IMO, the MCU universe just got too big. Too many characters, too many villians, too many crazy things that have gone on. It all feels a bit incoherent and short on actual character development.
To me, the best superhero movies are the ones that tightly focus on the superhero and their struggles and relationships. Batman’s conflict with violent tendencies, Spiderman’s difficulties managing his powers along with the stresses of being a teenager, Superman’s dichotomy of being Clark Kent and Lois Lane’s love interest, etc.
It’s not interesting to me to see an invulnerable man stop a bullet or a train, but it IS interesting to see how the invulnerable man’s thinking and feelings adapted to that situation. They explored that quite a bit on The Boys.
A lot of that character development and introspection was still in Iron Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, and the other MCU properties when they first started remaking them. But the need to go bigger, badder, and louder with each sequel led to movies that devolved into little more than filler between battles and explosions, with casts of dozens pf superheroes and supervillians, none particularly memorable to me. We stopped watching the MCU movies a couole of years ago.
Part of the problem is that these are truly global movies, and therefore have to be written to the least common denominator. No nuance allowed.
Well, when it costs $300 million…
I’m in the same crowd as most everyone. I don’t like walking into a movie and realizing I needed to have watch seven other movies and five television series to know who the characters are. I don’t care about giant battle scenes against legions of identical and totally disposable villains. I don’t want to go “huh?” as ridiculous half-thought through scenarios are played out as plot.
Minor superheroes are minor for a reason. No writer has ever given them enough character and purpose to distinguish them. Every once in a while some writer will pick up a secondary character and give them depth. Back in the olden days Chris Claremont took a canceled group of mutants and made them superstars. Frank Miller revived Daredevil. Jim Steranko made Nick Fury and Shield into a momentarily interesting comic. Alan Moore made a career out of this.
Those cases are rare and precious. They’re equally rare in the movies, although every once in a while you see a movie create a whole new world. It happened this year with Barbie. A couple of people had a vision and then fought the studios to get that onscreen. Not the studio’s vision. Not Mattel’s vision. Not a vision that anyone knew in advance would attract a known audience.
The MCU once appeared to support artistic vision. You had fun good guys against mean bad guys in battles with personal stakes. Yeah, we all have a personal stake in not having the universe collapse but, really, that’s meaningless because it is not personally comprehensible. Raising the stakes to destroying multiple multiverses pushes the issue even farther from one’s life.
Marvel needs to go smaller and more personal. Build a complete, complex world that people can get lost in. Good movies have always done that. Even today’s video games do that. People return to worlds they love. Nothing about a multiverse is lovable. Spend less on CGI and more on quirky people in gripping situations. That’s how Stan Lee made Marvel into a must read. Not doing so is how Marvel quickly became unreadable after he stopped writing. Learn from that past.
The conundrum- producers still think that expensive sequels and remakes are the “safe” thing to do. And so they make the 110th sequel even after several ones not doing well should be proving it really isn’t so safe, rather than “risking” trying something new.
Spiderverse was new and different. That will last for the trilogy of them. GoG3 was at least just three and not really part of the long line. And hopefully it really is done.
Yeah that’s an issue. No other film this past weekend even got to 10 million, and this one represented 53% of the box office.
But then on their first weekend Barbie broke clean even and Oppenheimer made 80% back; and even Quantummania made about half its cost on opening weekend dominating the box office share, before falling off the face of the Earth. So it quickly stops looking that good,
honestly, what you describe is in The Marvels. I would have liked it to be longer and have more of that struggle and adaptation in there - since it’s divided between three main characters, individually each one was shortchanged by that, but it’s there and Carol Danvers had (I believe) the majority of it. Powerful as she is, she screwed up and is still screwing up despite her best efforts, she hurt and lost people and relationships from the last movie until now, and in this movie we see some of the response and adaptation to that.
It’s also interesting how even though the conflict is universe-threatening, it’s also played out on a smaller scale - from living room, to colony, to planet, to universe and back to personal again.
Sidenote: One thing I did feel about The Marvels that hit different was, most big action movies are about “Kill the bad guy, blow up his superweapon/army, now the world is safe.”, aka destruction is the solution.
This one was more oriented towards rescue and repair, righting what both the protagonists and the antagonists had done wrong - it’s about trying to fix the problems rather than exploding them. IMHO.
The best superhero movie I’ve seen in the last five or six years - wait, no, the TWO best superhero movies I’ve seen - were the animated Spider-Man movies. The movies are wonderfully animated but what really makes them sensational films is the characterization.
Miles Morales is a wonderfully three dimensional character. He may have radioactive blood and he can swing from a thread, but you FEEL his stress and how he’s pulled from one thing to another. His parents feel like real people. Gwen feels like a real person. Peter Parker feels real. Uncle Aaron feels real. They’re clearly defined characters.
Have you seen The Marvels? Because that’s exactly how I would describe it.
