Canon-Strike VI: Marvel Cinematic Universe

[Asura]

Movie 37 - Morbius

You've got to love the debacle over this; how Sony rushed out a second run at the cinemas due to the meme, to almost no revenue. They just didn't get it.

[Neon Ignition]

The film wasn't great, arguably not even good, but the memes fell flat with me largely because there are just too many worse superhero films out there. Morbius is bad largely by how forgettable it is and it will likely be an oddity in time by becoming one of the most unresolved corners of the MCU plot arc as it's hard to see Sony returning to it.

[Neon Ignition]

Movie 38 - Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
After the runaway success of No Way Home, this film is the closest to a follow up with Strange facing some of the consequences of his actions in the prior film. With new character America crashing into his life from across the multiverse, he soon finds himself pitted against a threat he hadn't seen coming.





In a way this was following up on the storylines of three other entries (Doctor Strange, Spider-Man: No Way Home and WandaVision). As one of the most connective tissue entries in Phase 4, how well did Marvel do with handling the canon within a single film event?

[Neon Ignition]

I think in terms of 'as a film', this one for me was the overall best of the year for MCU releases. It ticks enough boxes and covers enough ground to keep itself lively and engaging throughout whilst also not feeling sidelined to overall events either. I was never that enamoured by the first film so it was nice that this one landed for me more. Though the post credits bit to presumably lead into a third film was clumsy as hell.

[Asura]

Though the post credits bit to presumably lead into a third film was clumsy as hell.

Yeah, tonal whiplash - as it kinda set up some jeopardy pre-credits then seemingly resolved it post-credits.

[Neon Ignition]

Movie 39 - Thor: Love and Thunder
Taking another whimsical approach to the God of Thunder, the fourth Thor movie followed the character as he battled against a god killer whilst also being reunited with Jane who is now dying from cancer. Dealing with his broken emotions he must come to terms with once again losing someone close to him.




Opinion on the humour of this entry has been fairly sour, but does it move the character forward in a worthwhile way?

[Asura]

Can I just say - tangential but - am I the only one who thought the editing on this was really strange? There are several cuts in it that are jarring and bizarre. We watched it on night-1 on Disney+ and I honestly paused the movie and googled to see if they'd accidentally uploaded the wrong version of the movie.

[Neon Ignition]

I googled and this seems to hit the editing nail on the head from CBR

"In comedy, timing is everything. When it comes to comedic filmmaking, the timing, pace and delivery of a gag are entirely reliant upon the edit. Raw footage may go into the editing bay, but what comes out the other side is often not a reflection of what happened during filming but rather a construct all its own. Editing will often space out the set-up and punchline of a joke or visual gag to make sure each is given proper resonance, leading to the greatest possible impact for the beat. Editing is also used to underline and strengthen a gag, with a cut immediately after the punchline delivery serving the same function as the age-old drum-hit to punctuate a joke in a stand-up routine.

Waititi's work is often a shining example of how profoundly editing can strengthen good jokes. Thor: Ragnarok, Hunt for the Wilderpeople and What We Do in the Shadows all have largely exemplary editing that helps not only streamline Waititi's more indulgent or rambling instincts but also to sculpt and accentuate what remains in the film into the strongest material it can be. By contrast, Thor: Love and Thunder is the rare editing misfire that feels too tight and fast-paced in all the places where it should be resonant and too indulgent and flabby in all the places where it should be taut.

In trying to deliver a bigger film, Waititi's script looks to both tackle iconic comic book arcs such as Jane Foster's battle with cancer and subsequent Thor-ification, as well as doubling down on the Flash Gordon-esque goofiness of Ragnarok. But as one might imagine, a woman's life-threatening battle with stage four cancer and the hijinks-filled adventures of a 'Space Viking' do not exactly lend themselves to meshing well with one another. To blend these two completely tonally disparate stories would take a great deal of care in the editing process, so when Thor: Love and Thunder just bluntly hard-cuts from one to the next, it is bewilderingly ineffective.

This failure of tones persists throughout the movie. Where Ragnarok or What We Do in the Shadows delight in exquisitely tightrope-walking between heartfelt high-stakes conflict and goofier absurdities, Love and Thunder seems to be unable to find any sense of balance in the first place. This dissonance in the editing also carries over to the beat-by-beat minutia of the gags themselves.
Waititi and Hemsworth's jokes fly at a mile-a-minute, in much the same vein as they did so successfully in Ragnarok. But where Ragnarok's cutting felt deliberate in establishing a pace and flow for the jokes, Love and Thunder's cutting feels entirely counterintuitive, constantly undercutting them. There are dozens of jokes in the film's opening Thor-centric set piece alone, and not one of them got a laugh in the theater this writer was in. The editing is either overtightened around the gags (leaving little room for setup or payoff) or far too timid (refraining from cutting rambling strings of jokes or extended repetitive information dumps), often leaving the movie at its loosest at crucial narrative junctures.

Many of these editing problems stem from the same issue: by all accounts, including his own, Waititi and Jennifer Kaytin Robinson's script for Love and Thunder was very much unfinished when shooting began. Throughout production and into post-production, the story was constantly evolving, leading to a consistent need to reshoot or ADR already shot scenes to bend them to the will of the final version of the film. This is undoubtedly a gargantuan contributing factor to both the story's messiness and the editing's biggest pitfalls. Four different editors are credited as having a hand in cutting Thor: Love and Thunder throughout its post-production, and these conflicting instincts are on full display throughout its runtime.

