It smacks of eugenics? Isn't it clearly eugenics? I'm not sure why you'd need to avoid that though. It's not like the Guild of the BGs are supposed to be sympathetic.

I don't think anything I said insisted on "changing" the story. Unless you think Gibson's was somehow a minute-by-minute recreation? For me, for example, the scourging went on so long that it actually became sort of numbing and I stopped thinking about Christ's suffering and sacrificial love and began thinking things…

Well I hope there's plenty of effective birth control on the ship or she's going to have to start studying home delivery. Unless there are doctor robots or something. Which would beg the question why there aren't sleep-pod-fixer bots.

Yeah. Would Aurora's desperation for companionship make her "forgive" him? Would she try to wake someone else up? You could take it into so many interesting directions other than, "I forgive you because wuv."

Do you know many missionaries? Some have the primary goal to spread religion, but there are numerous service-focused ones that provide medical care, educational assistance, construction, and medicinal training. Because they believe that serving others is a requirement of their religion.

That would be terrible and would really undermine the whole theme of spiritual struggle and responsibility. I haven't seen that from the trailers, so I hope that isn't what happened, definitely.

Because the only options are "totally useless" and "the only basis for artistic criticism"?

Tomb raider? That was gloriously silly, iirr.

Passion was really confusing to me. The non-torture bits really spoke to me as a Christian. But, even though in theory, I was the intended audience, the crucifixtion, scourging etc. felt like exactly what you said - torture porn that said almost nothing meaningful about what it was supposed to be about.

If you haven't seen the movie, how would you know it was "torture porn"? I mean, I can get saying, "the description of this movie makes it sound revolting so I'm not going to see it," but trying to actually criticize the movie's artistic merit or content without seeing it makes no sense.

Does it? I saw very little of that in the trailers. Plus, the book is about European missionaries and their spiritual struggles. Are you upset that Scorsese adapted this specific book or at the subject of the book itself or at something else?

That is the best one I've ever seen. I mean the cast list alone is exciting…

Was the casual movie going audience interested in seeing another SW at all? I mean, the profitability of the prequels aside, time was not kind to them. As often happens to hugely popular movies, they didn't become more popular with time. There had been years of people complaining about how terrible they were. …

Where is Madame Defarge when you need her?

1998's Godzilla is a perfect example of a charmless special effect extravaganza that no one would ever want to watch again because the story is bland and the characters forgettable. Whereas people still enjoy movies like MiB and even Independence Day despite the advancement of the technology. Why? Because the…

Well all characters have culture though. What you're really saying by avoiding "cultural stuff" is, "Let's have them all act like whatever the dominant aka 'normal' culture is."

DC has tons of heroes to pick from though. Why not be more inclusive when it's so easily achieved?

I mean is that true though? Are all characters interchangeable? And culture has no effect on a character's personality and motivations?

Chris Pratt is very similar: An actor with plenty of on-screen charm who adds that to the action movies he's in. Plus, he didn't really play the doofus from tv did he? He transformed himself into a muscly hero guy.

Most of them? I mean, name who you would have cast instead. If special effects were all it took, there would be way fewer flopping would-be blockbusters.