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Guardians (2017)
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Superhero novelist and comic writer Jeremy Flagg joins Perry this week to discuss Guardians! No, not "of the Galaxy," just Guardians, Russia's answer to The Avengers. It's a film with some flashes of great choreography and VFX mixed in with a lot of utter nonsense.
Visit Jeremy's website to find out more about his books and comics
Want to tell us what you think? Have any questions or comments for Perry about superheroes in media or comics? Leave a voice message to play on the show. You can also apply to be a guest on the show.
Patrons get to listen to episodes before everyone else, no ads, and they also get access to my exclusive companion podcast, the Superhero Cinephiles Book Club. If you want to join in, please consider supporting us through Patreon!
This episode is brought to you by BlendJet. Use my special link, zen.ai/supercinemapod12, to save 12% at blendjet.com. The discount will be applied at checkout!
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Transcript
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Introduction to Superhero Cinephiles Podcast
00:02:04
Speaker
I have two weeks to search all of the former Soviet Union for the superhumans that can stop a supervillain. Exactly right. These people are our only hope. What's the name of the mission? Guardians.
00:02:31
Speaker
We're all the same. Lair. Cons. Arsis. You wanna know who did this to you? Come with us. Welcome to the Superhero Cenophiles Podcast. I'm your host, Perry Constantine. Welcome to a new guest today and a fellow author, and that is Jeremy Flagg. Jeremy, how you doing today?
00:02:53
Speaker
I'm doing pretty darn good. How about yourself? I'm doing good. Not so keen on the movie we're talking about today, but I had an interesting experience watching it, which we'll get to. But before we do that, why don't you tell people a little bit about yourself?
Jeremy's Journey from Marvel Fan to Author
00:03:11
Speaker
So my name is Jeremy Flagg. I've been writing superheroes for 12, 15 years, something like that. I've lost count at this point.
00:03:22
Speaker
Um, but when I was younger, I was a huge Marvel fan and I sent script after script to Marvel trying to get past their minimum age requirements. And every time I got back a lovely letter from Stan Lee saying nice, but no. And I was like, you know what, I'm going to have to start, uh,
00:03:47
Speaker
drawing and I wound up being an art major and quickly discovered I can't draw. So that was quickly crushing the dream of being a comic book creator. And so what do you know? You can actually just write about superheroes. And that's kind of how I got into it. My books are very comic book inspired and basically the result of having no artistic skill.
00:04:16
Speaker
I definitely hear you with that. Before I started taking art classes online, I definitely, I was also one of those people who wanted to be a comic books writer, but couldn't really do the art thing. So I just started writing books instead. And which got me, and got where I got to where I am now. Now I'm actually working on comic books, but it definitely took some time to get there. Why don't you tell people a little bit about your books though?
Exploring Different Genres and Themes
00:04:42
Speaker
So I have a lot of books out at the moment.
00:04:46
Speaker
I write under Jeremy Flag, and those books are very Marvel Days of Future Past. It's one of my all-time favorite events in Marvel. Unfortunately, only two comics at the time. And I just love this very dystopian world where
00:05:07
Speaker
They're kind of pushed to the brink. And so I kind of take that and expand on it. My my superheroes are loosely based in science, like there are logical explanations. I don't have many Superman type characters. The I can almost explain all of their powers, except for my teleporter. He's kind of my well, hand wavy. Ignore that. But the rest of them
00:05:35
Speaker
A lot of the stuff is found in nature already. So I decided to run with that as a theme. And what happened was my parents were moving out of their house and they were like, we have boxes of papers. You need to get rid of them. And so when I went to go get them, they were.
00:05:52
Speaker
hundreds of issues of scripts that I wrote when I was in middle school. And so the books that I write now are based on those. Granted, at the time, they were basically just X-Men ripoffs. So I had to kind of go and rethink it and it just kind of moved on from there. And then
00:06:12
Speaker
For the past year, I've been writing under writer O'Malley because come to find out, superhero romance is a money-making genre at the moment. And it flexes a very different type of muscle writing romance. So I've been bouncing back and forth between those. And finally, I reached out to an artist and
00:06:41
Speaker
Producing my first comic book issue four of it will be coming out in hopefully about two weeks So I've kind of now I'm living my dream at this point. I've I've hit all the genres
00:06:57
Speaker
Oh, that's awesome.
Comic Production Challenges and Learning
00:06:58
Speaker
So, um, let's, uh, go back a little bit. So what's the, and I also had that Marvel rejection letter from, uh, from Stanley with the, with the little Spider-Man image on the top corner. Yes. I had that on my wall for a long time as a, like a motivational tool. Um, but, uh, what's, um, uh, what is your book series called? So the universe is called the children in Notre Dame and the flagships
00:07:25
Speaker
series in that universe is called uh it just got rebranded it's referred to as the synthetic wars um and it kind of i i wasn't sure what i was doing with my book and i wound up in the er and of course you're in an er they make you sit there and wait for hours and there was a documentary about no tridamus predicting the end of the world and i was like huh i wonder if he was really able to predict the
00:07:52
Speaker
What if he was the first in a series and that it just all steamrolled from there. Everything started together. And so I figured to, to reflect back on that wonderful experience in the ER, I referred to the whole thing as the children of Notre Dame at this point.
00:08:10
Speaker
Okay, cool. And you'd said that you'd based most of your characters in science. What was the reasoning behind that? Did you want to just set it apart from most of the superhero stuff that's more hand wavy or did you have an interest in science or what was kind of your thinking to do that?
00:08:29
Speaker
So I write best when I have rules and that instantly kind of thrusts some rules on. And there are characters in superhero dumb that I just I greatly dislike. And Superman's one of them. Wolverine's another the Hulk. There are these characters with unlimited potential. And basically, they almost kind of just super say in their way to victory over and over again.
00:08:59
Speaker
And I know they're more nuanced than that, but to young little me, it was just, oh, when Wolverine comes back from a single Adam, I mean, at that point, there's- Yeah, that was-
00:09:15
Speaker
I'm with you to a point on that. I did think that the whole he can regenerate from a drop of blood thing was ridiculous, but otherwise I'm more of the hand wavy stuff myself. Anyone who's read my superhero books knows that. I did the Stan Lee thing where it's like, fuck it, this is the explanation and it works for everything.
00:09:36
Speaker
And for mine, I'm not even gonna lie, like there, I just refer to it as the no-shadamis effect. How do they get their powers? Just poof, it happens. And we just accept it because at a certain point, like, you can only have so many radioactive spiders before you're like, really, what's going on in this world? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, that's why Stan Lee created mutants in the first place. He just got tired of coming up with different origin stories. And you get, yeah.
00:10:06
Speaker
There's nothing left. Like you've literally. Only so many rabid animals running around in the forest. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And only so much you can do with radiation. And oops.
