American Psycho is excellent though, if someone walks out of that film thinking Bateman is a cool guy then there's probably not much hope for them

  • UlyssesT [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    It's all a big "which Hogwarts house do you belong in?" Marketing gimmick, and it's very effective.

    I'm slightly surprised Disney didn't rehabilitate the Galactic Empire in Star Wars to the point of it being just another red team/blue team divide.

    • Leon_Grotsky [comrade/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      It was already done for them by the toy marketers in the decades prior.

      E) Funny, now that I think about it I had a flatbrim hat that was 50% Empire 50% rebel iconography on it. Literally the star wars radical centrism hat lol.

    • Dimmer06 [he/him,comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Actually Star Wars is one of the IPs I was thinking about. Nowhere in Star Wars film has there ever been a serious critique of the underlying economic system of the Empire. It's always been this nebulous corruption, bureaucracy, and authoritarianism which are bad things, but without the economic critique, chuds of all stripes could easily read the heroes as themselves. Something like the prison arc in Andor maybe gets close, but even that doesn't really critique economic relations, only political ones.

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Nowhere in Star Wars film has there ever been a serious critique of the underlying economic system of the Empire.

        Both "Phantom Menace" and "The Last Jedi" imply the nature of the Republic/Empire as one of rapacious merchantilism. "New Hope" describes Tatooine as a frontier colony and trading outpost between Hutt Space and the Core Worlds. "Empire Strikes Back" also implies Bespin is a frontier colony profiting from resource extraction.

        The focus of the films tends to be the ongoing civil war and associated military campaigns. But you can regularly see the edges of an economic picture - one of space faring civilizations spreading out into a galactic frontier in pursuit of new resources to mine for the benefit of the Core Worlds.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      They could have and it likely would have been a better movie.

      Andor does a great job of making the imperials sympathetic and human. It does a great job of making some rebels selfish and others overzealous.

      The conflict is more sincere when the characters all seem grounded, rather than naively righteous or comically sadistic.