The Marvel Cinematic Multiverse

[djtickle]

After having pretty much a web blackout for the last week I saw Infinity War yesterday. It is incredible, not going to go into anything but a solid 9/10 from me. So many spoilers online today, keep away from reddit I have never seen so many spoilers/mobile clips in one place.

Its the best thing Marvel have done in years, Emotional, Epic, Dark.

[Neon Ignition]

Solid stuff, carries a lot of weight that lessens as you think back on it after. I'll post a proper write up later but I'd say it's probably as good as it could have been. It's a proper 8/10 effort, even if I currently feel I know how Avengers 4 will pan out which lessens this one a little.

[Dogg Thang]

Saw Infinity War today. It was basically exactly what I expected it to be. Because it had so many characters, it had to hop from one group to another everyone got just a bit of screen time and it had to mix and match its tone due to merging films that have come to feel quite different. It was lots of punchy stuff and booms and stuff.

What I didn’t expect was that all that would lead to a really solid, engaging and strong movie rather than a mess of stuff.

I really enjoyed it. It had some serious punch and I was especially impressed by how it managed to merge those tones without feeling weird. Hard to say much about it without getting into spoilers so I’ll wait until more people have seen it before getting into the meat of the movie.

One negative: someone needs to sit Marvel down and have a frank conversation about how poor their visual effects are getting.

[Neon Ignition]

I'll put some thoughts down but readers beware everything in the Spoiler tag is outright based on you having seen the movie:

->Open Spoiler<-

First things first, in the vague chance I'm right, I'll extra Spoiler tag anything that's me speculating on future plots for upcoming movies:

I find the film has stayed with me during the day but at the same time no particular action scene resonates as stand out, instead the film hits because of what it represents. It's also a hard one to pin in terms of quality because it is very much an epilogue to the entire 10 year run rather than a movie in its own right. It barely has a plot beyond purple man grabs magic stones, everything rests on foreknowledge of the previous 18 movies but that's passable because everyone will have seen them by now.

The negatives I have aren't big and are passable because you can tell the restrictions the film faces are to blame. A mixture of pro's and cons in the story:

-Valkyrie is literally AWOL without mention for no reason
-Loki's key scene is perfectly pitched given his arc in Ragnarok
-Thor's obscene level of humour in Ragnarok is given some nice contextualisation in Infinity War that retroactively does the previous film a service
-It was smart dealing with Hulk fast to both bench a character recently heavily utilised and to show Thanos strength with no Stones
-Captain America is hugely under served by the film
-Thanos is very well handled, especially the previous decade of films set him up so poorly giving nothing but 'he's coming' as context to those unfamiliar with the comics. His motivation, flaws and strengths are set up quickly and effectively making clear how much of a threat he is but without making him a two dimensional villain
-The ending is 90% effective, nice to see something out of tone with the usual for Marvel

The long run time breezed by, it's got so much going on that you do feel relentlessly assaulted by moving parts. It has that feel that it's less a climactic event and more Marvel spending a few hours sticking its hand into the MCU and mixing it up into a jumble for the next ten years.

There are some nice moments, they definitely do as much as they can without causing the film to stumble but at the same time none of the character moments feel as fleshed out as they could or should have been.

Stuff like:
-Tony and Pepper planning to get married and discussing kids is huge for the character but it's reduced to a throwaway line
-Cap etc being on the run is dismissed quickly
-No characters with established arcs get to play them out (Hulk and Nat, Cap and Red Skull, Cap and Tony etc)

The interplay that was there was good though, Stark and Quill was good as was Thor and Rocket.

The ending though, probably the part likely to be discussed the most, was mostly good if only for the change of tone. I felt somewhat let down by the execution, partly out of Marvels hands as the realities of the business mean it's power was robbed by production scheduling but also the choice of characters they played victim with for such a huge event meant it carried little weight as the Undo button starts flashing as we already know their future. Also, how blankly it happened, these were beloved characters being killed on a huge scale and most went with a pretty indifferent or quippy reaction, only Peter (the character least suited to trying to be dramatic with) actually seemed to react in the right way and so was the only one to really hit home.