00:10:23
Speaker
All right, and the superhero romance stuff, I had talked with a friend of mine, she's mostly a romance author, and we had talked briefly about doing some sort of superhero romance stuff together, where I would do all the superhero type stuff, and she would handle writing all the romance stuff. Unfortunately, we never actually got it up and running, but it was something that we had taken a lot of notes on. And this is going back like,
00:10:48
Speaker
maybe five years now, but from what you said, it's actually, and I think it was just starting then, but what you said, it's actually turned out to be a pretty big thing now.
Superhero Romance and Series Structure
00:10:59
Speaker
So it bothers me to admit it, but I sell probably 30 romances to each sci-fi at this point. That does not surprise me at all.
00:11:13
Speaker
And and the pool of people and part of it, I think, is just the gluttony of the word superhero. You're either to the masses, to the non initiated. You say superhero. They think Superman, Batman and mine don't have capes and cowls, which if I was to go back and do it, I might go a little bit more into some of the traditional superhero tropes, but in for a penny and for a pound, like, right?
00:11:42
Speaker
I just I'm on book 15 in the universe and I just now introduced a suit. Wow, I'm impressed that you're able to keep it going. Like the most books I ever got in a series was was six. That was the most I was able to get out of one series. After that, I had to move on to something different. So the way my series works is the.
00:12:06
Speaker
In the very, very first chapter, you're introduced to the catalyst character, and then they they have no purpose in the rest of the intro series. And people were angry. Like I actually got fan mail that was like so about this. And I was like, well, don't worry, there's a series for that character. OK, let's go write that, which takes place in the 40s and rewrites World War Two and all of history as we know it from there on out.
00:12:37
Speaker
Then I do a five year jump and there is a series that goes international because I made sure not to talk about international stuff. So I'm I'm bouncing around, but the. After a while, you can only have so many world ending events before you're like again. Yeah, yeah. Aliens are the next thing I'm considering, but it's hard to justify it in my universe.
00:13:08
Speaker
And is the is the romance stuff tied into the your your main universe at all? No. OK, OK. My sci-fi stuff is so doom and gloom. I'm not even going to lie. Like it's kind of Game of Thrones level. Like don't like a character too much. You don't know what's going to happen. My romance is light hearted slapstick. It just it's name dropping over and over again like they
00:13:35
Speaker
They track the superheroes using the superhero app trademark. And it's just the humorous side of superheroes. In that everyone has radioactive powers or like a random magician or a demon shows up. It just, I got to get rid of all the doom and gloom and just
00:14:05
Speaker
Lightfully fun, which is not my typical personality. So I that's why I like bouncing back and forth between them Okay, cool and about the comic book you talked about tell us tell us a little bit more about that so originally When I was I went to Savannah College of Art and Design for my master's and while I was there one of my high school classmates was going for her undergrad and I had to go down and visit we literally just bumped into each other at a pub and it was kind of a
00:14:35
Speaker
Do I know you? Like what are the chances? And we reconnected. Uh, she got married to my best friend's little brother. And like, we've just been good high school buddies ever since then. And she went to school for illustration and she's had an ongoing webcomic for, Oh God, since 2010. And so I was like,
00:15:04
Speaker
Hey, would you ever be interested in collaborating? And she was like, full stop collaborating with the writer. She's like, let me explain how this works. You're going to pitch an idea to me. You're going to spend four hours of work and I'm going to spend the next year of my life making a comic. And I was like, OK, reality check. Yeah. So I originally wanted to do a comic book tie in to my novels and she shot down every idea. She's like, it's just not worth my time. Like this isn't going to fly.
00:15:34
Speaker
And ultimately, I had a young adult series that I was scripting out for an actual novel. And as she was flipping through my my notebook, she was like, that's the book I want to work on. She's like, make that happen and we can talk. So I wrote the script, pitched it to her and she was like, I'm on board. So we did a Kickstarter. It funded in like a couple hours and we've been working on it for
00:16:04
Speaker
just about a year and we're about, it's five issues long and we're wrapping up issue four and it's about right now probably around 80 pages, but it's taken us a year to get 80 pages and she does the pencils, the inks, I do the flats and then she does the 3D of fine. The rendering, yeah. And I did,
00:16:34
Speaker
I honestly don't know how a Marvel or DC artist can do 20 pages a week. That sounds like horrific working conditions to me now. So I have a lot more respect for comic book artists, anchors, even letterers. I now understand a lot more. But it's been an awesome project. It's a young adult coming of age superhero. So it's still within my wheelhouse.
00:17:04
Speaker
But it takes place in a small town in Maine where we grew up. And it's it's called I Am The First because he literally is the first superhero. And the whole concept behind it is Batman would have never existed had it not been for his trauma. And so we took that idea and went literal. And the main character
00:17:33
Speaker
develops powers because of a traumatic event in his life. And that's how all people get powers is through trauma. And it's kind of a feel good, deep, happy ending light at the end of the tunnel type story, which is very different than the other two things I write.
Inspiration and Themes in Comics
00:17:57
Speaker
So it's been fun. I love it. But I will be happy to see it.
00:18:02
Speaker
that chapter closed. And then we have another project called I Am The Last, and it's about the last superhero in that universe. So yeah, I'm just I just looked it up on Google and I'm looking at checking out her artwork. It's very nice. Very, very cool. Very, very, very nice one to call in her comic that she does is called Age of Night. She does very black and white European style artwork. So it's very
00:18:30
Speaker
not typical superhero, which is why we went more with the young adult approach than the classic superhero. Right, right, right. So how is it working on a comic book? And what did you learn about writing the scripts versus writing a novel? So I went to school for art. You would think some of this would be common sense, but she did have to, she'd be like, we're going to have a Zoom call. I need to explain something to you.
00:19:00
Speaker
write something in dialogue that is, do you remember like old school X-Men when the panel would be Cyclops using his optic blast, but at the same time you'd be like, let me reach up and touch my mask so I can use my optic blast. And you're like, you're showing and telling at the same time. And that's, that's not using the medium to its advantage.
00:19:27
Speaker
And my first script was very much like that. She was like, stop describing the visuals. Yeah, a lot of that is because the the old Marvel method of of working on comics was the writer would come up with an outline of the story, basically say like, this is what happens. The artists would then draw 22 pages just based on that outline. And then the writer would go back in and write all the dialogue to try. So to try and get around that, they put in like a lot of
00:19:54
Speaker
Exposition heavy dialogue or putting a lot of stuff in captions and yeah, that's definitely That was definitely a limitation of a lot of those old comics especially because you know a lot of times There was the whole idea of it was new stand distribution. So People weren't necessarily getting the comics every week. So Stan Lee's whole thing was every comic could be somebody's first you have to make it as accessible as possible and and they'd have a lot of overexposition because of that as well and
00:20:23
Speaker
And realistically, back in 1963 is Jean Grey's making something levitate. Popular vernacular didn't understand what telekinesis was. But she knew I was a Marvel fan, and so she very quickly broke me of that habit. And then what I
00:20:50
Speaker
What I took away from it, and it now applies to all my books, is the dialogue. If your dialogue is crappy in a comic, you better hope that that artwork is the most beautiful thing anyone has ever seen because reading cringe-worthy dialogue in a beautiful comic just ruins the experience. Yeah, yeah.
