Superhero Movies and the Cloud

Having not seen Green Lantern, I just learned a disturbing fact:Parallax, the main bad guy, is a cloud.

Now, just so we're clear, "Cloud" is not some kind of slur that I invented for a racial group or something, although doing so would be a wise decision if you talk a lot about putting down races. Nobody disagrees when you talk about how those "damn Pine Beetles" are always ruining the environment, and most would share
your shock and dismay when you said that Pine Beetles were always expected to provide tech support despite a complete non-grasp of your language.

No, when I say Cloud, I mean he's a Cloud. I'm not an expert at cloud identification, but I did take a Meteorology class in college because it was the only lab science that didn't require a field trip (the weather is all around us!). Based on that knowledge, I would say this cloud appears to be a Cumulo Skullshits.

That's an amateur opinion, however.

What's really fucked up, to me, is that this is not the first time a cloud has appeared and claimed the spot as main bad guy in a comic book movie. There may be more, but by my count, this is the third.

Wha?

Fantastic Four: 2, aka Fantastic Fourtwo.

Yes, instead of being a giant purple guy, Galactus appeared as a cloud. A space cloud, to be more correcter.

Okay, I understand that some things have to be changed in comic book movies in order to have everything make sense. And sometimes it's a good idea. I don't really need to watch Peter Parker construct mechanical web shooters, devices that would certainly net him hundreds of thousands of dollars, let alone his web formula. But I digress. The point is, some things change for the sake of making a movie make a little sense, and sometimes those choices are good ones.

And sometimes, it means that a giant purple guy turns into a big space cloud.

Now, this might sound like a sensible change, and it does on paper. But let's also consider that this is a film in which we have a silver man who rides through space on a surfboard, and a Fantasticar that was apparently cobbled together from a Dodge. Reality is broken, and I am prepared to accept some form of...well, I'm ready to accept a form.

The problem is that we've got a flame man, a stretch man, a rock man, and an invisible man who is a woman. Oh, and a silver man who surfs. These are visually interesting if nothing else, but we don't get to see them do anything cool. Punching, stretching, flaming, invisibiling, and hanging 10.5, minimum. Which brings us to our good friend the Hulk.


Hulk aka Not That One, The Shitty One. Shittier One.

(note: cloud bad guy in Hulk may have looked a little different. I only saw it once, okay?)

Again, we have a big bad guy, and it's a goddamn cloud. It's a weird electric cloud, but there is something very important I learned about clouds in my meteorologic education:

They cannot, per se, be smashed.

This is a quality that is not terribly important day to day, and we should all be thankful that clouds don't smash into shit all day, or fall down and smash. But in the Hulk movie, it would be nice to see him smash some shit.

It would be only five years later when we discovered that a bad guy who can be smashed still can't really save a movie. But it helps.

I would like to suggest things that the Hulk could fight as opposed to a cloud man.

-Giant man made of glass.
-Giant man made of wood.
-Evil car that comes to life.
-Giant evil car that comes to life.

Basically, anything that can come to life and be smashed should be just fine.




On the plus side, at least the Green Lantern folks figured out how to make a cloud into a toy so that we didn't have to go toyless. Thank god.