My only concern with that She Hulk finale is that
Spoiler - click to showMarvel is just lampshading the – very valid – criticisms of its storylines and characters rather than intending to do anything meaningful about them
but otherwise I loved everything about it.
Is it just me, or are more and more movies nowadays feeling like they could use another draft or two before shooting? I've got the benefit of hindsight, obviously, but the last few films I've seen definitely felt like they had at least one subplot underbaked.
Thor: Love and Thunder is definitely one of them.
We watched this last night and I came here to post pretty much exactly this. Somehow this movie feels unfinished, like they strung enough jokes together to make it last two hours and then just edited it together and kicked it out the door.
In its defence, the first half is pretty funny, although it's increasingly hard to reconcile Thor's earlier characterisation with his most recent incarnation as a moron. (He actually fits in quite well with the Guardians of the Galaxy, and it's a shame we haven't seen more of that). Natalie Portman gets to redeem her bored-as-shit performance from Thor 2 and complete no-show in Thor 3 with a movie where she actually looks like she's having more fun than anyone. And Russell Crowe's camp Greek Zeus is the clear highlight.
But the actual story barely exists, Christian Bale appears to think he's in a different movie completely, somehow it's a comedy movie with a cancer subplot, it plays its deus ex machina (the Necrosword) in the first five minutes, and overall it feels like you could have got entirely separate movies out of (a) Asgardians of the Galaxy (b) Jane Foster the Mighty Thor (c) Gorr the God Butcher and ramming them all together into two hours of slapstick did nobody any favours.
It's not terrible by any means but like most Phase 4 stuff it just feels terribly inconsequential.
it's increasingly hard to reconcile Thor's earlier characterisation with his most recent incarnation as a moron
Yeah, L&T definitely took it too far – in Ragnarok he was a bit goofy, but well-intentioned and capable. Love and Thunder made him an inept idiot.
Yes, please. Now. Please. Thanks. Now. Now please.
Across the Spider-Verse is… a lot.
Visually it one-ups the original by a considerable distance, but I can't help feeling the plot is a little too complicated. It spends a notable percentage of its runtime recapping and recontextualising the first film, and while that does pay off by the time the credits roll, it feels a little overstuffed in places.
It's really good, though.
We just saw it this evening, and although I don't necessarily agree that the plot is complicated, they do spend a very long part of the film obscuring what, exactly, the plot is.
It really is great. So many little touches and references, but none of them heavy-handed or clunky - it just feels big and bonkers in a strangely organic way.
I'm obsessed with Gwen's opening drum solo. Is it on the soundtrack? Please let it be on the soundtrack…
It's the end of the first track on the album.
Gwen is a non-event of a character and the first 20 minutes sags because of it, but once Miles is on the screen it thrums along nicely. I think it's too overstuffed to the point of indulgence in bits, but when it's good there isn't much to touch it. Joyful and brilliant and in many ways it really now shows up the Marvel films for the soulless vessels they are these days. Spiderman is glib and funny when it needs to be, but because it isn't a 15 a minute quipathon it really earns the more tender moments too.
I ordered the first film on bluray as I want to rewatch it - I don't think this was quite as good, but I could be wrong. Going to be hell of a trilogy either way.
I watched into the spiderverse this afternoon as a refresh for going to see the new one tomorrow. Into the spiderverse was even better than I remembered. Just fantastic.
We watched Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania last night, which was fairly enjoyable despite being just two hours of characters shouting exposition at each other while CGI went on in the background.
The MCU really seems to be in a tailspin at the moment, doesn't it? I remember when these things used to be character-driven but honestly Quantumania could have featured any group of characters as they just existed to move the plot from one place to the next. Ant-Man movies used to be about a funny guy who could go really small and do funny things (he rides ants! He fights bad guys on toy train sets! He goes down the plughole!) but all he did in this was get really big and punch stuff, which is nowhere near as much fun.
It was still better than Black Panther: Wakanda (Goes On) Forever, which had the potential to be a snappy 90-minute movie about Wakandans vs Fishmen but ended up bogged down in nearly three hours of self-important sludge and the studio demanding that the token white guy should get loads of screen time. The latest TV show, Secret Invasion, has got reviews so poor I don't think I'm even going to bother watching it.
There's a sliver of hope, I guess: Quantumania at least felt like it was kicking off the Kang storyline properly, which might bring some of these things together (part of the problem of Phase 4 is that everything was so disconnected, even when it introduced new characters you would never know when you would see them again). But it's all seriously lacking in momentum at the moment, I'm not sure any of the upcoming movies or shows will be able to turn this thing around.
