MCU: a very special Hawkeye Christmas…

[sifth]

3 minutes ago, john said:

I figured he just didn’t care. He pretty much confirms this in the trailer for his own movie when he speaks to Wanda, ‘What? Oh, Westchester? No, I didn’t want to talk to you about Westchester.’

I got the same impression as well. It should be of note that Strange was suppose to appear in the show originally, but was written out at the last minute. 

[DMC]

4 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

Sure, but let’s imagine Sword had some media line such as ‘it’s a training exercise’ or some such thing. Strange is tasked with protecting Earth from many tentacled beings from other dimensions, so how does ‘there’s some humvees and tents in the next state over’ make it to his radar? Why does he care?

Again, like I said from the beginning, the government setting something like that up in the suburbs is certainly worth at least checking out.  Otherwise Strange is very very bad at his job.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

22 hours ago, SpaceChampion said:

Yeah, the major cable news channels only do about 4 hours of climate change coverage a year.  What's to discuss about a giant alien corpse?  People want to forget about the existential threats and other things they can't wrap their minds around.

For the record I hear stories about climate change almost every day while I listen to NPR at work.

[BigFatCoward]

How the fuck has spiderman made that much money in a pandemic? 

[sifth]

2 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

How the fuck has spiderman made that much money in a pandemic? 

People love Spider Man and people loved seeing all of the characters return. Listen, I normally hate seeing films in movie theaters, but seeing that Spider Man film was honestly something special. I saw a lot of happy people; more so than I've seen in a long while.

[RumHam]

Yeah, it's the only movie I've seen in theaters since this started. I was just like "fuck it I'll take a chance for spiderman." Not great logic and I did get covid about a week later. 

[Rhom]

5 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

How the fuck has spiderman made that much money in a pandemic? 

Have you seen the sports stadiums with 100,000+ people in them?

Theaters aren't struggling because of the pandemic.  They're struggling because there are no good movies.  Get a good one, and people will go.

[Corvinus85]

4 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Yeah, it's the only movie I've seen in theaters since this started. I was just like "fuck it I'll take a chance for spiderman." Not great logic and I did get covid about a week later. 

Sorry about that. 

I saw every 2021 MCU movie in theater. But I've kept up with the vaccine and I'm lucky enough to live a small(ish) town and with the exception of Spider-Man I went to the matinee times when I knew it would be mostly empty. So I suppose my "fuck it" moment was going to see Spider-Man on opening night.

[Heartofice]

5 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

How the fuck has spiderman made that much money in a pandemic? 

That was last year 

[sifth]

47 minutes ago, Rhom said:

Have you seen the sports stadiums with 100,000+ people in them?

Theaters aren't struggling because of the pandemic.  They're struggling because there are no good movies.  Get a good one, and people will go.

More like get a popular one and people will go. There are plenty of good movies that failed at the box office; Fight Club, Dredd, Blade Runner 2049, and The Iron Giant, to name a few.

[Jaxom 1974]

56 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Yeah, it's the only movie I've seen in theaters since this started. I was just like "fuck it I'll take a chance for spiderman." Not great logic and I did get covid about a week later. 

That sucks.

But it's why I went to see the movie on a Monday at 11am in a theatre that sat somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 people...and I was only one of maybe 20 at that time...plenty of elbow room.

[sologdin]

hear stories about climate change almost every day while I listen to NPR at work.

maybe the wrong analogy--that's a chronic condition, to which one might readily accommodate in the fullness of time--people in the US are blase about pandemic deaths in the same way that they are about chronic deaths from MVA, GSW, childhood malnutrition, and preventable disease. the analogy requires by contrast an acute condition--something like an invasion or genocide.  who now speaks of the armenians, for instance.  or more currently, how many are aware of ongoing warfare in yemen, ethiopia, or myanmar? i have a feeling that most in the US easily ignored the congolese civil wars, which in the late 90s and early 00s resulted in 5M dead. we have active famines right now in yemen and south sudan. 

 

"fuck it" moment

no doubt.  i became blase (as supra) about the pandemic by the time dune came out. then it was the marvel movies, the surprisingly awesome spencer, wes anderson, TPA, the dire matrix resumption, and now macbeth. 

[BigFatCoward]

The dialogue in Eternals is fucking gash. 

[Heartofice]

I finished Eternals though it took a few sessions to get through it. It’s another Marvel disappointment, but maybe more so because you get the sense there is some potential in there, it was just wasted. 
 

The overall plot and the way it was structured, even the relationships, you can see how it could all be handled in quite an interesting way. 
 

But the execution is extremely bland. I was bored by almost every element of the movie. The design of everything was uninspired, the costumes are lame, the action is shooty shooty blah blah, the script is toss and the performances were mostly kinda wooden. 
 

I went in with quite low expectations but I feel the movie exceeded it by having a seed of something good. It all just felt like a mish mash of different peoples ideas that got muddied into this safe, forgettable ham and cheese sandwich of a movie. 

[mormont]

Watched Eternals last night, but I've got into the habit of letting films percolate in my brain overnight before commenting.

Overall it's not too bad. Falls into the category of 'fine, but I'm likely not going to watch it again'. Mixed acting performances. Barry Keoghan was the standout, for me, but Gemma Chan also makes a decent fist of Sersi, a character I never chimed with in the comics.

