Hindsight

“Some people won’t dance if they don’t know who’s singing
Why ask your head? It’s your hips that are swinging”

Look, I like superhero movies. There, I’ve said it now. And if that is a personality trait you find off-putting, you may as well leave now because I’m not going to stop liking superhero movies.

As you probably know, there are two major players in this space: the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is now old enough to vote, and the DC Universe, which is just starting to master using the big toilet.

Okay, the age comparison is flawed. Let’s just move on.

The DC Universe was rebooted at the end of 2022 with James Gunn and Peter Safran in charge in an attempt to bring some cohesion and quality to their projects following years of ‘throw it at the wall and see what sticks’ tactics starting with Zack Snyder’s Man Of Steel (2013), through a terrible Justice League cinema release in 2017, and finishing up with an awful Aquaman sequel in 2023.

I’ve always been confused why Marvel Studios succeeded on the back of a bunch of second tier ne’er-do-wells (How often do well? Ne’er.) while DC has continually struggled with, arguably, the more famous and well-loved roster of characters. Outside of Spider-Man and Wolverine, who does Marvel have that is as popular as Batman or Superman or Wonder Woman or The Flash.

Under the Gunn/Safran regime administration, though, things are looking better, at least creatively. Last year’s Superman was a joyful romp through Metropolis, nailing the casting on key characters like Clark Kent and Lois Lane and Lex Luthor, while introducing scene-stealers like Mr Terrific and Guy Gardner. We got a second season of the delightfully funny Peacemaker, starring John Cena atop an ensemble cast. There is a cartoon series called Creature Commandos which I haven’t seen. I probably won’t watch it honestly.

I did watch this years Supergirl. It was a little too Guardians Of The Galaxy-coded and it bombed at the box office and if you read the average comment about it on Reddit you’d think it was the worst thing to ever happen to cinema. If you actually watched it though, you’d find that Milly Alcock was fantastic, and Jason Momoa’s Lobo was inspired. Then last week saw the premiere of Lanterns, an eight-part crime drama starring Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre as the Green Lantern Corps members Hal Jordan (THE FIRST EVER LIVE ACTION HAL JORDAN, YOU HEAR ME) and John Stewart (not the Daily Show guy).

And you know what? They’ve all been pretty good so far.

“There is fashion, there is fad
Some is good, some is bad”

But if you visit the average DC Universe community online, you’ll find a litany of charges levelled at James Gunn and Peter Safran who stand accused of destroying all the hard work Zack Snyder laid down back in 2013 and 2016 when he bestowed the universe with Man Of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice, laying the groundwork for what should have been the next great cinematic universe, defining superhero film for the foreseeable, and he would’ve got away with it too if it weren’t for that pesky Gunn, and his little dog too.

I swear to you that I am getting to a point.

“[E]verything the Snyderverse gave us was love for the comic franchise,” writes one poster. “And we shouldn’t cry cause that golden era is over, we should be happy because it happened, and every loyal DC fan was alive to see it.”

“[I]t was beautiful and what has replaced it is almost a parody,” writes another.

If you were to summarise the main talking points in each fan community, you’d find MCU trying to figure out who else is in Avengers: Doomsday. Meanwhile, the DCU community is bickering over whether Snyder should be brought back, equating low box office with low quality, and wondering why Gunn/Safran would greenlight a true crime series set in Metropolis and introducing Gorilla Grodd (and, if you’re a betting man, Barry Allen aka The Flash).

Never mind who was better at making Superman movies. Why are we re-litigating things that happened a decade ago instead of enjoying what we have right now and looking forward to the future? Superman was really good and Supergirl was also really good. Lanterns has just started but it is a helluva good start. And that Jimmy Olsen/Gorilla Grodd show sounds hella fun.

The jury is out on whether Gunn/Safran’s attempt at a DC Cinematic Universe will be a long term success, but it won’t be for a lack of trying new and creative and interesting and occasionally pretty weird shit.

“And I’ve seen it before, and I’ll see it again
Yes, I’ve seen it before”

But isn’t this just, like, life in 2026. We’re a backward looking bunch, especially in the wake of COVID. Nothing is our fault, nothing is able to be fixed now, and everything is the fault of something that happened years ago.

I originally wrote a lengthy personal story about how I do this too, all about how decisions made over the course of years led to the depths of my current bank balance. It ended up reading more like a statement of financial position.

BooooOOOOOOoooooring.

We could talk about the most egregious example of this kind of backward-looking thinking, Trump, I guess - barely a minute or two goes by without the absurd orange one, or some lackey in his administration, complaining about how the issues facing America are the fault of Biden or Clinton or the radical left or the woke agenda or windmills or ‘trans everyone’ or the fake media.

