Avengers: Infinity War

another thing i've mulled over/bitched about forever: canonicity is the ultimate enemy of creativity and engagement

again not exactly a complaint because things are what they are, but yeah DC you're onto something about how serial fiction/canonical universes can never really pitch extreme emotions at you, never leave you shook or heartbroken. even when they try to pull that off you can't evade the thought that the myths will just get retold, it's a ritual rather than a revelation.

as in the marvel comics, which i was weaned on and love, the world hangs together and change is at the micro-level of the characters and their relationships (but not TOO much change or it's time for clones or demonic bargains to hit the reset button) which is why people care and want the next issue.

Someone was telling me about an Iron Man story that got pitched (but I don't think ever got made/published) involving blue-collar Detroit auto sector workers (or something) that Stark Industries disenfranchised banding together to take down Iron Man. Would watch that movie

sounds like a movie for.. spymaster

Dr. Who kind of faces the same problems, when every season involves universe-threatening monsters destroying all of time, yet you know the mains will always survive, somehow. fwiw the best episodes that do evoke hearbreak and genuine emotion are the more down-to-earth small scale bits ("Vincent and the Doctor")

Not a million miles away from Keaton's motivation in Spider-Man: Homecoming xpost

xp

the main reason i just lost interest i think. repeating the trick of "Girl in the Fireplace" got v annoying v quickly

another thing i've mulled over/bitched about forever: canonicity is the ultimate enemy of creativity and engagement

― the vomming of the snark (Noodle Vague), Thursday, April 26, 2018 9:01 AM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is the tightrope that any decade-spanning, multi-authored narrative has to walk: to what extent do you attempt to maintain an internal consistency so that this thing still works as a semi-coherent story, and to what extent do you fudge the details in order to allow the thing to breathe a little without being slavishly beholden to story beats that took place a generation before?

People complain about the constraints of continuity and I geddit, but at the same time if the Marvel U was just a bunch of disconnected one-off stories with no throughline, my personal investment in that project would be pretty much nil.

This is the tightrope that any decade-spanning, multi-authored narrative has to walk

but comics are unusual in that category tho in that their characters are essentially immortal - soap operas might well have characters who have had outlandishly eventful lives but eventually the actor playing them will die or they'll be written out, while superman will always be superman no matter what, as long as there's an audience for stories about him

soap operas recast characters all the time! and some have characters come back from the dead

i think it's the conception of an ongoing narrative that i have issue with, rather than a kind of mythological retelling of archetypal stories

well yeah but there's no soap opera character who has remained at age 35 for 80 years and could very well do the same for another 80 xp

soaps are generally terrible at portraying characters consistently beyond "villain", "matriarch" types. characters' attitudes and motivations and behaviours change all the time to suit the needs of the current storylines

bg, I am pretty sure they have done that by recasting roles with younger actors when they "return" after having not appeared for a while

and the time compression of comics has nothing on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera_rapid_aging_syndrome

and they lead such improbably eventful lives - like how many murders have happened in albert square in the last three decades ffs xp

i think that happens less with comics but i think comic characters on the whole are even more archetypal. it seems near impossible to me to think of Marvel since the 60s as a continuously elaborated narrative that isn't subject to the possibility of complete reinvention at any point. the MCU is different because it's more carefully crafted over a shorter span of time but i think the canonicity it aims at is a more modern fanboy invention than what comics have actually been thru their history

xp there were more murders in the Manhattan of the Law & Order tv series universe in one year than there was in actual Manhattan over several years

fiction is wild

this is all really just me elaborating why, as somebody who is totally into sentimental emo storytelling, these things never leave me feeling properly satisfied

NV otm, I think another thing that happens is that the events that become touchstones in later stories, like the X-Men stuff with the Phoenix saga, gets pared down and re-emphasized every time the story is retold

not that human history doesn't have new takes over time, but reinterpretation and expansion upon the context of particular events is still theoretically examining the facts of what actually happened and recasting them in a different context. on the other hand, historical fiction fucks with that by cementing assumptions about events in the public mind

it's hard to keep up with the emotional trauma of multiple dead spouses continually showing up in stories

it's interesting how these undeniably mythic characters like superman are inherently different from, say, the iliad or the odyssey or bible or whatever in that those stories are essentially closed while superman stories necessarily have to remain open because dc/warner brothers have shareholders

capitalism as a relentless driver for narrative, basically

watching Prisoner Cell Block H as a teen was when i first started thinking about this but that's a detour for a different thread

all this stuff is fascinating to me, maybe we should have a separate serialised-narrative thread?