The basic problem is the same reason Marvel has just never been able to make the Eternals happen. They've been trying since the 70s. Kieron Gillen couldn't make them happen. Neil Gaiman couldn't make them happen. Jack Kirby created them and he couldn't make them happen. Though to be fair to Kirby, he never intended the Eternals to be part of the Marvel Universe, and that's the issue.

The basic concept is that there are these powerful alien beings who've been influencing human history and have been mistaken for gods, and that's interesting, but then when you make them part of the main Marvel continuity that means also making them superheroes. That gives us an issue because then they have to be relatable and human, and the concept works better if they're alien and mysterious. Also, it does (as the film acknowledges) give us some continuity issues about why they didn't intervene in matters they clearly should have intervened in. 

(In evidence for this, note that the Celestials, who in the comics are weird ineffable space gods who mess with sentient species for reasons no-one can comprehend and who can rarely be communicated with at all, are a big part of the Marvel comics, no problem. The Eternals, though: nobody cares about them.)

The other main issue with the film is that the Deviants should have been sentient individuals. There's no impact when they're essentially just an undefined CGI placeholder to shoot at. The film tries for a resonance with the Eternals and the Deviants as both manipulated tools of the Celestials but it can't work because the Deviants aren't something we can care about.

Also, for reasons stated above I'm not here for talking Celestials.

That said, I did like that the Eternals really felt like a family, in that they disagreed but still clearly cared about each other. The action sequences were fine and I felt that I did manage to get to know a little about each character, though one or two were underserved. And I do absolutely buy Dane Whitman

Spoiler

resorting to the Ebony Blade and becoming the Black Knight to rescue a woman he's in love with. That's very much in character.

Mid credits scene: that is... an interesting character to introduce.

[Heartofice]

I think I would have preferred them to go over the top with Eternals , it all felt very muted and safe. If these are essentially gods, why not go all Kenneth Brannagh Thor and make it vibrant and silly and Shakespearean. Instead it focused more on making them feel human, whilst at the same time being some low budget super heroes. 
 

It didn’t really seem to all fit together and there was a real lack of fun in the movie, outside of the Bollywood stuff. 
 

I honestly don’t see how they fit into the MCU at all. If they go into space and meet the GotG then they will just be laughed at for being so boring in comparison, and how do they fit with Avengers? I dunno, I don’t get it.

 

[Cashless Society]

I watched it a few days ago and I must say, this was one of the most frustrating movies to watch. It's the type of movie where the problems aren't simply explained from the movie itself; they can only be explained by knowing what was going on behind the scenes from development to production. 

And from what I've read so far that's exactly why the film was dead on arrival.

[sifth]

2 hours ago, Cashless Society said:

I watched it a few days ago and I must say, this was one of the most frustrating movies to watch. It's the type of movie where the problems aren't simply explained from the movie itself; they can only be explained by knowing what was going on behind the scenes from development to production. 

And from what I've read so far that's exactly why the film was dead on arrival.

Care to explain what these are? I'm not even joking, I'm just honestly wondering what sort of issues this film had during it's production run.

 

[sologdin]

low budget super heroes

they are kinda a knock-off justice league, aren't they?

[Cashless Society]

5 hours ago, sifth said:

Care to explain what these are? I'm not even joking, I'm just honestly wondering what sort of issues this film had during it's production run.

It's nothing scathing like Justice League or TASM 2 but just some unforced errors that shouldn't be happening on such a major movie.

The movie has major implications for the MCU, an even larger scope than the Infinity Saga, so you'd think they would give it a similar level of care as that, but it doesn't look like they didn't. The turnover between when the script was being written and when the film would begin shooting was also rather short (approximately 1 year) compared to other films that had slightly less implications for the MCU (Guardians of the Galaxy, Thornton Ragnarok & Black Panther each getting at least 2 years to work out the script).

Zhao also talks about the works that visually influenced her in making Eternals, going as far as to ask Villeneuve for help in filming for IMAX. But it doesn't seem like she was viewed ensemble films like Boogie Nights, Ocean's 11, LOTR or Seven Samurai to learn how to balance such a large cast of characters.

Filming was already underway by the time Gemma Chan was cast as Sersi, the main character of the film. This kind of explains why her performance came across as wooden and lacked chemistry with most of her co-stars (who had already been cast and began filming). It seems as though she never had enough time to get into character or spend time with the cast to bond with them. In this roundtable discussion, Mahershala Ali talks about the importance and value in being able to sit down, go over the script and discuss character relationships with your co-stars before filming, to establish trust and understanding between each other. Lacking this, performances can come across as inauthentic, like the relationship between Sersi and Ikaris.

Then there's the problem of Marvel hiring Zhao because they were so impressed with her pitch that they didn't want another studio snatching her up. Which is okay, but this would really bite them in the post production phase. Post-production for Nomadland and Eternals occurred simultaneously, Zhao opted to primarily focus on the editing for Nomadland. So the editing was primarily done by people who Zhao hadn't worked with before with little communication going on between the two parties. Zhao would only join in on editing after the awards season, but the first cut of the film had already been completed. Given the differing styles of Zhoa and the editors (one who's done a bunch of Disney films and the other who works with PTA); it's easy to see how some of the framing and shots were wasted and why the editing in the film feels inconsistent.