00:21:16
Speaker
So at the time I was teaching high school and I made my students butcher my script and they like, Mr. Flag, no one says this. Well, okay, how would you say it? So being 40 and trying to write a 17 year old, I enlisted the help of a lot of 17 year olds, so.
00:21:43
Speaker
I still refuse to write, it's lit in there, but. I think that would definitely date it when people read it in like five years' time. Yeah, I.
00:21:55
Speaker
Yeah, working as a letterer definitely taught me a lot about how little space you have in comics to get your dialogue across. And it definitely changed the way I write scripts now. And and now having drawn my own comic book, I'm just I remember drawing the first pages of it and looking back at the script and like, man, who wrote this fucking shit? I'm like, fuck, that's right. I did. Well, and it's really funny because like we had there was a piece like
00:22:23
Speaker
We are wrapping up issue four right now, and there was a panel that referenced a panel in the first comic and it it ran counter and it was kind of like a continuity editor might have caught it. But here we are. And we're like, crap. Now we need we need to adjust one panel. OK, so if we adjust that panel, we can expand that page. But if you do that, then the rest of the
00:22:51
Speaker
Once you're locked in, you stare at those errors, so it is worth making sure that every word is where it belongs. And I am very much a fix-it-and-post person, and comic books don't allow for that as easily.
00:23:10
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's one thing to fix dialogue and post that's that's fairly easy. That's the nice thing about lettering my own comp my own scripts is I can look at it and be like, Oh, fuck, I did not need to say that. Or let's try rewording this or and that's the benefit of writing my own scripts. But when it comes to the artwork, forget it. Once it's done there, it's it's such a hassle to go back and change it. And and you are in now like, I remember reading comics where you're like, something here doesn't add up. And
00:23:39
Speaker
Well, of course it doesn't. They had seven days to produce an entire comic and get that out. So they made do with what they could. So I now understand comics a lot better. So I'm happy I did the process. I think next time we do it, uh, the time involved to do that and maintain our own careers. We, we kind of put our own careers on hold here and there to make this happen.
00:24:09
Speaker
And that was that was rough, because when we're down to deadline. Just doing the flats like I did not understand, like it's just Photoshop paint bucket, Photoshop paint bucket, OK, trace this, do the underwork. And she's just laughing at me. And then we get to a bunch of scenes with fence. I have to color 20 pages of fencing.
00:24:42
Speaker
Yeah, I'll be happy never to see it again. She's currently coloring fire and she curses my name on a daily. So Fire's tricky. I got a lot of turn invisible.
00:24:54
Speaker
Yeah, I do a lot of I do all my work in in clip studio paint. So there are a lot of like custom brushes and stuff like that to speed up those processes because it
Comic Production Process and Challenges
00:25:05
Speaker
and it really gives me a new oppression appreciation for artists who do everything on paper like the artists I'm working with on the comic project I'm doing he does it all on paper and then he scans it in and
00:25:17
Speaker
And I don't know how he works so fast and it's such high quality because me, like I did a lot of the background stuff cheating digitally and he does it all by hand. So we commissioned some alternate pages and the one of the artists. He does all of his digital and like he did like a little video on how he did it and he banged it out in like 15 minutes and then he sends it to his guy overseas who does all his coloring.
00:25:46
Speaker
and that's all that person does. And the whole process takes him 15 minutes plus a 24 hour turnaround. I mean, it's crazy. Whereas Amanda is, she does the pencils, sends them to me for approval. I thumb up it. She starts thinking with traditional ink on paper. So she has the full flats, scans it in, fine-tunes it in Photoshop, sends me the,
00:26:16
Speaker
Photoshop files, I do all the under colorings, send it back to her. So. I now. Like, if I go back and think of like old school comics that I would read, I was never a big like, I don't know names, I can tell you who the major writers are. But now I want to go back and I want to memorize every colorist, every anchor, every penciler, because damn, they've earned it.
00:26:45
Speaker
The colorists, at first at least, it was a very simple process. If you look at the older comics, there wasn't a lot of artistry to it, but that changed probably about the 90s is when that started to change, is when they started to use more advanced coloring techniques. Because the printing process just wasn't there. In fact, I think the original Marvel stuff, if I'm remembering correctly,
00:27:05
Speaker
They didn't color it in house. They would actually just send it to a printer and they would do the the coloring process because it was just very That wouldn't be at all. It was very it was just all flat stuff and it wasn't very detailed at all um, but now coloring is like an art form in itself and and sometimes like in one of the publishers I work for we have um They they do they have someone separate do all the flatting and then someone else will come and do the coloring on top of it Just like you were saying about you and and amanda
00:27:33
Speaker
So we've decided next time what we're going to do is we're going to hire someone out for flattening. If we decide to do color, because we're going to do a second series, a final series of this continuation, we feel that we kind of have to keep the process that we have going.
00:27:52
Speaker
which is a pain in the butt, but if we, we have a bunch of series that we've talked about doing moving forward, and some of them might stay black and white, some of them, if we do decide to go color, we're outsourcing that. It just, we might even outsource the rendering. She knows everyone in the Northeast when it comes to independent comics, and right now everyone's itching for some sort of work, so.
00:28:22
Speaker
Let's make it a process. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely saves you a lot of time. I'm doing the inking and the colors on this project, and it's a lot of work. It definitely has. I'm cursing myself to make that decision at some times, but it's something I committed to. And once you're in it, it's not like a Marvel comic where every issue can be a different artist. You're like, oh, man, I've kind of committed to this style. Right, right, yeah. I'm in it. Crap.
00:28:52
Speaker
Okay, all right. Yeah, things you learn. Absolutely. So today, we're talking about the the Guardians movie, not the Guardians of the Galaxies movies.
Discussion of the Film 'Guardians'
00:29:05
Speaker
I'm actually going to be recording episode on
00:29:08
Speaker
Guardians of the Galaxy 3 tomorrow at the time of recording this. I think it'll actually come out on the feed before this episode though. But the Guardians we're talking about is a 2017 Russian movie. The original title is, I'm probably going to mispronounce this, Zashitnicki is how it's spelled. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right.
00:29:32
Speaker
Yeah, I just stick with Guardians. It's easier. But I remember when this trailer came out and I remember generating quite a bit of buzz online when the trailer came out and then I just kind of forgot about it and I never
00:29:47
Speaker
Saw anything of it and then you'd contact we talked about it and you'd ask me if if you could come on You're like, can we talk about bad movies? I'm like, yeah sure. We've talked about bad movies before so you're like, I want to talk about Guardians I'm like, okay I don't know if I can find it here in Japan and I'm just like and I check the streaming service No, it's not in the streaming services and I'm like, oh wait the video store actually does have it. So yeah, we can talk about
00:30:16
Speaker
And I like this movie. I there are sometimes sometimes you go into a movie with such high expectations that it's got to deliver or you're going to be let down. I saw the trailer for this movie and I was like, this is bash it crazy. Like what?
