I have been living by this philosophy for a while and I'm not going back. I try to only discuss movies I've already seen with the people in my life, I don't watch trailers, and I don't read reviews (at least until I've seen it). It's really nice, I feel like I enjoy the experience more this way
my friend told me it was bad because it panders to different groups of people.
That's just idiotic. Too much pandering can be bad, but a lot of times it's just trying to be inclusive. Why not throw a little fan service to different people to get them interested in something?
100%. His argument was that international version didn’t have that stuff and I said, well they could have not done anything here in the US but they decided to show a more complete and diverse NY, so that’s progress to me. None of it bothered me while playing.
It's fine. I don't recall where I read it, but treat it like a Saturday Morning Cartoon. Some fun stuff happens, it's weird, I'm not sure it all makes sense.
Don't expect anything big.
I think the show could have been excellent, but what we got is fine.
Incels are not the majority of any real demographic outside of their own group. It's really weak to use that as an excuse for mediocre movies and shows. There are way more normal people that if it were good it still would've picked up.
Exactly. I'm so sick of this excuse that any female-led project that doesn't blow up only does so because people hate women. Ghostbusters (2016) was the first one I remember it being the big talking point. That movie was just not good, and it had nothing to do with the female leads.
I enjoyed She-Hulk. It wasn't great and there were moments that made me cringe, but overall it was ok. I love Tatiana Maslany (if anyone hasn't watched Orphan Black yet, what are you doing with your life?) and can't wait to see more of her in the MCU.
I, and I feel like most people, are perfectly willing to give any creative work a fair shot, and indeed, female leads in traditionally male roles offer a new opportunity to tell a new story, which is great in this time of endless remakes, reboots, and sequels nobody asked for.
...but just like it's not fair for viewers to dislike a work just because of a female lead, it's just as unfair for the creators (and critics) to expect viewers to like a work just because of a female lead.
Too often these days, it seems like the discourse surrounding such movies is simply a straightforward test of: "Did you like this movie? If not, you're a misogynist."
Unfortunately this misses the possibility (intentionally, at times) of viewers who didn't like a work for any number of fair and valid reasons, from fairly objective weaknesses to simple subjective preferences. Even people who wouldn't have liked the same movie even if it were cast with traditional male actors filling the roles as expected.
This does a disservice to women (or whatever unrepresented demographic takes center stage in the work) by shackling the merits of gender and/or racial equality to an artistic work for which criticism will necessarily be highly subjective...and from that point it just makes a fundamentally strong and simple truth ("We should value everyone, regardless of gender or race") and corrupt it to the point that the message that's really coming across in these conversations is sadly more the unspoken suggestion that these groups need this movie to prove their worth.
Which is nonsense.
Women are perfectly capable of kicking ass without having a movie tell us so. A shit movie about women can still be a shit movie without changing the truth of women being incredible. And we should all be able and willing to make a distinction between negative sentiment for a movie featuring women, negative sentiment for the performance done by female actors, and negative sentiment toward women in general.
My wife and I watched it and enjoyed the first few episodes, but then it took a turn and became just stupid. My wife was the first to call it, I agreed and we stopped watching it.
The show fails at comedy and that was the central item that was supposed to hold it together.
The problem is the the show is supposed to be absurd and doesn’t get there. The jokes don’t land and that wrecked the premise.
She hulk is a supposed to be a tongue in cheek takedown of the marvel’formula’ she calls out each item as it happens.
The tone they hit is about. Halfway where it needs to be where they want the main character taken seriously at times and irreverent at others.
The twerking scene is a perfect example of this. There is no reason for Megan thee stallion to have Jen as a lawyer. So it should be absolutely insane that a lawyer declares that she will kill for a client then starts busting a move with them. It should be so far outside of the norm for lawyers and the characters that it feels like a flash mob performing’never going to give you up’. Spoiler it doesn’t, it feel like just another set up joke. It never hits the line right between jokey and serious.
The finale didn’t land because it felt too serious. It was supposed to be gut ripping funny when she hulk travels from marvel show to the main menu.
It was a HEAVY lift to write and they didn’t get there. The main actor wasn’t charming enough to pull off the character development and comedy scenes. the vfx obscured any nuance in performance.
It was halfway between falling down and Ferris bulers day off and that’s not a good thing.
It's a fun show. The ending didn't quite land right, but whatever; it's not the kind of series where that matters. Also, I didn't have any problem with the CGI and don't understand why so many people are complaining about it; probably they're just the CGI equivalent of audiophiles and should be ignored by any who don't share that particular affliction.
I don't agree with the CGI part. It wasn't Black Panther bad. But there are a lot of moments where it looks off. But it also didn't have the budget of Infinity War or anything, so it's okay to not be as impressive.
I'm not usually super nitpicky with that stuff and it didn't ruin the show. But it was noticeable.
