Saw it again, still really like it. Brie Larson's smirk when Carol gets to let loose with her powers is infectious.
It doesn't have the clear personality that the likes of Black Panther or Thor Ragnarok brought to the table, but it's a solid introduction to a character who most people won't have heard of before – but who will, by all accounts, have a massive impact on the MCU from Endgame onwards.
Jesus. Go to a small cinema at 1.30 on a Monday and there are still 7 other fuckers with the audacity to turn up.
I got a bit fed up with the Marvel Netflix series, the second series of each of them didn't really seem to going anywhere and now they've all been cancelled I've kind of lost interest in seeing them through to their end.
There are a couple of other superhero-type series up there now though - has anyone here seen either Titans or Umbrella Academy and are they worth my time? (I should really catch up with the second series of Legion too).
We saw Captain Marvel this afternoon. It's good - a solid, if not spectacular entry in the MCU. Performances are all great, the script is decent, and it's got fairly interesting, fairly low-key stakes. I kind of feel like Carol didn't have much of an arc, though.
Spoiler - click to showShe finds out some Uncomfortable Truths about the Kree and her mentor, but fundamentally ends the film as the same person as she began it, without much growth other than what essentially breaks down as "you're adopted". Not a deal-breaker, just mildly disappointing.
Fury/Goose 2020.
Spoiler - click to show[Carol] fundamentally ends the film as the same person as she began it
Spoiler - click to showI don't think it's necessarily true; at the start of the film Vers believes that she needs Yon-Rogg's approval, that she needs to fit in with Kree society and impress the Supreme Intelligence. By the end, she realises that she's stronger than all of them (put together), that she's done some Dodgy Shit that she's trying to make up for, and has reconnected with her Earth-based family who accept and love her without demanding anything in return.
Spoiler - click to showCarol at the end of the film would act differently if she was transplanted back into its opening scenes, which seems like character development to me (though admittedly a low bar). I don't think the same could be said for, say, Steve Rogers in The First Avenger.
Yeah, that's fair enough.
I really enjoyed The Umbrella Academy, it's kinda all over the place but the world building and the characters kept me coming back. I think I watched it in the space of a week.
There's some pretty obvious "twists" but they manage to include plenty of pleasant surprises too.
It was nice to not be in the MCU for a while.
I got a bit fed up with the Marvel Netflix series, the second series of each of them didn't really seem to going anywhere and now they've all been cancelled I've kind of lost interest in seeing them through to their end.
I'd had more than enough by the end of Punisher season 2, and bearing in mind the quality of Jessica Jones s2 it's going to just be some kind of commitment to completionism that gets me through JJ s3 (if anything does), rather than any sort of enthusiasm.
(Insert rant about Netflix's commitment to 13-episode seasons (to the detriment of the quality of the shows) here.)
The only one of all of the Netflix Marvel shows I could see myself rewatching is Daredevil, and yet I still kind of find myself wanting the new Disney streaming service to consider picking up the continuity (again, possibly just on DD, which (as a show and a character) deserves better)…
I need help.
We saw Captain Marvel this afternoon. It's good - a solid, if not spectacular entry in the MCU.
I suspect this is about right; it feels like upper-middle tier for me, as I really enjoyed it at the time, but wonder if seeing it in IMAX (I have a new one about a mile and a half from me now! Woo!) and the usual high you get from seeing a new film in the cinema might have made it seem a bit more special than it actually was.
Still very much a good film, and probably one of the better Marvel origin stories, I'd say.
I really enjoyed The Umbrella Academy, it's kinda all over the place but the world building and the characters kept me coming back. I think I watched it in the space of a week.
There's some pretty obvious "twists" but they manage to include plenty of pleasant surprises too.
It was nice to not be in the MCU for a while.
Brilliant - thanks for that. I think I'll give it a go. Is it standalone or does it need some sort of comics foreknowledge to fully appreciate?
Best to go in to Umbrella Academy with no knowledge, as even if you had it would still be completely fucking mental.
It's the type of show where when a new character turns up you instantly assume they are dead, a robot or an alien. It's nuts. It also has a bit of a Wes Anderson vibe, in the way it portrays families and their oddities. After five minutes, it's already so mad that you don't bat an eyelid when the talking monkey butler shoes up.
But I loved it.
I'm definitely going to have to watch it next, I think; I read the comics years ago, and really enjoyed them, but there's (almost literally) no way they can have done the same story in the show (or what I remember of it), so I'll be more than happy enough with something that's enjoyable and keeps to the "spirit" of the books.
We watched the first guardians film tonight. I proceeded to tell my wife all about James Gunn getting booted off the series. Then I opened my phone to this news.
