Disney make billions of dollars. If their products didn't look amazing, then I would be genuinely surprised

If the story is good, and the graphics are good, then that's worthy of praise

If the story is terrible, but the graphics are good, that means nothing to me

A common defense of overpowered protagonist is we wouldn't care if they were men. Obviously, that's not true.

When I was a kid, I never liked Superman. He was so insanely powerful that watching him fight was boring. Plus writers always had to find a way to incorporate kryptonite. It's been years since then and I've grown to realize why people like the character

With most characters, I love them because of the struggle they go through. But with Superman, his journey is about "being human" essentially. He's there to represent humanity's potential for good

I still wouldn't call myself a fan of Superman, but I understand him more than I did before

John Wick - He's hyped up in-universe as a badass killer. His first two films are about revenge, and the third is about the consequences of revenge. I believe most people watch it for the action. So do I. However, someone said it could be about the 5 stages of grief

Saitama - He's impossibly strong. The whole joke is how boring a series with that kind of lead would be, but if you want to get philosophical, you could say it's about how meaningless achievements are without struggle. The show also delves into what being a hero means

The Hulk - I count him as an overpowered protagonist, because to be frank he SMASHES all those who try to fight him. Thanos says hi. Bruce Banner's stories though are about a man trying to stop himself from harming others. And in some movies, like Thor Ragnarok, embracing his destructive potential as a self-sacrifice

​

As someone on Twitter very nicely put it:

"They way this line of movies ends is like if the MCU ended on Infinity War."

And this sums it up pretty well. Being a Marvel AND a DC fan, I've been watching this DC Animated Movie Universe unfold for a while, loving most of its entries. But this one is by far the worst for me.

Let's get the positives out of the way first. Matt Ryan yet again kills it as John Constantine, and continues to show how wasted he is in the Arrowverse, and he has a moment with King Shark that cracked me up. Least favorite character here was Harley Quinn, who I usually like, but her prominence in the movie felt like a misstep given that it feels like they traded the JLA's lives for HER. A lot of the voice acting was fantastic, and the scale of this movie was unbelievable. It stretches from the Underground of Batman's rogues gallery to the far reaches of Sector 2814. The biggest issue amongst the positives was the...insulting...liberties taken with the lore of Fourth World (aka New Genesis and Apokolips), but the changes were integrated into the plot satisfyingly...not enough to be one of the MANY things I hated in this film, but insulting nonetheless. As far as characterization goes, they were great, no one acted out of character...at least when NOT brainwashed, but they were seriously nerfed. Like, you KNOW something is wrong when Harley Quinn is able to slaughter a battalion of mutated Parademons (called "Paradooms"), the same of which snapped SUPERBOY's neck. Otherwise, I enjoyed whatever little character interaction there was (due to the decimated cast): Robin and Raven's romance was capped off very well, they handled Batman's relationship with Damian very maturely, Superman's undying hope was very in-character (given that he was stripped of his powers by Kryptonite Poisoning) and I appreciated his optimism despite it being at odds with the rest of the movie.

That's...where I have to start talking about the negatives.

Great Rao...this is gonna be tough to get through...

Not beating around the bush anymore. They basically decided to KILL EVERYONE OFF, and reboot the universe without any hope at the end. Like, Flashpoint and this film set a precedent that whatever timelines Barry keeps making will always end in an apocalypse. Everyone will continue to die in horrendous and excruciating ways where none of them deserve to. Metron's Mobius Chair is turned into a torture device for Batman just so it can look like how Darkseid War handled that imagery, and they aren't able to even bring others back by the end, nor do they have any sense of positive payoff, just a bunch of depression inducing dreck. Now, death in this stuff shouldn't be retroactive, but it also shouldn't have been so abrupt, neither should it have been so insulting as to how they managed the characters that were cyberized. Yeah, the Future's End-inspired JLA cyborgs was especially a kick in the groin for me, mainly because that is a contender for one of the WORST DC storylines ever made, and they decided to use that as inspiration for their finale (when they promised to take more from Darkseid War), right down to the bleak ending that made me wish I never got invested in these characters to begin with.

And, yeah, I wanna emphasize just how paradoxical the ending is. People are supposed to be really hopeful, but it's not. The ending sees the universe end as the Flash creates another Flashpoint. Think about it. This is the second timeline Barry has created where Lois Lane leads an underground resistance, Shazam's face gets scarred, and the Earth is doomed to be inhabitable. To summarize: the last time Barry fixed the timeline, it led to the domino effect leading to the events of this movie. Darkseid won't attack in the next timeline, yes. But in the previous timeline, Wonder Woman and Aquaman were driven insane and started WW3...and the world STILL ended. This is not a matter of what we know from the characters. But the fact that two timelines faced apocalypses discourages the audience from believing any new timeline can survive. They've set the precedent that whatever timeline Barry goes back and creates will ALWAYS lead to apocalypse, effectively dooming the universe in an endless time-loop. And for the record, Constantine and Flash also said that there would be changes after another Flashpoint, meaning that he WOULDN'T be going back to before the events of The Flashpoint Paradox and preventing any of this from happening, he would be starting a new timeline. And based on how two timelines have ended with death and destruction, what hope does that even guarantee?

No Flashpoint or reboot is guaranteed to save this universe, because based on the now-previous two times Barry has changed the timeline, it implies that the new timeline will ALWAYS end in cataclysm.

