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David Muccigrosso's avatar

>> Reshoots might’ve deliberately weakened this premise, which is not fully explored in the series.

Lol no shade, but that’s a hell of an understatement!

TBH that was the moment the MCU jumped the shark for me. They couldn’t coherently explain where all this stuff was coming from and exactly what the hell was happening in the post-Blip world; they just charged right in to the politics. I’m not asking for Shakespeare’s histories here, but five minutes of solid exposition sprinkled throughout the first couple episodes of that show really would’ve saved the whole endeavor.

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Old Man Shadow's avatar

It’s funny.

First Blood remains a very strong antiwar movie that indicts the government for utterly failing veterans. John Rambo is a tragic figure. Someone who went over when his government called and did things he was ordered to do that haunt him. He is abandoned when he comes home. He is homeless. He suffers from PTSD. He doesn’t know how to reintegrate into a peace time society. When he is abused, he snaps and returns to what he does best. I’ve read that in the source material, his former CO is less interested in helping John Rambo than in cleaning up and covering up the mess Rambo causes.

Of course, we couldn’t have a tragic figure. It was “morning in America”. So in the very next movie, he becomes a gung ho super soldier. All of the antiwar stuff is gone. Violence is the answer.

We will briefly note that the “heroes” Rambo helps by killing a lot of Russians in the third movie become the enemies of the 2000’s. I suppose one could spin Rambo 3 then as an inadvertent return to the antiwar message of the first one.

But that was the 80’s pop culture.

The “bad guys” (mostly Black and brown skinned people) were threatening “good, decent” (read: White) Americans and only one (White) man with a gun could possibly stop them and “save America (Western Civilization). The Constitution was just a piece of paper that evil lawyers were using to exonerate those bad guys who were obviously guilty or the cops wouldn’t arrest them.

Now, I’d like to think most of us kids exposed to that horsesht grew out of that phase as we became adults. But it’s pretty obvious that more than half of us white kids are still stuck in that childhood phase of the 1980’s where we cheered the (white) cop no matter how murderous or brutal he became against the “bad guys” and the law, lawyers, and Constitution were just bullshit to shield “bad guys”.

Captain America and Superman are a call to an idealized America. An America at our best. They don't really fit the current decade.

I'd be curious to see how the next Superman movie handles this. Superman is generally the very definition of power under the control of compassion and empathy.

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