The DC Cinematic Universe vs. the World: Aquaman

It’s our 100th post! If you were to ask me what the bog standard Fnord post would be, I’d claim it’d be a queer-tinted anti-capitalist reading of a Sarah Jane Adventures episode. There’d be Doctor Who, kids programming, political leftism and queer theory all mashed into one – me and Dan in a nutshell. In this regard, having our 100th post be a 2,000 word defense of the hyper-macho Aquaman probably seems a bit off-brand. Then again, I think by this point another significant part of the blog is our inability to do any of it quite right. As such, let’s have this oddly deferred milestone stand as a cracked mirror celebration of both our successes and failures. It was either this or another review of A Dogs Purpose.

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Written by Tom

Batman vs. Superman and Suicide Squad set up an aesthetic for the DCEU to follow. Both became critical punching bags. Justice League ran away from the aesthetic as fast as possible. Wonder Woman showed that the DCEU would be better off abandoning the aesthetic. Team Titans GO! to the Movies showed that the aesthetic would be better off abandoning the DCEU. The DC high-ups gave up and started rebuilding the franchise from the ground up. And stuck in the middle of this was Aquaman, the final movie of the DCEU as Zac Synder imagined it and the first released into a post-Synder DCEU landscape. Which, like Man of Steel, made it into the film whose main job was defining the DCEU going forwards, despite this never being the intention at any point during its production.

For what it’s worth, Aquaman does a much better job of the task than Man of Steel does. This is mostly because it tries to be fun while Man of Steel… doesn’t. Man of Steel is very much a film which belongs to the time when The Dark Knight was the best superhero movie ever made. This means that everything is very gritty, greyscale and serious. Of course, this is then filtered through the aesthetics of Zack Snyder, the man who took the pitch of “low-scale character study of Superman” and used it as an excuse to level cities and snap necks. This gave the film a critical edge and resulted in its weird self-destructive campness – there is the feeling that Synder doesn’t want to be directing a Superman film and is putting his effort into breaking it from the inside out – but it also resulted in a film which focussed its audience on its flaws, parading the shortcomings of its Superman around as the point of the exercise, its best and worst qualities becoming the exact same things. The fact that Man of Steel is a bunch of competing aesthetics revolving around a character no-one likes is both the point of the movie and the reason why few people think it’s good. No wonder a lot of people got turned off by it.

Aquaman and Wonder Woman represent two very different ways of trying to make this aesthetic likable. Wonder Woman‘s way is to try to make a film that’s actually good as opposed to making a very good film about how bad it is. The issue with this, as we’ve discussed, is that what most consider to be “good” by the standards of superhero movies is very limiting. So Aquaman picks the opposite tack: it throws away the question of quality entirety in favor of being fun.

The DC Cinematic Universe vs. the World: Teen Titans GO! To The Movies

Written by Tom

The DCEU was beginning to splinter before our eyes. Batman vs Superman and Suicide Squad had been critical punching bags. Justice League got released to complete indifference. Wonder Woman became a hit by rejecting everything that had defined the DCEU up to that point. Things weren’t good. Cinematic Universes were turning out to be damp squibs anyway. Despite the large number of them which popped up in the wake of Marvel’s, few had managed any real traction. Audiences didn’t like cinematic universes, they liked Marvel films, interlinked or not. At this point, it must’ve been tempting to give up on the whole thing. So they did. Sorta.

They didn’t give up on it completely. They were still to release Aquaman. Birds of Prey was to feature Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn from Suicide Squad. Wonder Woman had a direct sequel in production. James Gunn was nabbed for the universe as soon as he got fired from Marvel’s. But it was nowhere near as structured as it once was. Instead of trying to dictate what the audience wanted before giving it to them, DC’s new strategy was to throw things on screen and develop whatever proved popular. It’s notable that Harley Quinn’s getting her own film while the Flash and Cyborg have found themselves largely forgotten.

More than this, DC started commissioning movies that had nothing to do with the DCEU. Todd Phillip’s upcoming film Joker has nothing to do Jared Leto, for instance. And then, between the release of Justice League and Aquaman, we got this: a cinema outing for the TV show Team Titans GO!

The DC Cinematic Universe vs the World: Suicide Squad

My “In Defense of Doctor Who Series 11” posts on “Thin Ice” and “Knock Knock” are proving way longer and more complicated than I thought they’d be. To give me more time to work on them, let’s instead resurrect my “Zac Synder vs. the World” series (in which I argued that Zac Synder’s films in the DC Cinematic Universe were brilliant movies which weren’t aimed at any of the audiences most likely to watch them) and apply the same approach I developed for that series to the rest of the DCEU. We start with a doozy:

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Written by Tom

Much like Justice League, the fact that Suicide Squad‘s production was an incompetent dumpster fire was well known even before it hit cinemas. Indeed, the main thing the film is known for is being terribly made. It’s become a warning for film students first, an actual movie second.

Nevertheless, let’s recap the basics. Zack Snyder had finished Man of Steel and was hard at work on Batman vs Superman, both of which were over-the-top deconstructionist grimdark movies which took the narratives they promised and actively refused to do any of them right. Given that this was how the DCEU apparently worked now, the idea of making a Suicide Squad film became the obvious way to continue the series. The idea of “a superhero film where the heroes are villains” was the DC modus operandi of “superhero films done wrong” made literal. The Suicide Squad comics featured a lot of iconic characters mixing with characters the film could hopefully make iconic, making the film high on marketing potential and an easy thing to spin-off from. And all of these concepts had recently been used by Marvel in the highly successful film Guardians of the Galaxy. In short, Suicide Squad was DC’s most obvious way of taking the series aesthetic created by Zack Snyder and turning it into a film which would become a sure-fire hit. Give the project to David Ayer, a well-versed director used to over-the-top action flicks, and what could possibly go wrong?

Well, for starters the DC Cinematic Universe was already years behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe before DC had started even thinking about retroactively making Man of Steel it’s origin point. As such, the producers’ main desire was to start paying catch up with Marvel, and they wanted to catch up fast. The result was that David Ayer was given an inhumanly small amount of time to get Suicide Squad together. Trying to find ways of streamlining the process, he decided that he would only write one draft of the script and would purposely overload it with every single scene he might even consider using, planning to spend his time in the editing booth doing the types of structural decisions you’d usually do on the page.

While he was filming it though, the rest of the DCEU hit something of a snag: Batman vs. Superman had been released and was proving divisive. The film had its good reviews and its defenders (why hello there) but it was also getting severe criticism from people who thought it was overly-serious, needlessly baggy and narratively unsatisfying. Given that these were meant to be some of selling points of the series overall, things were not looking good.