I don't buy that this is an actual trend. If anything I think we're seeing more original plots than we used to. Even marvel plots are a hell of a lot more interesting than their equivalents in the 00s, 90s, and 80s. A lot of content is starting to get smarter, and more genre savvy, and indie content is thriving more than ever before.

You and I must be watching different marvel movies.

I would comment as follows.

Iron Man - sort novel for setting marvel tone but mostly banal action movie

Iron Man 2 - banal action movie

Thor - banal action movie

Captain America: The First Avenger - particularly banal action movie

Marvel's The Avengers - banal action movie

Iron Man 3 - banal action movie, sort of interesting to see protagonist suffering PTSD anxiety from being a superhero

Thor: The Dark World - banal action movie

Captain America: The Winter Soldier - first interesting take. Patriotism is not the same as government obedience. Real fight choreography approaching a soft john wick.

Guardians of the Galaxy - Early rock and roll aesthetic pretty interesting

Avengers: Age of Ultron - banal action movie, perhaps mcu lowpoint

Ant-Man - superhero heist movie, literally deconstructs larger than life superhero tropes. I think thumbs up

Captain America: Civil War - by this point doing the mcu's own thing, which is novel, but probably not interesting outside

Doctor Strange - banal action movie

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 - aesthetic still feels mostly fresh.

Spider-Man: Homecoming - super down to earth high school drama, frustrated working class villains suffering the fallout of superheroes, seems interesting to me

Thor: Ragnarok - great film, very genre savvy. Rare achievement to make godly strength brutes feel really engaging to watch. Taika Waititi is a genius.

Black Panther - pretty good. interesting aesthetic. directly addressing racial tensions.

Avengers: Infinity War & Endgame - Mostly fan service and not too surprising but honestly still novel.

Ant-Man and the Wasp - Ehhh I really don't remember

Captain Marvel - Beginning had some great hard sci fi imo. Thought the ending message of newly apotheosizied female not needing to prove herself to her evil male mentor was a solid take, whereas a classic "mano a mano" kind of showdown would be so typical of the genre

Spider-Man: Far From Home - Villain emphasizing themes of the power of deceptive media? heck yeah.

Wandavision - Really bizarre and interesting start. Unfortunately non-self-aware conclusion

Falcon and Winter Soldier - Active discussions of race and the problematic nature of superheroes being supremacists? Very good.

Loki - kind of a super cliche topic (time cops) that is also somehow really rare? eh.

honorable mentions for Logan and Deadpool for being just great; and the Amazing Spiderman for its excellent aesthetics despite terrible writing.

Again, isn't this "the youths these day" argument again with no data to back it up? I mean, to put a quick example, Tenet requires a level of attention that other movies don't require.

Also, from the movie it's not so obvious that shields only block fast things. To me it looked like they work like a strong fabric held by a force field, but that can be penetrated if enough force is applied.

I'm pretty sure one of the characters explicitly says near the beginning of the film that it's fast vs. slow that makes a difference.

It's not about the youth these days, it's about Hollywood -- the fact that Hollywood movies are more commoditized and generally "samey" than previously is a pretty well-known development. It's an industry thing, not a culture thing (or, well, it may be driven by cultural changes, but I don't entirely believe that, and don't want to speculate anyway).

> not so obvious that shields only block fast

It's literaly said so by one of the character in the same scence shields are introduced: "the slow blade penetrates the shield"

I don't think it's a fair characterization. I think just about everyone can infer how shields work after watching this movie. I think the issue is you can watch the film as many times with as much attention as you want, and without extended context there will be a lot which goes over your head.

Can you give an example of something that goes over one's head?

> I think just about everyone can infer how shields work after watching this movie.

If you re-read my comment, my point is not that people can't infer how shields work (they actually don't need to infer it, because it's told to them explicitly in the first 10 minutes), but that they can't infer why swords are used instead of guns. That requires an inferential leap that the movie doesn't spoonfeed you.

I've had people IRL tell me they were confused by the swords, so no, it's not a given that people can infer that.

> my point is not that people can't infer how shields work (they actually don't need to infer it, because it's told to them explicitly in the first 10 minutes), but that they can't infer why swords are used instead of guns.

Isn't that utterly obvious from how the shields are supposed to work?

> That requires an inferential leap that the movie doesn't spoonfeed you.

What, "...and bullets move fast, so of course guns won't work" is a "leap"? Come on!

And here I thought I was pessimistic and cynical about the average IQ of the populace at large...

