Oh well. At least it wasn’t awful. Two words spring imme­di­ately to mind: for­mu­laic and shal­low. Not that there’s any­thing wrong with being for­mu­laic and shal­low — indeed many for­mu­laic and shal­low pic­tures nonethe­less rake in the big bucks — but for­mu­las become pre­dictable, and pre­dictabil­ity kills immer­sion unless the char­ac­ters are inter­est­ing enough. Here, they weren’t. They just weren’t devel­oped enough to make me care. Bat­man Begins fol­lows much the same for­mula, but in that film, we had real char­ac­ter depth and con­flict. We dig into Bruce Wayne’s moti­va­tions. We don’t do that with Tony Stark, so we don’t care [ . . . ]

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Gus Van Horn men­tions the dif­fi­culty of argu­ing against the government’s use of behavior-​​​​modifying tech­niques in mixed-​​​​government con­texts: Unfor­tu­nately, every­one is so used to the gov­ern­ment own­ing the roads ... that few so much as bat an eye when they hear of the gov­ern­ment look­ing for ways to psy­cho­log­i­cally manip­u­late peo­ple into doing its bid­ding. Indeed, in this lim­ited con­text, it is hard to argue pro­duc­tively against the gov­ern­ment tak­ing advan­tage of such knowl­edge about human per­cep­tion. As a law stu­dent, this topic has caused me a great deal of con­cern over the past few months. I have wanted to write some­thing about [ . . . ]

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And candy for cuties! They were right about the can­tilever heels, pants, and mobile phones, at least. My favorite is the headlight.