In terms of where the MCU goes from here, my money is on:

->Open Spoiler<-

-Ant-Man and the Wasp is set a few weeks after Civil War so all money on post-credits sequence being his daughter turning to ash, leading him into Avengers 4
-90's set Captain Marvel will clearly end leading into Avengers 4
-In Avengers 4, the remaining team members go out for revenge against Thanos but still can't beat him and more die including Hawkeye and Iron Man
-Thanos spends the film struggling with life after his universe level cull and his guilt over Gamora. The Avengers can't stop him but they don't need to as he goes back to the cliff and exchanges his soul for Gamora's resurrecting her

So yeah, its a huge dose of fan service, a grand pay off for ten years work. It just lacks a stand alone narrative strength 99% of films need to excel but in this one instance (and Avengers 4) that's perfectly fine as they've earned that win.

Oh, and massive shame thrown at every MCU TV series if it treats Infinity War with a throwaway line of dialogue like they did Avengers 1

[Tobal]

solid 8/10, kept me entertained for most of it, with the let downs being ending and CGI

->Open Spoiler<-

I was pretty numb to the ending, mainly because i just don't care about vision, and i just know the people turned to ash will be restored by the end of the next film, other that it just seems like simple way to remove the character bloat, the few who got ashed i did care about like the guardians seemed like a joke send off, with only peter getting some emotion out of me.

Also felt Thanos not having Lady Death as his motivation felt weak with what they came up with.

and anyone know why red skull was on that planet, i don't remember the CA1 ending.

[Blobcat]

Watched Avengers, liked it, my love for Thor as a character (and well, you know) is still strong.

Gonna have to try and watch Ant-man now before the wasp one comes out, we never got around to finishing watching that film.

[Asura]

->Open Spoiler<-

and anyone know why red skull was on that planet, i don't remember the CA1 ending.

->Open Spoiler<-

He got sucked into a kind of vortex at the end of CA1, created by the Tessaract. It was always strongly implied that he had survived.

[Dogg Thang]

Right, some spoiler talk. Don’t open this up unless you’ve seen the movie...

->Open Spoiler<-

Effects. Okay mostly this isn’t much of a spoiler but I don’t want to ruin anything for anyone. The effects over the last few Marvel movies have been going downhill. It’s not that there aren’t great effects. There are. But there are also some really awful ones. The CG Black Panther dudes at the end of Black Panther were terrible. The Hulk looked way better in Avengers than he did in Thor Ragnarok. The effects have gone really inconsistent. In this movie, Thanos was fantastic but some other effects were unbelievably terrible. Basically any head in a CG suit was awful. But also there was that CG villain woman who seemed to have no reason to be CG. She was human shaped and would have been better just being a person.

The worst offender was the head on the Hulkbuster. I have to wonder if there was a reason for this. In the trailer, he was Hulk but it’s possible they made that shot just for the trailer. But there is also a pop figure of Hulk bursting out of the armour. Given it was a plot point that was never paid off, I wonder if keeping him in the armour was a last minute decision and so the effects were rushed. Total speculation.

A movie gripe: Iron Man’s armour is basically magic now. It makes no sense, doesn’t build on the tech/mechanical nature of the previous suits and obeys no laws of physics. Even if the entire suit could be contained in the small space (like Black Panther’s), how could it make jets or weapons? What is fuelling those? How is it making a display? Did he have the Spider-Man suit in his pocket? It’s just magic now and I didn’t like that at all. Same obviously with Spider-Man’s. That’s going to be hard to go back from.

After Thor Ragnarok, the start of this was a bit of an Alien 3. I don’t have a problem with that. It set the tone right from the start. And it kept up the sense of real danger all the way through. The movie is relentless and I genuinely felt that nobody is safe.

But then we got the ending and I’m conflicted on it. On the one hand, it worked for me in the moment. It played out beautifully. On the other, a moment into the credits I was working out how much they have to rewind. Would they undo just that last bit or almost all of it? How much will they render this movie pointless in the next movie? The character that died for the soul stone - I can see her being critical to the plot (speculation on my part but I’m guessing she is in the stone) and that will undo that somehow and then if they undo the ending there is only the opening part that had any consequence. It would kind of suck for this movie to be robbed of its weight but I’m not seeing them doing it any other way. Marvel have a very poor record when it comes to consequences - things are just undone in an instant.

