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DC's "Suicide Squad" Casting Revealed

CuriousStranger said:
To be fair, this is a problem with superhero teams in general. Like, where the hell was everyone during Iron Man 3, Thor 2, Winter Soldier, etc...?
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Actually the MCU does that reasonably well.

In Iron Man 3 - well, SHIELD clearly didn't decide to intervene openly, so that leaves out Captain America, Black Widow and Hawkeye. The Hulk is obviously not ideal to deploy here, and Thor was on Asgard. As for SHIELD not intervening, remember that at no point until the end was the Mandarin that severe a threat - sure, you can argue that they should have rescused the president, but at this point the timetable was quick enough that they could simply not get there fast enough.

Thor - the Dark World was mostly set on Asgard. The fight in Oxford during the end took place of a short period of time, so we can once again say that none of the other Avengers had time to get there. Iron Man maybe, but that only applies if he's near a suit, and flying across the Atlantic takes time even for him.

The Winter Soldier was mostly intrigue. Nick Fury certainly isn't going to tell the Avengers about his super-secret plan. Hawkeye was semi-retired at this point, Tony Stark isn't a trusted asset, neither is Bruce Banner and neither would have helped much with the low-level conflict here. They could have beaten the Winter Soldier (or at least made it easier), but every fight was short enough that there was no time to call them in, even if one of them was in New York.
And then we have the fight to stop the Helicarriers, but that takes place over less than an hour. Put Tony on the West Coast, and he can't get there in time.


And Suicide Squad - well, their entire premise has an in-built reason not to have any heroes there. They're a black ops government unit, they get deployed where the government can't trust the heroes, or the heroes would refuse.
But then they had to turn the Suicide Squad into heroes by giving them save the city by stopping a supervillain.
It's at this point where you get the question "why didn't the heroes show up". But you could have used the same reasoning as Marvel used above - there was no time for them to show up.
Except they fucked that one up too, apparently. It would have worked fine if the Suicide Squad gets sent to kill someone (or steal something, or the like) who isn't a threat yet, the government wants them dead (understandable after the destruction other superhumans caused in the last few movies), thus having no heroes, and then they suddenly turn on the city-destroying mojo. And are defeated in a timeframe that doesn't allow any other heroes to show up. Yes, even the Flash because he could right now be in another fight, or just sit on a project and not watch the news 24/7 to notice the big city-engulfing fight, or maybe he has to nurse some wounds right now, or something. Give that a nod in a Flash episode or the like, and everything is fine.
But they didn't do that, apparently. Why is beyond me, this isn't exactly rocket surgery.
 
Very disappointed. Harley and Deadshot are the only developed characters (and poorly, at that), the rest are just pieces of cardboard. Damn, I wanted Katana to be awesome so much. :sad:
 
Right, my bad, thanks for reminding me.

You could do the nod in some other way. Heck, if you want to tie your movie-universe together, doing so in the movie-universe is preferable. Make it a subtle easter-egg - at some point, put a news report showing a video of The Flash fighting into the background. Either it's life (meaning he's busy right now) or it was slightly before (so he's injured).
If you do it well, it doesn't take any attention away from the movie, doesn't take screen time because it's short and in the background, and both satisfies people who complain about such plotholes and gives everyone a nod that this plays in the same universe as the Justice League movies.
 
Serafina said:
The Winter Soldier was mostly intrigue. Nick Fury certainly isn't going to tell the Avengers about his super-secret plan. Hawkeye was semi-retired at this point, Tony Stark isn't a trusted asset, neither is Bruce Banner and neither would have helped much with the low-level conflict here. They could have beaten the Winter Soldier (or at least made it easier), but every fight was short enough that there was no time to call them in, even if one of them was in New York.
And then we have the fight to stop the Helicarriers, but that takes place over less than an hour. Put Tony on the West Coast, and he can't get there in time.[/SPOILER]
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There actually was a planned scene with Hawkeye in that movie, but the actor couldn't make it. Its a shame, it would have been really cool.

