Captain America Brave New World: Tokenism Personified

Summary

So as some of you know I said I was not going to cover this, unless I could do so in a way that would not allow Disney to get my money, luckily an opportunity sailed my way, so I decided to disrupt the printing presses and force this, and my commentary on Bond, in here early to stay relevant, and then we’ll get back to regularly scheduled programming on Tuesday.

So I went into this with incredibly low expectations, and for the most part it met them. I didn’t find anything massively egregious with it but nor did I find anything redeeming. I still think that the idea of reducing the Falcon mantle to essentially being nothing, and something Sam happily shed is a little weird, he is very eager to pick up a white mans old title and assume the role. To me this felt odd in terms of the point of that, as would it not be more impactful for black viewers to see Falcon leading the Avengers and have a mantle he created and built himself be worthwhile, rather than saying yeah none of that matters and now he is important because he is a black man spin on a white mantle.

In addition the writing was awful, I know some of the same team from Falcon and the Winter Soldier came over for this, I don’t know if it was the same writer, but regardless the writer here is not bringing their a game. For example why did they almost go to war with Japan, why did everyone know it was a Celestial despite no one in the film supposedly having that knowledge, where are the Skrulls that were out to colonise the planet in Secret Invasion. Etc. However, it is probably best to not think of this film in that way and just turn the brain off.

Another odd thing with this film is how wedded it is to a film from almost twenty years ago. So in many ways this is a sequel to The Incredible Hulk, it brings back The Leader, Betsy Ross, General Ross etc. Now what makes it weird is that this is happening in a Captain America/Falcon film and not in a Hulk film, what makes it stranger too is that most people don’t remember or like The Incredible Hulk so it seems odd to draw from that well. Of all the films to use characters from it is bizarre to have it be that one.

The idea that Sam, Anthony Mackie, can go toe to toe with a Hulk without the serum is stupid, it is even more so when Red Hulk, who is only in the film for 5 minutes despite what the marketing promised you, and Sam manage to tire each other out fighting when in reality Sam would be dead. Oh also the fact Bucky is barely in this is stupid and badly thought out as again the film needed him desperately.

Overall, it felt like a long episode of a Disney + show which is to say disappointing, cheap and rushed out to fill space.

1.5/5

Pros.

They reduced it from two and a half hours

It had one funny moment

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Where Have All The Good Guys Gone: The MCU Slips Into Apathy, A Retrospective

I haven’t seen the film and this isn’t a review, this is an assessment piece on the current state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe from the perspective of audience engagement. The comments passed in this piece regarding Captain America Brave New World, are based on several key factors firstly the Cinema Score, a low b, which was lower than that of The Marvel’s and also Antman Quantomania, the critical Rotten Tomatoes score currently at 52% at the time of writing, on the broader fan consensus online which suggests that the film is middling not great not terrible. I would also like to address that on Rotten Tomatoes the film has an 82% audience score, though this could be inflated.

All of these things taken together paint a picture of the sorry state of the MCU, especially when you compare this release to the last few, sans Deadpool and Wolverine as it was disconnected and more of a love letter to the Fox X-Men films. The remaining films on the slate for this year also do little to reassure people that things are going to get better in the near term.

So the question is what went wrong and where do things go from here?

I would say the reasons why this film is struggling and why other Marvel films are struggling are numerous but also quite obvious. Firstly, folks don’t like homework, since the advent of Disney + not only has there been more content, perhaps too much, but also new requirements. To understand Brave New World fully folks would need to have watched The Incredible Hulk from almost twenty years ago, Falcon and the Winter Soldier and also The Eternals. That is 5+ hours of commitment just to watch the latest film in the universe and increasingly folks are getting sick of having to make it.

What can be done to fix this? At the current stage nothing, the projects that are already in development will suffer from it. However, for further down the line stuff there can be an importance placed on telling original and disconnected stories, there can also be an effort to cleverly use exposition within the films to bring folks up to speed on what they need to know from these other series, this would hurt Marvel’s numbers on rewatches but would encourage the casuals to return. They could also do a previously on at the start of each project including films, unorthodox but potentially a solution.

