FYI: There have been questions re: AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. recaps. Short answer: Yeah, Season 3 ultimately got so tiresome I couldn't bring myself to do write-ups of it anymore. However, with the season now concluded, I will be addressing that on the next installment of this series, tentatively arriving one week from today. Stay tuned :)
NOTE: This was originally written as the script for a video, but I decided it read better than it sounded performed. As ever, if you like what I do here, there's a MovieBob Patreon for that.
Alright. The Internet is all up in arms because of the below video wherein a guy who reviews movies says he's not going to review the GHOSTBUSTERS remake mainly for nostalgia/"respect-the-original" reasons (and will instead do a "non-review" seemingly mostly about the failed attempts to make a proper GHOSTBUSTERS III over the years); and I find the fallout interesting because half the web is celebrating: "Hooray! Famous Internet Man has joined our anti-feminist witch-hunt!;" while the other half is scolding him over:"Boo! Famous Internet Man joined their anti-feminist witch-hunt."
Meanwhile, the gender-flip business of the remake doesn't really come up other than a factual acknowledgment thereof in the actual video, making it nicely illustrative of the tiresome way discussion of this movie has become proxy-vs-proxy and not about the movie at all... but also of who's to blame for that tiresomeness in the first place (HINT: It ain't the so-called "SJWs.") Anyway, there's the video, my take after the jump.
So. Background: James Rolfe, probably still best known as the Angry Video Game Nerd and pretty-much the INVENTOR of the whole “pop-culture rant” internet video genre, put out a video where he announced he was going to do some kind of vaguely-defined “non-review” tie-in video to the remake of GHOSTBUSTERS because it looks really bad and he resents the idea of remaking it in the first place and would thus rather not watch it.
Which… I totally understand and think is pretty valid. I mean, look – I’m a film critic by trade and I’m generally of the opinion that everyone critic or not should experience as many things as possible and that goes double for things you assume you yourself won’t like I assume we’ve all read GREEN EGGS & HAM and I don’t have to explain the logic behind that further. BUT! It’s also true that not everyone CAN see everything and if you really do think something looks so beyond your capacity for enjoyment or rational engagement then maybe it’s best left to others every once in awhile.
To be frank – short of “not gonna watch it” I have a hard time disagreeing with most of his basic premise (though I'd like to think I wouldn't have said it was "good" that Harold Ramis didn't get to see the movie - that's a bit much.) GHOSTBUSTERS is one of those all-time classics that shouldn’t be remade even if remaking it well was possible which it isn’t because the making of GHOSTBUSTERS was one of those lightning-in-a-bottle scenarios that can’t happen twice and GHOSTBUSTERS II is the proof of that. The remake they HAVE made thus far looks and sounds terrible both conceptually and based on the trailers, everything about it makes me embarrassed for the very talented cast that’s been assembled to put it together. It’s a movie that probably never should have happened, stands almost no chance of being worthwhile and thus far doesn’t even look like it’ll be good enough to be a “whatever, next movie.” The last time a movie project looked THIS bad top-to-bottom before its release was BATMAN V SUPERMAN and just look how that monstrosity turned out.
And yeah, I COMPLETELY “get” resenting remakes of classics because – yes – while a remake doesn’t make the original “disappear” it does often inject a sour note into the cultural history of something (fairly or not) at least for a little while. See: Today, when you talk about ROBOCOP, you kinda have to specify that you mean the good one from the mid-80s and not that godawful piece of garbage from last year. Or when you talk about HALLOWEEN and have to point out that you mean the John Carpenter movie and not the Rob Zombie one. It’s not a huge problem or a major tragedy but it DOES kind of suck that unless this remake is itself an outright classic which – no, it won’t be – any discussion of GHOSTBUSTERS will now have to specify whether you mean the remake or the good one.
Now look, I’m not here to “defend” The Angry Nerd OR start some kind of debate over all this or even really to talk about his thing at all. And before somebody brings it up YES, I understand that he’s doing a “bit” and the whole “principled stand against a remake of a classic” thing feels like basically a clever promo for a what sounds like a video more about the history of the failure to make GHOSTBUSTERS 3 while it was still possible that he probably wanted to do anyway. I get it – self-promotion is the business, the business is what it is and he’s been doing it longer than almost any of us.
What I do think is worth noting is that the “discussion” that spilled out of this continues to be all about sexist assholes in fan-culture clearly being upset at this movie because they recast it with women… and the fact of that BARELY came up at all in Rolfe’s video. Now, look – full disclosure: I know this guy, not super well but we’ve worked with a lot of the same people, have done a few of the same events, I always admired his work, he’s always been a good guy to me, I have ZERO reason to believe he has some kind of issue with women and the fact that he doesn’t bring it up at all bares that out: I take him at what looks to be his word that this is about remaking classics and not about gender politics or whatever.
But what’s interesting and also depressing is… it doesn’t really MATTER, does it? The remake of GHOSTBUSTERS became a proxy battlefield for political posturing pretty-much the minute it was announced because that’s the world we live in now, and that’s always a frustrating phenomenon because it involves weighing two equally true facts against eachother – Fact #1 being that issues like feminism, progress, social-justice etc are, objectively, more important than whether or not a movie is good; but Fact #2 being that the only fair way to judge a work of art is based on its intrinsic merits and not which “side” of some bigger, more important argument its quality or lack thereof backs up.
