Tag Archives: Marvel

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

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The third new Marvel movie of the year. You can really tell that writer’s strike slowed things down for a minute.

The first thing I will say is that 2025 demonstrates that the claims about superhero fatigue aren’t correct. What people are tired of[1] is not superheroes, it’s having to keep track of nearly infinite interweaving threads to understand what’s going on in the next movie. So this summer where you have Superman that is the first movie of a new DCU continuity with no history to care about, and now Fantastic Four set on an alternate world by themselves without any of the stuff we’ve been aware of for the past 17 years[2]… this is a thing that people want.

Anyway. It was honestly pretty great?

First of all, this is the most believable Reed Richards I’ve seen in a very long time. He’s the same character I’ve lauded from Ultimate Fantastic Four who was always going to be evil, yet they found a way for him to be believably not evil. (As opposed to the generic comics answer of “he’s not a bad guy because he’s a good guy.”) And Pedro Pascal can apparently continue to play genre characters until the cows come home.

As for the rest of what’s going on… the world feels lived in. I would happily watch a series of shorts based on the several years they’ve been around, fighting their Red Ghosts and their Mole Men and their Wizards and oh please oh please oh please their Paste Pot Petes. I’m not sure in a world with just one superhero group I can believe they would be considered the world’s guardians, but I’m willing to let it slide.

Sue was amazing, Johnny was just a smidge underdeveloped (but that’s what sequels are for), and Ben’s essential sadness was nailed without anyone ever saying “Gee, look how sad (or worse, angry) Ben is!” I cannot imagine what someone coming to these characters for the first time would have thought, but I think it would work?

Oh, and the look of the movie was extremely stylish. Retrofuturism they say, ie what people in the past thought the future would look like. I’d still be fine if it looked that way right now, instead of the way it does look. Which is basically the same, only more drab in most places. So that part was also pretty great.

Lastly, the plot. You know what? The plot wasn’t the point. Introducing the characters was the point, and with that understanding of what’s going on, I really think they picked the right plot. Not an origin story, not a generic “here’s someone they’ve fought before.” Instead, a really big fight with really big characters, who I hope return some years from now in a sequel.

Third time in a row this year that I’m excited to see the next movie. Sometime in the midst of the quantumania of madness era, these started feeling like chores, and I didn’t even notice until now, when they do not.

[1] And here, die-hard fan though I am, I will include myself at least a little bit.
[2] god help us

Thunderbolts*

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Here’s how you know something is rotten in the state of Marvel: we made plans to see a movie on June 1st, just thirty days after a May 2nd release date. And no Alamo Drafthouse in the DFW area had even a partial screen for the movie in its fifth week of release. That just hurts.

And it’s also sad, because after six years, Marvel seems to be getting back into a groove. What I mean by this is not that their stories have improved, although I think they have. I mean that it feels like all of the movies I’m watching this year are tied together. It’s not the spaghetti test approach of throwing each new thing against the wall to see whether it sticks, there’s an actual throughline to the flicks being released. It’s exciting!

After the harrowing events of the movie I watched last week[1], the Contessa[2] Valentina Allegra de Fontaine is on the run from Congress and cleaning house as far as her various special projects. You could, but probably do not, recall her recruiting a varied group of powered individuals across multiple movies and TV shows that have aired since Nick Fury went into space to hang out with his cat[3] and therefore nobody was around to think big picture anymore. Well, Director de Fontaine has been here to swoop in and fill that blind spot in our collective foresight.

Except, well, her hands are not as clean as we might wish them to be, both in terms of the kinds of projects she has supported and most likely in terms of the gains experienced by her investment portfolio, if you know what I mean. So as I said, she’s cleaning house, which involves sending Yelena[4] (among her other recruits) to prevent the theft of dangerous and classified material (among the Contessa’s[2] other clean-up missions). In many ways, what Yelena finds there is not what she expected. And I don’t just mean because she’s been feeling burned out and has asked that this be her last mission. (I don’t not mean that, it’s just not the only thing I mean.)