00:30:40
Speaker
you literally just reached into American cinema and you kind of cherry picked very specific things. And I'm intrigued with your decision making. So when I saw the trailer, it wasn't a traditional superhero movie and I like different and I like foreign films. So let's give this a shot. And for me, there are a handful of places it delivered.
00:31:08
Speaker
And then there's many, many places where it forgot to deliver it all.
00:31:14
Speaker
So the big thing that stood out to me on this is just like, so I've got a, I had a tough time with this movie because the subtitles that I found for it were just God awful. Like, it's just like, I mean, I've seen bad subtitles before. These are without a doubt the worst subtitles I have ever seen. It's just like,
00:31:40
Speaker
I think if I took the Russian subtitles and put them through Google Translate, it would have given me better results than whatever the hell these subtitles were. It was just impossible to figure out what was going on. I mean, at one point there's several times where they talk about like one of the characters, the bearded guy, Lure, he talks about his child.
00:32:06
Speaker
And the subtitle, I say child because I don't know if it was a son or a daughter because the subtitles identifies it as both. And in the. So the first time I watched it, I watched it with subtitles because. OK, let's I generally would prefer that the actual actors voices be in there. The original actors.
Financial and Creative Failures of 'Guardians'
00:32:32
Speaker
There are moments where the acting is so subpar that I was like, I think dubbing may improve this. So the second time I was like, OK, let's do dubbing. And I'm pretty sure they did run it through Google Translate and just read it. And they read it with so little emotion that you were like. Were you were you forced to do the dubbing against your will? Because that's what it feels like.
00:33:02
Speaker
I didn't see the dub. I do wonder how it would have compared to the subtitles I got. Because I prefer subtitles, too. We recorded an episode recently. It hasn't been out yet at the time of recording this on Black Mask, the Jet Li film from the 90s. And the version I had was the dubbed version. And the actors on that dub were just terrible.
00:33:27
Speaker
And it was it was just so awful. So I wonder if it's if it's like that sounds like it's like that level of dubbing, where it's just like they didn't care anything about sometimes you get dubs these days and they'll put some work into it. Like a lot of the giblet films, they'll get like a list actors to come in and do the the English dubbing for it and stuff like that. But this was just so bad, so bad in in like I watch a lot of Korean cinema and because the the linguistics are so different,
00:33:56
Speaker
an American actor will give the line and there's like this extremely bizarre long pause as they have to wait for the film to catch up. Or they talk slowly so they can, and you're like, whoa, whoa, I can't, I can't do this. In this one, there were a lot of moments of that where the actor would say the English and
00:34:25
Speaker
they're still significantly talking. Well, in dubbing, you can change the script a little. You can add in a filler word here and there to have it fit more organically. And I feel like they got the original script, ran it through Google Translate. It is what it is. No one can edit it. Here you are. And it did it a disservice, I think.
00:35:00
Speaker
I can't really comment too much on the plot. I barely understand what was happening because the subtitles were just so bad. So mostly I'm just kind of like trying to piece together from, and sometimes they just didn't even bother translating stuff. Like there's literally points where it's just like, I think that's a word in Russian rendered in the English alphabet because that is not any English word I know. And it's not like a character's name or something. So I think you just gave up.
00:35:15
Speaker
across the board.
00:35:30
Speaker
And, um, but I will say one of the things that, um, was interesting is the effects on this movie. Not bad for a budget of only $5.4 million. They, they, they use that budget pretty effectively for the most part.
00:35:49
Speaker
So and let's compare five point four million the same year that Guardians of the Galaxy came out with two hundred and fifty million. So they had a five point four million budget for a uncanny amount of special effects. I will. I'm pretty impressed with the special effects there. There were some spots where
00:36:16
Speaker
Things didn't quite line up, but again, 5.4 million, I knew that walking into it. The acting, that could have definitely paid up a little bit, but there were so many scenic shots that required special effects that I truthfully don't understand how on a $5.4 million budget this film got made.
00:36:43
Speaker
I wonder if they had some people chained up to their desks or something to their computers. So funny story, I went and did a little bit of background research because I was curious about the success of the film and what, you know, what kind of happened. It worldwide, it doubled its it made nine point seven million, which in movie terms is a failure because you're supposed to meet
00:37:12
Speaker
minimum of three times the amount in, the studio that created it went bankrupt and no official numbers were ever reported. Everything is like this bizarre estimate on ticket sales, but there was no international distribution of this movie. Like everything, the moment it hit Russian theaters fell apart. And so
00:37:37
Speaker
There are theories like the studio was trying to keep itself afloat, and this was like their ambition, like Hail Mary, but it again, 5.4 million, like.
00:37:51
Speaker
Yeah, it will like you're saying, because you said it doubled its budget. And this goes to what you're saying about the the murkiness of what happened because it Wikipedia says the box office was 15 million. So it's, it's, it's definitely a bit of a black box. And and what it says here is that it it gross 83 million root rubles. And
00:38:18
Speaker
213 in the first four days, which is below expectations. And then on the second weekend, it dropped by 90%. And the gross kept dropping 90% every single weekend after that. And then yet, in July of that, it came out in February, in July, the production company filed for bankruptcy. And the cinema foundation of Russia had sued the company because they had put up part of the budget as well.
00:38:48
Speaker
And this was just the background on it. This was by large one of the most ambitious films done in Russia, entirely Russian made. And they were trying to cash in on the Marvel craze and this was their answer to the Avengers. So just a quick summary of the plot. It opens with some genetic experiments. You're not quite sure what's going on.
00:39:16
Speaker
crazy scientists are basically super seramine Russians. And we get a handful come to find out one of the scientists goes rogue, keeps continuing his experiments, winds up getting blown up by the Russian government. He survives the accident, gives him powers and the
00:39:41
Speaker
plot at that point gets a little bit like let's just glaze over because why is he doing what he's doing? Because he wants to prove to the other scientists that he's cool. Like I'm not entirely sure there. But then it's very classic superhero
00:39:58
Speaker
They go out. They find the heroes. They put together the team. The team goes out for their first battle. They get their butts handed to them. They have to regroup, have a deep thought moment. Then they go out and stop the villain, whose real ambition is to he takes his powers to take control of technology and he wants to take control of an old Russian satellite, which is basically a laser and destroy the world.
00:40:27
Speaker
So a classic superhero across the board. Like I don't think anything plot wise is revolutionary about this. Right. Yeah. But I now that I've rewatched it, I think it failed in the same way. And I know people can shoot me out for this. The Justice League movie.
Comparisons to Other Superhero Films
00:40:51
Speaker
I didn't like the Justice League movie. I liked a lot of things about it.
00:40:56
Speaker
But I didn't care enough about the characters because it was too much about forming the team and I didn't have enough invested in the characters. This was the same problem. Nevermind, he woke up as soon as I put him down. Oh. It was a trick all along. He always does that. Sometimes he'll stay down. It's like a 50-50 chance.
00:41:30
Speaker
See my it's funny you mentioned the Justice League stuff to it because and I know this movie was as like a response to the Avengers kind of like Russia attempting to do their version of the Avengers and then they'd said apparently a sequel would have been Would have added some superheroes from China and they would have had
00:41:52
Speaker
It would have been co-financed by Chinese studios. And so it seemed like this was kind of like the authoritarian world response to the Avengers in a way.