I hadn't read the books.

If you think about it for about 5 seconds, it makes sense swords are the only thing that are effective against shields and the explanation about fast vs slow is very clear.

The gun example is a bad one—that's not why they don't use guns. They don't use lasguns because they cause a nuclear explosion when fired against shields.

Oh, and since you are the only one mentioning it on this page, one of my pet peeve with the movie is: why so freaking many lasers? Two is two more than we should have seen, I think.

(the other pet peeve is that they don't draw blood every time we see a crysknife).

I didn't mention lasguns, just guns.

Why don't they just use the shields as nuclear weapons then?

Spoiler alert for Part 2!

Convention, just like why nukes haven't been used as weapons in over 70 years in the real world. If your enemy does it to you, you'll do it to them.

But also, isn't there an agreement that any house that uses nukes against human targets gets obliterated by the entire Landsraad ? Which might make a bit problematic the Fremens' use of nuke(s) in the Lynch-version assault on the emperor.

I think you're correct. It's been a while since I read the books and I deliberately didn't reread them before the movie to avoid the kind of frustrations that occur when you see an adaptation and are too-familiar with the books so a few of these details are escaping me at present.

The Fremen in Lynch's adaptation did what they did in the book. They won the war any way they could as they were the underdogs, without taking Arakeen they couldn't win it.

I'm not an expert on the world of dune or anything, but I guess I would have assumed that nukes on a relatively barren sand planet would be pretty ok.

Except that others will use it against you. Also, because this movie didn't convey it well, Spice is literally the thing that keeps the Empire and the economy going. Without it, there is no interstellar travel (thanks to a religious opposition to thinking machines). So maybe on an arbitrary barren sand planet you could try and get away with it, but this is not the one you want to test that on. It would be tantamount, at the time of the book's writing, to nuking the OPEC nations on Earth, you know, the places where (at the time) an incredibly large percentage of oil was being pulled out of the ground and keeping the global economy going.

I should probably just stop here and not expect to grok the geopolitics of this universe over a conversation like this but...

* Why is there so much conflict if there's an empire?

* Why doesn't one faction simply control the planet?

* These are just regular nukes right? Like on the scale of the atomic weapons we have now? I guess on the scale of intergalactic conflict those don't sound very important to me? Very different from the scale of a nuke on an OPEC state city.

Why is there conflict in any nation with an existing government? Because people have desires which conflict with the status quo. They want more power, more resources, better resources. In a galactic empire, do you want a planet or the best planet? Do you want the planet that makes you the most wealth or the planet that's just a bunch of rocks?

The Emperor, ostensibly, controls all the planets. The political system is based on fiefdoms in the book. He hands the administration of Arrakis to a particular noble based on his own political objectives and trust.

They are essentially nukes, yes. But melange (the spice) is only available from Arrakis (in the books it's discussed that they try and find ways to make it elsewhere, but without spoilers I can't so much more than that it doesn't work). If the OPEC nations were your only or principal source of oil in this world, and you nuked them, what immediate impact would you expect from that? A global economic shutdown, and almost certainly being ostracized (if not worse) from the international community. Setting off nukes and making it practically impossible to export melange from Arrakis would be similarly effective at collapsing the galactic empire and economy.

I'll try one last time before giving up :)

OPEC doesn't feel like the right analogy. OPEC is a foreign state. Arrakis seems to be, like all planets, owned by the galactic empire. It is by several orders of magnitude the most important planet. A better analogy would be if, say, Hawaii, contained the bulk of the world's energy resources. It is strange to me that the galactic empire doesn't rule this planet directly with extreme security measures. Why isn't the empire immediately taking charge directly when there's any sign of conflict on the most important place in the empire?

You're reading way too much into my analogy, but sure, go with your Hawaii version. It's an analogy, they are not exact, just, you know, analogies. To give you a sense of the idea.

Why not? You'd have to ask Frank Herbert for a definitive answer, but the next best is to read the books. There are many factions involved, the emperor is not actually in a position of absolute authority. The Great Houses, the Spacing Guild, Bene Geseret, Bene Tleilax and others also wield influence. There are checks and balances in place (by custom, by law, by force), and one of those is that the Emperor does not control Arrakis directly. It would put him in a position with too much power that the others (envious or desirous of semi-selfrule) would object to, probably violently. Arrakis is also a source of great wealth, and by giving it out to specific Houses, the Emperor is granting a favor (at least on the surface) and buying their allegiance.

At that point you might as well just nuke them