She-Hulk

[Darcy Parker]

I'm not saying you're wrong, but all I ever hear is how expensive CGI is.

Good CGI is expensive, comparatively, but even good CGI is cheaper than practical effects, especially anything on-set. George Romero said digital blood in Diary of the Dead probably had the effect of doubling the budget due to never needing to do cleanup and resets for gore gags not functioning as desired on the set and ruining a take.

[Dom D]

I heard that Marvel treat their contractors like shit with low budgets, changing requirements and insane deadlines, which may explain the ropy CGI.

I've been following that story for a while as it interests me. The effects houses have been in disarray for a long time now. Effect houses have for the last couple decades been taking on huge projects even though they know they will be working at a loss. So we have situations where one week an effects house wins the Oscar for best visual effects and the next week they declare bankruptcy. It's a nutty situation.

Marvel is not the only villian in here but they are a major one. They provide so much of the industries work that they have the sway to demand basically what they want and there's a lot of effects houses that say Marvel are incredibly unreasonable with their expectations and demands but they have to kow tow.

Which may not be moral but is an approach that should lead to good results- at least until that industry goes bust. I think ropey effects like She Hulk happen simply because the job is just that hard. Recreating a human is the hardest thing because we look at humans all day and our brains are so trained to notice everything about a human subconsciously. I'm not aware of a persons pores changing shape when they talk but I am aware there's something wrong when I watch a cgi human whos pores stay the same size. I won't know what's wrong, I'll just know it's wrong.

I think with She Hulk that level of work didn't match what is on offer for ba budget for a TV show. Not that the cgi bothered me that much. I would rather just watch a good actress than average cgi and its a shame the actress couldn't be worked in (I assume she's motion captured but that only goes so far).

[agent999]

I'm not saying you're wrong, but all I ever hear is how expensive CGI is.

I heard that Marvel treat their contractors like shit with low budgets, changing requirements and insane deadlines, which may explain the ropy CGI.

[Marshall Crist]

I'm not saying you're wrong, but all I ever hear is how expensive CGI is.

[Darcy Parker]

Hollywood's inexplicable hard-on for CGI has ruined so much stuff.

It isn't inexplicable. CGI makes effects work faster, cheaper and easier.

[FnordChan]

There're two things that factor into the success of any artistic endeavor: intent and execution. In the case of She-Hulk and the last two THOR features I don't think the execution is bad but I don't agree with the intent, which is let's tell the audience that we already know this shit is dumb as fuck by winking at them first. "Come on now. A She-Hulk? A guy in a porcupine suit? We know, we know."

I enjoy Taika Watiti’s take on Thor but I agree that it’s gone in for zany, self-aware hijinx over a more serious take on the subject. It works for me but I know folks who bounced off those flicks hard and I won’t argue the point. Would I prefer to see Thor taken more seriously and presented at face value? Generally, yes, that’s how I’d like to see all of the Marvel stuff presented, and if the series changes to, say, do straightforward adaptations of Barry Windsor-Smith material then I’m all for it. At the same time, I think if you are going to do winking, self-referential humor then She-Hulk is absolutely the place to do it and that the series did a great job with that. Even if you weren’t into the clips you’d been checking out you may want to jump ahead to the finale and see how they handled the “we need to wrap things up with a big fight scene” schtick. I thought it was a hoot and very well done.

Broadly speaking, for both the comics and the MCU screen adaptations, I feel that once you have an audience spend enough time in a shared universe it’s reasonable to acknowledge that the audience is probably pretty used to the genre conventions of superhero fiction and having fun with it, whether it’s winking asides or self-referential humor. That’s not all I want from superhero fiction - I thought the recent “World’s Greatest Detective meets Zodiac” tae on The Batman was great and that movie is serious as a heart attack - but I’m not offended by it. Let’s have some fun with the whole shared universe concept and acknowledge it when things are goofy and holdovers from the Silver Age. And, hopefully, let’s also have some parts of the universe play it straight when they need to. Again, no arguments if that doesn’t work for you, but I think that’s part of the fun of the shared experience, even if it does include some winking and nudging at the audience.

[Dom D]

In the case of She-Hulk and the last two THOR features I don't think the execution is bad but I don't agree with the intent, which is let's tell the audience that we already know this shit is dumb as fuck by winking at them first. "Come on now. A She-Hulk? A guy in a porcupine suit? We know, we know."

The writers are in a weird spot though. These were stories written for 10 year olds, now they're being put out as movies for adults that have to simultaneously respect the source material while also not looking totally naive to adult eyes. That's a tightrope.

You can go full Snyder and say this is all worthy of being taken seriously but that can come off really weird. Like at the end of his Justice League cut where a guys just says "My name is Martian Man Hunter" without any sense of irony at all and I fell off the couch laughing. I'm guessing that character goes back to the 60s or something and to kids back that sounded like a cool, tough name. You can't have a character calling Martian Man Hunter in a movie that takes itself as seriously as Snyder's do though. It's too incongruous.

Alan Moore seems like a bit of a dick but Google's been pushing his interviews at me recently and he's got some interesting things to say on this stuff. The cultures gone weird and superhero movies own a very strange space within that.

[Toyboy]

Based on the source material, She-Hulk has been written as a comedy title for over three decades now and was definitely presented as a sitcom here. Totally understandable if the humor doesn’t work for you but in this case you’re complaining about the amount of salt in something that is advertised as being high in sodium.

