Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "The Critical Drinker"
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I think Hela's antlers were totally ridiculous. I think Valkyrie would've been annihilated by the scavengers in the Thor-is-captured scene. But as a strong, diverse female, she of course had to kick everyone's ass, even if they had to stand still so she could do it. Major plot armor, there.
Then the "I gave you one job" scene between Loki and Scourge. There's no communication between the portal and the palace? Really? They can't get word to the palace any faster than a guy in armor can run a mile and a half?
Rufalo's Bruce Banner was a neurotic cry-baby, and total cringe. And BOY did they want to get that line in about his PhDs NOT being in piloting, even though the way they staged it was totally nonsensical. You're going to take your eyes off what's in front of you so the writers get to giggle? THIS is the guy Black Widow loves?
Other than those minor issues and the hint of woke from the Valkyrie scenes, which I'm admittedly hyper-sensitive to, after years of the shit, I thought Ragnarok was easily the best one of the bunch. The opening scene with the giant demon was pure gold. Thor's character arc was awesome. Teaming up with Loki, in a sort of redemption arc for the trickster, was good. I liked the "Asgaard is a people, not a place" idea.
Then they snatched it all away in Infinity Wars, taking all that character development AWAY from Thor, and then portraying him as fat, weak and emotionally fragile in EndGame. But then, the actor Chris Hemsworth, who actually LOOKS like a hero standing next to all the shrimp actors around him, just had to be taken down a few pegs.
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@shawngillogly6873 "Show me a revolutionary and I'll show you a closet aristocrat." Herbert had a much bigger story to tell, and a lot of people lost interest after the first installment, where the good guys win and Paul is made Emperor. I think it all holds together very well until possibly the last installment, published after his death, by his kid and a co-writer (Poul Anderson's kid).
The prequels which came along later are faithful to the canon, but much weaker than the original DUNE, itself. Lots of people don't "get" God Emperor of DUNE," but I think it's possibly the best of the bunch, tying everything together in a nice critique of human nature and political power. The PURPOSE of Leto II's empire was its destruction, and the MANNER of its destruction (and Leto II's death), the development in humanity that Leto II was aiming at, was key to humankind's survival against the return of the machines. Leto II didn't know how it all would end up, millennia after his demise. He just knew that if he departed in any way from his Golden Path, that the end of all human life was inevitable.
It wasn't that the Golden Path was all that GREAT. It was that all other paths he used his prescience to explore, led inevitably to human extinction.
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@nicholasleclerc1583 Well, if you're going to deny that Paul and Leto II were actually prescient, then why did you even bother reading past the first book? Paul and Leto II both saw the extinction of humanity within a few thousand years. Paul lacked the ruthlessness to do what was needed. Leto II, born a Fremen, had the necessary ruthlessness. It cost him his humanity, but as the books tell it, humanity DID survive, due to Leto II's sacrifice.
Of COURSE it's fiction. And I really enjoyed Herbert's systematic dissection of theocracy, monarchy, and even representative republicanism. How they all start out with the/a good idea, but time and human nature always find a way to corrupt them, assuming they weren't corrupt from the word "Go."
Leto II's main message was "Humanity will NEVER AGAIN put all its trust and faith in one leader, after what I'm gonna do to 'em." He WANTED to be overthrown, and it took 4,000 years for humanity to find its way around him, an eventuality that he met with great joy, hope - and utter despair for himself. He NEEDED a Delilah (Hwi Noree) to bring him down, and he embraced her arrival with all his heart, because she proved humanity's next stage of evolution had been achieved.
Anyway, I thought the entire series did Asimov's Foundation saga one better, although if you're familiar with Asimov's works, you see how he's wrestling with very much the same sorts of concepts and resolves them in very similar - and similarly unjustified - ways. None of these questions will be resolved in OUR lifetimes, but guys like Jordan Peterson are at least sketching the outlines of "What is the proper balance between the rights of the individual, the responsibility of the individual to the whole, and the responsibility of the whole to the rights of the individual?"
There's a balance between the collectivist and the anarchist that each generation must strike. Most of human history consists of the surrender of the individual to the collective in some way, shape or form, to the detriment of the individual and the collective. Historically, it's fear of outside threats, but at various times, internal threats - like contagion or the Jews - serve as the rallying point for those who hunger for power over others.
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The Baron had no idea how many Fremen there were. He only got an inkling from his new, temporary "twisted mentat," Thufir Hawat, after Duke Leto was dead. Hawat figured it out from the Baron's recounting of a conversation with Count Hasimir Fenring, who worked for the Emperor. "Witch's blood!" was what Hawat said, as I recall.
The Baron innocently talked about how he might use DUNE as a training planet for his own troops, following the Sardaukar's use of Salusa Secundus, a similarly hellish place, where only the best survived. The Emperor already understood the threat from the Fremen of Arrakis, whose entire lifestyle was basically better than Sardaukar training!
But I don't think the Baron ever really figured out how many Fremen there were until the very end. Hawat, never dreaming that Muad'dib was Paul, took all that information and basically made the Baron's plan for Feyd (Fade, not Fay-yed, imo) even better.