Two or three action set pieces later, Yelena, John Walker[5], and a handful of other misfits and/or one-time criminals are facing off against an existential threat[6] to the city of New York, and possibly to the world. I can confidently say that this will not go the way you expect it to.

Anyway: I liked all the characters (though I could wish Ghost had been provided a little more development), I found the story beats to be novel  or at least adjacent to novel, and I want to go back to my first point, which is how much I loved seeing aftershocks from Brave New World and foreshocks from Fantastic Four: First Steps. Many individual movies since the end of Phase 3 have been good (and many have been, ahem, not so good), but this is the first time in those six years where it has felt like they’re all connected.

If they can keep doing this, the MCU might be able to come back from limbo.

[1] No link, it’s literally one review back. Just click the “previous” button, or scroll down.
[2] Technically not (as far as I know) a countess in the MCU, but what’s a title or two between friends?
[3] Technically not a cat
[4] Who you may remember as Natasha Romanov’s sister and fellow Red Room Widow
[5] Who you may remember as Captain America, for at least 10 minutes before he got fired
[6] I might go so far as to say an existential terror

Captain America: Brave New World

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The bad thing about the post-Endgame MCU is that the writers want to have their cake and eat it too. On the one hand, you need to have watched The Falcon and the Winter Soldier[1] to understand where this new Isaiah supersoldier character came from or why he should matter. On the other hand, that means you will have seen Sam Wilson spend six episodes coming to grips with whether Steve Rogers made the right choice about if he should even have a successor, nevermind if it should have been the Falcon. It’s not that I object to people having more than one crisis of confidence. But if you’re going to do it in the long form exploration of the character first, then it isn’t worth wasting three minutes on a slimmed down conversation covering the same beats during the movie second. At the least, reverse the order so it’s not a recap, it’s an expansion! Either way, don’t pretend like you must cover this ground again in case I didn’t see the TV show you already made it mandatory for me to have watched to understand different ground you’re covering.

But honestly, that was the only thing about the movie that rang hollow. Brave New World is a solidly middle of the road MCU movie, which makes it noticeably above average for what they’ve released in the past six years. The deal is, there’s an enormous statue made out of a new thing that we’ve never heard of before[2] called adamantium, which is kind of a big deal. Might even be better than Wakandan vibranium, once people figure out all the applications. So once general, then later Secretary of Defense, and most recently President Ross[3] is trying to broker a treaty with several other nations to freely share “Celestial Island” and the adamantium, instead of fighting wars over it.

…unless of course he’s the same dick he has always been, and has a whole other agenda. That, ultimately, is the pivot on which the entire movie turns. That, and whether Sam can unravel the truth in time to save his cool elderly mentor and/or the world.

I think I liked it because it was good, but I will admit that I may have liked it because there was basically no noise about a multiverse. I’m not saying multiverse bad, but I am saying Something Else Once in a While good.

[1] One of the first couple of MCU TV shows they made, which also means it’s been a minute, unless you’re the type of person who rewatches everything for the tie-ins, in which case you’d have needed this, the first (or possibly second) Hulk movie, probably Civil War, and Eternals, at the minimum. But I’ll come back to this point.
[2] Well, we the residents of MCU Earth at least. We the viewers just maybe have.
[3] So that thing from footnote 1 where you have to be familiar with an ever-expanding, ever more intricate web of knowledge to even follow what’s going on in these movies? I’m sorry, but I can only say good things about this. I eat that shit up. It is awesome with a capital A++. If you want to say that’s a weakness of the movies, then you do not understand comics in the first place.

Deadpool and Wolverine

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On the one hand: you guys! I saw a movie in the theater! On opening night[1]! On the other hand, how does the only Marvel movie this year drop during the two month window when there’s no Alamo Drafthouse accessible to me? Ugh.