00:42:07
Speaker
this series was supposed to be but this one failed and that never happened and the director had also said that Guardians 2 never came out because he said that Deadpool 2 was to blame for it because Deadpool 2 had basically the same plot they were going to use for Guardians 2 and that was why they decided not to do it.
00:42:28
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I see the Avengers comparisons, but really, I think Justice League is a much better comparison, because this has got a very Snyder feel to it. It's like everything's kind of dark. There's not a lot of bright colors. Everything's kind of filmed with this blue filter. It's a much darker take on superheroes in general. In fact, I think one of my biggest problems with the
00:42:56
Speaker
I mean, well, I think with Man of Steel and with the Snyder Cut of Justice League, Batman v. Superman is another story. That was just a dogshit script. But those Man of Steel and Snyder's Justice League, they're not bad movies in themselves. They just don't fit those characters. And I think if you took that same approach, honestly, if you gave these characters to Zack Snyder and had him make a movie, but with these characters rebooting it, I think that would have been a lot more interesting.
00:43:25
Speaker
And I think, so the way they introduce the characters, one of the things that I dislike a lot in superheroes, and it's because I've read the comic books, an origin movie to me always feels redundant. Just, I get for the masses why it needs to happen. I'm along for the ride, I'll support it. But a lot of the times I always think, oh, I think the comic did it better. And in this case, when they introduced them in the beginning and it's just this,
00:43:56
Speaker
a montage of medical papers showing their powers in a very scientific kind of way. It it felt like the flashback from Wolverine, the second X-Men, when Wolverine keeps having the flashbacks of what happened. And I kind of like that. We don't need to see it verbatim. Just those little flashes give us I mean, we can tell in those blanks. But when they're introducing the individual characters,
00:44:26
Speaker
They they each have a heart moment where she at the beginning, she can't remember anything about her past and that humanizes her. And then later on we have Lure who he almost died and he thinks about his daughter and or son. We're not sure.
00:44:50
Speaker
And then the bear has a moment where he thinks, well, I'm losing myself to the beast. And they're all like exactly 90 seconds long. The lady Nick Fury goes around to each of them and has this heart to heart moment and it refuels their vigor.
00:45:15
Speaker
That was so awkward in an otherwise action-packed movie that give us those backstories in an individual or even like a duo movie. And now it feels earned. But in that moment, it was like, we need to make the audience care about these characters. So let's give you a really fast flashback, essentially, and hope it sticks. Yeah.
00:45:46
Speaker
I'm with you on the origin story thing. I think a big part of it is just that the origin story is like the easiest story that Hollywood can tell because it's just very simple. It easily fits into the hero's journey, a typical three act structure. So it's very easy for superhero movies to do that, which is why they kept doing it over and over again.
00:46:10
Speaker
Marvel finally got wise to that. And they're just like, if we just keep doing origin stories, people are going to get really sick of these movies really fast. So we got to change. And that's why after pretty much after Doctor Strange, they had stopped doing origin stories. And then Captain Marvel was kind of an origin story, but they did it in a different way to try and play with that format. And even experimented like a man. Yeah. Was a heist origin story. So it's getting a little genre in there. And I was like, that's all it needs to be. And now I'm.
00:46:39
Speaker
No, I'm invested. Unfortunately, this was straight up an action movie, so... Right, exactly, yeah. And I maintain that the best origin story in any superhero movie is in The Incredible Hulk, because that origin story, it's just, boom, those opening credits, five minutes, they tell us everything we need to know, and then we're off to the races. And that's all you need. It's just, well, Spider-Man 2 did that too, right? They just recap the origin story very simply in those opening credits.
00:47:07
Speaker
And I know this is nobody's favorite whatsoever, but in the... Oh, God. The Amanda Waller, I can't think of the name. Suicide Squad? The first Suicide Squad. I liked the comic book like, slap, here's the background story. And if they had done it for the whole cast and just kept moving, it would have been fine. But then they were like, but this character needs more, so we're gonna really
00:47:37
Speaker
No, we did it. We're watching a superhero movie. We don't need that extreme amount of depth, especially in an action movie. Yeah. Yeah. That was one of the few good parts of Suicide Squad. I agree with you. I like that opening a lot. The rest of the movie, not so much. It fell apart right after that. Yeah. But also talking about the
00:48:00
Speaker
the different characters and all that and having these character beats, it kind of reminded me of, this is gonna sound like a weird comparison. Do you ever see Don't Be a Menace to South Central Drinking Your Juice in the Hood? Yes. You remember how periodically in that movie every time they have those like heart to heart moments and then Damon Wayans, who's playing the mailman, he pops in and he's like, message? It reminded me of that.
00:48:26
Speaker
It might as well have had just descend from the top of the screen a little hard. 90 seconds. If you don't want an emotional moment, this is where you go get your popcorn. But like each one of them, and the best part is she is for all, take Scarlett Johansson, have her and Jayla have a love child.
00:48:56
Speaker
the, what's her name? Major Elena Lorena. But she's Nick Fury. That is who we got. And she is not cold, but she is a very stereotypical Russian duty above all else. And then she's almost like a lean in, like, tell me your problems. And you're like, what is going, like, are you really a therapist?
00:49:28
Speaker
Yeah. I also thought it was interesting they had that Star Wars thing. They brought in a mention of the Reagan era policy. I was like, of course it's a Russian movie, so they got to get in a dig against Reagan. And the best part was Reagan's to blame for this movie happening. Yeah.
00:49:49
Speaker
It just kind of cracked me up because the whole movie, whatever you feel about Russia, the images that come to mind, the personalities, every stereotype, this movie for me just reinforced them.
Execution and Character Critiques
00:50:07
Speaker
I don't know what real Russian life is like, but if it's like this movie, it is exactly as it's been painted in Western culture.
00:50:17
Speaker
I don't know if they were trying to cash in on that, but the moment when they were like, yeah, this is all because of response to Reagan's Star Wars project, I'm like, mm-hmm, thanks. Make it our call. That was, you're right. I mean, if they were trying to break any stereotypes that people outside of Russia have of Russian society or the Russian government, they did not succeed at all.
00:50:44
Speaker
And and it's funny because, you know, we're just coming off something like Stranger Things, which has a really strong Russian element to it. And those people that are in the I'm not going to spoil the newest season in case people haven't seen it, but there's a contingency of it that has a very strong Russian influence and they're very three dimensional, like.