(From memory it was massive 'king of the hill' style chase, with Hawkeye on top of a large tower showering Rogers with arrows while hes chased by a horde of goons. Eventually, he would have finally caught up to Hawkeye, and they'd appear to scuffle, only for it to be revealed minutes later that Clint dragged him out of sight, informed him his clothes were bugged, and told him the location of a cache with some unbugged clothes he could wear... and a joke that Rogers wasn't in good enough shape, because he really had to try hard to avoid making it look like he wasn't missing on purpose.)
 
Arcman said:
I'd prefer it to show the more abusive side to it, to give Harley a reason to break away at a later movie, instead of going the true wuv love route.
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That's a fair point, it absolutely could have used a bunch more of that. I just don't think her defying him would mean that much if the entire back story was flashbacks. It would have felt unearned in a movie full of easy fixes.
 
Fair warning, I am biased against Zack Snyder's work, but I did try and go into this movie with an open mind and a fair, analytical approach. I wanted to like it. Unfortunately we don't always get what we want, however, and much like ugly sweaters forced onto us by doting grandparents sometimes we just have to wrinkle our noses and muddle through.


The DCCU has been nothing short of a careening mess since Man of Steel and with the enormity of the Batman V Superman's failure, Suicide Squad was supposed to be what cemented the universe as a solid counterpart to Marvel. This was the long shot. The Ave Maria. This was what was supposed to sell us, "We can make good superhero movies too!"

That is not what happened.

I got a lotta ground to cover and not much time on mobile, so let me start with the one redeeming factor this movie has: it ended.

As for everything else - I just saw Suicide Squad and although it didn't quite live up to its name, I gotta say it sure gave me a run for my money in wanting to kill myself from having to suffer through two and a half hours of the most disjointed movie I've seen in years. It's taken the title from another of Hack Snyder's movies, 2011's Sucker Punch. That movie was a fractal kind of awful and I absolutely despise it. But I can't say that I hated Suicide Squad. I can't say that because I don't have it in me to hate a movie this bizarre.

There is so much wrong with this movie. I don't have the time or the patience to break down everything wrong with this careening death-rattle of the DCCU. I left the theatre just holding my head in my hands, wondering: why. Why do we have such an enormous casts crammed into a two-hours-and-change long movie? Why is the first half of it just pop song after pop song? Why is the Joker so prevalent if he's almost a non-entity in the movie? Why is Will Smith getting so much screen time to be made so relatable? Why are Boomerang Brony and Harley Quinn brought out and supposed to be able to respond to someone like Zod? Why is the 'twist' so contrived? Why does everything look like it's been made artificially darker when the shots are already so dark? Why is Boomerang Brony brought on but not The Flash when they have footage of him putting the former away? Why didn't The Flash help out? Why does this try to be like three different movies and fail at being them all?

Why is this movie's tone all over the place?

Why is anything?

This movie feels like a hooker covered in neon vomit shooting up in the back of the grimiest strip club you have ever seen, before giving you the sob story about how her unborn child has AIDS. And then she keels over. And her death rattle goes

"no viewer"

"you are the demons my life choices were fine you pushed me to this"

And that's the movie. I don't even want to call this piece of crap a movie because a movie is supposed to have a point and this... this thing has none. Nothing in this movie serves any coherent purpose, thereby rendering it all meaningless, but you'll go see this shambling excuse for a movie anyway because you're supposed to no matter how bad it is, which is the true takeaway from this movie: everything is pointless and without meaning. Suicide Squad in fact drives me to solipsistic navel gazing and ultimately, reminds us all that there is no point to anything ever.

I can't even recommend this movie to you if you want to just leave apathetic and jaded. Go get drunk instead with your 20 bucks.

You might even have some fun that way.
 
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Rook said:
Fair warning, I am biased against Zack Snyder's work, but I did try and go into this movie with an open mind and a fair, analytical approach. I wanted to like it. Unfortunately we don't always get what we want, however, and much like ugly sweaters forced onto us by doting grandparents sometimes we just have to wrinkle our noses and muddle through.


The DCCU has been nothing short of a careening mess since Man of Steel and with the enormity of the Batman V Superman's failure, Suicide Squad was supposed to be what cemented the universe as a solid counterpart to Marvel. This was the long shot. The Ave Maria. This was what was supposed to sell us, "We can make good superhero movies too!"

That is not what happened.