You're correct, but I'm sensing a shift in these shows and movies that mirrors what happened in the 00's in the comics themselves, even in the more serious titles. That is to say that a generation of writers, saddled with a few decades worth of silly characters and concepts, felt that the work around for the problem of "people are going to think it's goofy to have Daredevil fight a guy in a frog suit, so let's have DD point that out before the readers have a chance to." A recent example I saw of this in a modern comic was in a Donny Cates written issue of some title where Juggernaut is being transported by a S.W.A.T. type of organization and two of the officers are making fun of the fact that he wears two masks and then clown on him for having recently lost a fight to some D-list villain with a dumb name. That type of humor is pervasive in all Big 2 comics, not just the "comedy" titles and personally I find it really tired and hackneyed.

There're two things that factor into the success of any artistic endeavor: intent and execution. In the case of She-Hulk and the last two THOR features I don't think the execution is bad but I don't agree with the intent, which is let's tell the audience that we already know this shit is dumb as fuck by winking at them first. "Come on now. A She-Hulk? A guy in a porcupine suit? We know, we know."

[FnordChan]

There's too much salt in these movies/shows now.

Based on the source material, She-Hulk has been written as a comedy title for over three decades now and was definitely presented as a sitcom here. Totally understandable if the humor doesn’t work for you but in this case you’re complaining about the amount of salt in something that is advertised as being high in sodium.

Meanwhile, I thought She-Hulk was delightful and easily the best of all the MCU shows on Disney+. I’ve enjoyed all the other Marvel shows to varying degrees but felt they all dropped the ball with the last episode or two, around the time someone decides a big CG fight scene is needed. Thankfully, since the pitch here is “legal sitcom with superheroes” rather than “superhero show”, She-Hulk is able to sidestep that problem very neatly and in a way that jives beautifully with the source material. Speaking of which, in addition to the Byrne run’s meta comedic take I thought this series owed a lot to the Dan Slott run from, good lord, the mid-00s - and perhaps also a bit of Mark Waid’s take on Daredevil.

Overall, I’d say She-Hulk was charming and very entertaining - not least because it was allowed to be a half-hour per episode rather than being forced to drag things out towards the hour mark whether that was called for or not. Kudos to Tatiana Maslany for doing a helluva great job as Jennifer Walters (even if the CG was a bit janky when she was big ‘n green) as well as the rest of the cast. I’m hoping this gets a second season for sure.

[Toyboy]

I avoid most modern superhero comic books because whenever there's humor in a title it tends to come from characters cracking on each other for their names, costumes and powers. Throw any D-list villain from the 60's-80's into most anything and you'll inevitably get that "joke" over and over, and the Marvel movies and shows have followed suit. In one of the recent Honest Trailers on Youtube they did a supercut of every time a character made a wise crack about some other character's name in the Marvel movies and while I can take or leave the Honest Trailer format - get excited about some mindless entertainment then clamor for a snotty takedown of it a week later - you can't deny data and they pull that shit a lot.

Tatiana Maslany said she was excited to get Matt Murdoch/Daredevil onto the show so they could use that character within the tone of their program, and from what I've seen that "tone" consists of snarky takedowns. Look at this guy...he's a Man-Bull. This guy's a fucking porcupine. Look at this guy's dumb powers and that person's silly costume. I just don't find that funny because it's played out, which is why I've stuck to watching some random clips and some chunks of episodes here and there and maybe it's confirmation bias but what I've caught isn't for me.

When THOR: RAGNAROK came out a buddy of mine loved it and when I told him I thought there was too much humor he argued that all the MCU stuff has humor. True, but they're overdoing it and it's unnecessary. I told him it was like if you went to McDonald's and the person making the fries accidentally added double the salt so you complained. If the reaction was "Hey, french fries have salt. You must not like french fries." I'd counter with "I do like fries, but there's too much fucking salt on these."

There's too much salt in these movies/shows now.

[Marshall Crist]

Hollywood's inexplicable hard-on for CGI has ruined so much stuff.

[Dom D]

There should be more Tim Roth in this. He was great.

I give this show major props for how much upset it caused to a segment of the grown-man-worshipping-superheroes set. My favourite was a youtube video I saw where this Scottish guy lost his shit over She Hulk calling Captain America a Virgin. He just was not going to have it.

I strongly disliked the first episode and found it mostly watchable after that. Like Deadpool it walks a fine line between funny and obnoxious and it tips over a lot for me.

The CGIs disappointing just because you lose your actress. Couldn't they just have painted her green and oversized her like they did with Gandalf? The Hulk just looks very uncoordinated and awkward and our lead actress is great. Go with your strengths.

[Ian Jane]

Did anyone else give this a shot? I really did not like the first episode at all but as the series moved on, I kinda got hooked and wound up really enjoying it. If you go into this knowing it's a comedy and not so much an action series, it's pretty entertaining. Lots of fourth wall breaking and very 'meta' at times (especially the finale) but the therapy session episode was hysterical. Hopefully they do a second season.

[Randy G]

The CGI looks underwhelming and some of the dialogue is too on the nose but I found the 80s comic by Byrne fun so I'll give it a shot. DD and Punisher aside I've found the MCU tv shows unimpressive but who really cares at this point.

[agent999]

Befree release this had over 20000 ratings on imdb, pretty much all of them 10 stars or 1 and plenty of those reviews come from people over 30. I'm trying to picture the adult who's sitting there thinking "I've got to do some thing to take down that show about the green, cgi lawyer!' The world is a very strange place right now.

You don't have to picture them, they're all over Youtube! I find reaction videos galling at best (overgrown children pouring over news articles or teaser trailers rather than doing something creative themselves), but these people have their knives out as soon as something is announced. Would they even give a shit if they weren't scrabbling for ad revenue or trying to sell their merch/coffee brand etc.? I'm bemused by the 'never going to watch, but sure as hell going to slag it off' mentality. Sometimes I miss the pre internet days when people just switched channels if they didn't like something.