We have been watching through all the MCU films. I think we are eight films in just now. It's definitely the best way to watch them. I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that Marvel have managed to put together a bombastic multi-story-arc decade-long series of good quality or better films, but their comics have never been this consistent in tone and quality.
Breaking my own self-imposed rule and actually going to a cinema tomorrow to watch Captain Marvel. Taking my son along who's never seen any of the Marvel movies so hopefully it's pretty self-contained and doesn't confuse the bejeesus out of him.
It's set before any of the others (except Captain America), and doesn't have any direct plot ties to any of the other films – a few in-jokes and characters might pass a newcomer by, but I don't think knowledge of the wider MCU is a prerequisite for Captain Marvel. It feels a lot like a Phase One film, in that way.
Yep, Captain Marvel was great. Brie Larson was superb. I wonder how they’re going to fit her into the Avengers though seeing as she’s basically Superman now.
The boy liked it too, “better than Spiderverse” apparently. Might even spark some interest in watching some of the others, who knows.
Jesus. Go to a small cinema at 1.30 on a Monday and there are still 7 other fuckers with the audacity to turn up.
It was a fairly standard experience for me. The guy immediately on my left came in with a bag of popcorn twice the side of his head, which he proceeded to noisily eat for the entire duration of the movie; on our right was a small child of no more than 3 who obviously wasn't interested in the movie at all and jumped up and down and shouted randomly all the way through; and right in front of me was a guy who checked his phone every ten minutes with the backlight on full. I really hate going to the cinema.
One thing that surprised me though. The trailers that were shown, while uninteresting, were obviously age-appropriate, so we only got trailers for movies that were 12A or below. But that didn't apply to the adverts. Pretty much every other ad was for an 18-rated videogame (Anthem, Division 2, Days Gone etc) which meant we basically had twenty minutes of shots of angry men firing guns at each other to precede our light-hearted superhero movie. That seems… odd? I'd have thought the same restrictions would apply to the adverts as to the trailers.
That hadnt occured to me (my kids will never find me after the name change and operations) but it was the same here.
Definitely an advert for anthem, the Division 2, and I think also that new zombie/potential last of us rip off.
And plenty of booze adverts which should be completely banned by now.
I remember phones, a car (some new Seat?), and The Division 2.
So… this looks a bit different from most modern comic book adaptations:
So DC have progressed from making everything grim, to making everything miserable. yay.
We don't need a Joker origin story (Nolan proved that), is anyone keen to watch this?
So DC have progressed from making everything grim, to making everything miserable. yay.
We don't need a Joker origin story (Nolan proved that), is anyone keen to watch this?
I'm kind of interested in it? Like- it's a neat idea at least?
I kind of like that they seem to have realised that some of their characters are so iconic, they can just throw them at someone with an interesting take and let them run with it. If nothing else, just making a bunch of unconnected anthology movies is a different enough take from attempting to ape the MCU that it'll set them apart.
I think that looks interesting.
I'm just a grump. I wish people would make new stories rather than telling the same ones over and over.
At least with the MCU they are bringing the Marvel universe together into a more coherent, edited, whole and simultaneously bringing something to cinema which has never been done before.
I wish people would make new stories rather than telling the same ones over and over.
Batman, specifically. Surely it's all been done to death now? We've had two Tim Burton movies, two follow-ups, three Nolan movies, a Gotham TV series and whatever the hell Ben Affleck's been up to over the last few years. We don't need any more Batman.
Batman's not in this one, though. And I'm not sure that I've ever seen a Joker movie that digs into his Norman Bates-esque origins as a street sign clown, but then I don't read the comics.
This, as near as I can tell, is a pretty good way to make an interesting movie out of one of these ubiquitous cultural icons: give it to someone with a weird idea for one film and see what shakes out – the character can survive the experiment and you might get something good.
Compared to the identikit grimdark Snyderverse nonsense DC have been putting out the last few years, I'm a little bit excited to see where their more fractured approach to a movie "franchise" leads.
The closest that the Joker ever came to having a canon origin story is The Killing Joke, and even then it's caveated at the end with words to the effect of, "sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another… but if I'm going to have a past, I'd prefer it be multiple choice" - so the whole thing might be a Keyser Soze bullshit story anyway.
Finally watched Endgame. Managed to avoid spoilers for all this time, too, so went in completely fresh.
