No for sure, I get what you mean by being out of touch as old white guys are, or people like Michael Bay or Zack Snyder etc. I didnt mean to be rude or anything, but as a former fat person I was like "hey, fat people know stuff about music!" Once a fat kid always a fat kid I guess. :cheers
No, no. You definitely weren't rude. I was just being thoughtless, and you rightly pointed it out.
Anyway, I finally finished watching the film last night. It was...ok. A disappointment, really, because of the wasted opportunity. A few final observations.
1. The production design and acting in this film really was good. I don't like the Joker characterization, but pretty much everyone else was solid in their roles. You could tell they were acting well, given the script and direction they received. And, again, the movie was pretty gorgeous. I can't argue with that. The villains of the piece were suitably
weird in ways that we haven't seen before and I liked that. It was almost Lovecraftian, which is a nice change of pace from the usual "Evil cloud descends on the planet to destroy it." Unlike, say, Galactus or whatever the hell the villain was in Green Lantern, this "cloud" thing actually looked otherworldly. So, kudos for all of that.
2. The film was both too long and too short. It simply had too much to do, and felt both rushed and bloated all at once. This was most evident in how emotional beats would happen, and would be
completely unearned, like one of the characters referring to the group as a "family." What? What the hell is this?! You just met these people, like, 5 hours ago, and all you did was shoot some monsters and share a drink together, and now they're
family? No, sorry. Again, Guardians handled this
much better, because you got a sense of the scope of the experience these characters shared, even if the film was only around 2hrs long. The pacing and character development actually flowed well. But because this film didn't have time to let pretty much
any moment within it really breathe, all the moments felt hurried, even as there were also too many of them packed into a single film.
3. I would have completely restructured the film. Like, from top to bottom. I would've treated this like the DC equivalent of the Dirty Dozen. Show the group training together for missions, show them having friction, getting to know each other, give the story a sense of scope to it. Then throw things sideways by having the main plot of this film kick in (e.g. the main threat). During all of the interactions, you could have the characters convey some of their backstories, maybe showing what I'd call "emotional polaroids" that convey what they went through without devoting long stretches to "Here's
my backstory."
4. These characters should've been introduced in other films. This should not have been the 3rd film in the whole DC franchise. These characters are, generally, fairly low-level criminals. Yeah, they're a threat, but the scenes where they're captured probably should've appeared in other films instead of devoting, like, 30 min to showing the capture of only a few of them. I'm thinking of a sequence like the fight against the Rhino at the end of the last Sony Spider-Man film. That's a decent way to introduce a character that you'll use in the future. But instead, we get a rushed introduction to everyone, which means less time to flesh out the connections
between the characters and actually earn those later emotional beats.