Marvel, I think, has done a fairly good job at attempting to maintain an ever-progressing window (say like 15-20 years) of high-contrast continuity that gets a little fuzzier the further back you go. The old stuff informs the new stuff without insisting for instance that Cain Marko became the Juggernaut during the Korean War. The continuity has been fairly of a piece since about the time Bendis came onboard, but it feels like they're slowly moving away from that as the era which defines where they are now (both because of Bendis's departure and because so much of that material has been repurposed by the MCU).

I agree, bg. Serial narrative is almost like a medium unto itself and re: which we're still trying to figure out the rules (in part because our own self-mythology is, itself, an unwieldy and unbound serial narrative which we can never grasp the full scope of, etc.).

another limit case for shared universes might be something like grant morrison's new x-men, which reinvigorated the line like nothing in decades, but depended on enormous, universe-breaking ideas (there are now millions and millions of mutants, so you can write stories about them as a real minority, different mutant political strains and subcultures, mutant neighborhoods in major cities). practically, that only works if x-men was its own separate universe or if marvel was willing to embrace them and take the whole universe into strange new places. instead they largely ignored them for a short while and then brutally undid them with a magic spell that slashed the mutant population down to a couple hundred, leading to several years where the x-men concept felt more bounded and less interesting/relevant than ever before. they wouldn't even accept his contention that magneto was a psychotic terrorist, not an interesting ideological foil for the x-men, and therefore needing to be finally killed off. post-morrison stories revealed his magneto to not have been carefully infiltrating the x-men for three years under the masked identity of "xorn," but rather to have been a guy named xorn who posed as magneto posing as a guy named xorn. all to preserve what we are used to agreeing are the big interesting themes of x-men ("see, it's dr. king and malcolm x!") and the only themes it can really be about.

the other big restriction on the films, of course, is that they must all be tentpole blockbusters telling three-act stories more or less in the "action" genre. obvious maybe. but as with the star wars spinoffs where we were hyped a "war movie" and got a star wars movie where people wear camo, these things really undermine the idea that oh yeah it's this huge universe, you can tell all different kinds of stories! even in superhero comics, a real arc can be someone contemplating their own mortality or dealing with the death of a loved one. a whole issue can be a baseball game and people debating how far forgiveness extends. not to say these are all super sophisticated stories but in the movies you're just going to get a couple minutes of baseball as fanservice for those who remember the baseball issues, and probably some comic relief.

none of these are going to start with a daring night-time infiltration mission and then surprise you by evolving into a cancer drama or a couple struggling to work out whether they have a future after infidelity, or whether a person's terrible actions change how we think about their art, or how the memories of a lost loved one haunt a present relationship, or whatever. they won't even turn out to be other kinds of crowd-pleasers like rom-coms or disaster movies or buddy cop movies (though they may have flavorings of all these things, waiting for fans to declare that, shocker, i've realized this one IS REALLY A whatever type movie). they bring on "quirky indie directors" and often good ones - but ones known for coherent, talky, forward-moving narrative, and they manage them closely. from some of the blogosphere you'd think they were handing $200 million to alexander sokurov and crossing their fingers for box office gold.

again, i think individual action movies, made because the creators have a story they want to tell, have a little more flexibility here. fury road is about mutual redemption, the quest for liberation or at least a heterotopia for the oppressed, and the sufferers rediscovering their own humanity through caring about others. you can tell the filmmakers wanted to make a film about those things. the marvel movies start to feel like people with a room full of chess pieces of the characters and instructions to figure out something they could be made to do. oh we haven't put the hulk and thor together, who's a villain they could face... grandmaster! what's a comic we haven't adapted... "planet hulk" huh? hey this thing writes itself! (again i thought thor 3 was a total blast with a lot of creativity in it, so don't get me wrong.)

this is all obvious: no one would really WANT the films to be these other things, you can get them elsewhere... but i wish the more fannish reviews out there could recognize these facts, or at least give some sense that they have seen other kinds of movies and aren't just bamboozled by press releases declaring that this one is really dark, this one is really a comedy.