This is partially why you haven’t heard ME really have anything substantively to say about the movie up to this point: Honestly, I was rooting for it to be good (and still hope it is even though all possible signs point to “no”) because inverting the character-genders raised a lot of genuinely interesting possibilities and almost seemed like a good enough reason to remake a classic in the first place. And as soon as the awful trailers and the awful everything else started to roll in, y’know… I felt physically sick over it because I realized what we were now in for:
The same pissed-off woman-hating assholes that ran roughshod over video-game fandom last year and this year have managed to (improbably) turn the otherwise well-intentioned Presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders (of all people!) into a fucking punchline are going to climb all over this movie sucking as ammunition for their bullshit cause, which means the GOOD people on the other side will either feel compelled to jump in and “defend” this or get sucked in otherwise because it becomes the new talking point of the moment.
And while that’s annoying on all fronts, I’m not trying to make a false equivalency here: I HATE the fact that we can’t have an honest back and forth about this or any other movie without having to think about whether or not what we say is going to get repurposed a weapon in a bullshit “culture war,” but I know who’s to blame for it – and it aint’ the so-called “SJWs.”: It’s the regressives and the trolls and fedora squad and the MRA/”meninist” right-wing internet collective that’s been banging on about this shit ever since they realized that the inexorable tide of cultural evolution is poised and ready to sweep them and their bullshit played-out reactionary worldview into the dumpster of societal-obsolesence.
Because guess what: The remakes of ROBOCOP and TOTAL RECALL *both* looked just as bad as the new GHOSTBUSTERS looks (and spoiler: they WERE exactly as awful as they looked) – but I don’t remember a year-long preemptive, pre-TRAILER hate campaign against those movies; so logically there’s obviously something else at play here – and while it’s true that Chris Hemsworth being in a movie where he’s NOT playing Thor is usually a bad sign… I kinda don’t think it’s that.
So… yeah. You think the remake of GHOSTBUSTERS looks terrible? I agree – it looks terrible. I just hope it doesn’t stop people from putting Leslie Jones Kate McKinnon in good movies because those are two funny fuckin’ people. You think it looks super-disrespectful to the legacy of one of the most important genre-comedies ever made? Yeah, I think that looks to the most-likely case. Don’t wanna watch it because of that? Fine – totally valid, you do you. But please, don’t you DARE insult either of our intelligences by trying to tell me that *most* of the super over-the-top mega-hatred that’s being trained on this project and RUINING any chance to have an honest discourse isn’t mainly coming from paranoid sexist assholes who think something is being “stolen” from them.
Egh… can we just get this over with? And by this, I mean can we just fast-forward to five years from now when we’ll be able to find out what everyone REALLY thought of this movie? P.S. Since it's relevant, my original "Really That Good" episode on the original GHOSTBUSTERS. For those wondering: RTG: "Superman: The Movie" is in-production and should be done soon, Yes, I am aware it took longer than I wanted it to. As ever, if you enjoy the work and want to encourage more, please consider The MovieBob Patreon.
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Broken record time: There are plenty of pre-modern (read: prior to BATMAN BEGINS/IRON MAN) superhero movies that absolutely hold up. Sam Raimi's SPIDER-MAN is one. The 1978 SUPERMAN is one. BATMAN RETURNS... sort of. The first two BLADE movies, definitely - I know we're only "supposed" to like BLADE II because of Guillermo del Toro, but the first one is totally serviceable.
But the X-MEN movies? No. They don't hold up. Portions of them do: McKellan's Magneto is a hell of a performance, Jackman as Wolverine was a great discovery, Patrick Stewart is... basically doing exactly what you expected, so it's fine. Zeroing in on the gay-youth metaphor was a good idea. Sort-of-nude Mystique is iconic. X2 has a decent-ish screenplay, which helps alot. But taken as a whole? Only FIRST CLASS is a straight-up good movie, and THE WOLVERINE is 2/3rds of a good B-movie. The rest of them are varying degrees of straight-up bad (ORIGINS: WOLVERINE and X3 being the worst) - aesthetically ugly, blandly directed, filler-packed half-efforts of which X2 gets a pass because it's screenplay is good enough and restricting 90% of the action to the X-Mansion, underlit hallways and... more underlit hallways helps disguise Bryan Singer's inability to properly direct action sequences or really any sequence with more than one plane of action and more than three active characters.
(SPOILERS after the jump) And look, I get it: For a moment there, this looked like the best we could've possibly hoped for, isolated scenes like Wolverine defending the Mansion and Iceman "coming out" to his parents are damn close to transcendent and seeing the Phoenix shape under the water was Nick Fury before Nick Fury. I was there, too, I understand. But I've also lived through the decade-plus hence with clear eyes, and apart from FIRST CLASS (again, the only good one) the only thing more disappointing in hindsight than the totality of the X-MEN movies is the whole idea of Bryan Singer being a major talent as opposed to an unspectacular point-and-shoot dramatist of what we used to call TV-level visual chops.
What I'm saying is: It's okay to let this series go. I understand why we cling to it, but enough is enough. Propping up this franchise in 2016 is like unironically propping up HAWK THE SLAYER after LORD OF THE RINGS.
