Having QUICKLY chewed through a ton of comics including Under the Hood and then watching Under the Red Hood on the back of it, it is fascinating how that movie is like technically competent and fun to watch but it doesn't................ get Jason, it feels like.
A lot of the movie is 1:1 with the comics, which I like! It's nice to see stuff very literally translated onto the screen, a handful of scenes have dialogue literally lifted from the pages, and that's nice. It feels like it starts to lose itself when it stops accurately portraying the comics and starting to do its own thing and like... it never feels like it's for good reason. Like, they sub in the Fearsome Hand of Four instead of Hyena and fucking Captain Nazi (insane) because it felt like they didn't want to step into having Captain Nazi portrayed onscreen. Which, fine, whatever, we do lose one of my favorite Jason lines but it's not a big deal.
But then changing the entirety of Jason's death because you don't want to deal with the whole Iranian plotline, up to and including the like very tangible nature of her resurrection is....... bad?? Really really bad. The Lazarus Pit doesn't "make her feral" or whatever she says, it's like... guh. I don't know. It starts to feel like the movie tries to push this narrative of "Oh she came back wrong and that's why she fucked up and became a wild violent drug dealer" even though they continue the throughline from the comics of Bruce being straight up afraid of the potential Jason has for violence
Like, out of everything in the movie, I hate that they fuck around with her resurrection. I would've preferred them leave it completely up in the air rather than change it so bold-faced. Jason's motivation isn't that she's "gone insane from the Lazarus Pit" or like, that something's wrong with her, the point is that she's always seen Bruce's methods as flawed, and more than that, coming back and finding out that Bruce not only hasn't changed at all, but not even her death could make Bruce see what she sees, fucking breaks her.
It gets close to understanding the relationship between them, but it just doesn't quite hit it. The pacing gets weird near the end and it never feels like it delivers the same punches as UTH.
What really makes Jason's character for me (and also why she's so TMA lmfao) is that she is fundamentally someone who the world has failed, over and over, and continues to do so. Fuck, from a metanarrative standpoint she's been failed!
She tries to find a parent who will actually love her and be there for her and finds herself trapped in a warehouse with a bomb. Bruce believes she's capable of handling herself. Five thousand votes to kill her. Even when she comes back (in the Annual retcon at least) she has to claw her own way out of her grave. Talia tries to take care of her and at least lets her use the Lazarus Pit but after that, she's on her own again. Her becoming the Red Hood isn't (just) her lashing out in petty revenge against Bruce, it's her saying "Look at me. If I'd been afforded everything I'd deserved - if I'd gotten my way, if I'd been Batman instead of Bruce - look at what I could achieve." She's become this jaded, violent monster not because the Lazarus Pit has fucked her up but because at EVERY step of the way, in EVERY conceivable way, she has been failed by both family and society. That sharp edge has been honed to a fine point thanks to the grating of survival, and she's become this.