00:51:05
Speaker
You have a little bit of stereotype, but then you walk away from the stereotype. This, it is so stereotypical that every time it shows her having an aha moment, she is standing center on the camera and every person behind her is staggered in a perfect arrow. Do you have all of your telecommunication scientists, like a mark on the floor where they're required to stand when you have like a briefing moment because
00:51:34
Speaker
that got a little bit kind of funny. And there's a lot of moments where you're like, are we supposed to be taking this serious? Oh, back to the action, nevermind. We're gonna gloss over it. Yeah, and I can't really comment a whole, like I said, I can't really comment a whole lot on the plot. As far as the effects go, I thought,
00:52:03
Speaker
Loehr was interesting, the telekinetic guy, because at one point I'm just like, okay, come on, you keep grabbing any stray rocks that are falling around and it's getting a little, but then he assembles like this rock. I'm like, oh, okay, now we're doing something a little bit more unique. Okay, this is cool. I'm down for this now. And Kahn, the guy with the blade, the teleporter with the blades, I thought those effects were handled really, really well.
00:52:28
Speaker
And a lot of the action scenes with him and use and when he puts the swords together and all that, I thought that was also really well executed. They I swear whoever came up with his character watched X2, but only watched the first like five minute scene with Nightcrawler and the teleporting fast to slow to fast and the camera movement. They studied that to such a degree that they were like,
00:52:56
Speaker
Here's what we can do to make it better. And every time he is using his abilities, I feel that there is someone on set who fully understood how to make this look so amazing. Yeah, yeah. We had just done an episode on X2 and so it's very fresh in my mind. And that was exactly what I was thinking. I'm like, they definitely paid close attention to that opening scene of X2.
00:53:25
Speaker
And even Lure, when he, so yeah, the opening, it's just, every time it shows him, he just makes rocks levitate, like, eh, whatever. And you're like, oh, so you're basically gonna be a giant slingshot the whole time. And the first time that he pulls all the rocks and makes body armor out of it, I was like, okay, you just went up in the cool factor. But he looked so much like the thing from the comic books at that moment that I was like, oh, like,
00:53:55
Speaker
This is what, remember the, whatever the newest Fantastic Four movie, I can't even remember when it was made. It was about, I think it may have been this same year, if I'm not mistaken. It almost felt like the people who made Fantastic Four should have called the people who made the Guardians and said, hey, can we borrow that because your special effects look better? Yeah, yeah. God, everything about that movie was just a,
00:54:24
Speaker
I'm don't even get me started. Okay. So we go from the thing. My favorite part of this whole movie was her invisibility powers. Now there's consistency errors all over the place for her, but her opening scene and her powers, she can go invisible, but only when wet and you're like, okay, that's where are we going with this? Cause that's just an interesting,
00:54:54
Speaker
little limitation to your ability. Yeah. One, she's like her fight scenes were just amazingly choreographed, a little ridiculous how choreographed, but I mean, wow, I hope that stunt double got paid well. And then. But it's funny, because in the opening scene, she's wearing a dress, she dives into some water and goes invisible in all her clothes are invisible.
00:55:22
Speaker
Then later on, she goes invisible, all her clothes go invisible. And then they make this whole thing about giving her a super suit that can turn invisible with her. And you're like, has no one else been watching this movie? I didn't even catch that, but yeah, you're right. It's like two minutes of them explaining these cool new suits that'll enhance their abilities. And you're like, also, part of her abilities is that she's, she can control her body temperature.
00:55:54
Speaker
Never to be seen again. Yeah, I was thinking about that. Like that's a weird note to make and then to just never touch on that, like don't. And I saw fans say maybe that's why she survived the electrocution, but it doesn't get explained. Like you're kind of left going, what is happening?
00:56:16
Speaker
So I feel like the first act of this movie was every piece of potential. The second act started delivering on it. There were some slip ups and then those slip ups made the third act just bat shit crazy. Like none of it made sense. And yeah, not bat shit crazy in a good way. Just bat shit crazy and none of this works.
00:56:43
Speaker
And can we talk about the body suit for the villain? Oh, yeah. He is, so he's like seven feet tall, but like no neck, like it goes from his ears to his shoulders. And he's like all jacked, but in like kind of grotesque way with veins everywhere. It would have just been easier if they just pick some tiny little Napoleon complex scientist.
00:57:12
Speaker
Like him being this jacked, ridiculous looking dude. Did you want, did you go to like a dollar store for that costume because that's not where you spent your money? Yeah, that bodysuit was one of the worst things. And it's so jarring because you've got all these special effects happening all around him and you're not even paying attention to it because you're so distracted by how bad those sculpted abs look.
00:57:42
Speaker
And like the opening when all of a sudden technology starts to go awry and killing all these people and you're like, okay, I'm kind of in, where's this disaster going? And he walks through the smoke and you're like, were you bullied as a kid? Is that why you got so jacked? Because you went in the wrong direction here and
00:58:06
Speaker
And the fact that everyone takes everything so seriously in this movie, you just want, like, you want one of the guardians to stop and go, we're supposed to be scared of that thing? Like, not quite Instagram worthy over there. Yeah, I mean, I think that's, it...
00:58:27
Speaker
talking about again taking it back to the Snyder movies that was one of the biggest flaws a lot of those movies is just like how serious they take themselves and this one has that same problem it just takes itself way too seriously and at the end of the day I mean I'm fine with you know superheroes having some serious stuff in it like I you know
00:58:46
Speaker
Washman is still like one of one of my favorite books ever but still at the end of the day you're doing stories about people with crazy powers dressed in funky suits, so it's There's a there's a there's some aspect of ludicrous baked into the concept from the beginning and in the first x-men they address that yeah
00:59:09
Speaker
would we look better in spandex? And you're like, thank you. Thank you. That justifies you being clad in leather. I am okay with it. But I appreciate that you gave me a nod and you acknowledged how ridiculous this would be. And then Deadpool is basically in spandex, which just lends itself right there.
00:59:31
Speaker
Yeah, and so we talked about the bodysuit, but I also want to talk about Arceus's bear form, because talking about effects that did not work out so well, like it looked cool in the trailer. And I realized, because the trailer took the best clips of that form, because when you watch it in an extended form, you're just kind of like, oh my god, this really looks like it's taken out of a video game and just like pasted into here.
00:59:58
Speaker
at the again, the first act feels like that's where they spent their money. And it almost feels like the director got into a contract negotiation in the second act and then was fired for the third, because in the first one there, they make smart camera decisions. It shows him from the back shoulder as his body kind of ripples back to human. It will show his snout elongating, but they they made smart camera choices
01:00:28
Speaker
probably because they were like, hey, we can't afford to do this over and over again. So let's pick our moments. And then when you finally get the moment, you're like, oh, all I could see was Man-Bear Pig from South Park. I kept thinking the exact same thing. I was thinking the exact same thing the whole time. If Man-Bear Pig had a Gatling gun, it would have been those special effects.
01:00:55
Speaker
Oh, my God. I can't believe. Yeah, we both had the exact same thing. I'm not even a big South Park fan. And it's still like, as soon as I saw it, I'm like, that's man-bear pig. And and the number one critique of this movie, like, if you go read the reviews are his pants. He turns into bear form. He's a giant bear, just all bear like giant brown bear running around.
01:01:22
Speaker
And then suddenly he transforms back and much like the Hulk, his pants are back. And it doesn't happen like once or twice. We're talking like six or seven times that his pants get destroyed and yet they're always back on him. I'm glad to know that that's what the people on IMDB are concerned about. That didn't bother me that much just because that's a conceit of superhero movies, just like with, you know, with shapeshifters, their clothes changing and everything too.