Spoiler - click to showIt's a spectacle to admire rather than a movie to truly love, I think. It's too long, it could easily have lost 20 minutes of people looking sad at the start, and its middle act is weirdly reminiscent of Back to the Future II, but it has some of the MCU's best moments - Thor "going for the head", Cap picking up the hammer, the battle at the end with absolutely everyone - and it's as good an ending to this first era of Marvel movies as anyone could have hoped for. It requires a surprisingly thorough knowledge of almost all the other MCU movies to fully appreciate, and I was particularly surprised how fundamental the otherwise forgettable Ant-Man and the Wasp was to the story as a whole.
Spoiler - click to showIn particular they painted themselves into a corner a bit with at least three of the Avengers (Scarlet Witch, Dr Strange and especially Captain Marvel) being ridiculously overpowered compared to the rest, and therefore all three were pretty much sidelined in favour of concentrating on those whose primary skill is punching people really hard. Captain Marvel single-handedly destroying a colossal spaceship then immediately getting twatted out of the way by Thanos seemed particularly odd. But I get that they didn't want a brand new character completely stealing the limelight in what was essentially a send-off for the old guard.
Spoiler - click to showI'm kind of glad they're moving on now with some new characters, it feels like the right decision and these guys can get their side-stories and fan-service in the various TV shows that are also lined up.
We've started a rewatch of some/most of the MCU, skipping the bad ones that don't tie in much (the Iron Man sequels, The Incredible Hulk), and - after a brief hiatus caused by a degraded bluray disc - finished Thor last night. It's held up very well.
I didn't remember how likeable Thor was, after they turned him quite dour and portentous in The Dark World and Age of Ultron, it's easy to forget that Ragnarok was as much a return to form for the character as a reinvention.
Also, the Dutch angles - Jesus Christ, the Dutch angles. It's like Branagh threatened to fire everyone if he ever saw a camera sitting straight.
Main complaint, as ever: not nearly enough Idris Elba (does anything ever had enough Idris Elba, though?).
We've been doing a rewatch of the MCU (first time for the boy) and I'm surprised just how much my opinion on some of the movies has flipped, second time round. In particular I found Black Panther (which is where we are up to) to be a boring, turgid mess where everything happens three times like a crap videogame boss battle, half the film is set in one extremely dark room in Oakland, and the main character spends most of the movie stripped of his powers. But I remember quite enjoying it first time round. Maybe once you know where all this stuff is going, you have less patience for the slower, more filler-like movies.
That said, I enjoyed both Guardians of the Galaxy and especially Spider-Man Homecoming a lot more than I did first time round. So it's all balanced out. Infinity War this weekend and I am really looking forward to that.
I wasn't very keen on Guardians the first time I saw it, but came around on it the second time. I've still only seen Guardians 2 once, in the cinema, but I don't have a high opinion. Wondering if I'll like it better this time through, but I'm not sure; my issues with it are much bigger than the problems the first had.
I liked GOTG 2 as much as the first, maybe more - while the actual Ego plot is a bit silly, there's a lot of good character stuff in there and it's far funnier.
So my major problem with it is that it undoes a lot of the character stuff that was already covered in vol. 1;Spoiler - click to showthey've already gone from a bunch of antisocial assholes who don't like each other much, but come together and formed a kind of found family in order to help each other achieve something actually good - but then 6 months later, they all just hate each other again, Rocket is an unrepentant jerk who steals shit from people that he knows will attack him for it for no reason other than to be an unrepentant jerk. Just so he can have some heartfelt "couple of jerks" conversations with Yondu, whose fucking atrocious abuse of Quill is glossed over for the sake of an overly-baggy backstory with a Stallone cameo and some of that good old saccharine dad-bonding bullshit that Americans get all weepy over. There are more jokes, but I don't know that they're particularly good jokes, and Drax in particular gets properly shafted, going from one of the best, most surprisingly nuanced characters in the first film to TEE HEE SEX EXISTS in this one.
The Gamora/Nebula stuff is good.
How can you not like Guardians? It's clearly the best MCU film by a country mile. The second one, not so much. Homecoming is also great.
Anyone watched Invincible on Amazon Prime? If you go in spoiler free it's certainly…. well, my god. I wasn't…. even. Oof. I spat out my cornflakes.
I watched the first ten minutes or so, then my phone's wifi gave out and I didn't get back to it. A guy I used to work with is a big fan of the comic, and he was raving about it on Facebook.
I remember trying to rewatch GotG2 and being very put off by how mean everybody was being to each other. It feels like they're all arguing, all the time.
I watched the first ten minutes or so, then my phone's wifi gave out and I didn't get back to it. A guy I used to work with is a big fan of the comic, and he was raving about it on Facebook.
You really need to get to the last 10 minutes.
You really need to get to the last 10 minutes.
Okay, wow, that didn't go where I expected.
