Continuing my MCU rewatch

Fletch said:
Kind of awkwardly sat after the Snap, but with no reference to it until the post-credit scene. I don't know that there's a better place for it, because you want to fill the time between Infinity War and Endgame, but still kind of noticeable.
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Ehhhhhh.... most of the movie is before the Snap. The only part that is set after is the credit scene with the ant. The snap occurs in the middle of the other credit scene.
 
Ru1977 said:
Ehhhhhh.... most of the movie is before the Snap. The only part that is set after is the credit scene with the ant. The snap occurs in the middle of the other credit scene.
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No, I mean in release schedule.

It's fine, it's just a hard jump going immediately from the Snap to a movie where it's not a thing.
 
Ah, I see.

I dunno, for me it was needed. Infinity War is an emotional kick in the pants, and fun, superfluous, caper romp was perfect.
 
Fletch said:
Ant-Man & the Wasp
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Reading that made me realize I barely recall this film and probably haven't watched it since it was in theaters. Kind of feel the same about all the Ant-Man films really, not much "there" there...
 
That's a bummer - Quantumania trashed all the good things of the first two films, but the first two are just fun movies.

I think this A&W was perfectly positioned to reinforce Infinity War and Endgame - the audience was aware something terrible was probably going to happen in the end to some of the characters and then we lose three of the four! That hurt. And Scott is lost, potentially forever! That's an amazing bridge between two bigger movies and an integral plot point.

If anything, having to adapt the character dynamics to what happened in Civil War was more damaging. All the major relationship fractures occurred offscreen.

Agree on Sonny. Felt like a Justin Hammer retread minus the zing (no offense to Goggins) and a VFX-lite time filler. He also kinda felt like a joke the whole time, so I don't remember ever feeling a threat from him. I don't think I've ever seen this character on a ML want list.

I'll always love this Cassie, and Luis.

I liked the ideas behind Bill and Ava, but the execution I don't think quite got there, like maybe another draft was needed. If we're going to play her as a little girl in constant, molecule-wrenching pain, she was written too caustic and not caring about others? She's very selfish, which makes sense, but cold-blooded murderer to just trying to survive didn't thread right - felt like she shifted halfway through this film.

Agree on the ending - Janet somehow fixing her was really weird. I kinda wish it was a team effort super-powered by Janet or something - or maybe Janet won't be able to exist in our plane anymore because her body has absorbed 30 years of quantum energy and it has to go somewhere or it will kill her at full-size. I'm glad Janet aged - she was having a different experience down there than Scott did, and her not being the same age as Hank wouldn't have been the fun reunion.

I like Hope. Evangeline is always a very interesting performer. I think perhaps the shift in her in this one is that the first movie let her do nothing super and here she's doing everything like she's been doing it all along - but I feel that was actually a good course-correction.

I'm really sad Hope isn't a part of the MCU anymore - I strongly feel she and Scott should have been running whatever the next iteration of Avengers would have been post-Endgame. Separating them again after the lessons learned in this film, and that smile in Endgame, makes me sad. They work so well.
 
Schizm said:
the audience was aware something terrible was probably going to happen in the end to some of the characters and then we lose three of the four
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I remember seeing that scene for the first time and thinking A) "time vortex" eh? I think I got the next movie solved, and 2) this 'half the universe' thing doesn't seem to be spread out very evenly.

Schizm said:
her not being the same age as Hank wouldn't have been the fun reunion
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I mean...

No, I get it. In hindsight, it set up the mystery of the quantum realm/microverse and set the stage for the next movie. I'm just saying that, at the time, her aging was counter to what Hank had said previously about the quantum realm, but nobody questioned it.
 
Captain Marvel

It still feels rude that they skipped a solo Black Widow movie, but Captain Marvel at least *should* be the predominant female Marvel hero. I wasn't reading comics at the time, and I think this is how I learned Danvers had taken the name Captain Marvel. It's a move that made so much sense in the comics that you almost don't notice that she's never called, and nobody ever says, "Captain Marvel" in the movie.

  1. Aww, a Stan Lee Marvel logo intro. That's nice. While I'm at it, I want to point out his cameo in here is one of my favorites. I thought him reading the Mallrats script was a deep cut just for people like me, but it also means that this is the one Stan Lee cameo where he's actually Stan Lee.

  2. I really like Brie Larson as an actor, but why is she so terrible in this movie? Like, she's actually worse than I remember. Yon-Rogg keeps telling her she needs to control her emotions and I'm not convinced she has any. She's never surprised by anything, sad about anything, or worried about anything. She's just decided she's going to be coolly stoic and the director said "sure, whatever." There's a scene where Lashana Lynch is absolutely crushing it as the woman who lost her best friend only to have her return six years later, and sitting opposite of her at the table is this woman who literally could not care less.

  3. We knew going in that this took place as a flashback in the 90s just from the trailers, but I would've expected more build up to Djimon Hounsou appearing here as Korath. Since we'd last seen him killed by Drax a few movies ago, him being on the team was the first indication that this was a flashback. But there was no attention drawn to it at all. He's just in the room with everyone else. Alternately, they could have cut him entirely and made the crash into Blockbuster the reveal of the time frame.

  4. I really like Ben Mendelsohn, but my mind balks at a space-Australian accent. I do recognize that he covered his accent pretty good when he was playing Fury's SHIELD boss, but it was wasted effort because we already knew he was a Skrull from the autopsy scene. Imagine if we learned it at the same time Fury did. Wasted opportunity. Speaking of Fury, Sam Jackson saves every scene he's in. No matter how wooden Larson is, he has enough charisma for both of them. His Young Fury has a perfect blend of charm, badassery, and whatthefuckness, and the de-aging effect is flawless throughout the movie (even if it's clear that it's an old man when he's running). And I'm glad he got to demonstrate on a few occasions that he really is a good spy, even when wildly out of his element.