But whatever. Thanks to DEADPOOL we're going to keep getting these now in one form or another, even as it begins to feel more and more like Fox intends to jog in place accomplishing nothing special (the next movie will apparently be set in the 90s to maintain whatever the nonsensical continuity is now) for the main series while they wait for Disney/Marvel to make them a Spidey-style shared custody offer; so it's time to watch the surviving FIRST CLASS actors team up with the new baby-faced versions of the Parts 1-3 characters whose actors have aged out of the franchise for what amounts (in terms of actual plot) to a 2 1/2 hour explanation for why Professor Xavier went bald early. Riveting.
Any pleasures to be had amid this tedium are strictly of the ironic variety. Specifically: It's enormous fun to watch poor Oscar Isaac (usually one of the most expressive and versatile actors working today) stomp around looking like a 1970s SUPER SENTAI villain in absurdly fake-looking prosthetic makeup and plastic armor (there isn't a single prop, set, costume or makeup effect in the film that doesn't look Schumacher-BATMAN-level phony) as Apocalypse, supposedly "The First Mutant" and our basis for various myths about gods and demons etc. Buried alive in Ancient Egypt, he wakes up in the alt-reality 1980s created by DAYS OF FUTURE PAST's time-travel meddling and decides that humanity has fucked up the planet so bad that he needs to blow everything up and start over as Mutant God again; so he assembles a team consisting of Storm, Angel, Magento and newbie mutant Psylocke and supercharges their powers to help him kidnap Professor X so that he can hijack his mind-powers to find and manipulate every mutant on Earth at once because that's exactly what the bad guys did in X2 and that was the last time anyone not named Matthew Vaughn made a good X-MEN movie.
Meanwhile, plot contrivances (and contractual obligations) bring Mystique (J-Law again, somehow affecting her most vacant, disinterested thousand-yard-stare yet) back to the Xavier School at the same relative time as the new Barely Legal versions of Cyclops, Jean Grey and Nightcrawler are all turning up along with still-mindwiped Moira MacTaggart, who wants help running down Apocalypse and Magneto - who's evil again because he moved to Poland and tried to start a family and just guess how that ended up. It's all just a lot of marking time until Apocalypse can show up and blow the school to smithereens, compelling Mystique to get over her resistance to heroism (young mutants now hero-worship "The Blue Woman" as a Che-style revolutionary icon that she wants no part of) and re-assemble The X-Men in order to rescue Charles and beat Apocalypse...
...but only after an insultingly-pointless, utterly unnecessary plot detour during which the main good guys are abducted by Baby General Stryker and whisked off to an underground facility exclusively so that they can bump into Hugh Jackman for about two minutes of bloodless Wolverine cameo-carnage and then promptly hurry back on their way to back to the main storyline. It's as nakedly awkward as I'm making it sound, reeks of post-production interference and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out it was all created in reshoots - and yet, somehow, Wolverine still has more actual bearing on the plot than (Arch?)Angel, Storm and Psylocke; none of whom serve even a contrived purpose since Apocalypse's big scheme is essentially: Super-Magneto destroys the world with Earthquakes.
On balance it's not quite as disastrously bad as X3 and just about even with ORIGINS: WOLVERINE in terms of enthusiastically-boneheaded stupidity, to the point where it might even be "fun" after a fashion if Singer was a better director of spectacle or had the capacity to have genuine fun within the genre. Unfortunately, APOCALYPSE has clearly been designed with the aim of aping the structure/tone of the most-recent Marvel features - read: witty banter, elaborate fight sequences, Lucky Charms color-palette, a giant climactic fight scene in the middle of basically the whole damn world exploding into pixel showers in the background - which would make for a headache-inducing clash with Singer's prevailing "sullen-Ambercrombie-models-looking-pouty" aesthetic that it likely wouldn't have looked good if he could direct it properly - which he can't.
It's honestly shocking just how bad the "big" moments of the film look, particularly a third act mega-brawl set in a blown-to-bits Cairo. Outrageously poor green-screen compositing and lighting/lensing choices seemingly designed to highlight how fake everyone looks (poor Olivia Munn looks like she's posing for an expensive-for-2002 cosplay shoot) would be forgivable with even a minimum of visual flourish, but the composite/soundstage/CGI mix is so stagey and basic that your average Sid & Marty Kroft show was overall more inventive about disguising their plate-shots. Fassbender's Magneto, hovering unconvincingly amid swirling digital chaos, looks less like a Horseman of The Apocalypse than he does a badly-dressed many giving a TED Talk about advances in particle-FX animation.
In a moment that crystallizes the "soulless xerox of an MCU entry" sensibility intrinsic to the whole enterprise, the film opts to insert it's requisite Stan Lee cameo not into the margins or a tension-relieving "funny" scene; but into one of the most (theoretically) dramatic moments possible - garaunteeing gufaws from the audience at one of the least opportune times. By the same token, since everybody (but me) made an obnoxiously big deal out of the Quicksilver slo-mo scene in DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, we get two more of them here: One of which turns what should be a big deal plot point into a jokey "Ha! I remember that 80s song!" spotfest, the other of which serves to render him so overpowered it feels pointless to have any other X-Men around - even if everyone didn't keep forgetting which powers they have until they need it for a specific beat.
The only question I end up having as all of this dull drivel winds down is whether or not having to follow one of the best recent superhero movies (CIVIL WAR) and one of the all-time worst (BATMAN V SUPERMAN) to theaters works out against the film or in its favor. I'm on record not believing in "superhero fatigue," but X-MEN: APOCALYPSE is exactly the kind of movie that under the right circumstances could get me way down in the dumps about the genre - it's not even bad enough to make for interesting "how did this abomination happen!?" discussion like BVS or FANT4STIC. There's no mystery to how pointless, uninspired fare like this get's made - or to why there'll almost certainly be more of it before we're through.
