Birds of Prey trailer I - Oct 1

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Now onto TV land?

Ok, first I need to address some issues that arose from my previous posts. What are they, as follows?

First, someone has commented that the end of BBR, we see the door of another motorhome open to release its’ inhabitant, who will help the Motorhome family of No Name get through the destruction of their own motorhome. Yay! …It is also supposed to show that humans do not have any great advantage now that the dinosaurs and the other prehistoric reptiles are out and about. Fair enough.

Now, the entire premise of the original JP movie was all about ‘life will find a way’, which echoed, however distantly, the message of the original JP novel, as spoken by that version of Ian Malcolm. Yay, (the novel’s version of Ian Malcolm does little more but blather after its’ version of the initial T-Rex attack; it has its’ own share of flaws, but we are not talking about them here), so what does the franchise’s reboot do?

…Bring back not only Dr. Grant, Dr. Sattler, and Ian Malcolm for its’ final film, but also Hammond’s grandchildren, Tim and Lexy, (do not confuse her with Rexy – Lex/Lexy is a human young woman, while Rex/Rexy is an aged female Tyrannosaurus. They are different). The fans are quite happy with this fan service, but will it help the franchise? Considering that they already have the ‘new’ characters – Owen, Claire, Maisie, Franklin and Zara – this leaves them with a lot of characters to juggle around, and killing any of them will likely backfire by enraging the fans!..

On the contrary, and this brings me to my other critique, ‘Insatiable’ the Netflix series has gone the other way around – it seems to have largely removed the entire WG/WL issue from its content, (there’s a scene of Patty compulsively eating, but this it so far), rebooting itself as a standard black humor drama/comedy; the trailer for S2 is much better and far less messier than it was for S1. It still is not for everybody, but least it is not offensive. So kudos to ‘Insatiable’ here and now; sorry for bitching about you in my previous blog entry.

…And now that we have this out if the way, let us move onto the main event: the ‘Birds of Prey’ first main trailer. What can be said about it? The 2016 ‘Suicide Squad’ movie was a mess. It was not a bad film, but it had plenty of room to improve, and apparently, it is going through a reboot now. By contrast, the upcoming ‘Birds of Prey’ film will be focusing on Harley Quinn’s character, and her emancipation. This is not a problem; the problem is that it appears that they will be cramming several years of worth of her emancipation in the comics into a single film. Compounding this is the fact that the BP movie itself already feels chaotic, in a bad way: there are characters from all strata of DC comics – there’s HQ herself, there’s the Huntress, there’s officer Montoya, there’s the Black Mask, there’s Cassandra Cain, whose version in DCEU clearly has a long way to go before she reaches her kick-ass levels in DC comics, (where she is one of the Bat-family, BTW). The trailer itself gives surprisingly very little exposition for such an action-filled piece: I think that Harley and her posse will be saving Cassandra from the Black Mask and his people? Yeah, there are worse films in DCEU, including the ‘Suicide Squad 2016’ itself, let along the ‘Justice League’ film, but still. I am of the mixed feelings when it comes to BP.

A special shout-out should be done for the hyenas that we also see in this trailer. Obviously, just as in the TLK-reboot, they are CGI – they may not be as impressive and regal as the African lions are in real life, but their teeth and jaws can crack bone, so it is hardly unlikely that any movie will be featuring them as real life animals. They are supposedly not that easily trained either.

…There are rumors that the beast of Gevaudan, a much-discussed wolf-like cryptid of the pre-revolutionary France, had been either a spotted, or more realistically a striped, hyena, released into the French wilderness. How probable is that is debatable, but this is one of the more popular theories when dealing with this monster, and I felt that it should be mentioned, because Joker. He is not in the BP movie, it seems. Considering that we are talking about the Jared Leto version here, it isn’t too surprising; regardless of how you feel about the 2016 movie in general, its’ Joker had certainly sucked. Not surprising, then, that BP feel probably not feature him in person, but trying to cram several years’ worth of Harley’s character development in comics into a single film is not the best solution either. Ah well, we will just have to wait and see what will be revealed regarding the BP movie next.

…This is it for now, see you all soon!