I got a lotta ground to cover and not much time on mobile, so let me start with the one redeeming factor this movie has: it ended.

As for everything else - I just saw Suicide Squad and although it didn't quite live up to its name, I gotta say it sure gave me a run for my money in wanting to kill myself from having to suffer through two and a half hours of the most disjointed movie I've seen in years. It's taken the title from another of Hack Snyder's movies, 2011's Sucker Punch. That movie was a fractal kind of awful and I absolutely despise it. But I can't say that I hated Suicide Squad. I can't say that because I don't have it in me to hate a movie this bizarre.

There is so much wrong with this movie. I don't have the time or the patience to break down everything wrong with this careening death-rattle of the DCCU. I left the theatre just holding my head in my hands, wondering: why. Why do we have such an enormous casts crammed into a two-hours-and-change long movie? Why is the first half of it just pop song after pop song? Why is the Joker so prevalent if he's almost a non-entity in the movie? Why is Will Smith getting so much screen time to be made so relatable? Why are Boomerang Brony and Harley Quinn brought out and supposed to be able to respond to someone like Zod? Why is the 'twist' so contrived? Why does everything look like it's been made artificially darker when the shots are already so dark? Why is Boomerang Brony brought on but not The Flash when they have footage of him putting the former away? Why didn't The Flash help out? Why does this try to be like three different movies and fail at being them all?

Why is this movie's tone all over the lap?

Why is anything?

This movie feels like a hooker covered in neon vomit shooting up in the back of the grimiest strip club you have ever seen, before giving you the sob story about how her unborn child has AIDS. And then she keels over. And her death rattle goes

"no viewer"

"you are the demons my life choices were fine you pushed me to this"

And that's the movie. I don't even want to call this piece of crap a movie because a movie is supposed to have a point and this... this thing has none. Nothing in this movie serves any coherent purpose, thereby rendering it all meaningless, but you'll go see this shambling excuse for a movie anyway because you're supposed to no matter how bad it is, which is the true takeaway from this movie: everything is pointless and without meaning. Suicide Squad in fact drives me to solipsistic navel gazing and ultimately, reminds us all that there is no point to anything ever.

I can't even recommend this movie to you if you want to just leave apathetic and jaded. Go get drunk instead with your 20 bucks.

You might even have some fun that way.
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I feel constrained to point out that this movie was not directed by Hack Snyder (I like that, btw. Thanks!), but by David Ayer.
 
ZerbanDaGreat said:
I... think you're really reaching to make this a race thing. All I know is that I'm pretty sure Killer Croc is actually a cannibal in the comics, and the fact remains that even in this movie he's still the kind of weird fuck who'd (according to a deleted scene) hawk up half-digested raw goat then pick the bigger bits out of the vomit to eat them again right in front of like a dozen people. Between that and his Monster Mash face can you really blame the average person for being 'racist' against him? Because the average black person may have different facial structure and melanin content than what your brain is programmed to find normal but at least they aren't lizards from the paleolithic era asking for about tree fiddy.
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Can I blame people for discriminating based on appearance? Is that a serious question? But then I see "what your brain is programmed to find normal" and I realize that yes, it is a serious question.

Anyways, the movie is not the comics, deleted scenes were cut, and this is some very interesting argumentation about how this character is inherently a monster because of his aesthetics rather than his actions.

VolantRedX said:
Well he does eat raw meet and requested to be locked in the sewer rather than a normal cell. Also it seems strange to think of Croc as a black person. I mean do we actually have any proof that he would be black if he wasn't a giant lizard man? Sure he was played by a black actor but that doesn't mean the character was black.
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Well, gee, I dunno, dude. Should we let the casting influence how we understand the character? Should we let the use of AAVE and thick Creole accents influence how we understand the character? Should we let the casual police brutality influence how we understand the character?
 
Bakustra said:
Can I blame people for discriminating based on appearance? Is that a serious question? But then I see "what your brain is programmed to find normal" and I realize that yes, it is a serious question?
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Are you really equating 'being black' with 'being a one-of-a-kind carnivorous lizard-monster'? Is that a serious question? But then I see you attempting to throw shade on me for daring to mention that racism has its roots in the fact that our primal instincts are racist little fucks that tell us that people with different ethnic features are Others and therefore untrustworthy. And I realise that, yes, it is a serious question.