Secondly is the problem that these characters just are not a draw. Marvel got high on their own supply and started to believe the mythology surrounding them, thinking that they could turn anyone into a billion dollar grosser, and for a while when everything was seen as required viewing in order to get the Infinity Saga’s broader narrative it worked, however, in the disconnected and seemingly aimless Multiverse Saga this has been proven untrue. The issue here is twofold firstly the Multiverse Saga is objectively a failure, fans are not connecting, due to the glut of content things feel deluded and far to disconnected. Moreover there does not seem to be a clear direction in which it is going, yes to comics fans it is clear we are getting Battleworld the Beyonder and likely God Emperor Doom, however, for casuals it just seems to be without purpose at the moment. Secondly, it is clear that the MCU has tentpole characters that folks need to see often in order to stay invested, this can be Spider-Man, it could be Doctor Strange, it could be Wanda, it could be the founding Avengers, regardless, due to the massive uptick in production we are getting less and less projects with these tentpole characters and more and more ancillary stuff with characters people just don’t care about and that is leading to apathy. The idea that Marvel film are not events anymore sums this up rather well.

What can be done about it?

Well I have said it before and I’ll say it again, they need to do a purge. By that I mean, the Marvel slate no matter if they have announced it or not needs to be studied and second guessed, some of these films and tv shows with provably unpopular characters, I am looking at you Iron Heart with your multiple failed comics runs, should be written off and never released. It does not matter if they are done and ready to go or in production you need to trim back all this fat and get back to the core characters people care about. The Thunderbolts is the antithesis of my point, a group of mostly recent and Disney + era characters that no one cares about. The film will be met with apathy. Furthermore, there needs to be a cleaning house of the higher ups at Marvel that greenlit all these projects, who thought Echo and Agatha needed there own shows, as whoever did should not have a job. I would levy this at Feige himself, if his eye has come off the ball he should be replaced.

Finally, is the idea of escapism. Media should exist to provide audiences with a means of escaping from their lives, yes some cover real world issues, but superhero films should not. Again this is a twofold problem for Marvel, the MCU could use real world politics themes and ideas to influence it’s films, but they don’t have good writers. What I mean by that is that they don’t have writers who can be subtle and who can weave it in in a nuanced way, they have people who need to show scenes of Sam being denied a lone simply because he is black, as the scene tells it, in order to be incredibly heavy handed in its messaging. This is a problem as then audiences feel like they are being preached at and feel like the films are becoming political which is a turn off both for those that don’t agree with the politics but also those who don’t want to engage with politics. Secondly, bringing in heavy handed real world political issues such as presenting, according to reviews, Ross as a stand in for Trump, it stops the world from feeling different and new and instead makes it feel like a reflection of our own which isn’t what people want.

How can this be fixed?

Honestly this is probably the simplest, by hiring better writers, one who can use politics in a subtle way and put themes into films without it being overt and making the film politicised.

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Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man Season Season One Overview: Thank God For Sony

Summary

He has the super power kick, you want him as your neighbour.

The above is paraphrased lyrics from the trailer for this show. It doesn’t understand the character, he doesn’t have super powerful feet, and that it is generic and feels like it is doing stuff to kill time, you want him as your neighbour a superfluous lyric.

Honestly, I don’t know what is going on at Marvel animation first What If’s final season and now this. I think that there needs to be a culling at Marvel animation as something is clearly rotten. The same people who brought you duck sex have now race swapped most of the classic Spider-Man cast and for what reason? Because Coleman Dingo can’t possibly voice a white character.

Ignoring the race swap they also completely and I mean completely emasculate Harry Osbourn to a point, where you question if they aren’t setting him up to be the female love interest of season two. The character bastardisation feels like if I am being charitable people who have never read a Spider-Man comic before and don’t know these characters, but at worse this feels like a deliberate effort to lessen them.

Occasionally, here and there you get to see characters you actually want to see show up like Daredevil, voiced by Charlie Cox, these moments provide a nice if fleeting moment of respite before the mediocrity of the story and the objectionable nature of the race swaps comes back to drag you back into the gutter. There is a genuine question with this show as to why it is that a large percentage of the villains are white, and a large majority of the friendly characters/perceived as friendly aren’t.

Overall, thank God that Sony still has the rights to Spider-Man and long may that remain the case if this is what Disney would serve us.

1/5

Pros.

Some entertaining cameos

Cons.

It ruins various characters

It is poorly plotted

It tries too hard to be something it isn’t

The humour is grating

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Kraven The Hunter: One So Bad Not Even The Critics Could Pretend To Like It

Summary

With a whimper the SSU dies.

I think everyone could tell you that this film was going to bomb before it came out, it had disaster written all over it from its moment of announcement.

Sony needs to answer a very simple question, why do we need villain films without Spider-Man? The answer is we don’t.

This film once again is a villain origin story that tries to make the villain cool and likeable, as it is too afraid to have them be anything other than an anti-hero as who wants a true crime film that shows the rise of one of Spider-Man’s greatest foes and has him always be evil. No they have to be made into the good guy in some way even though that means the idea of them later banding together to form the Sinister Six to fight Spider-Man another good guy makes no sense at all.

