Mulan (2020)

All non-Nolan related film, tv, and streaming discussions.
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Master Virgo wrote:
August 18th, 2018, 3:47 am
All that God needs to do is to torture Ramses and him only if he so desires. But nah, the sadist jerk prefers to bring pain to all Egyptian civilians instead. And then we are supposed to sympathise with all that nonsense. Nope, it's just a big failure of storytelling.£
I don't get that sort of logic. How is it a failure in storytelling if it tells the story exactly as it is in the Old Testament? Is a story worth telling only if it's morally right and redacted? That's what I'm reading from your post. I'm sorry but it seems like your subjectivity regarding this specific story is shifting the way you talk about storytelling in general. What about Noah then? Everybody deserves to drown in their sin except for Noah and his family, those lucky as hell animals? How about Aronofsky's changes to the story with the ancient giants? Or the oldest epic in the history - Gilgamesh, which told the exact same story centuries before? I'm sorry, but a failure in morality is not a failure in storytelling. If we take for a fact that what Moses' god does is cruel and move towards actual cinematic plot points, it's still an epic that works - Hebrew child gets lost on Egyptian royal ground, they embrace him as their own, Moses eventually finds out the truth about his heritage, goes into desert and returns as a different man. Cue: storm and fire. Let's find another story - Homer's Iliad. Who are we supposed to sympathize in that story? Which side is the right side? Which gods are the right gods? Doesn't matter. Because the purpose of that story is not the morality of gods, but the morality of heroes - who sin, on both sides. And nobody is more human than Moses in PoE, for better or worse.🕷

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It's a failure because the film wants you to side with Moses and his god. The entire premise is centered on Moses being a saviour and a hero. If you can't get behind that, then this is bad storytelling for you.£

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Master Virgo wrote:
August 18th, 2018, 5:12 am
It's a failure because the film wants you to side with Moses and his god. The entire premise is centered on Moses being a saviour and a hero. If you can't get behind that, then this is bad storytelling for you.£
The film doesn't want you to side with Moses, the story is presented as a one sided take on the story because it's directly lifted from the text, it's up to you to 'side' with the protagonist or look at it from an analytic observer perspective and see it for its flaws and positives. You're concentrating on the false morality of the story being equal to false storytelling because it's a false morality, but I'm sorry that just doesn't work. I just finished s02e07 of Mr.Robot and the protagonist was lying to me for six straight episodes about the reality that I was seeing, was that bad storytelling, or just a modern storytelling technique? You can't go back to something that worked within a specific thousands year old text, presented to us via a medium from 1998 and call it bad storytelling just because it's exactly as it was back then, albeit as an artistic piece and not just a religious anecdote. Old Testament god is a prick, Moses is a weak human, Egyptians are presented as racist slavers who believe they are gods on Earth. None of that has anything to do with how the stories are told throughout the history.🕷

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Master Virgo wrote:
August 17th, 2018, 7:13 pm
Exodus: Gods and Kings had the right approach to that story, that God was an annoying child and Moses was raving bonkers. Such a shame that it was also a terrible film.£
I really wanted that film to be good...

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Well it’s bad because he removed the mythos out of the myth. Stick became a sword, angry old god became a child, Egyptians became... white. Scott’s Hood was the same. When it worked, it worked because it did a classic thing with the new coat of painting, when it failed it did so because Marianne was in full armor battling horsemen on the beach. There’s a reason these stories work for generations. 🕷️

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I can take what I want from the core story, that much is true. But judging the presentation is a completely different story. This film very clearly attempts to make a case for Exodus being a heroic tale, and that's a miscalculation. A fellow going around following the orders of a merciless racist god cannot possibly be a likeable figure.

If the film had a neutral point of view then you could argue that the morality of the central character is completely irrelevant to how successful the narative has been in its intentions.£

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lol it's a Mulan thread guys.

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What can I say if Nomis is the master of pointless bumps, then I'm definitely the master of veering threads into all sorts of strange places.£

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We’ll just have to agree to disagree on that one Virgo. And I guess it’s still on thread track because it’s all about mainstream animation and what works/doesn’t.🕷️

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Master Virgo wrote:
August 18th, 2018, 6:05 am
I can take what I want from the core story, that much is true. But judging the presentation is a completely different story. This film very clearly attempts to make a case for Exodus being a heroic tale, and that's a miscalculation. A fellow going around following the orders of a merciless racist god cannot possibly be a likeable figure.

If the film had a neutral point of view then you could argue that the morality of the central character is completely irrelevant to how successful the narative has been in its intentions.£
Films don’t have to align with your political opinions to be great.

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