Or we could talk about Luxon?

New Zealand’s own prime minister Christopher Luxon, and his National-ACT-NZ First government, have been big on discussing the mess they inherited from the previous Labour government. Actually, governments in this country have been doing this for years, as documented in this not-at-all exhaustive list last year by The Spinoff’s Lyric Waiwiri-Smith.

To hear them tell it, our sitting government inherited a “country with its bank account run down and its credit card maxed out” in the midst of a “recession” following a “long period of economic decline”, with a “school property system bordering on a crisis” and a “pipeline of underfunded school upgrades that were over scoped and couldn’t be delivered”, a “health system in a state of turmoil”, a “huge emergency housing problem”, a “tough labour market” beset by widespread “welfare dependency”, and a “significant backlog of road maintenance across the country”.

All of these quotes came from Waiwiri-Smith’s piece.

To be fair, the preceding Labour-Greens-NZ First coalition inherited a system full of “laissez-faire neglect that nine years of a National government produced”, an education system suffering from a “decade of neglect” and “low morale”, a “health and disability system that had been woefully underfunded and neglected”, “neglected infrastructure, including rundown hospitals, roads that had been announced but not paid for, overcrowded classrooms and a state housing shortage”, a “glaring deficit in infrastructure planning, management and funding”, and a “widening gap between what needs to be spent, for instance, on public transport and roads, and what has been set aside by the previous government”.

(By the way, NZ First was in both governments. Coincidence?)

Labour minister Pete Hodgson gets the final word, echoing back to us from 2002 when he said “I try not to go on too much about the mess [former energy minister] Max Bradford created. It’s my job to fix it up, not complain about what this government inherited” - the irony, of course, being that he is referenced earlier in the piece doing exactly this.

“And the joke rather sad,
That it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.”

I’ve been entertained over the last few weeks by a trend.

Here in New Zealand, we’re still a ways out, but I’m almost certainly going to party vote Opportunity in this year’s general election. And as the polls start coming in with increased rapidity, I’ve noticed three things happening:

• Opportunity keeps increasing its share of the party vote

• National leader Christopher Luxon and Labour leader Chris Hipkins keep losing ground in the Approval and Preferred Prime Minister stakes

• National leader Christopher Luxon and Labour leader Chris Hipkins keep dismissing Opportunity as a coalition partner

And in America, it appears that incumbent left-wing representatives are being unseated by even-further-lefter-wing candidates, starting with Mamdani in New York and continuing through the various primaries taking place right now.

Opportunity aren’t a left wing party, but they share some DNA with the likes of Mamdani: they see political leadership as an opportunity to make things better for everyone. The Greens here in NZ share that same value, even if they’re increasingly caught up in the muck by being a coalition partner with Labour over the years. There is an optimism inherent in what they do.

I think these parties and people are succeeding while the establishment recedes because voters increasingly want change. We don’t want to hear why something isn’t your fault; we want to know how you’ll help. We want you to focus on the issues at hand. And we want you to do what you were elected to do. Gender definitions aren’t important, NZ First, when we’re all struggling to put food on the table. It doesn’t matter how woke the media is, ACT, when petrol prices are in flux due to an unsanctioned war between the USA & Israel and Iran.

And if you have good ideas, National, don’t keep them back until after the election as some kind of ‘give us another shot’ marketing ploy, and don’t paster the cities in billboards about how bad the opposition is. I don’t care what you think Labour might do if they get in; tell me why you’re the right leaders for this country. Even better, do something when you’re in power to show us.

By discounting Opportunity and not seeing the lay of the land, National and Labour are paving the road toward their own extinction.

Okay, I’m starting to rant now.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m less interested in what happened than in what might happen next. I think we all should be. And I think our political leaders should be focused on making things better. There are signs of life out there: Labour have promised to make Smokefree Generation a priority again should they be elected, a public health plan that makes sense to everyone who isn’t working for (or controlled by) a tobacco company, and National has introduced a bill to ban social media use for anyone under 16 years old, even without the backing of its coalition partners.

Both pieces of legislation look ahead to a New Zealand society that is better for those living in it. And I applaud both, honestly. It just might be too little too late.

And that Gorilla Grodd show sounds great. I’m looking forward to it.

Thanks for reading everybody, and thanks for humouring me while I get on my soapbox for a while. I don’t know if it all made sense or if I connected all the dots. But I had a good time writing it so [shrug].

Take care, Chris xo