Posts Tagged ‘individualism’

What could "The Expendables" teach us, besides why you don't want to pick a fight with any of them?

Back at the beginning of Summer we gave a preview of three films that were to come out that have something in common. What these films share is a focus on a tight-knit group of ex-military soldiers who work towards a shared goal of some kind. With The Losers it was about getting revenge, with The A-Team it was about living up to one’s duties as a patriot, and with The Expendables it was about serving the human condition. As you may have noticed, the motivations of the groups got progressively nobler, from serving selfish incentives to fulfilling an intangible obligation to heroic morals; namely the moral that the strong have to protect the weak. The three movies, and by extension the three groups in these movies, may share a similar basic premise, and may interact within their respective contexts in a similar way, but their differing motivations distinguish them from each other more so than we may have anticipated. Likewise, they also shared more in common than we previously thought. What exactly, though, can we learn from comparing them further?

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Short Take: Decently entertaining, but largely disappointing

Director: Sylvester Stallone (Rambo)

Screenwriters: Dave Callaham (Doom), Sylvester Stallone (Rocky franchise)

Cast: Sylvester Stallone (Rocky Balboa), Jason Satham (Crank: High Voltage), Jet Li (The Forbidden Kingdom), Giselle Itie, Eric Roberts (The Dark Knight), Dolph Lundgren (Rocky IV), Mickey Rourke (Iron Man 2), Terry Crews (Idiocracy), Randy Couture, Steve Austin (The Longest Yard)

Length: 1h 43m

Synopsis: A group of mercenaries are offered a job by the CIA to kill a warlord that has taken over the island country of Vilena. The mercenaries know that the CIA is hiring them instead of doing the dirty work themselves because if things would happen to go wrong then news of the fact that an ex-CIA agent was part of the warlord’s inner circle would leak out. Meanwhile, in the process of tackling this thorny mission the mercenaries get entangled with a woman who is part of the island’s underground resistance against the warlord, and as it turns out her predicament is far more personal than they could have known. Despite lacking confidence that they can succeed in this tremendous undertaking by themselves the mercenaries decide to take the moral high ground and do the dutiful. Now all they have to do is survive. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight: Batman Becomes a Westerner

The character of Batman as presented in director Christopher Nolan’s 2008 film The Dark Knight represents many of the iconographic elements that comprise what is known as the Westerner. The caped crusader can more accurately be distinguished as being more medieval (that is, consisting of character traits more attuned to medieval literature) in most of his filmic representations, such as Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), and such a connection does not completely stop with Nolan’s most recent feature as even the film’s title outright labels its hero a “knight.” But despite this, Nolan has introduced the character of Batman to the world of cinema in a new way that displays him more as a western idol reminiscent of the days of John Wayne. American audiences gorged themselves on this newest version of the classic superhero, amassing a domestic box office revenue of over $530 million (second only to Titanic‘s $600 million+), and the reason for this may be found in the social structure of its viewers. Read the rest of this entry »