Guardians Holiday Special < She Hulk < Miss Marvel < Secret Invasion < Hawkeye < Falcon and Winter Soldier < Moon Knight < Loki < Wandavision.
Disney+ shows don't suck as much as the haters hate them. The ones on the top are actually really really good.
I think they really let themselves experiment and get weird with the D+ shows, which I think is a GOOD thing, even if it resulted in some REALLY cringy moments in She-Hulk and Miss Marvel and some "... what are you doing?" moments in Secret Invasion and Hawkeye.
In general, the MCU seems to be striking out a lot on the sillier end of things lately. Makes me anxious about Deadpool.
So much of what Star Wars does these days has the feel of filler. Like Dave Filoni is giving ChatGPT three or four climactic moments and then letting it write the rest of the show. MCU does NOT feel like that to me, even at it's worst.
You put Secret Invasion above things? Yikes, dude. I can understand putting She-Hulk and Ms. Marvel lower than other stuff, because they were more targeted to specific audiences and didn't necessarily have the same mass appeal as the others, but they are good at what they were attempting to do, even if you don't love what they were trying. Secret Invasion didn't even seem to know what it was trying to do, but it failed at every level.
It's just not in the same category in my brain. It had some of the best episodes and some of the worst episodes, but I really feel like it's it's own thing.
Why don't you watch it and decide for yourself? What's with this need for everyone to be validated by the shitty opinions of others?
I thought it was funny and the characters were well crafted. The goofy tone worked surprisingly well, and in retrospect it shouldn't have surprised me how well it worked because we're talking about a universe where people turn into giant green beefcakes and shoot lightning out of their hands. That's silly as hell, and this show is really the first instance of the MCU acknowledging that. I want more of it.
What’s with this need for everyone to be validated by the shitty opinions of others?
Also this need for everything to be put in a box. One or the other. Black or white. It's somewhere in between, like most things in life. I hate this weird need to label everything all the time.
I'd rather not potentially waste my time watching something to see if it's good, if others can tell me that have already seen it. That could be one reason people seek others' opinions first, idk. However I acknowledge that this method doesn't always lead to successful recommendations.
I feel like people have really weird expectations about some shows. And when that show does it's own thing and refuses to cater to those expectations, people get mean and refuse to appreciate the show on its own terms. And when I say people, I mean misogynists. Expectations are the male gaze. And the show is women.
Honest opinion - it was just below mediocre. Very undercooked and you could feel how the producers jumbled around the episodes and changed things. Like most of the marvel shows it feels very amateurish and part of the reason Feige\Iger are changing things with marvel studios and now starting to bring in actual tv producers instead of using the movie folks.
I think it was just okay, a couple of episodes even decent. But man the finale 😩 idk I just hated the 'breaking the 4th wall' thing and the rolling back of some events cause the main character didn't like it. I was like 'wtf??' watching it haha
This sums it up here. Bruce can't control his anger and turns into a rampaging hulk. She can control being the hulk because as a woman you have to be in control of your emotions all the time ( apparently men can just act as they want all the time ). That is the justification for her being a better hulk than Bruce right off the bat.
Of that sounds like a fun time go for it. I couldn't dealnwoth the out right misandry in the show and just gave up on disney.
I personally didn't watch it as I dropped off the marvel train before it aired, but that sounds like a good commentary on the concept of 'hysterical' and it's etymology. Women have often been found to be 'rampaging hormones' so having the physical manifestation of that makes pretty good rhetorical sense. Maybe you just didn't know the history behind it.
No, it's just bs. Even how she got her powers she would be weaker than Bruce, since Bruce is the source of her power. In the comics she is many times weaker than him.
It's post endgame marvel content, which means it was made with a pre established equation from Disney.
So you'll see the exact same story flow, humor, and acting as every other marvel franchise, with very little originality beyond the premise.
Which means it's mediocre depending on your tastes.
What makes she hulk specifically unenjoyable though is the very obviously shoehorned diversity requirement by Disney. I want to be clear I'm not anti progressive in any way, but it really comes off as "We threw in this fad from Twitter to make you happy" type of material. Not something well thought out or interesting that many children's shows often do much better.
The plot and characteristics of the main character are still kinda dumb. Hulk gets sidelined as some useless dude. The ending was really stupid. And there's too much random stuff related to other marvel things which makes it harder for the show to stand out on its own or get new viewers interested.
It's really a hit or miss on whether or not you enjoy it, because there are some people who like this generation of marvel stuff, even though I personally find it really boring and not very well written.
On a somewhat related note, Ms Marvel had similar issues. The plot was dumb, the character was dumb, and the writing/acting played the very same with the same type of jokes and humor. It was kind of an insult to the comic because it completely missed the point of the original source material and instead was formed into another cookie cutter marvel franchise.