Came just to see what the latest chat was and went through the same thing with Invincible! Doubt I'd have persisted had I not checked here.
Invincible is good and it's deviating from some of the more questionable calls made in the comic, so that's neat.
I remember trying to rewatch GotG2 and being very put off by how mean everybody was being to each other. It feels like they're all arguing, all the time.
The overriding feeling I remember from Vol. 2 is that it's like a first draft. It's trying to hit the same "funny/charming a-holes" tone as the first film, but gets the balance wrong. It was clearly rushed out because the first one was such a success, but it needed longer at the script stage.
Tonight, we watched the back half of Captain America. Thoughts: I somehow forgot Tommy Lee Jones was in this, and how many great lines he gets. Stanley Tucci is still my favorite part of the movie, and the overly-rushed Howling Commandos montage is my least. They clearly spent the majority of their VFX money on Skinny Steve.
The first Captain America is still my favourite origin movie in the whole series. It's just so pulpy - the good guys are unquestionably good, the bad guy is literally an angry red skull, and the WW2 backdrop works so well. They managed to take a character who should have been (at best) ridiculous and (at worst) divisive, and in the space of a single movie turned him into the flagship hero for the entire MCU. It's a very under-rated film.
I'm intrigued to know where Phase 4 is going to go, though. It's had a bit of a wobbly start, I think: WandaVision was great but The Falcon and the Winter Soldier seemed to suck the momentum out of things, and the first movie of the sequence is a Black Widow flashback. Hopefully once they start to introduce some new characters it'll all get rolling nicely.
Hopefully once they start to introduce some new characters it'll all get rolling nicely.
I'm not entirely sure that's the plan… Most of the Phase 4 movies I can think of are sequels – Dr Strange 2, Guardians 3, Black Panther 2, Thor 4, another Ant-Man…
The only ones I can think of that're going to definitely have a new headliner are the Captain Marvel sequel, Marvel Studios Presents Marvel's The Marvels, which will have Kamala Khan in it (but she's going to have been introduced in her own TV miniseries first anyway), and the questionably-titled Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings which is going to be the new test for how much the Marvel brand can sell people on a movie.
The Eternals looks like a big deal, that's up fairly early, and then apparently Fantastic Four quite a long way down the line.
There's a lot of new stuff in the TV series too - She-Hulk, Ms Marvel (as you say), Moon Knight.
The amount of stuff coming out over a short timespan is ridiculous though, there are 11 movies and 13 TV shows confirmed for the next 2-3 years, and four of each this year alone (not even including the two shows we've already had).
It's going to be really interesting to see if they can keep the momentum up, post-Endgame.
WandaVision and Falcon/Winter Soldier felt very much like a lot of (mostly entertaining) filler with one important plot development at the end; likewise Ms Marvel feels like it's just going to be setup for her big-screen MCU debut. Loki could be interesting (in a less-weird-LEGION kinda way) but I don't expect it to be doing much to push things forward beyond further establishing the Multiverse ahead of Doctor Strange 2.
Black Widow is starting Phase 4 off on the back foot with a prequel movie for a character that was killed off already; followed up by Shang-Chi, a movie about a guy nobody except Luscan has ever heard of.
I guess my main concern with The Eternals is that they're going to try and out-Endgame Endgame with it, but before they've done any groundwork for the characters. Ancient alien superheroes fighting against equally ancient, equally alien supervillains feels like they might be hitting the gas on this one a bit too quick.
I'm pretty sure people said the same thing about Guardians of the Galaxy, and that turned out OK, so I'm fairly confident this will be all right too.
I don't think they've actually made a bad movie in the MCU, the worst you can say is that a couple of them are a bit dull, and Eternals doesn't look dull.
A lot of Phase 4 seems to revolve around replacing the original roster with new equivalents. Captain America, Black Widow, Hawkeye and possibly Thor are all getting swapped out for new versions of their characters, and they'll obviously have to do something with Black Panther now Chadwick Boseman has passed away.
Can i just check, I picked up an iPad and Marvel Unlimited - is the story with Vision living in suburbia the one Wandavision was based off, or is there another comic that more closely aligns with the show? I'm enjoying the Vision story I am reading and it has some parallels with the show, but it's still very distinct. Indeed, I sort of wish they adapted this one as I like some of the creepy shit in it.
I think it's a combination of a couple of comic arcs, it's not a straight adaptation of anything in particular.
I'm sure Luscan can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think any of the MCU stuff is direct adaptation; for the most part, they're an inspired by/greatest-hits amalgamation of each of the characters' key arcs, or in some cases (like Age of Ultron) they just take the name.