Anyways, the movie is not the comics, deleted scenes were cut, and this is some very interesting argumentation about how this character is inherently a monster because of his aesthetics rather than his actions.
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If Killer Croc were recast as a fucking xenomorph would you still be calling the guards' mistrust of it racist because its exoskeleton is black?
 
mc2rpg said:
But his actions were also monstrous, so what exactly is the problem?
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What, exactly, were his monstrous actions? He beat up some prison guards, which is right and moral, and he fought some shoggoth'im, rescued a guy from getting strangled underwater, and fought a supervillain. I guess there was that time he said he was beautiful.

ZerbanDaGreat said:
Are you really equating 'being black' with 'being a one-of-a-kind carnivorous lizard-monster'? Is that a serious question? But then I see you attempting to throw shade on me for daring to mention that racism has its roots in the fact that our primal instincts are racist little fucks that tell us that people with different ethnic features are Others and therefore untrustworthy. And I realise that, yes, it is a serious question.
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So the guy has a skin condition and bad teeth. That also describes, like, a quarter of the British Isles. No, that's not a fact, that's an opinion. It's a very bad opinion, in my estimation, but it's certainly not a fact.

If Killer Croc were recast as a fucking xenomorph would you still be calling the guards' mistrust of it racist because its exoskeleton is black?
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What on earth is this? The aliens from the "Alien" series aren't real, nor do they star in movies, although it would be kickass if they did.
 
poaw said:
I think the character of Waller tripped up the writers because her animated and comic book representations are so at odds with the reigning cultural feelings of today.

Her other incarnations involve her being a competent, ruthlessly pragmatic, and unflappable government bureaucrat. The kind of person who, if left in charge of say...the Department of Transportation, would ensure all the trains ran on time. But she's not in charge of the DoT because, fuck the trains, a private citizen created a city destroying monster that is impervious to nukes and a few months before that extraterrestrials tried to terraform Earth with all of us still on it. She's ultimately comes across as dated in the post-Snowden world; where before people didn't like the hammer of government intelligence agencies because it occasionally hit people's thumbs, but they trusted that it was never intentional and the nails needed to be hammered.

So now she has to represent the maliciously opaque, in both motivations and methods, view of American intelligence agencies that people have now. With that comes the fact that she has to be made a greater villain than Suicide Squad themselves, so they have to do things that make her actively unsympathetic. Without doing so, she's just a hard-ass tasked with corralling a bunch of scumbags into doing something good; which audiences would likely have trouble with, because it's a fundamentally sympathetic portrayal of something they're not willing to sympathize with. It's tonally confusing and people respond negatively to that sort of thing.

We get instead an Amanda Waller who does things just to make her dislikable, instead of the arch pragmatist we get someone who just comes across as petty and cruel, and they have to ensure she gets her comeuppance, so they put her in a situation where the "real" Amanda Waller would never find herself. Which is a shame because that means the writers are already painting themselves into a corner concerning her in the future.
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Considering that, and then comparing her to Marvel's counterpart Nick Fury, it's funny to think how Marvel managed to do such a good job of getting Nick Fury right even as there's a huge debate on DC's depiction of Waller.
 
Bakustra said:
So the guy has a skin condition and bad teeth. That also describes, like, a quarter of the British Isles. No, that's not a fact, that's an opinion. It's a very bad opinion, in my estimation, but it's certainly not a fact.
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*shakes you violently*

THAT 'SKIN CONDITION' IS SCALES! THE 'BAD TEETH' ARE FANGS! HE IS A LIZARDMAN! A NOT-STATISTICALLY-INSIGNIFICANT PORTION OF AMERICANS BELIEVE HIS KIND SECRETLY CONTROL THE GOVERNMENT! AM I EVEN SPEAKING ENGLISH!?
What on earth is this? The aliens from the "Alien" series aren't real, nor do they star in movies, although it would be kickass if they did.
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I-I meant it as...



I was drawing a parallel to Killer Croc's creepy appearance by presenting the hypothetical scenario in which the Killer Croc character is replaced by a xenomorph but otherwise treated the same in order to highlight the absurdity I perceived within your argument.
 
