Yeah I don't wanna try to defend Adam too much for his pretension, but I would agree that throat cuts should probably either be bloody or not on the screen at all.
Lots of movies avoid gore by cutting away, or casting the fodder as some sort of non-gory alien/robot. Much better techniques that can avoid gore and breaking immersion while still including some violence.
There's a whole separate discussion about what violence should or should not be shown in movies for kids, but no matter what your intended audience, showing a literal throat cut with no blood is going to be distracting for most people.
Logan and Deadpool really changed my perspective on R-rated superhero movies. I don't think every movie should be R-rated from now on, and I know Marvel/Disney would never go for it, but I'm quite certain THIS movie would have been a better film if it was R-rated.
On the action side, sorry but after Logan a bunch of people swinging bladed weapons in PG-13 just kinda looks stupid. When the rhinos were rampaging through the last battle, it just looked so goofy there's no tension or emotional response whatsoever. It's just a slapstick routine.
On the storytelling side, I'm not asking for 12 Years a Slave or anything, but some brutality would've sold Killmonger's motivations and backstory better. Edit to clarify: Killmonger only works if you already know about the history of black people in America. Unlike Magneto where they showed a clip of kid Magneto in a concentration camp, here they chose to tell instead of show. They tell you just enough to know what Killmonger is referencing, but only if you already know what he's talking about. I can see a lot of Asians being confused.
That's literally what I was discussing with my friends immediately after watching it. This movie easily could have been R. For a movie with such a message and some of the scenes being particularly violent, the lack of swears and blood were actually jarring. Add onto the fact that they couldn't use pretty much any of the songs off their own soundtrack because of profanity is annoying.
But then again, part of the whole big deal about this film is that it's a big, mainstream, big budget movie made by black people celebrating black people as heroes, and that it can be watched by children. I think that's a big deal, something you'd lose by making the movie R rated.
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u/uwace Feb 17 '18
Yeah I don't wanna try to defend Adam too much for his pretension, but I would agree that throat cuts should probably either be bloody or not on the screen at all.
Lots of movies avoid gore by cutting away, or casting the fodder as some sort of non-gory alien/robot. Much better techniques that can avoid gore and breaking immersion while still including some violence.
There's a whole separate discussion about what violence should or should not be shown in movies for kids, but no matter what your intended audience, showing a literal throat cut with no blood is going to be distracting for most people.