(Full Text after the jump) It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when Marvel makes a bad movie. I don’t mean as in “Hey, this isn’t as good as the first one!” or “This feels tonally at odds with the others and/or of lower stakes;” I mean an entry that actually outright kind of sucks – and I’m not counting the third season of AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. even though, yeah, Season 3 does kind of suck overall. I mean at some point, just by the law of averages, one of these things is going to outright bad… and at this point I’m curious to know what that means, because my suspicion is that the answer is “not much.”
By now the Marvel machinery works so well that comparisons to Swiss watches are no longer adequate: The studio’s output is more like the water-cycle at this point, turning hype into engagement into narrative and back into hype so efficiently that it feels fully capable of processing a failure and moving on: If DOCTOR STRANGE turns out to not be good in November whatever new slivers of worldbuilding detail it contributes to the bigger picture will still be poured over in forgiveness-generating detail until GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY 2 wins everyone back in May with SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING batting cleanup in July. Whenever the subject of “superhero fatigue” comes up, I continue to maintain that the I’m-tired-of-this/lets-take-a-break/oh-hey-a-new-one-I’m-reminded-why-I-like-this cycle that used to be a years-long process for genre movies now takes mere months and happened for Marvel in the brief interlude between AGE OF ULTRON and ANT-MAN.
I bring this up because among the surprises to be found in CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR is just how leisurely and self-assured it feels about its own existence. Despite the sensationalism of its basic setup (Friends becomes enemies! Superhero civics debate! The End of The Avengers!?) and the frenetic pace of its narrative, in terms of tone and self-regard it’s the most “lived-in” feeling blockbuster in recent memory – capable of thrilling and confidently carrying a two or three of the most satisfying setpieces the genre has ever managed to deliver up its sleeve like an emergency mood-booster, but secure to an almost zen-like state that A.) it has the goods and B.) even if it doesn’t have quite the goods it thinks it does, we’re not going to “turn” on the MCU now.
The result is that, while it could well be (on balance) the best Marvel movie since THE AVENGERS (and a more fitting thematic follow-up to that feature than its own sequel by a substantial measure) it’s also among the most deliberately-plotted and “comfy” installments in whole Marvel mega-franchise – the action movie equivalent of a hit TV show wheeling out the big guns for sweeps week secure (along with the audience) in the awareness that there’s still plenty of episodes to go before the finale.
That should be bizarre, given that the entire plot of the film is about (literally) blowing the status quo of the MCU’s central narrative hub to smithereens, but it makes sense given the degree of investment expected of the audience for all that “blowing up” to matter: We care because we love these characters and their world, we love these characters and their world because we’ve gotten to know them over more than a dozen prior films, because we love them and their world we know there will be many dozens of films to come – so, for a change, even though the action is big as ever the actual stakes are comparatively small and intimate: The world doesn’t need to be ending and it’s pointless to pretend that the MCU storyline could “finish” here, so instead lets enjoy watching our favorite characters work out some issues, develop some new dimensions and occasionally set off some new fireworks. In fact, without giving too much away, this is the first film in awhile where the mystery of what’s “really” driving an escalating series of small, personal grievances turns out to be… A smaller, even more personal grievance.
The plot you already know from the ubiquitous trailers: Something goes wrong during a routine Avengers mission that leads to collateral damage and takes the already faded bloom off the rose of having superheroes running around unchecked with enough of the global public that the U.N. steps in to force Captain America and company to become a regulated outfit. Some say yes, others say no, Cap’s “no” becomes more emphatic when a terrorist strike during the signing of the new deal is blamed on The Winter Soldier – aka Cap’s brainwashed ex-HYDRA cyborg assassin bestie Bucky Barnes – and he (after being convinced of his friend is innocent and something more sinister is afoot) goes rogue to hunt for the real culprit. Complicating matters further, one of the U.N. signatories killed in the attack was the King of the secretive African nation of Wakanda; whose son has now donned the ceremonial battle-armor of The Black Panther in order to hunt down and kill The Winter Soldier himself.
The big question mark hovering over the film from the beginning has been whether or not this was the point where the overriding commitment to a shared universe would overwhelm the individual storyline: Sure, it’s nice to see the cast hanging around and not having to wonder where all the other heroes went during a solo movie; but are we getting the “lite” version of an AVENGERS sequel at the expense of a CAPTAIN AMERICA movie?
Luckily, the answer turns out to be… it can be both: This is definitely CAPTAIN AMERICA 3 – and, more importantly, the direct continuation of the WINTER SOLDIER storyline – but since Captain America LIVES in Avengers Headquarters and the other Avengers comprise about 99% of his known social circle it really can’t help but also be an AVENGERS movie. And with that aforementioned leisurely confidence in place, CIVIL WAR wisely opts to take some of that well-earned audience goodwill and spend it on fleshing-out the character stuff that’s been driving these movies from the beginning: So Vision and Scarlet Witch get some character development, Falcon and War Machine get to voice their opinions about the way their more prominent allies conduct business, Black Widow gets to be morally-complicated on a more than superficial level… hell, Black Panther get’s an entire introductory character arc two years in advance of his own movie!