And won’t it be weird that we’ll be seeing trailers for Homecoming 2 before the next Avengers movie is out?

Anyway, just some thoughts. I really enjoyed the movie. It had a lot of impact. The way they were able to keep it very serious and big and tense while also not losing the Marvel humour and silliness was quite a feat, in my opinion. That’s one area that could have gone badly wrong, either going all dark and DC or having the humour totally strip the movie of weight or not match the tone of the rest of the movie. This struck a good balance. And it really paid off those other Marvel films. I was (am) concerned that this would be too reliant on prior knowledge and it is and yet it worked.

But I hope they go back to self-contained movies once they have these two Avengers movies out of their system.

[Neon Ignition]

Iron Man suits, I feel, have become consistently worse with each and every film since Avengers 1

[Dogg Thang]

I liked what they did in Iron Man 3. It was an advancement and gave it a completely new ability but also introduced a weakness that make sense with it - if it could slot together so quickly, it was vulnerable to breaking apart just as easily. There was still a reason to use the more traditional suits. This one seemed to have no thought behind it.

Also...

->Open Spoiler<-

Was someone just carrying around the Hulkbuster armour for some reason?

[Asura]

The Iron Man thing, I think...

->Open Spoiler<-

Was a nod to the comics. Part of Stark's arc in recent years has been that at one point, he was Tony Stark and the suit was Iron Man.

Then he started to wonder if the suit was just a suit, and anyone who wore it could be Iron Man, but War Machine is one of the examples that kinda shows that isn't the case.

Eventually he comes to accept that he is both Tony Stark and Iron Man, both in one person. The culmination of this is a version of the suit which is created by nanomachines within his body, which is kind the ultimate expression of this, because he is both personas physically and mentally.

I'm not personally sold on it. I actually have always preferred War Machine's armour in the movies, in terms of presentation.

[Mayhem]

->Open Spoiler<-

Not a lot to add over the already posted speculation and comments (and yes, I thought the CGI looked a bit off in places, and joked they had spent so much time elsewhere, they could only afford to put Hulk in once!), just a couple of pieces...

Given the difference in Thanos' goals for the film compared to the comic, here it's a lot more altruistic, will the reverse still occur to rectify the click of his fingers? Thing is, we've only been teased Andy Warlock so... I wonder if they might use Captain Marvel here, given the post credit scene? Also, how did Thanos know Nova Corp had the power stone, a guess based on the events of GotG1? And is he dead, and in some sort of perfect utopian Limbo, given Thor did put Stormbreaker right through him? Which really would make the second film different to the comic. When Thor said he needed a new weapon, I did wonder if they were going to use this.

Would have liked more interactions between characters who had not met before, and longer in most cases, my favourite was arguably Thor/Rocket, followed closely by Stark/Strange. Loki is probably dead, but I liked Thor's hopeless hope that he might somehow survived this like he always did. And Red Skull appearing was a bonus cameo, guess he did get teleported by the Tesseract, not destroyed.

[Neon Ignition]

http://www.darkhorizons.com/is-ben-wheatley-making-a-marvel-film/

Director Ben Wheatley is being rumoured to be circling an MCU movie

Here's the trailer for the next new MCU series, Cloak and Dagger

http://www.darkhorizons.com/venom-trailer-was-a-surprise-big-hit/

Venom's latest trailer has proven massively more popular with its viewing figures topping that of Wonder Woman.

http://www.darkhorizons.com/marvel-planning-ahead-through-2025/

Feige has also commented on Marvel currently cementing the films that will release in 2024/2025

[Dogg Thang]

Ah, I was wondering why Cloak & Dagger showed up in Lego Marvel Superheroes 2 DLC. I don't know it outside of that.

[Neon Ignition]

I'm going to give it a go, same channel behind it as Runaways which was passably entertaining enough.