01:01:52
Speaker
Yeah, it doesn't make a lick of fucking sense, but it's it's just part of the. It's baked into the concept, so you just kind of go with it. It's baked in that when Peter Parker has to always make comments about finding his his street clothes because he put him somewhere, you're almost like, come on, can you just be like every other superhero and always have them on you, like microform, like, you know, the flash rain just right. We are.
01:02:22
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, yeah. Overall, I think this it's not a good movie. Let's just be real, it's not a good. There's no there's nothing to these characters.
Action Scenes and Underexplored Potential
01:02:34
Speaker
It's just like all stock emotion, you know, stuff like what I mean, I feel like, you know, they're talking about, you know, the fear of like AI writing scripts and everything. This script feels like it was written by AI.
01:02:48
Speaker
It feels like you fed an AI a bunch of superhero movies and you said write me a superhero movie set in Russia. Yeah, that is like I like the movie and I can't defend it. Like and I always tell people the first 20 minutes you're going to walk into this movie hopeful. Like when you see her using her invisibility powers, you're like, wow, that is what the Invisible Woman should have been in the Fantastic Four. When you see
01:03:18
Speaker
What's his name going around with the blades? You're like the best part of X2 right there. Like it's nothing but hopeful and you're excited for it. And then minute 26 happens and you're like, what? Yeah. And all hope goes away. Yeah. I mean, I would say, honestly, instead of sitting through this movie, because, and again, now I'm not, at first I just thought it was a bad subtitle file that I had found for it because I had to,
01:03:45
Speaker
the version I got, it only had Japanese subtitles, so I had to, you know, dig up American subtitles, English subtitles from the internet. And at first I just thought it was just the subtitle file I found was a bad one, but from what you told me about the dub, and like they still don't know if it's his son or his daughter, I think it's just like, I don't know if there was a good version of these subtitles.
01:04:08
Speaker
And I actually like, I wish I knew someone who spoke fluent Russian cause I want to be like, Hey, I got a great movie for you to watch. Go check this out. And we can talk about it afterwards. Cause I just want to ask like, does it deliver better in Russian or, and the other thing is, and I don't know this. Um, I started trying to dig around for it. I don't know what Russian cinema has for American distribution.
01:04:37
Speaker
So are Russians becoming acclimated to the Marvel movie way or the DC movie way? And it made me wonder if if I had not seen another. If I only had X-Men one to compare this to. I'd probably be a lot more forgiving. Mm hmm. So I I wonder if there is like a time gap in
01:05:07
Speaker
Because I watched the making of this afterwards. In all its rushing glory, there's no English subtitles, so you just had to watch it. I hope you understand it. But their green screens are not green screens. They are green curtains that are being hung. And you can see them hanging them like curtains. There's not an official green screen room. When they were doing the rendering, they're using computers that we haven't seen for a decade.
01:05:36
Speaker
Like it did make me laugh that every time the techno guy like looks at this 1970s computer, like he's professor Xavier and basically his power is to make the. The font move quicker. It's just after I watched that, like it made me wonder, like.
01:06:01
Speaker
would I have a different opinion if I didn't have all this other exposure? And it made me wonder, do they have that exposure?
01:06:08
Speaker
I think they do. I was just looking it up. And if not, like, I think they do have those, they do get releases in Russia. And if not, they've got, they're such a big black market for like regions and stuff in Russia. So they're definitely aware of them. So I think they're definitely going to be comparing it to, I would just, I was curious, cause I'd glanced at the IMDB reviews and I checked up just looking at letterbox now. Your review is the first one that pops up on my letterbox actually. And then I see another one,
01:06:39
Speaker
Just I want to fuck Russian Nick Fury so bad. So there some of the stuff that it does well, like there are the concepts behind the characters. I dug that the fight scenes, the fight scenes between humans and clones. I don't know if they're actually clones. It does such a bad job of explaining who these bad guys are. Like just whatever. There's bad guys. There's a militia.
01:07:07
Speaker
The martial art scenes are noteworthy. They are so well done when she has her fight every time. I'm thinking, well, damn, you, you, you hired a great choreographer for that. When, um, I keep, what was the blade guy's name? I can't even think of it now. Wesley Snipes. No, uh, the director.
01:07:38
Speaker
So do you remember like all of the the nightclub scene, essentially, like it used his fighting with the sword with his. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. And it did such great job combining that with the camera work that for me, that's still one of my favorite fight scenes. This had some of those elements.
01:08:02
Speaker
but the elements are isolated, they're two minutes long, and then there's 15 minutes strummed together of what the hell is going on. So. Yeah, and it's, although I will say, one of them is that, another great review says, it is truly awful. However, it does feature a bear with a mini gun. And I guess that's something you could say about this movie.
01:08:32
Speaker
And again, Rock Dude, he was the best thing from Fantastic Four. The Invisible Woman in this was the best Invisible Woman that we've gotten so far. The Blade Guy, Great Blade Guy, the Bear Dude. Okay, he's a bear with a Gatling gun, so why not? But man, that villain just wiped away all potential. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think they would have, and it's frustrating, because there are,
01:09:01
Speaker
Aspects that they did really well like you said like the seed a lot of the CGI and a lot of those effects in
01:09:07
Speaker
The fight scenes and all that, most of it is pretty solid. I'm like, OK, yeah, I'm down with this. I love the the, you know, the stuff with Khan and the in the blade fight scenes. I love those. Those were excellent. Xenia's invisibility effect. Yeah, you're absolutely right on that. The archises transformation early, like we said, when they pick their camera angles, very cool. But then when we get to the end, it's like, oh, yeah, gone. Yeah, yeah. Do you think that this is a case of like I couldn't tell
01:09:36
Speaker
You know, in some superhero movies, you're like, okay, this is where the director lost the studio exec fight and there's a bunch of suit and ties making some decisions. Do you wonder if maybe that's what happened? Because it just feels so weird that the first third of this movie felt, again, all potential. And then it just started to erode. I think so. I mean, because it
01:10:06
Speaker
it's telling that this came out, there's so much that this has in common with Justice League and with the Josh Trank Fantastic Four movie because they both have, you can see when the studio came in, right? So like you said, that first act is very strong, works, everything seems to be firing on all cylinders. And after, and same thing with, you know, the Josh Trank Fantastic Four movie, the first half of that movie,
01:10:34
Speaker
It's a terrible Fantastic Four movie, right? From beginning to end, it's a terrible Fantastic Four movie. But that first half is not bad as a movie in itself. It had the potential. It had some potential to be something, but then the second half, it's just like, it gets completely taken away. Same thing in, you know, Justice League has all these weird parts where it's like, okay,
01:10:58
Speaker
I see, we got the whole hopeful Superman thing. That's good. That's a good change you made. Okay. And then we're trying to put in this weird Russian family. And it's like, why are we doing this here? And same thing with this, right? We have this good, strong first act. We get decent effects with all of them. We get to introduce all the characters. Interesting premise of these super soldiers created during the Cold War.