There's meant to be a lot more Kang in the upcoming second season of Loki as well, but given all the accusations around Majors at the moment, it all feels a bit fraught. Marvel's complete lack of comment on the situation is probably meant to be reassuring, but it honestly reads as mild panic.
We watched Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 last night. It's pretty good! It does less undermining of itself than some (especially more recent) Marvel fare, and sticks the landing pretty well.
I particularly liked that Gunn didn't just Spoiler - click to showundo the Gamora reset stuff, where I think a less confident film would have had them back together at the end; though Quill's repeated petulant insistence that she "doesnt remember" the last few years does.grate a little, like he's too dumb to realise that she doesn't remember it because it never happened for her.
Also, Adam Warlock could have been really annoying, but Will Poulter's performance was so full of eager honesty, he was actually quite charming.
I decided it's time to get caught up with the last year or so of MCU so I spent the evening rewatching the first two episodes of Loki season 1. It's nonsense but it's exactly the sort of nonsense that I love.
We saw The Marvels last week. I really liked it a lot.
Short version: Iman Vellani is worth the ticket price all by herself as far as I'm concerned.
It's a little weighted down by the now-necessary MCU lore – though the impact of this is lessened by the relatively short 105-minute runtime – but I actually thought its core plot was impressively self-contained despite technically being a sequel to at least four other movies and TV shows (Ms Marvel, Captain Marvel, Wandavision and Secret Invasion), so the critical complaints about its convoluted plot struck me as a little odd.
But even you were to think it's one of the weaker Marvel offerings, I hope you'd agree it's certainly much more watchable and enjoyable than Quantumania, the last Doctor Strange thing, Wakanda Forever or Love and Thunder, all of which were flabby, over-CGI'd and emotionally empty.
So season 1 of Loki is just brilliant.
Quantumania was fine. Felt a bit like i had stumbled into a made-for-TV Saturday afternoon kids movie that Lucy and Robin were watching.
Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is currently paused 20 minutes from the end but I have loved it so far.
Season 1 of Loki was good. Season 2 is… not. Which is a bit of a shame.
I didn't like Guardians 3. I just don't think you can recapture the lightning in a bottle that was the first one. Everything in G3 feels forced.
Rewatched Constantine the other day, which was actually pretty good in a mid 00s sort of way. I know it's not Marvel (is it? It's a DC line of comics maybe?) but I found it infinitely more creative and watchable than the sort of tuneless dirge that the Marvel superhero films have become.
The Constantine film is good, even if it's not the John Constantine of the comics.
Halfway through season 2 of Loki now and it's totally lost the relentless pace of the first series.
Ok, Loki won me back. That finale was incredible!
I found Loki s2 felt weirdly wheel-spinning in the back half, but yeah, the finale brought it together really well.
Across the Spider-Verse just landed on Netflix and I was surprised to find that I enjoyed it a lot more than the first one. They really just went for it with this one, didn't they? Nothing left to prove so they just chucked it all at the screen. It's easily the most visually overwhelming thing I've ever seen, but it's got a surprisingly decent plot too (by the standard of Marvel multiverse stories at least). I really had a good time with this movie and one mark of how much I enjoyed it is how angry I was when it ended abruptly on a cliffhanger.
I saw Deadpool & Wolverine lately too which was also quite enjoyable and at least felt like a self-contained movie with a purpose to it rather than just chapter 47 in the ongoing MCU saga. Having never seen any of the X-Men movies or indeed any of the other non-MCU Marvel movies it referenced, I felt like most of the references went right over my head, but even taken on purely face value it was a good way of spending a couple of hours.
The first two X-Men movies are better than some of the later MCU stuff – and they'll give you more than enough context for Logan, which is both brilliant and the only other X-Men film really worth watching.
I quite enjoyed First Class and Days of Future Past.
Logan is basically essential though.
Captain America: Brave New World is strangely forgettable - it's not bad, exactly, as just a bit pointless. As the sequel to two of the worst MCU movies (Incredible Hulk and Eternals) and one of the worst MCU series (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) it has its work cut out from it from the off, but Mackie's decidedly unsuper Captain America and Harrison Ford's regrettably recast Thaddeus Ross make for an uninspired pairing and the whole thing seems to have been assembled in the edit, with action beats arriving at precisely regulated intervals and a weird final fight where a load of CGI beats itself to death in a place that apparently has no people in it at all for miles around. The movie's big reveal could have been pretty good had it not been comprehensively spoiled by the marketing numpties well in advance of actual release.
