MCU: KEVIN's world

[DaveSumm]

The big one will be Fantastic 4. If they can position them to play the same role in the MCU as they do in the comics, that’s a very solid foundation to move forward with. That movie has to be better than average, and they have to cast the F4 very well.

[SpaceChampion]

2 hours ago, mormont said:

I thought Shang-Chi was terrific. Elements of personal taste, maybe, but for me it was absolutely up there in the top rank.

Same. 

[Heartofice]

2 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

The big one will be Fantastic 4. If they can position them to play the same role in the MCU as they do in the comics, that’s a very solid foundation to move forward with. That movie has to be better than average, and they have to cast the F4 very well.

I’m probably mostly alone in thinking those two F4 movies with Chris Evans were not entirely terrible. At the very least I they got the tone right, and half of the casting was good. 
 

As long as they don’t carry on with Reed Richard’s from Dr Strange I’m sure Marvel will get the casting right.

My worry with it though is it’s just one more bland MCU movie with a bunch of people running away from a green screen and no real identity. 

[Rhom]

8 hours ago, mormont said:

I thought Shang-Chi was terrific. Elements of personal taste, maybe, but for me it was absolutely up there in the top rank.

I liked Shang-Chi quite a bit right up until the end when they entered the fairy world or whatever it was and the entire genre of the movie changed.

[RumHam]

I've come to like Eternals more as time goes on. I've only watched it twice, but I think about it from time to time. 

[polishgenius]

I really wanted to like Shang-Chi but I felt very little of it, visually at least, was executed as well as it should have been. That's been a problem for most of the phase 4 movies- I mean, it's a problem with Disney in general - but it was stark here because it's directly attempting a very visually-focused and visually-spectacular genre. So I think I found it harder to roll with it falling a bit flat than I did with similar issues at parts of Wakanda Forever. 

Mind you, I also felt WF just understood the underpinnings of what it was doing better than Shang-Chi did. 

[Werthead]

Eternals I think nodded to the idea of a less-quippy, less-forced-humour MCU. The biggest headache it had was trying to establish 10 major characters from scratch in 2 hours (11 if you count Black Knight), it just couldn't do it. It would have been much better as a 6-10 episode TV show with more time to layer in the characters. As it stands, it's an interesting film that doesn't achieve its ambitions, but at least has the balls to try to be different to the rest.

Almost the rest of the Phase 4 movies was a waste of time, but I did have a lot of time for Sam Raimi's excellent direction on Multiverse of Madness. I do think a major problem for Phase 4 is that it was trying to be "regular Marvel," that is the period of normal adventures for heroes (new and established ones) before the next world/universe-ending threat rears its head. It was deliberately not trying to race ahead to Thanos Mk. 2. But that didn't work very well, mainly as the films still had too many tie-ins with other things despite trying to be standalones. Phase 1 worked better in that it was building up the characters and having hints of a bigger picture at the same time.

I can understand rolling back on the TV shows. They can make the TV shows faster than the films, but coordinating plot elements between them seems to not be working as well as they wanted (Loki and Multiverse don't fit together as neatly as they should).

[mormont]

1 hour ago, Rhom said:

I liked Shang-Chi quite a bit right up until the end when they entered the fairy world or whatever it was and the entire genre of the movie changed.

I'm scratching my head at this comment, honestly. I mean, from minute one right through, it's the same genre. I have no idea what genre of movie you thought you were watching the rest of the time, but... you weren't.

[Rhom]

44 minutes ago, mormont said:

I'm scratching my head at this comment, honestly. I mean, from minute one right through, it's the same genre. I have no idea what genre of movie you thought you were watching the rest of the time, but... you weren't.

I was watching a Jackie Chan movie.  Complete with over the top kung fu action on a runaway San Francisco bus and the scaffolding of an Asian sky scraper.  Might as well have been a spiritual sequel to Rush Hour with Awkwafina in the Chris Tucker role.  Then all of a sudden there's a giant CGI dragon fighting another big CGI dragon while an army of fairies fights an army of demons.  Those aren't the same.  

[Myrddin]

I just pulled up the movie, which I haven't seen in a year or so. I was surprised that they entered the fairy world about the halfway point of the movie. My memory put that much later, with all the "real world" set pieces vivid in my head, but not so much the training section of act two.

 

[polishgenius]

The bus scene was obviously pretty Jackie Chan, but I'd say the rest of the action was trending pretty strongly Wuxia/fantasy-type martial arts even when it was on like the side of a skyscraper. The shift definitely didn't come out of nowhere.

[Heartofice]

I don’t really remember but doesn’t the movie start with the story of his dad meeting his mum and that’s all pretty much fantasy dragon / house of flying daggers stuff.

I thought the movie basically bookended itself with the fantasy.

It didn’t come out of nowhere but I do think the contrast between the two styles in the movie is pretty jarring and the tone of the ending doesn’t quite fit with what happens during most of the rest of the movie.