Nevertheless, we forge ahead. I just rewatched the two prior Deadpool movies, because this was coming[2]. (I should note that Deadpool 2 has grown in my estimation.) This movie is… well, it’s completely different in virtually every way from the two that preceded it. Wade doesn’t have a girlfriend, he isn’t inextricably tied to the X-Men (as a team nor as a franchise), and he is all in on becoming a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

In fact, the driving force of the movie is his attempt to join the Avengers, and what he’s willing to do once someone offers him a chance to accomplish exactly that. Naysayers will tell you that multiversal shenanigans are what is wrong with the MCU post-Thanos, but no, what is and has been wrong is the complete lack of any plan to tell an actual story. (Well, and the story they were not especially telling being rather mid.) I cannot tell you with any certainty that Ryan Reynolds just saved Marvel, but it’s the first Marvel movie I’ve watched in years now where I believe that this could all come together and actually work.

It would work better, of course, if he starts showing up in all the rest of the MCU movies, the way you had a Steve Rogers or a Tony Stark in basically 90% of the first three phases. But at least there’s a potential for something, now.

(Wolverine was cool too.)

[1] And then I fucked it up by taking nearly a week from when I started writing this review to actually finish it.
[2] Later, Disney+ suggested Logan, but I ran out of time to rewatch that. Alas.

The Marvels

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The Marvels marks the first MCU movie that I did not see in a theater. 15 year run, that’s not bad, but still: pretty big sad face emoji. Plus, it makes me irrationally feel responsible for how said movie kind of tanked. (It’s not like I didn’t want to see it. But it pretty much requires a grandparent in town to take over the kids, while the movie is still on its theatrical run. And because of a random illness outbreak, we missed our window.)

I mean, I shouldn’t feel responsible. There’s a pretty obvious culprit for why, and it is how comic book movie fans, painted with a broad brush stroke, are less interested in lady-helmed movies than dude-helmed movies. If you want to make the capitalist argument of “give the people what they want,” well, okay, I can understand that. But I would counter with the artistic argument of “lead from the front.” Anyway, enough about all this. This more important question is, was it good?

The MCU in general has been a mess basically since the credits rolled on Endgame[1]. It’s not quite rudderless. It has been dealing[2] with the aftermath of the Blip. It has been more and more broadly introducing the multiverse, and to a lesser extent it has been waving Kang around as an existential threat. But none of these things have been tied together tightly the way it was done in the old days, when every single movie was part of the whole, whether you knew it in prospect or only in retrospect.

So where do The Marvels fit into all of this? During (let’s say) a deleted scene at the end of Captain Marvel 30 years ago, Carol Danvers took out her aggressions on the Kree Empire’s AI emperor, so the kind of thing that happened to her would never happen to anyone else. Fast forward to the present, where for comic book logic reasons, an existential threat to the intergalactic superhighway has (at a quantum level) entangled Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel (she had a TV show) and Monica Rambeau (she was a secondary character in a different TV show). Also, the threat turns out to have a personal component, because that’s just better writing than if it did not.

So they have to learn to get along, and how to sort out their differences, and how to be successfully introduced to non-TV audiences, while going on a road trip through the galaxy trying to resolve the driving concern of the film. And they do it lady-style! …which sounds like I’m making fun, but seriously, since the dude-style version of this is just a bunch of punching each other, it’s nice to see the alternative.

In the end, a) I liked the movie, and okay I usually do; I’m forgiving of this particular genre and especially universe. But I think it was pretty good. Light and funny in the way I imagine The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants to have been, except with lots of punching and explosions[3]. And self-contained, which is a good thing when the attempts to not be self-contained have been so tragic. But b) the MCU at large is still a mess; nothing there has been improved by this movie, it was just a good in itself. And c) really it was more like 90% of a good. All the scenes with Nick Fury’s SABER space station were present for no other reason than to set up 10 minutes of highly gratuitous fan service. I’m not saying those scenes weren’t amusing in the moment, just that boy do they age poorly. (And to be clear, I saw this movie three days ago, which gives you an idea.)

