Finally watching The Wandering Earth…. I thought we're doing so well when the first bit of Indonesian was heard in the first twenty mins or so…. But they've done it. They've ching-chong'd Bahasa Indonesia. 💀
So the word was buzzing on the street about how James Gunn's new Superman movie is very anti-Israel/pro-Palestine (not the same thing) so with a lot of skepticism I went to check it out. And you really can't deny you can make a strong argument for it, in what Borovia is doing to Jahanpur, but I can also say it's a case of James Gunn suffering the same problems The Onion faces: no satire or hyperbole can exceed actual real life evil. So every single bit of Borovian stuff in this movie has an active Israeli echo, and it's just a case of timing more than anything else. And my general sense of distrust considering how much lip service you have to pay to Zionism to even succeed in Hollywood.
But.
I can't run away from the rest of the script that very specifically chose to code Muslim characters (more than 'Arab' - Jahanpur would feel more Afghani or Pakistani, though the people are just diverse black and brown people) as good, and Islamophobia is a character defect signal. The everyman character who helped Superman and got his hero arc is a halal cart operator. Superman's defamation and character assassination campaign had one particularly successful hashtag that is an Islamophobic orientalist trope. Kal-el really is Khalil, and if that happened to share the same name as that guy who got detained for no fucking reason, again, timing.
Also yay Hawkgirl (you'll understand)
The "funniest" thing about coming late into Turkish historical dramas is when they get into their pre-Ottoman era and the following shorthand will never fail you: the more European-looking the Turk/Mongol/nomad character the likelier they are that they're not evil, unless if they're redheads.
horusporus