Rolling Marvel Cinematic Universe thread (+ a poll: Classic or Dud?)

way too long, reveled in its violence while trying to convey Its Toll, half-asses the dystopia stuff *and* the western angle, lazy expository dialogue, monotonous fight scenes, general unearned air of self-seriousnessness

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Thursday, 9 March 2017 18:37 (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

100%

The reviews that state that "this isn't just a great superhero movie, it's a great movie" or w/e are totally incorrect.

Even for a superhero movie, this was shit.

I wouldn't call this a great movie, but it was very good for a superhero movie I thought. I actually had some sort of emotional attachment to the characters, which doesn't really happen with superhero movies typically.

have we already pedantically told y'all to take it to the dang Wolverine thread because the X-Men stuff is emphatically NOT part of the MCU I mean come on

can we get a ruling on just wtf the sony spiderverse is for now? is it temporarily in the MCU until they spin off these movies with characters nobody cares about mentioned upthread?

pretty sure marvel studios' plan is to use spider-man as much as possible in their movies and otherwise just point and laugh at sony's ever-more-desperate attempts to pull together aunt may vs willie lumpkin or whatever

it's the only laugh they can get considering Fox will those movie rights forevuh

I don't know if I saw it anywhere on the board but they just announced this week that the long-delayed and cancelled and uncancelled Venom movie will totally and for sure be released next year. Which is never gonna happen, but I admire the chutzpah.

My guess is that Sony will still keep feebly flushing money down the toilet developing projects for all of the tertiary Spidey-related characters they have rights to and that will never actually become anything ever until they finally make the logical step of selling the film rights back to Marvel for a spine-telescopingly enormous mountain of money.

Amy Pascal will probably get a cut of it as part of her most excellent golden parachute she got because of the hacking fiasco

i still wonder what deal with the devil she made to make that happen

I think she got hooked up because someone had to go down because of the hacking, in spite of the fact that she made the studio a fuckton of money. So the golden parachute was her going away present.

Do Fox get to make movie merchandise, or is that all run by Marvel?

Doctor Strange is a very good looking nothing-burger of a movie

Rachel McAdams as Christine Palmer was the most memorable character, I think. Certainly the only one I actually sort of cared about, and they didn't even bother to put her in any peril other than having an astral punch-up sort of knock some things around. They somehow got Mads Mikkelsen to be a terrible, boring villain who strides so purposefully everywhere he goes it's like an inside joke we're not in on.

So I guess this week they confirmed that the long-mentioned Cloak & Dagger has been picked up for a 10-episode series (on ABC Family Freeform) alongside a 10-episode order for New Warriors (featuring Squirrel Girl) AND there's also apparently a Runaways series in development at Hulu. While I hope they aren't diluting the brand too much, this is a direction I support wholeheartedly.

When are we getting an animated Power Pack show on Disney XD

If it was stylized to look like Bogdanove's art, I'd be down 1000%.

It's spelled 'Brigman'

Also this is dope news

Although Marvel seems to be widening the relational gulf between their movies and their TV projects, I guess this would still be the place to post the Cloak & Dagger trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5hrFVQiGyk

It's a little weird that Dabney Coleman is seemingly uninvolved, but I'll take it nonetheless.

BREAKING: 21st Century Fox has been holding talks to sell most of the company to Disney, sources say. https://t.co/JRf6Ly3hs6

— CNBC (@CNBC) November 6, 2017

oh I guess Bloomberg are saying the deal is dead now

so much for Dr Doom getting a proper treatment

Marvel did such a great job with the leased Spider-Man and Wolverine movies, I wouldn't give up hope.

Homecoming was pretty good. I didn't think Logan was a Marvel Studios production?

It wasn't

Haha, that's totally right. Man, Logan might be the only of all the Marvel movies I want to see again.

Logan was much better than I anticipated. Stewart really made the movie.

I thought Logan was loathsome, self-consciously grim & gritty trash

a really dispiriting movie

It was overly bloody but I don't think it was trash

I find the lack of blood in the MCU, while understandable, more disturbing and dispiriting than the more explicit stuff I saw in Logan. So many people bloodlessly impaled in the new Thor. These movies are non-stop violence, minus the bloody horror. Kind of perverse. Whether the violence had anything to do with the emotional punch of Logan, I dunno. But it did a better job of showing the cost of a life of violence than Iron Man and Captain America punching each other.

The new Thor is pretty much a comedy so I'm not surprised by the minimal blood. Also, PG-13 vs R.

I feel like if you are watching a Marvel or DC movie expecting to see the cost of a life of violence, you are in the wrong movie.

incorrect. you could sit through Man of Steel and Batman v Superman.

I don't expect to see that stuff, because these are movies for kids, first and foremost. It's just something I've thought about, and certainly something that helps me pinpoint why all these movies about doomsday or the end of the world or mass extinction events initiated by arch villains or killer robots just feel like such low stakes stories. (It doesn't help that there have been so many of these, more good than bad, imo). I definitely don't want them to go the gloomy DC route, and they're not going to go that way (although if the Thanos plot plays out anywhere close to what's expected over the course of a two part epic ... ). I grew up reading these stories (though not close to the extent of some of you) and I do recall lots of pathos and violence and threats and darkness in a way that drove the story. In these films all those things are sort of sanitized in an almost surreal way. It's not unique to these movies by any stretch, of course. But when a major character in this movie picks up a pair of machine guns and just starts shooting, I must admit that for the first time in a long time, innocuous though the scene may have been even in the context of a movie this fun, it made me a little queasy in the context of current events.