Overall I think Shang-chi has some good elements, strong cast, but it’s main failing is in its storytelling, it’s just not a strong narrative and doesn’t really do a good job of establishing its main character. So by the ending I was completely indifferent to what happened. 

[Corvinus85]

25 minutes ago, Rhom said:

I was watching a Jackie Chan movie.  Complete with over the top kung fu action on a runaway San Francisco bus and the scaffolding of an Asian sky scraper.  Might as well have been a spiritual sequel to Rush Hour with Awkwafina in the Chris Tucker role.  Then all of a sudden there's a giant CGI dragon fighting another big CGI dragon while an army of fairies fights an army of demons.  Those aren't the same.  

Sure, but the movie starts with a prologue about the Mandarin and how he meets his wife which is fairly heavy on the fantasy action side. So it was bound to return to that at some point later. But it could have remained in the realm of fantasy martial arts and not have soul sucking flying monsters and a dragon. 

[polishgenius]

I also wanna say that I don't think the problem with the ending of Shang-Chi, or any of the movies, is that they use CGI monsters/stages, it's just that they use them pretty badly.

 

I used this example before I think, but just after I watched Shang-Chi I watched Yin-Yang Master on netflix. There were a few reasons I liked that more as a fantasy martial arts film etc etc, but the difference in approach is really obvious in the finale. There's a huge CGI monster there too, and it looks quite janky at times, but nonetheless it works better because they set it in a spectacular, well-lit fantasy landscape and then, crucially, keep it there, used the setting to the max. If there's one thing that really did annoy me about Shang-Chi it's that it set up a beautiful stage, specifically made it so that they were fighting in the light of dawn, then obscured all that in a cloud of grey smoke and set most of the fight against a grey cliff. 

But it's not just Shang-Chi, they do that shit all the time. Black Widow could have done fantastic things with its finale on an exploding, falling sky-fortress, something they could only reasonably have done with CGI- but they made no use of any of the opportunities for tension that should have afforded. Love and Thunder has the fantastic sequence on the greyscale planetoid, but the finale is just in a big dark room. Even Wakanda Forever, I said the other day I did think they at least tried with the ending on the big ol' boat, but it just felt undercooked. Under-planned and under-developed. Whereas the sequence rescuing whatsherchops falls exactly into the same problem as Shang-Chi did, set up the potential of a chaotic city-based battle but just runs to a big empty bridge as fast as possible. 

Even Endgame did it, really, it just slid by there partly coz it was one of the first time they really leant heavily on it and partly coz it did kind of fit the tone there.  

 

It's one thing they really have to sort out I think. Whether it's CG or practical, they're just wasting opportunities for spectacle. 

[Kalbear]

By comparison the fight between Shuri and Namor at the end was awesome. More of that! And it had cgi to spare.

I don't think it's easy to say that all the shows failed in the same way. Shang-chi failed with a crappy end and pacing, Dr. Strange was too incoherent (but the pacing was good), eternals just didn't have a very good story but the end fight was probably the best of the lot, Thor has all the bad things above and then some. And from what it looks like ant-man focuses too much on a plot that they wanted without thinking about the people in it.

Also, I think a lot of the earlier movies benefit massively from avengers iw and endgame sticking the landing. GotG and iron man and Thor all are suddenly much more elevated. Might be that can happen with these.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

8 hours ago, RumHam said:

I've come to like Eternals more as time goes on. I've only watched it twice, but I think about it from time to time. 

I think Eternals as a potentially really good film that they tried to find in the edit. They didn't quite make it. 

-

Oof. Quantumania isn't being received well by some critics. 'Might actually be interesting. 

[sifth]

5 hours ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

I think Eternals as a potentially really good film that they tried to find in the edit. They didn't quite make it. 

 

I still say Eternals would have worked better as a tv show. This way every character could be fully fleshed out and their back story explored.

[Heartofice]

I didn't realise that Eternals has the lowest RT score of any MCU movie. Thats actually quite shocking. I also don't think it's terrible, it's just not very good.. and it's boring.

Quantumania is looking to challenge that however which cannot be something Marvel are very happy with. 

*Edit I listened to Mark Kermode's review of Ant Man 3 and he is scathing. He says it's 'rubbish' and made snoring noises. He's not a fan of comic book movies but he usually has something positive to say even about the bad ones. 

[polishgenius]

Looks like The Marvels is being pushed to November. Which may be a good thing tbh.

Nice poster though. 
 

[DaveSumm]

I’ve seen it pointed out that Phase 4 ramped up the number of films/shows in production during Bob Chapek’s tenure, then now he’s left, we hear of less shows and the films getting shunted back. Hopefully this is a blip and they can regain some quality (I’m still somewhat chipper about Ant-Man which I’m seeing later tonight, for whatever reason).