(Seriously – I’m really curious what the BLACK PANTHER movie is going to be about now that a version of the story you’d kind of expect them to tell in the first BLACK PANTHER movie has now already been told in background of this one.)
And yes – especially in the second act – it does start to feel like the proper AVENGERS sequel that AGE OF ULTRON never quite managed to be, if for no other reason than it’s as strongly a movie about a team falling apart as that first film was about a team coming together. But once the plot heads into its conclusion and the full scope and purpose of the narrative is laid bare, it becomes extremely clear that CIVIL WAR is fundamentally Captain America’s movie above all else – in as much as the thematic core is all about the push-pull of doing what you want emotionally versus doing what’s right and he’s the Avenger that embodies that inner conflict moreso than anyone else in the franchise.
The narrative arc they wring out of that, where it’s completely understandable that the other characters are more than a little skeptical that Cap’s thinking clearly when he decides to basically fight the entire rest of the world in order to clear his friend’s name, is legitimately fascinating to watch play out in such surprisingly complex terms; and instead of hogging the spotlight as many had feared Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man turns out to be a perfectly-chosen mirror-opposite to the same arc: Sure, he seems to be doing what he thinks is right; but it’s also clear that retirement not really working out and no longer having any Avenging to fall back on is letting his personal demons consume him all over again. And the dynamics at play that allow the pair to maintain their ideological “sides” while gradually trading places in terms of the attitude is a such a strange but interesting way to construct an emotional narrative I can’t help but admire it.
The strength of all that heart-on-sleeve operatic emotionality is why I’m having a hard time settling on whether or not this or WINTER SOLDIER is actually the better movie. It’d be hard to argue that SOLDIER was the more rigidly coherent and polished work in terms of structure, but CIVIL WAR is substantially more satisfying from a “pure cinema” perspective: There are some pretty hard to ignore logical leaps a play – mainly in that the entire scenario hinges on someone being able to both manipulate and predict the exact actions of dozens of individuals and entire national governments without really explaining how said someone was able to do – so but the payoff is SO strong and hits SO hard it’s genuinely hard to care… and also, yeah, because it’s a Marvel movie and by now we’ve all been trained to give that sort of thing the benefit of the doubt since three movies from now it’ll probably turn he had a magic rock or something.
But yeah – it’s a superhero movie, but it’s practically structured like the macho-melodrama version of a MARX BROS comedy: The storyline is “there” but it’s largely incidental to the true purpose of creating scenarios for the characters to literally figuratively “bounce off” of one another: So if it’ll help remind everyone just how natural it is for people in this universe trip over themselves for the chance to fight alongside Captain America and having Ant-Man show up will do that? Then you do that. And if it’ll add some necessary complexity to Tony Stark’s storyline to have him help out an underprivileged teenager and that gives you an opportunity to introduce Spider-Man to everybody? Then you do that, too. And that means you’ve got two more dynamic characters for a big show-stopping end of Act 2 blowout where everyone vents their long-simmering frustrations with one another and since they’re all varying degrees of super-powered godlings it escalates into one of the most ridiculous yet amazing action sequences ever put to film – and yes, it’s as awesome and worth the price all on its own as you’ve heard.
But however cool it all is, what sticks around and satisfies about CIVIL WAR is the emotion-driven character work that the action scenes ultimately exist to facilitate and underline – which is why it’s hard to find fault with the actual plot being kind of a superfluous shell game: By the time the big all-cards-on-the-table finale has rolled around we find – even as the mysteries have all been solved, the cause of the superhero Civil War has been identified and the narrative reasons behind the fighting have ceased – the fighting isn’t over because the dark secrets, deep-seated character flaws and furious emotional pain involved have transcended the plot-mechanics that brought them to the surface in the first place; and sometimes things like that don’t just “go away” because the inciting disaster has averted. When was the last time that was the moral of a “serious” or “grownup” movie – let alone a movie where freakin’ Ant-Man is a featured player?
And what’s most impressive of all, from a broader cultural standpoint, is that while it’s a given that the smug set will be all too happy to hand CIVIL WAR the backhanded compliment of having accomplished all this “in spite of being just another Marvel movie;” the fact is the weird, risky, offbeat, atypical stuff that makes the film work is largely only possible because Marvel has created a cultural zeitgeist for CIVIL WAR to inhabit. You simply couldn’t have a character-driven movie in this genre with this dense of an emotional narrative if so much work hadn’t already been done establishing these characters and their world in the first place: What starts as a geopolitical conflict of high-minded hypotheticals narrows down into an extended-family schism among a dozen or so ideological standard bearers and then compresses all the way down to an intensely personal brawl where it’s genuinely, viscerally difficult to root completely for (or against) either side.
That’s an impressive feat of storytelling in any genre; and while I’m not 100% convinced that CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR is itself the best film the Marvel Cinematic Universe has produced, it’s far and away the best example of why it was worth constructing in the first place – and why it’s not going anywhere any time soon.
P.S. In case you were wondering: Tom Holland is fantastic… but I feel like Tobey Maguire is still going to be the best Spider-Man. That being said, I’m increasingly of the mind that the Sam Raimi SPIDER-MAN probably needs to go on the shelf with the Richard Donner SUPERMAN i.e. “Yes, these will never be equaled and you can’t keep marking down every subsequent attempt for not living up to unattainable miracles.” The new SPIDER-MAN works and I think HOMECOMING is in good hands.