The Sardaukar were the MUSCLE, not the precision. It was the Baron who paid for them to come to Arrakis. The cost was monumental.
Anyway, I don't think the Emperor knew how strong or how numerous the Fremen were. To me that's a bit of a plot hole, because the Bene Gesserit must have known. They were all up in the Fremen's business, and had even engineered their religion, centuries before. It just seems a bit unlikely that they would've withheld that bit of information from the Emperor, when Mohiam was basically working for him.
It never made sense to me that Mohiam would be so pissed-off at Jessica and at the predicament they were in, after Paul used the family atomics to destroy the Shield Wall protecting Arrakeen. The Emperor had no idea what he was up against, even though he knew enough not to want the Baron to make DUNE a prison planet, like Salusa Secundus.
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@based9930 Whatever the reason, 2-hour-movie makers will always be at odds with the fans of the original work, because they're trying to make something complete that is over in about 2 hours of runtime. To the movie makers, it's always a one-off, and they'll add or subtract whatever they think they need to in order to make the one movie a success. I've seen this over and over, since long before critics started criticizing it.
While there are definitely some deliberate cultural genociders out there, in the main, it's the nature of the medium to butcher the original intellectual property. I'm always the geek who's read the book before seeing the movie, so I've seen how they butcher books in order to get a self-contained, 2-hour movie that'll make money.
I think it used to be relatively rare for someone to know "the canon" before the movie came out, and most people's only exposure to, say, Wuthering Heights, was the movie. The audience that'd be disappointed was always far outnumbered by the "normies," who'd never heard of it until they made a movie about it. But they opened up a can of whoop-ass when they took on the Marvel and DC Universes, with millions of comic-book fans coming out of the woodwork, angry at how they took great stories and, to be repetitive, butchered them, not for any story-telling purpose, but for some other purpose.
I think audiences are also a lot more sophisticated, generally, because of the glut of entertainment, the Netflix Binge Phenomenon, etc. There're still a lot of normies, but the number of people who are susceptible to just any old thing if it's got good special effects is dwindling. Hell, everybody's a critic.
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@leonrobinson8180 If you live long enough, you discover Nietzsche was full of shit when he said "What doesn't break you makes you stronger." Sometimes, you just come out weaker, more fearful, more scarred, or more cynical, or some subset from that list. I survived the great battle, but I'll never be as good as I was before I blew up my knee and had three holes blown in my midsection.
I think there was room for one or two de-constructed heroes. What's the saying? If the hero lives long enough, he becomes the villain? Conan finally wins the kingship, and although he turns out to be a pretty wise and tolerant king, the mere fact of BEING king forces him to hurt or even destroy someone or something good for the greater good of the kingdom.
MY big gripe with the movies is that they were NEVER as good as I thought they were. You become old and wise and educated enough, you can't help but realize that ALL Hollywood writers are ignorant cretins, and pretty much always have been.
That doesn't mean that wokeness hasn't made things worse.
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@politicallycorrectredskin796 The Hobbit was written for kids and kind of a warm-up for LOTR. Dwarves were pretty helpless in The Hobbit, yet somehow in the larger story, they were pretty bad-ass. The Hobbit, itself, was pretty inconsistent about the nature and abilities of dwarves.
I think they could've made a good trilogy out of The Hobbit, regardless. Painting the actual picture of the Barrow Downs, Tom Bombadil's abode, his wife, ... They could've worked in an Ents connection, there, because Bombadil's wood had trees that were pretty Ent-ish. They could've stretched out the parts fighting the spiders. The escape from the wood-elves.
There, again, is another inconsistency within Tolkien's own work. The pettiness of the elves in The Hobbit, as opposed to their tragic nobility in LOTR. The incompetent blundering by dwarves in The Hobbit, but the near super-hero abilities of Gimli in LOTR.
They could've spent a huge chunk of movie on how Bilbo engineered the escape from the elves. They didn't delve into that. It was actually a pretty cool thing that Bilbo did. Bilbo changed a TON in The Hobbit. Not to really capture that in the movies, and to insert a love affair between a dwarf and an elf that wasn't in the book was just bleah. Instead, they did a lazy montage of what could've been a HUGE part of the movie. Lots of room to be creative, there, because Tolkien uses a very few words to describe a pretty monumental achievement by the burglar.
I think a trilogy for a story as rich as The Hobbit is totally appropriate. And while I agree that they did a pretty darn good job on LOTR, that could easily have been serialized into 10 beefy 1- or 2-hour installments. I hope that's what they start doing more of. Mini-series and midi-series-length is hopefully the wave of the future. But the creative types have to figure out how to make it and get their money back for it, in a changing marketplace.
I think there's plenty of pent-up demand and $$$ for good movies and better, smarter adaptations. Peter Jackson's not the only one who can do them, nor is he going to hit a home run on every swing. Still, I wish I'd seen more elaboration on things Tolkien DID indicate, without going into great detail, because The Hobbit did need some tweaking to really stand up on screen. It would've been cool to actually see Beorn out on his night's travels, and not just a single shot from a distance, which is all Tolkien gave the reader. They could've built on that legend. Readers thirst for more on Beorn. More on Bombadil. There's so much room for some creativity that is NOT just standard Hollywood fluff.
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