Over the weekend I had an awful cold. One of those colds that just shut down both your brain and your respiratory system to the point that playing video games or doing anything that’s not lying down feels like a chore. So instead of doing my ritual video gaming I did something totally out of character and actually sat through not just one but three movies. Long ones too. Over the course of Saturday afternoon, I watched Marvel’s Eternals, The Dark Knight Rises, and Joker.

I started with Marvel’s Eternals, one of the first Marvel films in years to get a trash rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Going into this movie, I was already expecting this movie to be not that great. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, but this movie fully exceeded my expectations. It is not a good film. First of all, they bring in an entirely new group of heroes who are supposed to be immortal and help birth planets but they’re pitifully weak for the task they’re put up to. Secondly, they implant a completely new villain who was nowhere to be found in any other marvel movie despite being seemingly pretty abundant in the world, so much so that an entire group of heroes was created to fight them. Not only that, but the whole point of these heroes’ existence is to help life flourish throughout the universe and then continue to neglect a situation in which Thanos tries to wipe out half of all life. In general, this movie suffers from a pretty unrelatable cast of characters and more plot holes than the entire franchise so I really don’t understand how Marvel pulled off such a mediocre film after such a reigning decade of great movies.

The next movie I watched was The Dark Knight Rises which was a long-overdue viewing experience for me. I had seen the first of the trilogy at a very young age and then watched Dark Knight multiple times throughout my life because that movie absolutely slaps. I honestly don’t know what I was thinking about not watching Dark Knight Rises for so long I mean Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies are awesome. Although this one doesn’t have as compelling or coherent of a plot as the one preceding it, Dark Knight rises is a very good-looking and well-shot movie with a pretty moving plot for a DC/Batman movie. Christopher Nolan does a great job of blurring the line between good and evil to create a tangible dilemma that Batman/Bruce Wayne has to face throughout the plot. Although this movie doesn’t live up to its predecessor, it is a great continuation of the trilogy and a good way to cap it off.

Joker was the last movie I watched and this one was a very different story. This movie is straight-up depressing. This movie is a fantastic example of the direction that DC needs to take to be taken seriously in Hollywood. This movie takes Gotham, a city that is very prevalent in the DC universe and makes it a very tangible, and very depressing place with deep-rooted economical issues that caused an uproar of poverty. And it doesn’t just show that by having a lot of crime. There are living in rundown apartment buildings, suffering to find a living, and even budget cuts in mental health institutions. Instead of Gotham just seeming like a playground for Batman, it is now a mirror of the depressing reality that is living in poverty in a city, the neglect of the U.S government to fix these many problems such as mental health and care, and the empty promises by those who are wealthy to fix all of this. This whole film completely flips the Batman story on its head. Now you have this horrible and unsavable town in which people are doing whatever they can to help themselves out of this crushing situation that they didn’t even cause. It makes all the people previously beaten into a coma by Batman seem almost innocent for their crimes compared to the heinous neglect of the lower class by both him and his father. By the end of the movie I was kind of waiting for them to kill Bruce’s parents because, in all honesty, Thomas deserved it. Overall, this movie is the direction that DC needs to take with their films because this is a clear improvement over everything they made after the Dark Knight Trilogy.