Hey! Did you notice I've been a little quiet on this website the last few weeks? Well, it's because big things* have been in the works. Two of which can now be read up on ScreenRant:
A CHRONOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE: Sure, you've probably read through the "which order to watch the Marvel Movies in" lists, and you've probably done your refresher-course work to get ready for CIVIL WAR (review forthcoming, incidentally) - but have you ever wanted to be able to look at a chronological breakdown of every event depicted in the MCU movies starting with the beginning of the Universe (as in The Big Bang) right up to this very week, including the events of the Netflix series and AGENTS OF S.H.I.EL.D.? Well, now you can. The (tentative) plan is to update it as new information becomes available, so bookmark it now if you want to - either way, enjoy!
*Yes, the long-awaited REALLY THAT GOOD: SUPERMAN is in fact one of those big things. It's on the way, and I thank you for your patience. As ever, both speeding me up and keeping me afloat period are functions of The MovieBob Patreon :)
"The Team" has been teased as "the one you've been waiting for," since it's plot supposedly involves finally giving the Secret Warriors (i.e. Daisy and the handful of good-guy Inhumans we've met so far this season) a full-fledged mission; in this case to rescue the rest of the cast from being held captive by Hive and Giyera. The sequence where this actually happens is pretty impressive, with the standout business being the chemistry between Yoyo and Joey, even if it does serve to highlight that giving AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D its own mini-Avengers to play with only highlights how much of an also-ran the series feels like in its lesser moments.
But whatever, it's actually a tiny part of the episode, is over quickly and the entire Secret Warriors storyline more or less goes "That's it, next thing!" by midpoint. Gotcha! No, really. Once the rescue is done and the team is back at S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ with a willingly-captured Mallick (he wants to team up and fight Hive now to get revenge for his daughter), "The Team" more or less tips its hand and reveals the Secret Warriors' big debut was basically misdirection for the episode's true intent: A low-tech redux of THE THING.
Short version: Mallick tells Coulson about Hive's ability to mind-control Inhumans, so all the non-Inhuman Agents get paranoid and decide they have to covertly lock down the base and try to figure out if any of their allies are infected without telling them. Naturally, this doesn't work and soon enough The Inhumans are in quarantine (Daisy betrays them to her teammates) and now nobody trusts eachother - especially since, in all the confusion, someone killed Mallick. For a moment, it even feels like they've found the infectee... but it turns out they figured wrong, and the episode concludes on the now evil former good guy poised to potentially destroy HQ with everyone inside.
So who's the baddie? Daisy, duh - who else was it going to be?
In truth, this is a pretty damn good episode up to that point. The quandry makes sense, the two Spanish-speaking Secret Warriors are great characters whose actors have a killer rapport, everyone's actions make complete sense and there's a palpable sense of loss to the idea of these people ceasing to trust one another even though there wasn't any other choice to be had. Hell, on paper Daisy being Hive's unwitting sleeper even makes total dramatic sense in as much as it leaves the team in the worst possible situation: The Agents and The Inhumans will have to put their mutual distrust aside to stop this, and the only teammate who truly lives in both worlds has been removed from the equation.
And yet, frustratingly, that also means AGENT OF S.H.I.E.L.D once again going back to the two wells that have become the most tiresome: The tendency of every damn storyline to lead back to Daisy and "Skye/Ward," a pairing that wasn't interesting when they where both human and is unlikely to be interesting now.
I don't know. I'm trying to work out how this wraps up interestingly short of "death of a main character" or "unlikely actual reprecussions from CIVIL WAR" and the options feel pretty limited at this point. Daisy being "evil" for awhile, the turning out Hive because Coulson/May/Lincoln/whoever somehow gets through to her just feels like a retread of places we already went at the climax of Season 2 but not as good. Supposedly the "Fallen Agent" storyline is going to be stretched out over a 4 episode arc ("The Singularity," "Failed Experiments," "Emancipation" and "Forgiven") with CIVIL WAR happening in the middle, with the season finale "Ascension" hitting one episode later.
I guess we'll see, especially considering Season 4 is already greenlit.
In the wake of some much needed diversion from formula in last week's offbeat future-seeing episode, "Paradise Lost" gets us back to AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. Classic Recipe: a lot of low-tech-playing-high-tech diversions with the promise of later payoffs, capped off by a last-minute swerve and (for good measure) someone slamming their fist on the big red button marked Major Plot Point with enough flourish to almost make it feel like an earned moment as opposed to "Hey! The writers have just been informed of how CIVIL WAR shakes out." Spoilers after the jump... To recap: Everyone is finally on the same page re: Hive, the ancient Inhuman HYDRA apparently worships as a god is on Earth wearing a Grant Ward skinsuit and building an ill-defined evil scheme involving his fellow Inhumans, but now things are complicated further by good guy Daisy and bad guy Gideon Malick both having experienced flash-forwards involving death last episode.
For a change, the main story this time is mainly about developing the villains; as we learn Hive's back story (short version: he was the Mark I Inhumans' General Zod, a genetically-engineered military mastermind who led the Inhuman rebellion against the Kree but then went mad with power and got himself exiled offworld) and get some background on Malick and HYDRA - though fans hoping that it might make AGENTS' conception of the secret supervillain society make more sense are out of luck. But, then again, if "make more sense" is really high on your list of priorities for AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D., chances are you checked out of Season 3 awhile ago.