The drugs must be in plentiful supply over at Sony for them to make such an unenforced error like this, or maybe they just don’t realise what audiences want. Remember gang Madame Web was a great film it only flopped as the critics hated it.

It also features other Spider-Man adjacent characters and messes with their origins and backgrounds too, as who watching this will care about the comics right.

Overall, a necessary death.

2/5

Pros.

It has some fun moments

The action is good

Cons.

It gets the source material wrong

It feels the need to make Kraven a hero

It is too long

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What If Season Three Overview: Shut Down Marvel Animation

Summary

Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

So before this series aired it was well known that What If was not coming back, yet did they think to have it go out on top? Oh no. What Marvel animation produced is one of worst things that Marvel Studios has ever dumped onto Disney Plus in disgrace.

Where to start, maybe with the fact that none of the characters you know and want to see are shown here, no Iron Man, no Scarlett Witch, no Cap, but hey you do get popular Phase 4/5 characters like Agatha, Shang Chi and Kate Bishop, remember them? Worse yet rather than show us what if scenarios based on characters we like they decide to give us all new characters that mean nothing to us, Howard the Duck and Darcy have a kid, yes casual bestiality in an MCU show, and she is an important character later in the season. I bet you can hardly contain your excitement.

To break it down episode by episode so you can get a flavour of what is just so bad about the season, the first episode reads as a kid copying off their more successful friend in this case Marvel Animation stealing ideas wholesale from Pacific Rim and Godzilla. The second is an old Hollywood pat on the back with Agatha, one of the least popular characters in the MCU. The third tries to be a spy thriller sort of affair with Winter Soldier and Red Guardian yet reads more as how much can David Harbour embarrass himself in twenty minutes. The fourth is the infamous duck sex. The fifth features a Riri Williams the bargain basement Iron Man clone with multiple failed comics runs to her name. The sixth is an old west adventure with Shang Chi and Kate Bishop, who have about as much chemistry as two neighbours who have had a bitter blood feud for twenty years. The seventh is a Captain Carter and her new characters adventure across the multiverse, this is probably the best episode though that doesn’t mean its good, it sets up an interesting finale and has Storm so those memberberies are present.

The finale takes anything good about episode seven and defecates all over it and serves it up to you on a bed of middle fingers, it is about twenty minutes of Captain Carter and co punching the watchers until she finally kills herself at the end. The death of Captain Carter should have felt like something she was the show’s most important creation and yet it just felt like you had twenty minutes of your time wasted, they could have done so much with this and taken the finale in a number of ways and yet they just didn’t.

Overall, this leaves a bad taste in my mouth after a year of questionable Marvel offerings with worse yet to come. Personally I believe the age of Marvel Studios is well and truly over and I don’t think they can come back, I think it is over.

0/5

Pros.

There is nothing redeemable about it

Cons.

They seem allergic to using popular characters

The finale is terrible

The casual bestiality

It isn’t entertaining

You feel nothing

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Agatha Series Overview: Finally A MCU Series For The Wine Aunts And The Cat Ladies

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

Well friends here we are, at the end of another underwhelming Disney + series.

As you may recall from my review of the first two episodes, I didn’t think the show would be terrible but I also questioned who it was for and where it was going. Now with all the episodes out I can say that these were questions the show never answered. There was a number of cool directions this series could have gone in regarding the supernatural side of the MCU but it side stepped all of them.

The show didn’t even have it in its power to be bad in an entertaining way, rather it was just deeply forgettable, by the end it would only have been the most ardent of new age drunk cat ladies and their cats watching and not much of anyone else. Hence the entire lack of discussion of it online.

To me the main issue with this series was that it indulged its small yet vocal audience too much, you had long scenes of them trying on clothes, of them drinking wine and of mimicking various musicals and things like that, none of these things advanced the plot at all and just felt tedious to watch. It also pandered to shippers giving Hahn and Plaza’s character a needless kiss scene so that they can all go and write their fan fiction about them online. That is what the MCU is now.

The ending of the series sets up a series of questions that will likely never be answered due to the series low viewing numbers and unpopular characters. So that is pretty unsatisfying.

The performances across the board were pretty bad with Plaza being the only bright spot I could find. Hahn was simply playing hammy and over the top, being loud isn’t acting, and Locke was just playing the same character he does in everything a soft spoken yet sassy gay teen. The question remains however, did anyone ever think the acting was going to be good.

Overall, this series spat on the good will gathered by Deadpool and Wolverine and highlighted the MCU’s decline.