[1] with the sole exception of the Spider–Man movies, and probably because Sony makes them with the approximate assumption that people are watching those three movies and nothing else in the MCU. Which is a bad assumption, but the unintended results cannot be argued. (Also, I’m being unfair to James Gunn here by not mentioning his (also closer to stand-alone) efforts.)
[2] badly. It has been dealing badly with the Blip, because Kevin Feige isn’t willing (or doesn’t know how) to go ahead and make even one movie or one TV show that is more than 10% a drama, and give his characters room to breathe and to grieve. Because that, much like ladies in charge of the movie, won’t put butts in seats. So maybe it’s not entirely Feige’s fault after all, I suppose.
[3] “But you said…” No, right, I know. It’s still a Marvel movie, come on. But they didn’t punch each other! Which is important.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

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My mother-in-law was in town for my son’s birthday, and due to a coincidence of chronology, my birthday is one day later, with the upshot being we had childcare available for my birthday! As a further result of which, we went to see the semi-recently released newest Marvel movie, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

If you’re worried about plot spoilers, do not be, because I legitimately could not remember who or why the bad guy was, until I spent several moments of concentration trying to. Which sounds like a strike against the movie? But no: I come not to bury Gunn, but to praise him. Because, plot or no plot, what the movie had was a ton of heart, and even more tons of concern for its characters. The only real problem I had with it, in an overarching sense, is that it made most of the recent previous movies[1] worse just by virtue of its existence. Because this is what has been missing since Endgame. Not a specific direction, or a replacement for Thanos. Just… heart.

Anyway, I do remember what happened, more or less. Like everything that has ever happened in any Guardians of the Galaxy movie, the past shows up to bite everyone in the ass. The only things I will say are that a) this is maybe the weirdest take I’ve ever seen or can imagine seeing on Adam Warlock, to the extent that I feel like maybe they shouldn’t have actually thanked Jim Starlin in the credits; and b) the take on the bad guy, whose presence I will not spoil, is so accurate it reminds me of Ultimate Reed Richards.

[1] Essentially all of them in the age of COVID except No Way Home.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

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The internet hated the third Ant-Man movie. This is no secret. And… as a movie, okay, I get it. It had maybe seven actors running around in front of green screens and emoting at explosions and creatures and whatever in the hopes that the CG people could keep their eyes pointing in the right direction. So when Martin Scorsese says whatever he said about superhero movies being soulless, I understand where people like him are coming from.

But this wasn’t Martin Scorsese, this was a broad cross-section of the kind of people who go to see all of the Marvel movies. And I just don’t really see the problem? The entire premise, as laid bare in the first ten minutes, was predicated on people who are nominally on the same team not talking to each other, nor apparently to their therapist.[1] So okay, that’s a little dumb. But really, when you get down to it, Quantumania only had one task, which was to introduce the viewing audience to Kang the Conqueror, and if they had to stretch credulity (but not violate any established character beats) to get there? Who cares.

They could have done a lot worse! I liked the crazy hunter-killer bot that I will steadfastly refuse to spoil. It was dumb, but it was fun dumb. I like this take on Scott Lang where his power isn’t that he can shrink or grow or talk to ants, it’s that he has an entire family to back him up. (I like that by implication Hank Pym was not a successful superhero because his powers were the inverse of Scott’s. It tracks.) I was a little disappointed, maybe, that the leader of the rebels wasn’t Jarella, but look, these movies are not for me, on some level. I’ve gone too deep![2]

Here’s what I will say in favor of the “not a good movie” camp. It was two hours, but it felt like two and a half, minimum. Still and all, and granted that I was primed by months of internet hate, but I really don’t think this was nearly so bad as what people say. It was bottom 50% of MCU movies, but was it bottom 25%? i’m not convinced it was. As a counterpoint, for example, I literally do not remember what Ant-Man and the Wasp was about. I know there were a lot of Pym particles and… I was about to say, and a geography defying bus chase, but that was Shang Chi. So, nope, nothing.