That's a scene directly from the source material, though.

I dunno if glossing over the effects of violence is that bad because most culture that does focus on the immediate physical effects of violence ends up stylizing those effects, making them part of the draw, in a way that is I'd guess even more damaging.

Of course those movies don't tend to show a realistic portrait of the physical and psychological effects of violence either, because those are horrible and nobody wants to think about them in an action movie.

Not saying this means the issue has no solution but it does seem an uphill battle.

This might be o/t but since at least 9/11 I've had lots of trouble not being taken out of the moment by these superhero movies where entire metropolises are levelled by supervillains/heroes as some kind of collateral damage. Like, human beings presumably lived or worked in those buildings. I know The Avengers series (and, to a less convincing and more ham-fisted degree) the recent Superman movies have engaged with this somehow, but, still.

My takeaway from a lifetime of reading superhero comics is that the answer to "what if superheroes existed in real life?" can only ever be "it would be terrifying and horrible"; some books made that point well, a whole bunch more used it as an excuse for reveling in sadism, but in the end the only way to stay a fan of the genre is to just leave that question be, I think. Which is not to say everyone can or should have to do that.

I disagree (though of course ymmv). I think many of the best comics stories - like movies, or books, or TV shows in any violent genre - have addressed the moral/ethical/philosophical quandaries of violence, and that from the start is partly what has earned comics respect, though especially in the more modern graphic novel era. But I think that stuff has to be suppressed on a more mainstream level, or at least seriously counterbalanced, by more innocuous stuff, or (as it is often termed) "cartoon violence" or "comic book violence," a distinction that robs the violence of its real world implications, like a frying pan to the face or hundreds of faceless stormtroopers being decimated with lasers. Vs. buildings and cities being destroyed. Obviously the movies gravitate toward the latter, for the sake of spectacle, but take the new Thor. Without question, the world destroying stuff is much less compelling and entertaining than Thor and Hulk hitting each other. The flip side might be the TV Daredevil/Jones/Luke Cage world, which is as grim as anything in the real world, and seems to be by far the bloodiest, most sadistic and (to me) most disturbingly violent approach the MCU has explored yet. Daredevil was the first MCU property I had to warn parents away from.

Oh my goodness, yes, keep yr kids away from the Netflix series (ironically the most easily-accessible of the lot), particularly the two seasons of Daredevil. Kingpin and the Punisher wreak some gruesome havoc.

I think there's plenty of ethical/moral/philosophical questions that are routinely tackled in the superhero genre, but they do not incide on violence itself as much as questions of power and responsibility (as Spidey would have it); heroes failing to save someone, loved ones being put in danger, etc. This feels to me fundamentally different from what, say, a crime novel or a revenge movie have to say about violence, because the actual dynamics of violence are never truly examined. Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns aside (and really it's arguable to what extent the latter truly critiques violence), I feel like most attempts to do so in the modern era have failed, turned incoherent or, as I said above, used the question as a hook to then wallow in violence w/o actually having anything to say on the subject. I think Marvel has taken a concious decision to move away from that kind of project in its comics of the last decade or so, and the MCU follows suit.

I'm just saying, if you want a comic book movie that functions as a mediation on the ramifications of living a life a violence, you are likely to be more interested in A History of Violence than you are Thor: Ragnarok; as D_Rf says, violence in the MCU is a tool used to create scenarios that explore other themes and is rendered the way it is partially to appeal to a wider audience and partially to not distract the viewer from the story that is being presented.

(I haven't seen Logan yet but, given the character, it makes sense to delve into the ramifications of a violent life with a character whose existence is driven by berserker rage and the ability to shrug off near-fatal injuries and what happens when that character's healing abilities falter.)

Logan is explicitly about violence (not unlike, say, a movie like Unforgiven, or The Searchers), and may be in my estimation the best and most emotionally resonant of all these movies. Like I said, maybe that's just a coincidence. And I'm not saying I want that from all or even most MCU movies, just saying that it at least partly explains why all these movies are starting to feel like running in place to me. Seemingly indestructible beings somehow overcoming other seemingly indestructible beings with minimal repercussions. And I stand by my observation that given the only thing distinguishing the sadistic violence in these movies from their R equivalents is actual blood, the results are pretty surreal. As if a lifeless corpse impaled on a giant spear is less disturbing minus the dripping blood. I'm not a prig, I just think they want it both ways (per the maximum profit maxim), but if they're going to be hyper-violent anyway they might as well better explore those themes. I'm not saying this would make them superior entertainments, but it might make them better movies, ones worth watching more than once.

(I haven't seen Thor: Ragnarok yet, either)

it's a lot funnier than Logan

This doesn't surprise me!

I'm just saying, if you want a comic book movie that functions as a mediation on the ramifications of living a life a violence, you are likely to be more interested in A History of Violence than you are Thor

Haha in fairness, I haven't seen or read that either.

Hi dere, I am DJP and today I will talk out of my ass about movies I haven't seen yet.

i like all the MCU stuff - and the CW DC shows for that matter - when they create the look, tone and feel of the superhero comics of yore. It's pretty simple but when they're as fun as the stuff I grew up reading, it's more or less all I'm in it for. To that end the Cap movies and the Flash show have been pretty great for this. I started strong on DD and the Netflix stuff but I kind of waded through the second series of DD, never finished Luke Cage, and put up with 1 ep of the Defenders.