I am guessing we’re not likely to see an official spoiler-thread about The Marvels at this point due to lack of interest? Is it bad form to co-opt this one? 'cuz i had a few thoughts …
Sounds good. That means that Disney needs to get the word out better than they have. The reviews saying that this is just another comic book movie don’t make it sound appealing.
I also don’t know how many previous Marvel things I had to have watched to appreciate it. Just being a sequel puts up a block.
Maybe it will gain an audience over time as the word gets around. A good movie doesn’t have to live and die by opening weekend grosses.
I think this is probably the official movie thread for the Dope, so I have no objections.
Maybe ask a mod to add “Open Spoilers” to the thread title?
[Moderating]
Done.
The herding cats scene was funny as hell. “Everyone, stop running and let the flerkins eat you!”
The musical planet was fun, too.
I wonder if the bad guy’s planet is just going to keep the other two resources they stole from the other planets. Will the musical planet get back their ocean, or nah?
We got’sch X-Men!
And note that a song from Cats was playing.
(I thought ahead of it happening how they could evacuate people, but didn’t know if they would go with that kind of inside the cat thinking.)
Oh, that made me laugh SO HARD.
My thinking is, probably yes Hala did keep the resources but that it’s “mostly okay”. Probably.
Given how things ended, the additional unstable jumppoints should have closed up and were open for no more than a 24-hour day at most, certainly less than 48 hours. The musical planet most likely still has a whole lot of ocean left, whether they want it or not they just gained some extra landmass to inhabit … which is a good thing, because otherwise Hala would’ve been flooded out. (Way to solve the problem Dar-Benn, I’m sure drowning your home planet will fix everything!)
I mean, unless the planet was a fairly shallow ocean… ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The former Skrull colony, well it was evacuated - of sentients and some atmosphere - and will probably result in major climate change and various extinctions of whatever life can’t suddenly adapt to a significant drop in air pressure. (and presumably the Hala atmosphere became rather more dense for a while if clean air was being forced into it, I had the impression theirs had become more toxic rather than reduced in volume)
That actually gives me a whole series of thoughts about jumppoints which I can only handwave by believing that the quantum band allowed Dar-Benn to create them with an gravitational pull to them. If they were bidirectional, opening them between the atmospheres of two planets would only equalize the pressure unless you opened the source near ground level and the destination forty miles above the surface. For the water transfer the source should’ve been opened a mile deep in the ocean so the water pressure would drain it through - why did opening a point in the sky pull the water up? And how would creating one near the Sun pull it’s substance away against the Sun’s own gravity? The points themselves don’t typically seem to have a pull to them or Monica couldn’t have hovered in freefall next to one. Does gravity propagate through them? (Yes, I remember the Stargate SG-1 black hole time dilation episode)
Regarding the Skull colony, that plot point does reopen the whole can of worms that Secret Invasion tried to sell us, that Earth’s political powers-that-be declared open season on non-Terrans … so first they leave New Asgard hanging in the breeze and now there’s a new group of Skrulls, SABER aliens and Flerkans on Earth. Presumably now that SABER’s safe, their resident aliens will go back to work … and maybe take some Flerkans with them? But New Asgard, well …
(and that’s another thing - did they build a new Bifrost device? is Thor working part-time as their Uber driver? did Heimdall’s son inherit and master the ‘Dark Magic’ to summon it?)
(I’m also going to assume that the Earth Skrulls didn’t want to join that particular colony because of either clan/family conflict, overall population sustainability, or just not wanting to gather all members of their race on only one planet that could lead to extinction - i.e. not having all your eggs in one basket)
I’m also going to add that I hope Carol went down to Hala to tell someone, anyone, “I’m sorry I broke all the things, I fixed your sun, we good now?” … but i doubt it.
Alan Moore? Never had an original idea in his life. And his Watchmen are travesties mostly of well known magor heroes.
Now Neil Gaiman took Sandman and made a true classic. There’s an example of a secondary hero being made into a great work of writing.
Is The Incredibles, for me. Or Superman! (1978). Mind you Iron Man, Avengers, etc were damn good. Then they decided to kill off the second best known group of Superheroes and showcase little known ones, with Mixed results- Guardians of the Galaxy- wow, vs Eternals (who? why?).
Dan Riba did the best animated series with Justice league and Justice league Unlimited- in which latter you get to see a lot of minor heroes get a role, several epis just had the lesser known heroes.
Bit harsh. Moore is very much a synthesizer - he takes existing material and mashes it together in new and interesting ways, with varying degrees of success. I happen to think Watchmen was one of his more successful efforts as was V For Vendetta, whereas From Hell had a lot of straight “lift and drop” from Masonic lore, Jack the Ripper legends, and a big chunk of Iain Sinclair’s books.
Just some mind-rape and gaslighting and loss of years of her life, no biggie…