Thunderbolts: The Future Of The MCU

The New Avengers are formed.

So going into this film I expected it to be bad, I had heard things about the film I did not like beforehand and I thought it would be on the same level as Brave New World.

However, after watching it I found it to be quite a delightful film with a similar feel to the Guardians films. Would I say something so dumb as to say the MCU is back? No because one good film does not fix the countless other problems the franchises is currently facing.

A lot of the reviews mention mental health and how deep this film is, well for me this is mixed. One the one hand the way the film treats Bob/Sentries, Lewis Pullman, mental health with him having a split personality as a superhero was well done, as was the depiction of domestic abuse we see when we see his childhood it was much better done than in Moon Knight for example. However, on the other hand, the film is not all that deep in its commentary on mental health, as Yelena’s, Florence Pugh, journey of needing to atone for what she has done was never fully explored beyond just being a loneliness issue. Moreover, there is a sequence near the end of the film wherein the whole team goes into the Void, the evil form of Sentry’s mind, and we don’t explore the trauma of the other team members. I think it would have been worth the time to have looked into Walker’s, Wyatt Russell, trauma of losing his wife and kids a bit more as it would have helped round the character, but alas it was a missed opportunity.

Outside of mental health talk I think the film does a lot to balance the heroic and the goofy, with each character having both. Red Guardian, David Harbour, is often the comedic relief but the film also gives him a number of great fatherly speeches wherein you can see how much he cares about Yelena and he risks his life constantly to help her. Walker too has a number of heroic moments such as shielding the team from bullets during the Limo escape scene. This is important as the MCU wants you to hate Walker after the events of Falcon and the Winter Soldier but this film does a lot to show him as a hero and to show he is not a villain. If the film was being reductive and simply wanted to show a lot of the male characters as sad pathetic losers for you to laugh at, as some have said, then they would not give them moments like this.

I would argue that Pugh is probably the least served member of the cast as whilst she is the focal point of the film, she is not really centre focus, with that being Bob, Bucky, Sebastian Stan, and the broader ensemble. Whilst I liked the father daughter scenes with Pugh’s character I thought how the film depicted her depression just felt like a cliché and had little depth to it. The scenes in which they talk about her first test are similarly repetitive rather than really pushing anything forward. I wouldn’t say any of this was due to Pugh’s performance rather the material she has been given.

This film shames Brave New World in that it takes its empathy ending and actually does it well. So for those of you who don’t know at the ending of Brave New World Falcon, Anthony Mackie, talks down Red Hulk, Harrison Ford, and defeats him through empathy and by appealing to the side of him that loves his daughter. This was terrible and makes little sense in the film, whereas here it makes sense why they need to go into the Void to get Bob back, they cannot beat Sentry in a fight, they try and get beaten, the only way they can win is to go into Bob’s mind and help him with his trauma, narratively it makes sense and works.

My main criticism of the film would be Val, Julia Louis Dreyfus, who is playing a cartoonish villain. She is being impeached and yet she thinks sending all her mercenaries to fight each other and then destroying bases linked to her doesn’t make her look evil, then you have how she treats her assistant and uses people. For a film about nuance she is not given anyway. Also the Trump or perhaps Tulsi Gabbard comparisons are incredibly on the nose and irritating.

Overall, a good Marvel film that feels like something you would have got pre-Endgame. Whilst not perfect it is a welcome step in the right direction.

4/5

Pros.

The tone

How it deals with Bob and his personalities

The team and the team dynamics

How it sets up things for later in the MCU

Cons.

Walker and Yelena could have done with more depth

Val is a horrible character and really should be written off at the earliest opportunity

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Daredevil Born Again Season One: Netflix Beats Disney

Summary

Disney continues one of the greatest superhero TV shows of all time.

So as many of you know, I believe that marvel is currently in a death spiral I think that a lot of the things that are coming out now were greenlit and shot years ago and so are unable for marvel to fix or turn around in a meaningful way. There are rumours surrounding this Daredevil series that production was shut down midway through and the whole thing was retooled. Upon watching it this seems evidently true, as the first free quarters of episodes feel like a different show now there are still some darker elements in these earlier episodes which were clearly added post the original episodes as we know they wanted to go for a legal comedy series originally. However, were the problem arises is that they have also kept in these more comedic lighter tone plot beats and they can clash horribly with the darker elements feeling schizophrenic. Take for example episode 5 it’s a bank robbery episode with broadly comedic themes and Kamala Khan’s Dad, who was accused of some heinous things in real life, is there providing comedic support. If you compare this to episode 4 wherein you got to see Muse killing people and draining them off their blood you get immediate whiplash.

Then you have the character assassination as Marvel is becoming known for with Matt, Charlie Cox, seemingly a punching bag for everyone else in the show. He goes from being a leading man who commanded respect in the Netflix run to being screamed at by a criminal for not getting him a lighter sentence, despite him being a repeat offender, and having the problems of the legal system hung around his neck. What does Matt do, does he tell the man don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time? No he takes it and says it is his fault as this series wants to make Matt as weak and subservient as possible. Couple this with Kingpin, Vincent D’Onofrio, who goes from a one man killing machine who ruled with an iron grip to someone who gets cheated on and then goes to couples counselling wherein he learns it was all his fault. After what Hawkeye and Echo did to Kingpin I thought the series couldn’t drag the character any further down, and yet it still managed to do it. It does do a little to bring him back by the end of the series but it is too little too late in my opinion.

Another curious choice is the fact that Matt doesn’t fully suit up and become Daredevil again until episode 6 of a 9 episode series with a massive amount of filler in those first few episodes, as it sets things up as though it is Game Of Thrones. However, the issue with this is not only is it boring but most of these things are then never executed upon or just don’t happen making all the set up feel extra annoying. Episode 5 ends with Matt being offered dinner at the Khan’s and yet that never happens.

They get rid of Karen, Deborah Ann Woll, and Foggy, Elden Hensen, and replace them with a new staff on legal characters for Matt to interact with none of which can hold a candle to Karen or Foggy, who they killed off only to bring back next season. Also Kingpin now has an entourage which are also annoying and serve little purpose, Michael Gandolfini in particular is terrible.

The central villain of the series Muse is killed off without much fuss so that they can have the real villain be Kingpin and his corrupt police force, which Daredevil could easily beat in an episode, but they need to draw it out in order for it to be more timely. As we all know who makes for the best comic book villain ah yes the police, we should defund them yes great idea. Stupid and dumb.

Overall, this is what I get for getting my hopes up about a Marvel project.

1/5

Pros.

There are a few cool moments

Cons.

These are promptly undermined by the destruction of Matt and Wilson as characters

Matt is treated like a joke on his own show

The ungodly amount of filler

The marriage counselling scenes with Kingpin

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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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