  5. Thanks for mentioning the universal translator, Vers. That answers a lot of questions I have before I even ask them. And it was a very natural delivery.

  6. The Skrull makeup is really good. And the transformations really do look like a biological ability.

  7. These 90s female vocalist needle drops are getting obnoxious.

  8. Jude Law as Yon-Rogg was pretty good. He did everything he was supposed to do. He never actually came across as a villain, despite the movie's effort to make him one. His subtlety sold him as just a loyal son of Hala, and a sincere mentor of Vers. I think that was the right choice. The other Kree soldiers are fine. Mostly just background, but I like that they were individuals.

  9. This movie does a good balancing act of using characters and places from the comics while just telling their own stories about them. Yon-Rogg, Mar-Vell, Atlas, Minerva, they're all Kree characters from the history of Captain Marvel Comics. Even Project Pegasus was a fun grab, even if I didn't recognize the significance of "Pegasus" until the title card popped up.

  10. I really enjoyed the plot twist of the Skrulls being the victims and the Kree the oppressors. Sure it's counter to comic accuracy, but I'm willing to give that up for the sake of a better story. I don't think I ever thought Vers was a Kree and not a human, but that might be in part because the trailer showed all the flashbacks of her as a young girl on Earth. That plot twist was never going to land, but the reversal at the end was unpredicted.

  11. Speaking of those flashbacks, the "stand back up" again montage toward the end was a really powerful coda to all the memories we'd seen earlier about her getting knocked down. I quite liked it as a character building moment. On the other hand, I can't point to a single point in modern times that those flashbacks tied into. Like, she never showed any self-doubt that came from years of being told she couldn't do something. She was always just charging in and thinking she could handle things herself while occasionally remember times she fell over as a kid.

  12. Okay, I'm not as mad at Fury losing his eye to the cat as I was when I first saw it. At the time, I was like "that's it? That's his 'I trusted someone once' moment?" On rewatch, I found myself really enjoying how into cats Nick Fury was, and it kind of felt earned. It does seem a little out of nowhere when it happens, though. I can't figure out why this time, of all times, the flerken took a swipe at him. However, it earned us a solid Sam Jackson "mother-flerken!" which is priceless.

  13. They're playing a little fast and loose with the tesseract here. Remember when it needed special containment cases and melted through the decks of a bomber? Now it's being carried in a tin lunchbox and ends the day just sitting on Fury's desk.

I think there was a real kernel of a message here based on the idea of a woman wanting to be a fighter pilot in the 80s. She would've been told "no" her whole life and ridiculed every step of the way. Yon-Rogg could've been the first person to let her reach her goals, even if it was only a subconscious realization. And if he kept phrasing it as "I picked you up" and "I pushed you when you needed it," it's still him taking credit for her accomplishments. Then the realization that, every time she fell, *she's* the one who got back up would've been a more valid motivator.

But what I'm really here to talk about is Infinity Stones. I'd sort of forgotten that the tesseract wasn't in the test plane itself, but this is the movie when I formed my theory on how people get powers from them.

My theory is that each Infinity Stone has a secondary purpose to create other Infinity Stones. Sort of fill a void when there's too much of one aspect of creation, if that makes sense. You'd think that a Space Stone would give Space powers and a Mind Stone would give Mind powers, but that's never what happens. Instead, we have the Space Stone here giving Carol Power powers. And Hydra used the Mind Stone to give Wanda Reality powers. I'm even prepared to argue that Pietro got Space power from the Mind Stone but died before he could really develop them. Even the colors of their powers match the Stones they're mimicking.

I mention this because WandaVision isn't too far away, and her ability to reshape Reality in that is presented as a "the Mind Stone unlocked an ability you had inside you," when the obvious answer was right there all along.
 
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Fletch said:
  1. I really like Brie Larson as an actor, but why is she so terrible in this movie? Like, she's actually worse than I remember. Yon-Rogg keeps telling her she needs to control her emotions and I'm not convinced she has any. She's never surprised by anything, sad about anything, or worried about anything. She's just decided she's going to be coolly stoic and the director said "sure, whatever." There's a scene where Lashana Lynch is absolutely crushing it as the woman who lost her best friend only to have her return six years later, and sitting opposite of her at the table is this woman who literally could not care less.
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I need to rewatch, but I felt they were going for the idea she was cool and fun before the Kree more or less trained that out of her/blocked her memories which also then blocked her personality, so she is low key stoic/arrogant all the time because that is the Kree way. But the flashback scenes didn't really get at her being more "fun" or "cocky" quite enough to show that contrast, that she was missing something more than just being naturally flat. Unfortunately though, they didn't really then let he let personality loose in the later appearances, so who knows.

The problem is that Jude Law didn't get the "be stoic" memo as much, so she comes across as dull as compared to him - too repressed and too under control. We don't get enough of a glimpse of the internal conflict/power that the other Kree are scared of, at least not quite enough.

But I mostly enjoyed this one myself.

I like the idea the Infinity Stones are trying to do something, maybe trying to find a outlet/vessel to be used...
 
fac said:
I felt they were going for the idea she was cool and fun before the Kree more or less trained that out of her
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That's actually a premise I hadn't noticed but there is some evidence to back up. They do show a lot of memories of her singing karaoke with Maria, fer instance. Like you said, there's no change or acknowledgment, so it's really some sub-subtext.
 
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