Super hero movies

A friend and I were discussing superhero movies yesterday. We agreed on a general principle:

• Most super-hero movies suck.

Obviously, such a principle is useful when determining if a movie is worth seeing. You can apply these principles as you would firewall rules. A firewall rule may be something like this:

IF SourceIP = Any AND DestinationPort = 80 THEN DROP PACKET.

A similar rule applied to the movie domain could be this useful rule:

IF MovieCast INCLUDES "Travolta, John" THEN DROP MOVIE.

Most movie rules are not as strict as firewall rules. Only a few are as strict as the rule above. Most rules would affect a composite score in some way. At the end of the rule application process, a score would be returned. If it's positive, the movie may be worth seeing. Negative means "stay away." So, for super-hero movies, you may have a rule like this:

IF MovieGenre.SubGenre = "Super-Hero" THEN Score = Score - 3.

Naturally, a really good super-hero movie can easily dig its way out of that deficit. For instance, for the movie Unbreakable, you win by applying this rule:

IF MovieDirector = "Shyamalan, M. Night" THEN Score = Score + 5.

Naturally, rules can be changed over time. If M. Night ever screws up a movie bigtime, his rule adjustment may degrade to a + 3, which would have left Unbreakable at 0 unless there was another rule that affected it, such as:

IF MovieCast INCLUDES "Willis, Bruce" THEN Score = Score + 2.

Anyway, back to Batman. Another general purpose rule that affects Batman is this one:

IF MovieMotif INCLUDES "Gothic" OR MovieMotif INCLUDES "Noir" THEN Score = Score - 4.

So if you combine all of the rules that affect Batman, you have something like this:

IF MovieGenre.SubGenre = "Super-Hero" THEN Score = Score - 3. IF MovieCast INCLUDES "Nicholson, Jack" THEN Score = Score + 2. IF MovieMotif INCLUDES "Gothic" OR MovieMotif INCLUDES "Noir" THEN Score = Score - 4. IF MovieDirector = "Burton, Tim" THEN Score = Score - 2. IF MovieCast INCLUDES "Keaton, Michael" THEN Score = Score - 1. OUTPUT SCORE: -8

No wonder Batman sucked!