We here learn (courtesy flashbacks to a college age Gideon and his brother uneasily taking the reigns of the family business after the death of their father) that while all of HYDRA is aware of their Hive-worshipper origins, not everyone is still fully onboard. The Mallicks belong to the old school "draw lots to see who gets sacrificed to Hive" sect, while Red Skull and Daniel Whitehall's Nazi-aligned faction were less devout about it and who knows what the S.H.I.E.L.D-infiltrating cats were on about. With a little extra push, this would all be a brilliant satire of how monumentally stupid the entire Illuminati/Bilderberger/Rothschild/Trilateral/"Bankster" globalist-conspiracy theory bullshit is when you lay it all out; but sadly AGENTS' usually admirable resistance to self-parody won't quite let it.
In any case: We glean this as Mallick, while waiting for HYDRA bigwigs to arrive for a fancy dinner in Hive's honor at his estate (while also scheming to avoid a prophecized death he believes will occur at his god's hands) recalls how Whitehall tempted he and his brother being tempted to the dark(er?) side by Whitehall, who reveals that Papa Mallick rose to power by gaming his participation in the lot-drawing ceremonies with a marked stone. The brothers resolved to reclaim the family honor by holding a fair-and-square drawing, and if you're noticing that this is the first time we've ever heard that Mallick had a brother you know where that's going.
Fortunately, most of that predictability pays off decently in terms of what however much of the other Mallick remains in Hive thinks of as karmic payback, and the whole thing has an appropriately lurid "70s pulp-Satanism" vibe; but there's no avoiding that AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. has fallen too much in love with its own penchant for misdirection: We can see it coming by now.
Elsewhere, the B-story is all about Coulson and the non-Inhuman Agents breaking into a factory acquired by Mallick in order to set up either the cause or solution to whatever Hive's big plan is. Finally getting to see Coulson start to lose it at the revelation that not only was murdering Ward against his own code but the direct cause of Hive being able to reach Earth is nice; but otherwise it's a bit of a snooze. Even the promised one-on-one fight between May and Giyera (Mark Dacascos) feels obligatory - c'mom guys! Dacascos and Ming-Na Wen are both legit icons of B-movie action, this is (literally!) Chun-Li vs Billy Lee... have some fun with it!
But whatever. The whole thing is really only happening so Giyera can be captured, taken back to S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ and escape, leaving the conveniently off-site Daisy and Lincoln to decide that *NOW* is the time to call in the Secret Warriors reserve-troops... as opposed to the several other times where the stakes have been at exactly the same height. The problem is, while Dacascos has screen-presence to burn, the show has been too indecisive about Giyera's role for him to suddenly be an all-stops threat now; so it all feels too obvious that the only real reason for the Warriors to go into action now is because AGENTS' needs a team of powered-pepole to show up and have their actions be misunderstood so that the plot can sort-of sync up with CIVIL WAR.
Amusingly, the C-story that serves to keep Daisy and Pikachu safe enough to push the Plot Button is actually more interesting: They go to seek out an Inhuman survivalist in Australia who once burgled information about Hive's back story from Afterlife, but the hook is that he's one of the Inhumans from whom Jaiying ultimately denied Terrigenisis because... he's a douchebag, I think? It sets up a novel bit of conflict where Lincoln baits him with Terrigen in order to grab a mysterious orb-like relic he'd stolen from Jaiying, but ultimately refuses him powers because he agrees with whatever their ex-leader's reasoning was. It's here that we get more information about Lincoln: He caused his girlfriend's death in a drunk driving accident shortly before The Inhumans found him.
This all feels like so much further setup for Daisy and Lincoln to be on opposite sides when AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D's version of the CIVIL WAR schism hits; but it plays out a lot more naturally than he Giyera story and I hope Australian Guy is a recurring character - especially if he turns out to be C-list SPIDER-MAN nemesis "The Kangaroo," whose power set includes jumping very high and being from Australia.
As for the orb? No idea. It looks like something halfway relates to the Infinity Stone vessel from GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY but covered with designs that look more than a little DOCTOR STRANGE-y; but at this point the safest bet is that they hadn't fully committed to what it is or does when they (the show) designed it, so it looks like a lot of things to cover all bases.
NEXT WEEK: In "The Team," The Secret Warriors get their buildup over with, at last, and someone turns out to be bad maybe. Personally, I'm hoping for Sexy Evil Simmons Who's Been Part Hive All Along; if only to spare us the predictable arc of Fitz and Simmons being on opposite sides of CIVIL WAR LITE:
ALSO: The show loves the hell out of Hive reducing his victims to skeletons, and Mallick's vision only shows him being partially zapped, so I'm renewing my old guess that he somehow winds up as Red Skull 2.0
HARDCORE HENRY is the sort of gleefully violent sensory-assault moviemaking that critics sometimes like to say feels "made by a madman," but in overall execution it's just a hair too deliberately-structured and well made for that to be a fair assessment. All told, the film is much closer to a (slightly) more polished version of a student film handed in by the class troublemaker; a show-off reel of every wicked, dangerous, inventive, perverse creative impulse they've got all in one go-for-broke splatter of imagination - as though they can't believe someone finally let them play with the camera and they know it has to count because they'll never be allowed to play with it again.
The results of such work are often tiresome, but at their best they offer a window into a unique, unrestrained vision. Like a lot of present-day art-school anarchists, director Ilya Naishuller's vision is one thoroughly cluttered with the influence of YouTube parkour and the video-game aesthetic; but also one with an awareness (however nascent) of those influences beyond mere imitation.