The whole purpose of the thing seems to be "hey, we have Adamantium now" and once you know that, there's not much point in watching this.
Getting caught up with MCU.
Captain America: BNW. I agree with everything Gar says above. It's fine, but a bit pointless. It doesn't really progress anything in the big plot.
IronHeart. There's some fun stuff in here and it's nice to have a small story about criminals in the MCU rather than another story about heroes. Could have done with more resolution and less set up though.
Thunderbolts. First half was a bit too dumb. Second half was actually pretty good. It's certainly not essential but it felt like a comic book and I like that.
I watched Fantastic Four: First Steps and thought it was just very silly. I probably need to stop watching comic book movies, I can't remember the last one I genuinely enjoyed. Shang-Chi maybe.
Fantastic Four was just rubbish. I do not understand the vaguely positive opinion most people seem to have of it.
I think it cruises along on Pedro Pascal's charisma a lot. I remember feeling like a lot of things just kinda happened in it, without any real explanation why; I get that they didn't want to do an origin movie, but it felt like Reed Richards just got a pass from the entire world's governments to do whatever crazy shit he felt like, with no real examination of, or interest in, what that actually meant for the world it was set in.
I went to see the new Spider-Man film last night and thought it was fantastic. And not just "a good film in the marvel series" but a genuinely good film on its own merit.
I just got back from seeing it and….I didn't like it. I haven't seen the last two and we weren't told the showing we brought tickets to was 3D so that spoiled the film for me regardless, quality felt like watching a cam rip of a torrent site, it was awful, I didn't know 3D was even still a thing.
I was kinda into it until like 2/3 of the way through, then the last part kinda' fell flat to me, didn't really feel like it was going anywhere.
Sounds like you were watching the film in hard mode.
Dude, the fight scenes alone were scuffed as hell because any kind of frantic motion had pretty bad ghosting, and on the whole it was dark no matter how kinetic the action was. I took the 3D glasses off for some dialogue scenes even and it was noticeably brighter except stuff on the edge of the screen was blurry because 3D. I wish we had decided against it because we knew it was going to look terrible, but the cost had sunk too deep by that point, we were already in the theatre holding the large cups of Pepsi when the attendee inside said it was a 3D film, all this so I can see Spider-Man sink into the background a little bit when he swings away.
Guess I will watch the other films before Doomsday comes out then too.
I really enjoyed it. From the trailers, I'd expected it to be over-stuffed with bad guys and subplots, but it was actually pretty focused (if a little over-explained at points by that tedious AI assistant in his suit).
Stuff I particularly liked:
The mutation stuff felt a bit under-baked (and wasn't really resolved?), but whatever.
The best watching order for Lord of the Rings is 3, 1, 2.
I didn't intend to watch it at all because I stopped caring about the MCU but the Doomsday trailer was closest I've come to being as excited as I was for the Infinity War/Endgame duo so maybe it's good to have an excuse and circle back
I still like superhero films but I am not expecting much from Doomsday. It was a small miracle that Avengers and Infinity War/Endgame were as good as they were considering all of the pieces which had to fall into place to make them work. Doomsday only has half the pieces and half of those are bad.
I could be wrong though. It has certain happened before.
I know people call these films marvel slop but I think the run up to and including Infinity War and Endgame was a real achievement, it was so ambitious and it succeeded in my opinion, only need to look to DC and see how possible it was to fuck it up. The only reason I stopped caring after that was because I felt after that, everything just felt like a sidequest. I'm sure the TV series are good (in fact I was like 3 episodes in to Daredevil and really liked it, might jump back in) but I kinda' couldn't be bothered to watch every new film, also yes the third/fourth (I lost count) wave of MCU films looked kind of mixed, but I'll always be impressed by what the first batch managed to do.
I think they went a bit too hard on the TV series to start with - stuff like Falcon & the Winter Soldier and Loki felt like required viewing, which started to become a big time commitment. While they were often good, keeping up with Marvel started to feel like work. Then they went the other way and several movies (Shang-Chi, Eternals) and shows (She-Hulk, Echo, Wonder Man) just seemed to go absolutely nowhere. So the narrative momentum has been completely lost.
Incels howling "woke" at everything with a female main character didn't help.
Then the whole Kang thing happened - they built up a shit villain over the course of several of the worst movies they've ever made, then dropped him abruptly when real life stuff happened, leading to the next Avengers movie suddenly being Dr Doom with absolutely no build-up whatsoever.
