The overreliance on the hero's journey seems like a better criticism than of sci-fi/comic book movies for being that per se. There's plenty of interesting sci-fi that's not that, and of course plenty of comic books that aren't either.
Hero's journey is pretty difficult to avoid in the superhero genre though, for obvious reasons.
It's driven more or less entirely by the special effects and the charm of Chris Pratt; the characters are poorly drawn at best; there's little in the way of plot or character development; and at times, the movie seems downright misogynistic.
Frankly, I'm mystified as to why it's doing so well. It's nothing we haven't seen before, and done better to boot.
Quote:
If Universal can mint money with Furious 7 and Jurassic World in just three months, I would love to imagine that the studio’s internal reaction would be a sense of financial security coupled with confidence that would allow it to take some modest gambles on passion projects and compelling mid-budget movies. But it is just as easy, and more familiar, to imagine a studio saying, “We’re not in that business anymore” — something that I hear publicly almost never, but privately with regularity and bitter resignation.
That attitude is endemic at studios right now, and its ripple effect is dire, because even aside from the fact that low- to mid-budget movies often define Oscar season, they are essential for directors. A system in which films like Looper or Insomnia are less and less possible is a system that is failing its audience and its talent.
This.
Except that while I agree Looper was a pretty original movie by Hollywood standards, I don't think it was a good movie. In fact, I thought it was pretty stupid, with logical inconsistencies and plot holes you could drive a battleship through.
But that's just my
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
Then I really started thinking about how the male gaze is a privilege perpetuator. In the Roger Ebert documentary [“Life Itself”], he talks about films being an empathy machine, so whoever the protagonist is, they’re going to have empathy and when men are making movies about men, they’re creating more empathy for the male gaze. So the male gaze, because the men are subjects, necessarily divides us, divides women into either/or —the madonna or the whore, the slut or the good girl or the many, many ways in which women are divided to be seen as objects when the male character is the subject. That divide is kind of a wound that’s really harming our entire planet right now.