Look, I didn't love Guardians 3, it's a conservative, Christian movie and I don't agree with most of its premises.
But there wasn't a dry eye in the house by the end of that, and I'm pretty sure most of them know what "it meant", and it certainly wasn't "almost like AI making a film". Ditto for Across the Spider-Verse, whcih is a progressive movie I do agree with.
There's always been this argument that successfull movies are bad, and I've never liked it. It's never been true. There are tons of bad films that make their money back, but for every Air Force One there is a Die Hard or Back to the Future (more conservative movies I don't agree with but are very well made, go figure).
So yeah, I do agree that Oscar bait keeps Oscar baiting, and that superheroes aren't killing cinema, which is a hard take to roll with this year in particular. But no, I actively don't think superhero movies or genre movies are worthless or trash, any more than I think westerns are trash or action movies are trash.
_cerpin_taxt_@lemmy.world 1 year ago
How is Guardians 3 a conservative Christian movie? You know the director, James Gunn, is very outspokenly progressive, right?
MudMan@kbin.social 1 year ago
I responded to this above, but just to clarify on this point, I mean small c conservative here. Which is absolutely not inconsistent with Gunn being a normal person who is not an actual fascist.
I mean that it's a conservative movie in that it explicitly religious and does take the stance that science and technocratic "let's change the world" science is inherently equal to hubris and negative, while the positive flipside is enduring suffering, embracing spirituality and being rewarded with a happy afterlife. There is absolutely a progressive read of those beliefs, there has been for hundreds of years. Gunn seems to be explicitly aligning with it here, and that's fine, but that's still a (small c) conservative viewpoint.
Hell, I'll go one further: a lot of people on the opposite side of that argument are today, in fact, actual fascists. It's not hard to go find examples of atheist dicks online, or of technocratic tyrants. Turns out your religious beliefs are not connected to whether you're a good person. That doesn't mean the Catholic worldview isn't inherently conservative. I was using the word philosophically, not politically.
Mongostein@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
That’s a lot of mental gymnastics to make GOTG3 political.
It’s a movie about friendship, family, and a megalomaniac.
MudMan@kbin.social 1 year ago
How is it mental gymnastics? I'm starting to feel bad for Gunn, because he put all that stuff on the movie super on purpose and apparently people will not just miss it they will actively try to ignore it.
Eh... I may be late to this, but... yeah, these are extreme SPOILERS. This thing really needs a content warning system, a spoiler alert system or both.
Anyway, dude, Rocket goes to actual heaven. They flag it as actual heaven. We see it on screen. Lyla straight up says there is a God and a heaven and Rocket gets to go to it.
Normally you expect this argument to be about some subtextual reinterpretation or an allegory or whatever but... no, man, it's right there. Explicitly.
Hey, don't look now, but besides being pretty explicit about there being a God and an afterlife it's also super not on board with for-profit health care and animal testing. You may have missed how it's like 75% of the running time of the movie. You could argue about it being a religious film, but political? It's the story of a group of people whose friend's organs are hadlocked by a corporation, they go fight the corporation and end up freeing all their animal test subjects.
Every time this "it's not political" stuff comes up in online conversation I swear it's like an optical effect of some sort. It makes you question how subjective perception is and wonder how other people's minds are parsing the world in different ways.