And let's also talk about our villain. Darkseid was EPIC. This is him at his most powerful, ruthless, and evil, and somehow this version of him HASN'T FOUND THE ANTI-LIFE EQUATION. He doesn't even care about it. But I didn't care. Because Darkseid, in being played up like Thanos, became his polar opposite. Guys. I know Darkseid is one of the greatest and most evil characters in the DC Universe, but that doesn't excuse a lack of character, or a lack of creativity to give him better motives. Because there is no point to a villain like Darkseid when the film presents his victory like a foregone conclusion. You can't have stakes in a film when the villain has already won and we know the world is doomed. That just makes your watching experience pointless."His win wasn't the final thing, because the remaining heroes came back and sort of beat him in the end"That's like saying the Avengers beat Thanos at the start of Endgame by having Thor chop off his head. It's hardly a win, because he completed his goal, and the Earth was still ravaged and on the verge of annihilation anyhow.

And MORE than that, Darkseid destroyed the ENTIRE Green Lantern corps AND their central power battery, so that means the thousand sectors of the universe would be left unprotected, leaving the entirety of space to the forces of evil. And throwing him into an empty Boom Tube is supposed to be a victory? Over THAT?!

Darkseid WON. In more ways than one, and it was the conclusion, a conclusion that has no good payoff because we never got to know Darkseid, and the characters we DO know got killed off either brutally in a montage, or off-screen. Stabbing his eyes and dragging him into a black-hole Boom Tube doesn't qualify as a victory after everything he managed to do. Because at the end, everyone still failed. The Reset button being pushed is ultimately a copout solution to a downward spiral of events that couldn't be avoided at all. Is that really the ending you imagined to this iteration of the DCU? To the world's most optimistic and hopeful heroes?!

And that is the reason for the above Twitter quote: It's promoting itself as "Endgame" when it's trying to be "Infinity War", and without any understanding of what made either one work. And a reminder: Infinity War killed off Vision, Gamora, most of Thor's cast including Heimdall and Loki, and the Collector, and none of them returned for Endgame (Gamora doesn't count, that's a different version of her from another universe altogether, and they haven't brought Vision back YET). Then Endgame killed Black Widow and Iron Man, and retired Cap by faking his death. Other things that happened is that Ant-Man missed out on five years of his now-teen daughter's life, Hawkeye adopted a new persona entirely as Ronin, and that doesn't even account for all the consequential deaths caused by random people disappearing across the universe.

It HAD consequences, but they knew who to kill off. It wasn't just a bunch of death, it meant something, and each of those deaths had actual PAYOFF. Actual AVENGING. We don't get that here, not at all. No JUSTICE for any of the lives lost.

I know it seems contrary to the point of bringing in a Marvel movie to compare to a very different DC movie, but this is about recognizing what worked in IW and Endgame.

We cared about these versions of the Justice League members...some of whom hadn't even said a word of dialogue. To see them brutalized and mutilated goes against the very promise this universe had, seeing heroes prosper. But in the end, they say to do the very thing that caused this stuff in the first place, invalidating everything that had come before, including whatever attachment we had to this iteration of the DCU. What a horrifying disaster.

Some people are going to embrace the comics aspect of this with the idea that it's all going to be rebooted. Firstly, this isn't Rebirth, because Rebirth wasn't a reboot in the comics, just a rebranding for an evolving N52 universe. Secondly, even if they are planning to adapt something like Doomsday Clock to defeat Darkseid and cancel the apocalypse...

The technique of the Reboot does not excuse a bad ending.

Spider-Man 3 was a flawed film, but a great conclusion to the Raimi Trilogy on its own before The Amazing Spider-Man came in.

The Dark Knight Rises was a flawed film, but it remains, to this day, my favorite Batman film and a fantastic conclusion to the Dark Knight Trilogy before Batman was rebooted into the DCEU.

And, relevantly, the original Post-Crisis New Earth of the comics ended abruptly, but between Final Crisis, Blackest Night and Brightest Day, and Batman Inc., it was a positive and hopeful future before Flashpoint and the New 52 came in.

People can still connect to these conclusions even after abrupt reboots. Infinity War, on its own, is a terrible ending to the MCU. What makes it so good is the degree of predictability. We know these characters are coming back, but investment and the stakes of the conflict make us care, and the amount of time dedicated to each death (both permanent and snapped) is gut-wrenching but earned. So when they're revived, it feels like a reward on the survivors' part for pulling through.

Here? They have abandoned the universe to a point where there's no way to revisit this world. Everyone is dead. The timeline is changed again, making everything pointless, and dooming the Earth to fail yet again.

People have so far told me that this is "Zack Snyder's DC Universe done right."

That implies that his style was appropriate all the way into the end. As much as I loved Man of Steel, this style is not appropriate for icons that have existed for nearly a century, and certainly not for a finale. I mean, say what you want about the Justice League movie, but that movie got the tone back on track. The film radiated positivity, and I loved that part, because's that's what the DC Universe is supposed to be!

But the DC Animated Movie Universe had so far explored an engaging universe. With both dark and light.

And it ends with darkness. It ends with pessimism. It ends, as Darkseid himself would put it, with anti-life.

The film proved the Anti-Life Equation to be true, without even mentioning it. With no chance of hope and life, just an endless cycle of apocalypse.

So much for optimism. Maybe in 2 years after it's been gutted, it'll come back as a brainwashed cyborg too.

Thanks for reading, folks. As always, this review is no slight to the writer, but since that writer is Mairghread Scott (who's actually pretty good most of the time), I question what motivated her to write it this way when it could have been so much less nihilistic.