The movie tells you straight up early on that there’s less meaning than you think.  IIRC one of the old dudes who catches Tom Cruise trying to sneak into an event tells him that fairly early in the film.

The lack of nuance hurts the series IMHO. In the very first episode we have our squeaky clean midwestern girl meet her childhood hero for the first time and he almost immedately demands that she suck his dick, right in the middle of their big hero-themed conference room. Subtlety is not Ennis’s strong suit.

It really is a miracle that this event is still going on 20 years later.

The other thing that bothered me about the finale is how everybody could suddenly only speak in superhero cliches.

As for why the tranq dart didn’t seem to work, I don’t think the writers understand how tranq darts work. They seem to think that since Gert pulled it out after a minute or two the dart would immediately stop working.

It’s probably the only scene people remember from that movie.

It works so well because it subverts expectations. The movie up to that point had been a dumb by-the-numbers monster movie. So when the big name actor gets set up to do a big long inspiring speech everybody starts to hunker down and wait for it to be over.…

A lot of their designs started off as “take a real or prototype military vehicle, slap a bunch of gigantic missiles and extra guns on it, done”.

Again the fuel density issue kills the dream of personal jetpacks.  Physics is a cruel mistress.  Hoverboards seem so cool until you discover that they have less range than a Bird scooter.

It’s probably never going to be a practical form of transport for soldiers, but when you need funding for your ultra-expensive toy it’s natural to ask the military.  They’ve funded a lot of crazy stuff over the years that never made it into production. 

This movie is hardly alone in the crowd of 80's comedies that include rape/sexual assault as a joke. The culture has shifted a lot in 40 years and there are precious few comedies from that era that don’t make me uncomfortable on a rewatch now.  It’s really no wonder that so many Hollywood bigwigs are getting caught up…

It bothered me that nobody in the crew ever stopped to say “The place you are trying to reach is full of monsters you can’t control, are you idiots?  Yes we know all about it, it almost killed us twice already and you guys aren’t even close to properly equipped to deal with the nightmares in that world.  Guns and…

I’m not a fan of the “power dynamic” argument because it seems to imply that a famous or powerful person simply can not have consensual relations unless it is with someone else who is equally powerful and/or famous.

If it’s your direct superior then it’s not a good idea because it can be seen as trading sex for…

Every ride is like that at Disney when it first opens up.

I’m surprised more people don’t pull out their phones and watch all of Avatar while waiting in line for the Pandora Flight of Passage ride. 

Boy George was famously sexually ambiguous. Being played by a woman seems like not a stretch at all. It’s not like the movie is about Dave Brockie.

A ballsy series might even have it turn out that the Reid technique conviction was against an innocent person who just cracked.

Locking her political enemies in a church and burning them alive counts as evil.  Actions can be justified and still evil. 

“A bunch of rocks randomly fall on you and you die” is how cranky GMs deal with annoying players in D&D. It shouldn’t be how your show’s big bad goes out.

What you are saying is that it is being churned out by the same corporate remake mine that gave us Jurassic World?

The first movie was also one of those ones where someone had been working on or thinking about it for most of their life and had incorporated a whole world of tiny details that made it clear that the world could work. They built the world first then let a story just naturally flow from it.

You know what holds up surprisingly well?  The MiB Cartoon.