1.5/5

Pros.

It mentions some interesting things with regards to the supernatural side of the MCU

The episodes are short so we don’t have to suffer for long

Cons.

It panders to shippers

It doesn’t justify why it exists

It is dull and has many scenes that should have been cut

The acting is awful

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Agatha Episode One and Two Review: Disney And Its Need To Push Sexual Themes Onto Kids

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

Agatha, Kathryn Hahn, tries to get her mojo back.

The marketing for this show was awful, rather than treat it as a show in its own right or talk about how it is going to advance the MCU we instead got lots of comments about how gay the show is, as though that is some mark of quality and that gay shows cannot be bad no matter what. It is silly.

With that in mind I went into the first two episodes expecting the preaching to start from the off, however, the message was not laid on as thick as I was expecting it to be, and if you can ignore the red carpet stuff then the show is perfectly fine. During its first two episodes it never really justified why it needs to exist, is it just because people liked the song, or that she is vaguely Wanda, Elizabeth Olsen, related? As it stands now it is a forgettable side piece of MCU content that you can skip.

The only major thing I had an issue with was the nude scene. So there is a scene in these opening episodes where Agatha is nude and as she is she is being checked out by a little girl. Once again we come back to Disney and its odd relationship with pushing sex onto kids, the kid could have just been innocently playing and not done anything however the big smile on their face and how they struggle against their father as he tries to cover their eyes shows that she wants to look. Again had it been an older teen then that’s one thing but this was a younger kid and it just feels like Disney living up to their horrible reputation for this sort of thing.

Overall, it is fine with some questionable moments, especially the one with the kid.

2/5

Pros.

It is mind numbing

Aubrey Plaza is good in it

Cons.

The weird child thing

It doesn’t need to exist

It is slow

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What If Season 2 Overview

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

What If is back and boy is it a downgrade.

So before we get into the overview lets talk about the basic conceit of the show. It is what if stories based on films in the MCU, it is not new stories that have no basis in the films at all. Yet this season introduces us to a character that has never been in a film or tv show before and centres a whole episode around her.

Moreover, it continues to use characters like Captain Carter, Haley Atwell, and evil but reformed Doctor Strange, Benidict Cumberbatch, rather than focus on new films or tv shows from the MCU. I have no issues with Carter or Strange but I find that I want to watch one off episodes not recurring narratives, that I thought was against the conceit.

I think this show started out with good ideas for what if stories and then slowly over time lost its way, like the wider MCU, and became boring and predictable and not at all like the wacky and out there what ifs we had all been expecting it to be.

Overall, I don’t think we need a season 3

2/5

Some good moments

It is watchable

Cons.

It introduces new characters and breaks the conceit

It is boring

It is repetitive

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X-Men 97: A Blast From The Past

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

When scraping the bottom of the barrel what is there to do but move on to the next decade.

At first when I saw Disney were resurrecting this old and beloved series I thought to myself this would be little more than a cynical effort in brand exploitation. However, upon watching it I found there to be a lot of elements to like, in many senses this series felt like an X-Men comic book come to life. A number of iconic X-Men moments where depicted in the series for the first time and they were done justice to.

Personally the nostalgia factor was not there during my time with the show as whilst I grew up on X-Men cartoons for me it was Evolution that was my go to X-Men fix.

Something that hampered my enjoyment of the show was how it would jump around in structure, in one episode we would follow the main team but in the next a side story. To me this felt disjointed and often killed excitement I may have had between episodes.

Another thing that somewhat affected the series for me was its allegiance to current year identity politics. We had characters that were non binary, and I am no Morph expert but I do not believe the character was called this in the comics as this is a modern term. As such I believe it was included to tick a box which is the cheapest and laziest form of representation. The series also focuses heavily on the characters feelings towards Wolverine which as a side character this felt odd. The Scott and Jean relationship of which is central to the X-Men lore got less screen time and plot consideration, this could only be done in a tokenistic effort to show diversity on to appease bluehead people online.

Overall, whilst it was nice to see classic X-Men moments on the screen for the first time it was undercut by a need to appease identity politics and the structural issues with the episodes which I found jarring.

3/5

Pros.

Classic moments

A number of good action set pieces

Some fun to be hard

Cons.

Identity politics

Odd pacing and structure

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Deadpool and Wolverine: A Missed Opportunity?

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

Deadpool, Ryan Reynolds is back.

Buckle up friends this will be a long one. Everybody knows the terrible state the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been in over the last few years, is because of this and because of the importance of mutants in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that I went into this film with incredibly high expectations. Is it also because of this that I left feeling disappointed.