01:11:26
Speaker
I'm on board with this and I think it's cool to examine, and one of the things I think it's cool with these superhero movies they can do is when they examine how history would change with a superhero arms race or something like that. That's a really interesting concept. You mentioned Ant-Man. One of my favorite things about Ant-Man is the whole idea that
01:11:46
Speaker
know, Hank Pam and Janet Van Dyne were superheroes during the Cold War. That's interesting. That's cool. Let's see more stuff like that. And it's a cool concept. I would have liked to see more about that. Okay, so what's China doing with their super soldiers program? Presumably, you know, America would have had a super soldier program as well. What was their program like? This would have been, there's a lot of interesting things to explore in there. Instead, we get
01:12:11
Speaker
all that interesting backstory and then now let's put it in the present day and have generic supervillain trying to destroy the world. And it does get to a point where you're like, really? Every time a bad guy shows up, just go get the team together. Just, this'll take you five minutes. Why are you doing this on your own? Like,
01:12:36
Speaker
I have to suspend a lot of disbelief that you have all these super mighty friends and they're all out on dates right now. So I like historical components. That's one of my series. I set it in the forties because what would happen if something as simple as Hitler is discovered early because of a psychic? Well, how would that change the rest of the world?
01:13:06
Speaker
It ripples forward. So I love when things look at that singular moment, shift it and then go ahead and go forward with it. Let us see what the world looks like because it's not going to be hockey dory like like in this movie. And I was a little angry that they sidestepped it. The Cold War happened. They they basically all just vanished for 70 years.
01:13:37
Speaker
No, I wish they had some of them had stayed like what would Russia be like at that point? There is a more interesting story in this universe than the story they delivered us. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And yeah, that and that's the story I want to see, like, right. Don't give me this generic supervillain in this terrible bodysuit. Give me the story about
01:14:02
Speaker
how that super soldier program ends, what happens when super soldiers, because one of the problems when the Soviet Union fell was all these weapons now flooding the black market. Okay, what happens when you've got, you know, fucking super soldiers hanging around? What happens to them after the Soviet Union falls? And that was kind of like, what's the Superman? Is it Red Sun? Yeah, yeah.
01:14:27
Speaker
I love Red Son because you get the classic Superman ethos that you're so, or the mythos that you're so familiar with, and we're gonna change one simple thing. He fell into Russia. And you spend the next, you spend the rest of the comic getting to explore what that would be. And that was this, that was the story I wanted.
01:14:58
Speaker
So and just that one change changes the entire fucking world, right? That's amazing about it. And yeah, I'm with you 100% I mean even with you know watchmen one of the coolest things about watchmen on rereads is just how different that world is because of one superhero just one superhero exists and because of that everything fucking changes so I
01:15:25
Speaker
I know people will argue to death with me. I love the movie for Watchmen. I originally read the comic. I was a huge fan. When the movie came out, it was everything I wanted in a bag of chips. And I know I'm probably the only person in the universe. But when it shows the newspaper fall of Batman's parents surviving. That one little change right there
01:15:53
Speaker
I and I know that it was a loose tie in and it didn't really impact anything. But just knowing that that one simple change could have created this whole world. I love that type of stuff because I mean, I've been reading comics for 35 years at this point, like. There isn't a superhero story that we haven't done so, especially with the characters that we've grown to love, right? So.
01:16:22
Speaker
And that's why like I loved X-Men, no, X-Men, Spider-Man Unlimited. Was that what, that universe? When Spider-Man goes to Counter-Earth, you mean, the animated series? No, the, what is the, oh God, now I'm not gonna remember his name. Not Biden, starts with a B.
01:16:48
Speaker
He did Miles Morales, that universe. Oh, Bendis. Oh, Ultimate Spider-Man. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that whole universe, I loved it. Simple things, like the X-Men on that was amazing. I loved it beginning to end because that X-Mansion gets destroyed a lot. How did they fund it? Well, the X-Men go get corporate sponsorship, of course. So,
01:17:17
Speaker
Yeah, this movie, I will find more people to make watch it. I don't know why. I feel like it's a train wreck I need to share with everybody.
Final Thoughts on 'Guardians'
01:17:28
Speaker
The first 20 minutes, everyone texts me. Oh, this doesn't look so bad. Just wait. Yeah.
01:17:38
Speaker
And yeah, it's coming and it's coming fast. Honestly, I'd say I wonder if there's like a super cut on YouTube or something. I'm sure there is of just like all the best action scenes in this movie. And I would say
01:17:50
Speaker
Look for that first. Watch that because I think that'd give you the best experience of this movie. Because again, the plot makes no sense. The plot may not even exist. And the characters aren't. There's nothing special about the characters. The best thing about this is the effects, is the action scenes, and just the promise of the world it creates.
01:18:12
Speaker
you're excited for a promise that never gets fulfilled. And I actually, I went back and watched some of the trailers. They did a trailer for each of the characters. If you go watch those, then go write the fanfic about it. That is exactly what everyone's doing. Because it's gonna be better. Yeah, yeah. Okay,
Where to Find Jeremy's Work and Podcast
01:18:35
Speaker
Jeremy. Well, thanks for coming on to talk about this movie. So why don't you tell people where they can find your stuff.
01:18:42
Speaker
Oh, thank you for letting me subject you to this movie. Everyone can find me, probably the easiest place on my websites, remi flag, R-E-M-Y-F-L-A-G-G.com or writer O'Malley. I'm not going to spell it out exactly as it sounds. You'll find my sci-fi. You'll find my romance stuff. And everything is available on Amazon. So whatever you're kind of feeling, just
01:19:12
Speaker
Go for it. Okay, great. And we'll have links to those things in the show notes. Everybody can go.
01:19:17
Speaker
Check out the the book series either if you're I mean if you're listening to this show, obviously like superheroes are ready. So Check out those books. Also if you're in superhero romance, too, then you can check out that as well. So But that does it for this episode of superhero cinephile superhero cinephiles comm is the website super cinema pod on Twitter and Instagram and remember you subscribe to our patreon for as little as a dollar a month you get these episodes a week in advance no ads plus you get access to the book club and
01:19:46
Speaker
companion podcasts where about once a month or so we talk about comic books and graphic novels. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.
01:19:56
Speaker
If you enjoy the Superhero Cinephiles, then you'll also love my companion podcast, the Superhero Cinephiles Book Club. All my Patreon subscribers get access to this exclusive podcast where I review superhero comics and graphic novels. Not sure what comics you want to read next or what you should dive into? I've got you covered on that. I'll be doing reviews, recommendations, and also talking to you about useful entry points.
01:20:17
Speaker
If you're interested in reading some comments but don't know where you should start, plus you'll get access to all episodes of the main show a week before everyone else. On all of this for as little as just a dollar a month, all you have to do is go to patreon.com slash supercinemahot and you can sign up at any subscription amount to get started. Thanks so much for your support and please don't forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
01:21:00
Speaker
Thank you for listening and as always good night. Good evening. God bless.