There's an early sequence in Love and Thunder that serves as a near-perfect encapsulation of all of these issues. Thor returns to New Asgard in the hopes of thwarting Gorr the God Butcher's in-progress attack, reunites with Valkyrie and is re-introduced to Jane Foster, now as The Mighty Thor. This is a pivotal convergence of many of the movie's most prevalent threads and is the scene that will effectively set the rest of the story in motion. It is of monumental importance to the film, yet it feels like nothing because the foundations for it have been so poorly laid out.

In the interest of preserving Thor's goofy opening action scene, he isn't actually allowed to learn anything about Gorr's god butchering until two minutes prior, depriving their conflict here of any meaningful tension or resonance. Any footage of Jane becoming The Mighty Thor for the first time, experiencing the power that is so crucial to her arc and the film at large, hits the cutting room floor in favor of preserving a baffling non-reveal that attempts to mimic the source comic's mystery surrounding the identity of The Mighty Thor, for all of five seconds. Valkyrie has not even had a line in the movie up to this point, as the edit opted to turn her introduction as a bored King of Asgard into a light and bubbly musical montage that conveys pretty much anything but the boredom and monotony that will come to drive Valkyrie's thirst for adventure.

Pair all this with the fact that the sequence is overtightened, with none of the action beats landing with any impact and hardly any clarity in the staging (thanks to the Volume-induced claustrophobia), and Thor: Love and Thunder's first big culminating set piece is a massive disappointment. What should have been an easy slam-dunk first act-ending, momentum-filled sequence is instead an incoherent and unmotivated mess, thanks to its lackluster editing.
Thor: Love and Thunder is overflowing with ideas, but the movie's final cut seems steadfastly uninterested in exploring any of them. Instead of artistically sculpting the film into an affecting feature, the editing seems focused on bringing the runtime in at the two-hour mark and little else. The poor editing deflates the movie before the audience's very eyes. To paraphrase what the great Academy Award-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker once said of modern blockbuster filmmaking, the editors of Thor: Love and Thunder are "sticking stuff out there and asking you to believe it, but they're not making you believe it."

[Neon Ignition]

Movie 40 - Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Mirroring real life events, T'Challa dies from sickness and Wakanda enters a year of grief and mourning. As the rest of the world tries to lay claim to Vibranium another hidden society is stirred into action against the world raising the question over whether Wakanda will stand with or against the other nations and if the Black Panther can endure.



Not the first time the MCU has dealt with death, this is the first time it's had to reflect it with real gravity. Did the film succeed in doing so and capping off Phase 4?

[Neon Ignition]

This has been one of the heavier years for MCU content as things picked up again following the pandemic years though it's arguably been one of the hardest for the MCU with its releases seeing a dramatic drop in fortunes over the span of just four months. Time to begin looking back at the cinematic additions to the MCU canon:


Movie 41 - Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
An effort to expand on the Quantum realm had long been teased by the previous films but the bold decision was made to use the character to make the first introduction of the new over arching villain Kang to audiences also. The family are cast into the Quantum realm where they find themselves hunted by a Kang variant who is himself seeking to escape it and to resume his war against the universe. The film scored mixed reviews but is the highest grossing of the three Ant Man movies.



Did it do a good job at getting the ball rolling on the road to the next Avengers event however?

[Asura]

Movie 41 - Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

I saw it and can barely remember it.

[Dogg Thang]

It’s a bad movie but I feel for the team because it was visually really ambitious with so much work put into it. I lot of people did superb work on that movie. But the story was weak and it just didn’t hang together at all, leading to a really unsatisfying experience.

[Neon Ignition]

The ending was a mistake as well. I harbour no hunger to see Rudd leave the franchise but really the film needed the shock of the family losing badly to Kang. Showing a goofy sea of him doesn't sell the threat, when he swaggers around saying how much of tyrant he is he needs to follow through with it and getting beaten by Ant Man in one fight weakens him. Had Ant Man and some others die would have been more memorable and a statement of what's coming

[Asura]

It’s a bad movie but I feel for the team because it was visually really ambitious with so much work put into it. I lot of people did superb work on that movie. But the story was weak and it just didn’t hang together at all, leading to a really unsatisfying experience.

I mainly think the introduction of Kang has been botched, and that's a problem if they wanted to build an arc around him.

First he shows up in Loki, and I kinda found that iteration of him annoying (for reasons I don't remember). Then in Quantumania, I just didn't buy the sort of villain he's meant to be.

If I remember, there was only one part of his introduction I liked; when a character asked him "What are you going to do?"

And he just answered, "Win."

It was a corny line. But I like the idea; that as someone who has crossed the multiverse, he's abandoned all forms of morality or notions of things like wealth or power, and all he has remaining is the desire for victory. It's cool in concept, but nothing else about the character was memorable or interesting.

[prinnysquad]

Not going to disagree with the criticisms levelled by you nerds, but I liked it. I didn’t find it anywhere near as bad as the 1 star reviews made out.