The problem with "shoehorned diversity" is that.. there's no "reason" for minorities to exist in real life, they just are. So if a character happens to be anything other than a white cishet man, is that shoehorned in, or a reflection of reality?
The truth is that shows are far less diverse by default than they should be. I don't exactly know what diversity it is you are talking about in she-hulk, as I couldn't find any exceptional amounts of it, but according to Gallup, 19.7% of Gen Z identify with an LGBT label, which means in a show that has 10 gen Z characters, two of them "should" be queer, with one of them being bisexual as bisexual people are 13.1% of Gen Z. But it's rare you even see a queer person in media at all.
Hold on what's the "obvious" shoe horned diversity in she hulk? Forgive me but it wasn't obvious to me, I watched it and found it generally entertaining and didn't spot any "token" characters or anything like that.
I'm not the person you're responding to but I think he was more referring to the shoe horned women issues bit. Like how half the plotline revolves around men being useless pigs and how she has no trouble being a hulk because she's a woman and she's been controlling her anger her entire life (???).
Like it doesn't feel like it's part of her life story but rather it feels like someone told a writer "make it wooookeeee we need to appeal to womeeeeennn". It mostly felt shoe horned in to me. Like that space show where all the characters are teenagers each from a different race and they spend the first few episodes making sly comments about race and gender like it was some woke teenage drama show
This was actually one of those shows where I wondered if the articles about the outrage was manufactured to try and get attention to the show, since I didn't hear anyone actually talk about it. Just didn't seem to have traction among viewers other than articles talking about how people are angry popping up on /r/television back then.
It's great, probably my favorite marvel miniseries.
I didn't read any reviews about it so I want aware of the haters.
The actress is really great and the storylines and action were all fun but made sense in the story, a story that I found made more sense and was more engaging than most marvel stories.
Whatever low ratings there are have gotta be full of crap.
I'll be honest, I thought She-Hulk was alright. Was it Marvel's best work? Not really. I think the ending was pretty... Different? Not good? A cop-out? Unsure.
It kinda feels like they just slapped together something for the sake of slapping together something, for money. If it felt like it was a bit more planned out in terms of story line, flow, and if the ending was an actual ending, then I think it'd be better rated.
Of course, the female-lead movies will have the misogynists that tank the ratings, and that's unfortunately unavoidable. But I think some of She-Hulk's ratings was that people were expecting a fully-fleshed-out season like their other streamables, like Daredevil, The Punisher, Wandavision. Those felt like complete, planned stories, even if meant to be supplemental to the movies. This felt different. In fact, most of the recent episodic stories feel different. Because I think they feel episodic: divided up while also trying to be a story.
I'm not sure if the portayal of She-Hulk is true to her comics. I honestly have only read a small handful of comics, so I go into the movies and shows just taking it in as it's shown.
She-Hulk felt like they tried to slap some laughs, fourth-wall-breaking, and a variety of cameos into a sort of "what whacky adventures will Jen the Hulk Lawyer get into today?", followed by a botched ending to wrap it all up.
Now all of that said, I did enjoy it. Except the ending, if I haven't made that clear enough. It was nice pieces of a story. I have nothing against She-Hulk as a character, or any of the female characters. I think its great to bring a wider variety of people (sex/genders, religions, sexual orientations, etc) into the multiverse. I just think this story was not great, and I hope that botching the story and causing bad ratings as a result wasn't an intentional act in order to say "See, people don't want this Marvel hero."
I think perhaps a bit of both? It had some good aspects and there were some total misses and most of it was just ok to meh. There was also a misogynist uproar surrounding it. But you don't need to be misogynist to hate it.
Its one-dimentional. "She's awesome, men are shit". Its kind of fun for first 3-4 episodes after which it gets tiresome, because its just more of the same. There's no character development, because she's awesome from start. There's no obstacles to overcome. Its like playing a game in god mode. Fun for a moment.
At no point did the show say that "men are shit". Fuck, it has Matt Murdock and Bruce Banner in it, both of whom are depicted as cool, stand-up dudes who are anything but shit. It also has Wong, who is awesome, and Pug, who is a bit of a good but also pretty cool.
If you're getting "men are shit" then you're identifying with the wrong characters, and that's a you problem.
And yeah, she's awesome, she's a damn superhero. Did you have this same problem with Captain America or Iron Man? It's not even remotely true that there are no obstacles for her, it's just that the stakes are different because it's a workplace sitcom. I don't get this line of argument at all. How is "She's awesome" supposed to be a criticism?
I thought it was probably more amusing when you know the: "men are usesless and women are perfect"
But the worst part of the show for me is just that it's very very boring. They kinda treat the audience like idiots.
That's not in there at all. The point was that when high profile women screw up in public they get shit on relentlessly, but men in the same position will more often than not get away with being shitty constantly. The women have to be perceived as perfect just to stay out of the crosshairs.