Well, unless you are Martin Scorsese, reading this review. From your perspective, sir, I get it, and this was a legitimately terrible movie. (But some of them have been pretty fantastic, and you’re just not the audience, is all. Don’t forget that it’s important to judge a movie from the viewpoint of its intended audience, not just from your own.)

[1] side-note: I wonder who acts as therapist to the superheroing community. I think I’ve seen Doc Samson do it, but he frankly wasn’t very good, plus he’s a superhero himself, so it seems sort of like a conflict of interest. I bet Marvel does something with this someday, but I’m surely at least 10-15 years away from it. But the MCU is in modern times, not in 1987, so you’d think this would have come up before now.
[2] get it?

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

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It’s impossible to think about a sequel to Black Panther without thinking about Chadwick Boseman. I don’t mean because he died, or I don’t only mean that. I mean that every aspect of the movie’s plot is wholly informed by the fact of his loss. I try to imagine a movie with any shared plot point but also T’Challa is the main character, and… I just cannot.

Instead of whatever might have been, we got one of the grimmest MCU movies I can remember, in which a series of unlikable politicians face off against[1] an unlikable Queen Ramonda[2] faces off against the goddamned Submariner.

I want to have more to say, but… I kind of don’t. Wakanda Forever ended up feeling like exactly the movie it was, in which the MCU architects were forced to spend an entire movie shifting around pieces on the chess board to explain why there’s still a Black Panther even though the actor died and they were smart enough to not replace him in the same role with a new actor.

The best part of the movie was the payoff of that conundrum, where the most deserving justification and the most deserving character came together very neatly to solve the problem and save the day. The second best part of the movie was that they managed to convince me Namor’s ankle wings are not entirely ridiculous in every way, via Mayan mythology. The second worst part of the movie is that I think if Boseman had lived, we would not have gotten the goddamned Submariner into the MCU yet, or maybe ever. (The worst part of the movie is that Chadwick Boseman died, of course. Even if it happened before they settled the script.)

[1] Because, see, they want vibranium, and there’s no longer a Black Panther to protect Wakanda. (I mean, there’s still piles of Wakandan futuretech and those badass Dora Milaje, which you’d think would be plenty enough to give anyone pause.)
[2] A lot of the time, she[3] has good reason to be angry. But she’s just not nice to anyone, and it definitely adds to the grim feel of things.
[3] T’Challa’s mother, the new ruler of the nation since he had to be written out of the story.

Thor: Love and Thunder

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The fourth Thor movie came out in, what, July? We went to see it at the drive-in, and it was good enough in an actiony explosions and rainbosenberg bridges kind of way. Also, like always, I was tired and it was a summer movie, which means starting near sunset for two (and a half, counting previews, etc) hours is a lot later than if we were watching it in, say, February. So I lightly dozed through a lot of it, which caused me to judge what I did see perhaps more harshly than I would have otherwise. This doesn’t matter to you, because I was always going to watch it again for real before writing a review, which not incidentally is why this one is six months late. But it did mean I kept putting it off even though it’s been available to me for multiple months via certain online sources run by mice.

Thor: Love and Thunder has two glaring flaws, the first of which is sort of a spoiler but not especially. So, one of all, he went off with the Guardians of the Galaxy at the end of Endgame. But now he has his own movie. and also, they have their own movie soon. So the possibilities are that these movies a) tie into each other in some way, b) are lopsided because Thor is sharing screen time with a whole team but then isn’t in their movie at all when it comes out later, or c) are wholly unrelated, and the team and thunder god have to be uncoupled. C is bad because it means them going off together in the first place was pointless and poorly thought out, with no planning. You can guess which one happened, I trust.