I've kept up with the movies (which have been a real mixed bag lately) but I'm several shows behind and not really inclined to catch up. I'll probably see Avengers but it's definitely not got the hype of Infinity War, and I'm not sure how it ever could have had.
I watched the first X-Men movie for the first time in the runup to Doomsday, and it was so bad I'm astonished they made any more of them.
It has about 15 characters to introduce, each of which gets their allotted 5 minutes of screen time to do their one mutant party trick then it's on to the next one. No-one gets any actual character development at all, apart from possibly Wolverine who gets ten minutes at the start where he acts completely differently to show how much he's changed by the end of the movie. Every plot point is "Mystique is pretending to be this guy, oh no, however could we have possibly seen this coming". The fight scenes are slow and clunky with obvious stunt performers, but the editing for everything else is abrupt and frantic with nothing given any time to breathe.
I know it comes from a different era of superhero movies and maybe this is how X-Men always is but it honestly just felt like a bunch of action figures rather than an actual movie. Drivel. I'm going to watch the rest of them now.
The scene where Magneto confronts the police is awesome 👌
And the White House scene in X2 is even cooler
It it an anniversary or something as I've had loads of XMen clips on the socials.
Early superhero stuff is a hard watch now after the later stages of the Marvel stuff, which was finessed and buffed to a shine. With extra quips. I wonder if the modern stuff will date quite as much.
The Fox X-Men stuff includes about 3-4 decent movies - that are still often campy or cringey - sandwiched in-between a bunch of others that range from vaguely serviceable through to absolute drivel. I'm always amazed by quite how many there are actually are too, especially if you count the pseudo-spinoffs. The fact that they tried to shoehorn in the Dark Phoenix saga twice and fucked it both times is almost impressive, and I suspect Marvel will try that again eventually, but I hope they take their time getting to it, as it is an iconic storyline, it just needs to be done better.
I am still fond of a lot of it though? Nostalgia is obviously a factor, and Logan still stands apart in terms of quality, but I do still like X2, First Class, Days of Future Past, and the Deadpool moves (for my sins), and while a couple of the rest are genuinely terrible some of the others aren't completely without merit. They've certainly had some excellent set-pieces in there in amongst it all - like Al says, there's Nightcrawler in the White House, and then also those two Quicksilver sequences in the prequels that are probably the biggest standouts besides.
There's that post-credits sequence in Deadpool & Wolverine where they effectively bid a fond farewell to the whole messy Fox years, and I genuinely enjoyed the look back, as well as the song choice - 'Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)' - as they are something flawed and messy, but I did quite like them.
I've never really been enormously invested in superhero comics, just used to have a few cartoons I would watch as a kid, and then X-Men, Spidey and DC tpbs I used to read (or copy from) as a teen, but the X-Men movies probably got this whole thing superhero going, for better or worse, and then the MCU had me right up until the end of Endgame, partially just because of the 'younger me would've never believed this' element. I am finding myself vaguely interested in how they handle Doomsday/Secret Wars now though, partially because I can see it going a bit awry, but mainly because I think I'm at least a little interested to see how the MCU handles the X-Men in those and going forward, as they seem to be the characters I retain the most fondness for.
It it an anniversary or something as I've had loads of XMen clips on the socials..
They're starting to integrate them into the MCU now, with some of the old Fox cast appearing in Avengers Doomsday later in the year, and then a lot of the new MCU casting - for a 2028 X-Men movie - being unveiled last week
Ahhh, that would be it.
I must admit, I'm now totally checked out on all things superhero, apart from the Robert Downy Jr not being Ironman or something in the new Avengers film. I think what broke me were the three Spiderman movies which all had a very similar name and the need to watch shows about the Hulk's third cousin on Disney Plus to have any idea what was going on. Oh, and Ant Man, which was shite.
Oh the first Quicksilver scene is by far the best scene in that movie if you ask me. And I fucking love Deadpool 2, 1 and 3 were okay but 2 is my favourite, I giggle every time he meets Juggernaut
That fist X-Men film is very weird now. There's so little dialog and they keep putting putting both the heroes and villains off at the side of the scene in action figure pose.
We watched them all this year (my younger kid is on a huge X-Men kick just now) and I enjoyed watching them. I was surprised to find that Dark Phoenix wasn't nearly as bad as I expected. It might not me good exactly but it has some great bits. If you enjoy watching Magneto fuck people up with massive chuncks of metal you should at least watch the fight on a train.
Also I read the original Dark Phoenix comics this year and they suck too.
We are currently enjoying X-Men 97 on Disney+. It's still silly and cringy by the powers are excellent.