I didn't mind it until right at the end. The last episode of two totally ruined it for me. Breaking the 4th wall was unnecessary and awkward, and they screwed up a perfectly fine ending with their jarring 'subverting expectations' approach.
Personally I didn't are for it. The actress is great but everything else was just mediocre and the CGI was horrible in so many parts in the first few episodes I just gave up watching it. I think most of the series Marvel Studios is putting out is garbage for the most part, the "make a series like we do with the movies" just doesn't work and Netflix kicks their ass making Marvel serialized shows.
I also don't like the She-Hulk comics where she is trying to be funny and carefree or whatever, the ones where she is a serious bad ass are awesome.
It was ok. Certainly not on level with loki, wandavision or moonknight, but not bad either. But I especially didn't like the feige part, and the ending itself, and breaking the fourth wall, which is something i didnt like in deadpool either.
Breaking the fourth wall is She-Hulk's thing as much as Deadpool's. The ending is actually based on a famous moment in one of She-Hulk comics where they flee from a bad guy by literally running through the comic book.
Yeah I'm not saying the tv show is diverging from the comic book, just that i don't like that kind of pre-baked postmodernist stuff. As I said, the show was fine, i don't agree with most of the critiques that have been thrown at it.
I liked it. I wish it was a little longer, so we had a better character build for her. I say that about most Disney+ shows, though. I get they're expensive, but they're also the largest media empire on earth. They monetize the show far outside the initial run of it anyways so it would be nice to give some of these shows a better chance of hooking people during the first season with a few more episodes and a less rushed story.
I remember watching the first season. It wasn’t bad but also not good, far from the best. It’s hardly memorable. I do remember lines and dialogue were kind of forced or not cohesive.
Why does the OP think that She-Hulk ‘got bad ratings’ when it was one of the two most viewed Marvel shows on Disney last year?
That’s right, more people spent more minutes watching She-Hulk than anything other than Loki, including content from other Disney franchises.
Social media outrage & negative review brigading on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes from a demographic that is mainly male, a certain age & American doesn’t actually represent the majority of those of us paying for Disney+.
Women subsidize content designed for that market all the time,,why the outrage when the rest of the market gets something to their tastes?
I was primarily basing it on reviews and ratings including IMDb tbh. Fair point, but just out of curiosity, if IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes are unreliable due to review bombing/etc for often reasons unrelated to the project itself (including wanting to "restore the Snyderverse" and boycott Warner Bros, or not liking the fact that a remake of something classic was made in the first place, or political objection to the themes expressed)... what is a good source for determining what the actual public consensus on a show or movie is, ideally with a numeral rating guide like IMDb/Rotten Tomatoes?
Any social media crowdsourced rating is going to be vulnerable to review bombing/brigading.
You can get some sense of the perspectives with IMDb if you look at not just the score but the distribution of scores (available in the app). A huge spike of 1/10s tells the story.
It’s not that bona fide statisticians can’t get useful data out of crowdsourced surveys, but a public platform like those ones attracts brigading and the score is not adjusted for demographic balance.
We've all seen it. "Blah mah women bad, bad because another woman."
It's a problem now. You're not allowed to criticise a movie with a woman in it because it's got a woman in it, and now you're a misogynist, even if it's terrible and the fact is got a woman in it is irrelevant.
See the all female remake of Ghostbusters.
Also there's a certain amount of (I hate to use the word) woke washing. Where studios are trying to show how progressive they are by having women as the main lead and then going "look how progressive we are we've got women", rather than just having a women play in good well written roles, which would be actually progressive.
This is a bad faith argument in itself. Nobody is censoring you for having opinions. State your opinions clearly without retreating to a persecution complex, and if people find your arguments valid they'll engage with them.
That's is a bad faith arguement. People are censored for their opinions all of the time, they may not be arrested but they will lose their job or worse, I'm not talking about actual censorship I'm talking about the court of public opinion.
There are many reasons people don't like the show, misogyny, the different tone compared to everything else in the MCU, putting established characters in a different tone than they're used to, and then other more substantial complaints about writing, CGI, etc.
It's often a mixed bag and I've seen a lot of people blame the writing when it was really one of the other factors. Personally, I loved it.
I never watched it because from what I saw in ads and clips people posted it didn't look lile something I'd enjoy. I can't say if it's bad or not because I haven't watched it.
I think a lot of people who felt the same way are shitting on it regardless of if they watched it or not. Just watch it yourself and form your own opinions. Everyone has their own tastes. If you don't like it skip it and watch something else
I thought most of it was fun. But I really didn't like the finale. I know breaking the 4th wall is in her comic, but they just broke it too hard. Any emotional stakes that may have existed were blown away. And now, the MCU has to either ignore She-Hulk or fix it.