Two of all, the movie itself is… I am about to say it’s pointless, which is only true insofar as the context of the way the Marvel Cinematic Universe has previously worked makes it true. It adds nothing to an overarching storyline being told in its Phase or in its collection of phases. Or if it does, what it is adding is entirely opaque. And what occurs to me is that neither of these is a flaw of the movie itself. It is a flaw in how Marvel and apparently Kevin Feige are meandering aimlessly from one plot to the next, with practically no connective tissue. This doesn’t bother me in the comics because the comics started out that way and, despite crossing over with each other frequently, rarely have giant events. Whereas the MCU was one enormous event from start to end[game]. But they can’t come out and say, hey, we’re going full comics, just making these for funsies with occasional big events (but of course regular crossovers), as it would piss the public off, after what they got out of the first ten years. But they also can’t not say it, because then it looks like this, with people hating on most of your movies because they don’t make overall sense. Which, of course they don’t, if you didn’t write in any overall sense to be made!

Either that, or Feige got infected by whatever happened when Disney contracted the third Star Wars trilogy without a plan.

Anyway, all of that to say: this was a good movie, as long as you did not have grand scheme expectations. Waititi has the same sense of whimsical fun that made Ragnarok work so well, and if it was maybe amped up a little higher, that worked for me. (I understand why it wouldn’t have worked for everyone.) Hemsworth is having the time of his life, clearly. Various callsback in miniature scattered throughout gave me exactly what I’m also getting from reading all of the comics, and in summation, I’m not tired of what they’re doing yet.

But I do wish they were more certain of what that is, or else that they’d communicate it clearly if they are. The movies are good on a case by case basis, but the overall look is just not very good, you know?

Oh, plot thing, if you need it: a bro with a religious axe to grind gets a magic god-killing sword and starts, er, killing gods. Later, he kidnaps a bunch of Asgardian children, which sends Thor and also Thor (you had to be there) on a quest to stop him from killing those children maybe and still more gods definitely. Also, there are some pretty sweet goats and really a lot of Guns ‘n Roses. And, as you can perhaps envision from the title, a love story.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

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I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a completely full drive-in parking lot. Whether this is a factor of Covid, or the new Doctor Strange movie only having been out for a week, or both, or some other X-factor… Regardless, I’ve seen a lot of movies at drive-ins relative to my age[1], and some have been crowded, but never packed like this. Man that is a lot of people flashing a lot of headlights, individually, at various moments. But I guess not much more distracting that people getting up to pee or food deliveries or whatever.

I have no segue here, I just like to talk about the drive-in.

See, there’s this teen in need of help, and she occasionally runs into Doctor Strange, who while not the Sorcerer Supreme these days is nonetheless still in charge of the New York chapter house or whatever wizards call their sanctums, and he decides to help her, since that’s what you do in these movies. Then he finds himself traveling the multiverse and fighting demons and the Illuminati and a big bad and pretty much, well, everyone. Turns out the multiverse just isn’t a fan of this guy.

Was it good? It took until the final act for me to say to myself, my, this certainly is a Sam Raimi movie, isn’t it? Unlike I’m sure a lot of people, I did not say this with a heavy heart. Basically, this is a family drama and a second family drama mashed up together, and then turned into a fantasy horror movie, and I completely understand why that is not for everyone, but I kind of dig it, you know?

In retrospect, this may have been the most drive-in friendly movie Kevin Feige has ever signed off on.

What I did not like is how heavily dependent the movie is on watching all of the TV shows Marvel has been pushing out lately. Like, I’ve seen and remember Wandavision, but I feel like you shouldn’t have to? Which is a weird take for a guy reading 100% of Marvel[2], I know, but… you shouldn’t. Needing to watch dozens of movies to keep up is enough to ask. Wanda’s character arc barely makes sense with the TV show for backstory, though, so I’mma call foul there.

[1] Or at least I think I have? Maybe I’m fooling myself.
[2] Close enough, anyway