What 'comeuppance'? I mean, she lost her first shot at taming a superhero, but she's sitting pretty well at the end of the movie, having turned her little experiment in systems of control into a useful black-ops team. The only issue is whether Batman will take action to shut Task Force X down, but that will have to wait for later movies.

ZerbanDaGreat said:
*shakes you violently*

THAT 'SKIN CONDITION' IS SCALES! THE 'BAD TEETH' ARE FANGS! HE IS A LIZARDMAN! A NOT-STATISTICALLY-INSIGNIFICANT PORTION OF AMERICANS BELIEVE HIS KIND SECRETLY CONTROL THE GOVERNMENT! AM I EVEN SPEAKING ENGLISH!?
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He's a guy with a skin condition and bad teeth. He's not a lizardman. He may be suffering from a congenital condition, or he may have developed his condition later in life, but he's a human being.

I-I meant it as...



I was drawing a parallel to Killer Croc's creepy appearance by presenting the hypothetical scenario in which the Killer Croc character is replaced by a xenomorph but otherwise treated the same in order to highlight the absurdity I perceived within your argument.
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Cool, so you don't know what "casting" means, you conflate looking strange to being an inhuman dick-monster, and you don't understand what "coding" is.
 
Bakustra said:
What, exactly, were his monstrous actions? He beat up some prison guards, which is right and moral, and he fought some shoggoth'im, rescued a guy from getting strangled underwater, and fought a supervillain. I guess there was that time he said he was beautiful.



So the guy has a skin condition and bad teeth. That also describes, like, a quarter of the British Isles. No, that's not a fact, that's an opinion. It's a very bad opinion, in my estimation, but it's certainly not a fact.



What on earth is this? The aliens from the "Alien" series aren't real, nor do they star in movies, although it would be kickass if they did.
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Bakustra said:
So the guy has a skin condition and bad teeth. That also describes, like, a quarter of the British Isles.
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Bakustra said:
So the guy has a skin condition and bad teeth. That also describes, like, a quarter of the British Isles.
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Bakustra said:
So the guy has a skin condition and bad teeth. That also describes, like, a quarter of the British Isles.
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Motherfucker! :mad:

(source is british)
 
I do think it was telling that Croc was the only Squaddie who didn't get murder or attempted murder in his flashback bits. I have no idea what his crime score was when we got his neon flashcard, however; I'd be very interested to know to what extent the movie supports the narrative that Croc isn't that bad in the absence of people locking him in a sewer and dropping hunks of goat on him occasionally.

---

Also, I think it's reasonable to point out that mistreating people because of their looks is wrong because skin color or clothing choice or so on are really bad indicators of future behavior. A lot of gang members might be black and wear hoodies, but a whole heck of a lot of hoodie-wearing black people aren't gang members, so your false-positive rate of mistrusting black people in hoodies will be through the roof.

I dunno how many reptilian fanged-and-scaled humanoids there are in the DCCU, but I'm reasonably sure that there are some. I'm also reasonably sure that it's a given that most full-body mutations also affect your brain and behavior in significant ways; no one's wondering whether or not any of the lurching-forward Shoggoth-folk had broken free of Enchantress's spell and just wanted to be rescued, after all.

It is reasonable for the gaolers to treat Croc with extreme caution given what they know about him, because being a giant crocodile-person is quantitatively different than being black. This, however, doesn't mean that it is reasonable to lock him in a sewer and have their only social interactions with him be dropping meat on his head.
 


Pictured: an actual black man.

In the 1950s, children in New York would buy black men and then, when they became tired of them, flush them down the toilets. Urban myth held that some of these black men survived, eventually resulting in a dangerous breeding population of black men native to the city's sewers, which-

-oh, no, wait, that's crocodiles. They're easy to mix up, you see.
 
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Revlid said:


Pictured: an actual black man.

In the 1950s, children in New York would buy black men and then, when they became tired of them, flush them down the toilets. Urban myth held that some of these black men survived, eventually resulting in a dangerous breeding population of black men native to the city's sewers
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So that's the Underground Railroad I heard so much about.

Well, 'Underground Waterslide' might be more appropriate.
 
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