{"id":27,"date":"2010-05-13T21:12:25","date_gmt":"2010-05-13T21:12:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/?p=27"},"modified":"2011-06-15T11:56:37","modified_gmt":"2011-06-15T11:56:37","slug":"elektra-is-better-than-batman-begins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/?p=27","title":{"rendered":"Elektra is better than Batman Begins"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!--  p.MsoNormal \t{mso-style-parent:\"\"; \tmargin-bottom:.0001pt; \tfont-size:12.0pt; \tfont-family:\"Times New Roman\"; \tmargin-left:0cm; margin-right:0cm; margin-top:0cm}  li.MsoNormal \t{mso-style-parent:\"\"; \tmargin-bottom:.0001pt; \tfont-size:12.0pt; \tfont-family:\"Times New Roman\"; \tmargin-left:0cm; margin-right:0cm; margin-top:0cm} -->Mind Over Matter is up  on Random Action Hour.<\/p>\n<p>Thursday night is  movie night, and I decided to watch <em>Elektra<\/em>. I didn&#8217;t really put much  thought into the decision.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Elektra&#8217;s some kind of  ultra deadly assassin who everyone knows about and there&#8217;s all kinds of legends  about her&#8230; and then that angle is dropped after the first fifteen minutes so  she can start protecting a family she was ordered to kill, as apparently they&#8217;re  the target of the Hand, a gang of evil demon ninjas, or something. Apparently  the girl of the family is some kind of super prodigy who&#8217;s the answer to a war  between good and evil that&#8217;s been raging for a long time, or something, but  nothing&#8217;s ever explained well and the movie&#8217;s so slow-paced that I&#8217;m surprised I  actually remembered that much.<\/p>\n<p>The movie is <strong>slow<\/strong>.  It&#8217;s not long, running up at only an hour and a half long, but <em>gahd<\/em>, to  say it is slow and meandering would be an insult to slow and meandering things.  The 2003 <em>Hulk<\/em> movie was slow, but it at least kept action going for a  fair pace just to jolt a bit of life in it once every five hours<span style=\"font-size: xx-small;\"> (at least, that&#8217;s what I remember. It&#8217;s been a long time since I watched it!)<\/span>. <em>Elektra<\/em> is just <em>slooooow<\/em>. It tries to create the heroine as a  tragic figure whose life is made miserable by her days of being a contracted  assassin, but is turned around by her almost maternal relationship with the  prodigy girl, but personally, it was just boring. There&#8217;s lots of moments where  it looks like it&#8217;s trying to show just cute this relationship is, but for at  least three quarters of the film I was bored out of my wits. Maybe if the film  had just been about a generic spy\/assassin lady and not a licensed superhero  film this sort of glacial pacing would&#8217;ve been a little more acceptable, but I  chose the movie under the misguided belief that it would be like <em>Daredevil 2<\/em> &#8211; same basic style, same basic pacing, same basic entertainment. It&#8217;s more or  less the exact opposite.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" title=\"blog-elektra\" src=\"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/bl\/blog-elektra.JPG\" alt=\"WHO LET THE DOGS OUT AM I RITE\" width=\"576\" height=\"240\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a shame, because  it has a guy whose animal tattoos come alive.<\/p>\n<p>Seriously! Elektra  herself has no personality and her costume is ridiculous <span style=\"font-size: xx-small;\">(I was  really hoping she would just stick with casual wear for the final battle, but  sadly not)<\/span>, the plucky teenage sidekick is a royal bore, and the plot is  dawdling and uninteresting. And then halfway through we&#8217;re introduced to the  villains of the show, a group of mystical dudes with gimmick powers and they are  pretty freakin&#8217; badass, man. Tattoo has tattoos that come alive! Stone is a guy  made of stone! Typhoid makes&#8211; well, they&#8217;re all pretty self-explanatory. The  point is, while the story is as interesting as a brick wall, the villains are  cool and would steal the show if they actually had more than twenty minutes of  combined screen time. I chose to watch this movie solely because, while skipping  through it, I saw the scene where two spirit wolves burst out of Tattoo&#8217;s chest.  The movie should&#8217;ve just been about him. In fact, why hasn&#8217;t anyone made <em> Tattoo Assassins<\/em> into a movie yet? That would be badass.<\/p>\n<p><em>Daredevil<\/em> worked because while the protagonist wasn&#8217;t exactly portrayed terribly  consistently (see the January 14th 2010 blog entry!), there was lots of  entertaining character interaction, decent action and an overall engaging  atmosphere. <em>Elektra<\/em> isn&#8217;t <strong>bad<\/strong>, but I won&#8217;t deny it was a slog to  sit through. It&#8217;s got the makings of a decent film, but it places all its  emphasis on drama and has a serious lack of action, which is what one generally  expects from a superhero flick. My dad believes if it threw in twenty more  minutes of action then it would&#8217;ve left a better impression, but I don&#8217;t know.  Some of the fight scenes were nice, the highlight being the forest scene with  Stone, Tattoo and that acrobatic guy, but others, most notably the final  showdown, just seemed&#8230; wasteful. Like <em>Batman Begins<\/em>, they made it so  you just couldn&#8217;t really keep track of anything, both because of rapid-fire  camera cuts and how the main villain can freakin&#8217; teleport around the place.<\/p>\n<p>Also I&#8217;d just like to  say that the manner in which the villain is defeated was a hell of a letdown. I  was <em>expecting<\/em> a letdown, but the letdown I got was of catastrophic  proportions.<\/p>\n<p>I guess I&#8217;m glad I saw  it, just so I can finally see why everyone&#8217;s so negative about it and also to  make <em>Daredevil<\/em> seem so much better by comparison, but I also feel I  could&#8217;ve made better use of those ninety minutes. I still haven&#8217;t watched <em> Theodore Rex<\/em>!<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: xx-small;\">P.S.  Elektra is meant to be Greek? Jeez, you&#8217;d hardly tell. I just thought the Greek  lettering for the title and credits was just the director being unnecessarily  stylish.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mind Over Matter is up on Random Action Hour. Thursday night is movie night, and I decided to watch Elektra. I didn&#8217;t really put much thought into the decision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7,6,16],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-movie","tag-review","tag-update"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}