Now the film did have a lot of positive aspects and things to enjoy and this review is coming from a place of someone who cares deeply about the characters, however, it is because of that care that it will be a negative review. Though it was nice to see Wade back on the big screen and treating us to some more blood and gore than we usually do in the MCU, the issues arise as a matter of tone. Deadpool is obviously a comedic character, and has a number of laugh out loud jokes in the film, but there were a number of times I was hoping that the film would take itself seriously, because it needed those moments, yet didn’t. Considering the multiverse stakes of this film and the fact that it has a very heavy emotional arc for Wolverine, Hugh Jackman, it needed those serious moments to truly do it justice and to have heart, yet whenever we get close to one of these moments it is ruined by some forced joke.

I know the creatives are very excited to be in the MCU, however it does feel at times like there’s a little bit of disrespect towards the Fox X-Men universe. For example, take the opening sequence that spoils the end of Logan by having Deadpool desecrate his corpse in order to kill a bunch of people. Now at other points in the film Logan is treated with respect, however, this opening feels like it takes away from that. You could have done something equally as cool and gory using a different montage that wouldn’t have taken away from the most impactful film of the fox X-Men universe.

In terms of cameos this film goes a little over the top at times to a point where you feel like saying okay please no more fan service. Some of the cameos are cheer worthy, such as the return of X-23, Dafne Keen, who I am very glad to see with Wolverine and Deadpool at the end of the film. Some of the cameos are bad such as Channing Tatum finally getting to be Gambit yet feeling like a cosplayer rather than the character himself, he needed longer hair and to be less muscular. And some are massive missed opportunities such as the Deadpool Corps, what should have been an epic moment was just a throw away fight scene.

Another thing that I thought was questionable about the film was how much of it cantered around concepts from the Loki TV show, now this was a popular show but it was not one that will be watched by the whole audience of who would show up for a new Deadpool film. There were many many references made to Loki over the course of the film, and it just seemed an odd decision to base such a big film around events from a Disney + show. I did enjoy the Void return of some of the best Fox characters such as Aaron Stanford’s Pyro and Chris Evans’ Human Torch. However, by far the best character that appears in the Void is Cassandra Nova, Emma Corrin. Corrin clearly is having a lot of fun here and I have never seen her in anything before, at least not that I can remember, but she sure leaves an impression here. Corrin’s villainous character is both menacing and also at times quite funny and likeable, in the truest sense they are a three dimensional character.

In terms of performances Reynolds is much the same as we’ve seen him in the previous two Deadpool films, however there is an earnest side here that is new and which offers the character so new dimensions. Though I must say in contrast to that Wolverine, whom I have wanted to see in the MCU for a long time, has no new ground to cover, we have seen old defeated Wolverine before, in Logan, and whilst it’s nice to see him in the costume for the first time it still feels like there is no new depths of the character explored here. I would like to see, at some point in the future, Wolverine in a teacher role helping a new generation of mutants find their place in the MCU, this would be a new aspect of the character that hasn’t been explored before in any great depth on screen.

The final act of the film is somewhat disappointing, after the Deadpool Corps fight, which features Blake Lively as Ladypool which I liked, you then get Deadpool’s universe saved and all of the surviving characters staying in it. Now for me where this lets down is the fact that I wanted all of the Deadpool characters to end the film in 616, I wanted the film to end with them all entering into a portal together and arriving in the MCU proper whereas now they still feel distant, they are MCU adjacent but they’re not in it and I think that was something the film should have done. I understand that all the worlds will be brought together for battle world, however it just feels a bit of a bait and switch.

Another thing I don’t understand and that’s strange about the film is the fact that Deadpool can clearly travel between dimensions as he takes a 616 based Avengers job interview, yet then later when talking to the TVA doesn’t seem to know much about the multiverse only about time and space. This just doesn’t make sense to me, as okay if the character can just hop between dimensions then it really makes no sense that they were not in the 616 timeline in the end. Moreover, I would have liked to have seen Wolverine to go the Xavier’s school on the Deadpool universe and have him settle there at the end of the film, I thought it would have been a nice moment of hopeful optimism for the character. Yet the film ends on a joke about Chris Evan’s Johnny Storm swearing, yes I rolled my eyes at that too.

Overall, a good and enjoyable film with some great moments but ultimately one that is disappointing and without substance at times.

3.5/5

Pros.

Wolverine is back

X-23

Ladypool

It is nice to see the Fox characters go out with a bang

Cons.

It doesn’t end in the 616

It is afraid to have more serious moments and sometimes ruins good emotional moments with a bad joke

It wastes the Deadpool crops

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