(sorry for the long block posts btw, side effect of subway commutes with interrupted service, might as well just keep typing since it won't go through yet anyhow)

i want to start this but i'm not going to now because i'll be away from ILX shortly and have nothing coherent to say right now

as far as this movie and the MCU is concerned i defer to you OL because you know this stuff and it's mainly fragmentary and hypothetical for me

doc c killing it itt, we need that serialised narrative thread imo

the marvel movies start to feel like people with a room full of chess pieces of the characters and instructions to figure out something they could be made to do.

yeah, for sure, and one of the things i think is most interesting about marvel movies on a meta-level is that they've evolved into this very sleek, very efficient machine for pumping out movies which are always at the very least diverting and that in itself is not actually an insignificant achievement - movies are hard to make! big tentpole action movies fail way more often than they succeed!

Theoretically DC are in a better position because they have a history of generational change, of heroes handing down the mantle to others - and then they'll hand the keys to someone who just wants his childhood heroes back, dammit.

Of course this is a long term problem, and so not really a problem for MCU at all - one of the meta things that I find interesting is just how they'll deal with rebooting a universe - Spiderman and X-Men can do so because they can just drop the series on the ground for five years or so.

agreed on the serial narrative thread, mostly so I can complain about the idea Odysseus wasn't in a bunch of spinoffs and fan fic

canonicity is such a weird idea. these are all made up stories, yet some are "more real" than others. it's a weird concept, something inherent in mass media from the days when it was primarily religious in nature. apocryphal works, fan works, etc., there has always been this struggle to define some kind of objective mythical reality

i went in

Canon fodder: serial fiction and how it works

Dr. Who kind of faces the same problems, when every season involves universe-threatening monsters destroying all of time, yet you know the mains will always survive, somehow.

Sara Kingdom and Katarina can't come to the phone right now

they won't even turn out to be other kinds of crowd-pleasers like rom-coms or disaster movies or buddy cop movies (though they may have flavorings of all these things, waiting for fans to declare that, shocker, i've realized this one IS REALLY A whatever type movie).

Kinda hope at a point that they just start spinning a wheel to figure out their approach to these things. She-Hulk as Méliès silent film. Moon Knight as non-diagetic Malickian meditation. Alpha Flight as '70s porno flick.

SASQUATCH GENDER SWAP GOES HERE

lol I meant to put “JOKE” in the middle of that but it works fine as the storyboard panel nobody was sure how to draw

The only review you need:

https://youtu.be/tH2w6Oxx0kQ

so so so many plot holes and conveniences but if you grew up reading comic books the special effects and fight scenes are totally worth it

here is my question: why does billionaire tech giant tony stark have a flip phone?

from the sound of things, this seems pretty cool. focuses mostly on galactic space monster? cool. fight scenes are just costumes superheros throwing colorful orbs of light at each other? im down for that.

i dont need every flick to move me on an emotional or intellectual level. usually Marvel has been pretty good at knowing what they are doing and being fine with that (DC in contrast is flailingly silly while screaming "Take us seriously!!!")

I'd guess Tony Stark thinks that flip phones are cool? Though if the first movie is set in 2008, maybe Stark hates that fucker Jobs and everything he brought in?

he's been a playboy CEO for twenty years and iron man for ten, guy is into his IDGAF old dude swag phase.

between that and nick fury's old school 'captain marvel paging' blackberry something seems a little tricky with the timeline(s)

A'ight, if the spoilers are starting in earnest I am outta here.

me too, i'll be back in eight hours or so once i've seen it

these aren't spoilers. micro-minor details that give zero away, promise

Really enjoyed the film and looking forward to the 2nd part.

There is one post credits scene, thought there was a habit of there being like 3 interspersed with titles.
Saw it in 3D which i haven't done in a while.
Think I might go and see it again.

But way out of step with the comics. Did this tie in with a comic arc that is 27 years old or something?