MILD SPOILERS from here onward:
Set (I think?) in the near-future, its protagonist is a recently injured (dead?) man named Henry who’s just been Frankensteined back to life by his lovely super-scientist wife Estelle using technology that’s effectively made him a cyborg – complete with a titanium skeleton, onboard battery and a superhuman endurance for pain. It’s also, supposedly temporarily, left him without any memories and unable to speak, allowing the film the cheeky trick of letting its protagonist not only take the audience along for his adventure in video-game inspired First Person view but also to embody modern gaming’s favorite brand of protagonist: The mute, backstory-free, superhuman bullet-sponge cipher.
When Estelle winds up kidnapped (because video games, you see) by Akan, a telekinetic supervillain (because video games, you see) who wants her to make him a whole army of undead cyborgs (because v… you get the idea), Henry sets off to save her – aided in his quest by Sharlto Copley’s mysterious Jimmy, a living parody of NPCs who wanders in and out of the story to hand Henry his mission objectives… even as he’s repeatedly killed off, only to return with a costume change and a new personality.
There's eventually a suitably high-concept explanation as to what's going on with Jimmy that adds a welcome note of poignancy to all the gorehound fireworks that make up the rest of the film (in terms of creative bloodshed, HARDCORE HENRY makes DEADPOOL look like the kiddie-pool), but like most of the film's reaches into science-fiction it feels less driven by narrative than by reverse engineering: "What sci-fi concept do we need to invent to have this bit of common video-game nonsense happen in the real world?" At one point, Henry even "powers up" by ripping a piece of combat-enhancing hardware out of a foes chest and graphically self-installing it into his own body like Mega Man as reimagined by David Cronenberg.
And make no mistake: While fans of extreme action-comedy in general will likely find plenty to enjoy in the film (the sheer number of new ways it finds for Henry to shoot, stab, slice, crush, bludgeon, bisect or even tri-sect the human body is something to behold) the places where Hardcore Henry becomes something like transcendent will land strongest with gamers. They're the ones who'll cue in on the specifics when Henry's mission objective takes him on a wholly gratuitous tour of a strip club a'la Duke Nukem, or when a gaggle of oddly-unperturbed sex-workers reason out a somewhat counter-intuitive method for recharging the weary hero's energy reserves (well, if it works for Kratos...) and will note the precise moment when the lengthy final confrontation with Akan (who already appears to have leaped, fully-formed, from a METAL GEAR SOLID sequel) switches from being the climax of a movie to a Boss Fight. If you're looking for the gamers in your screening, they'll be the ones already cheering when Henry kicks open a luckily-discovered first aid kit (yup!) filled with syringes conveniently-labeled "ADRENALINE" before Freddie Mercury's vocals come sneaking in on the soundtrack.
It might be a step too far to call it “satire” of modern gaming, but it's definitely a send-up; bursting at its (admittedly roughly-stitched) seams with the same love/hate exuberance about video games that REN & STIMPY had for classic TV cartoons - or that METALOCALYPSE had for heavy metal. It's not necessarily a condemnation of the fantasy of inhabiting a video game (or of being a game hero in real life), but it recognizes that either option would be more comic than dramatic - even as it chooses to revel in the "fun parts" anyway: It knows enough to pause for a laugh when a pair of Jimmy's allies showing up as leggy katana-wielding blondes in black vinyl catsuits, but you're still getting leggy katana-wielding blondes in black vinyl catsuits.
Fortunately, it's also got a few things on its mind about the medium beyond just hanging a lampshade on its own inherent silliness as an excuse to just keep doing it (though, yes, that's most of it - this is a science fair volcano, not a geology thesis.) The aforementioned reveal of what, exactly, the deal is with Jimmy is the start of a string of Act 3 story turns that aren't exactly unpredictable but arrive welcome all the same; retroactively infusing the preceding story (such as it is) with a vein of self-examination that should be familiar to gaming fans who've already taken their swings at the medium's emerging canon of self-critical works like THE STANLEY PARABLE, PORTAL, BRAID and SPEC OPS: THE LINE. It's the latter (a seemingly-conventional military shooter than gradually morphs into an apocalyptic denunciation of CALL OF DUTY-era narrative structure) with which Henry's final denoument has the most in common - though the film is aiming less for condemnation than it is for "a swift kick in the ass” when it comes to the games medium itself.
At the beginning I referred to Henry himself as a kind of Frankenstein monsters, and so it’s appropriate that to the degree that HARDCORE HENRY wants to be "about" anything it's about what a creation owes its creator and the very idea of identity and one's choice in their own story. As the film races into its own climax (like any great video game there's a castle to climb, a last wave of enemies to cut down and a Big Boss whose defeat requires every skill you've acquired) its central narrative question ceases to be whether or not Henry will save the princess and instead becomes who (or what) is really in charge of the hero's destiny: Estelle, who "made" him and now requires the very services she installed? Akan, who started the story and drove the narrative? Jimmy, who set the goals and walked him through the missions? Or is Henry the one with his hand on the (figurative) joystick - and if not, shouldn't he be?
Granted, it feels dubious to suggest that anything as enthusiastically frivolous as HARDCORE HENRY is really attempting some sort of existential statement. But a self-consciously blunt highlight reel of live-action video game homage turns out to be an amusingly insightful way to tweak narrative convention, even if a wicked final twist that lays all the self-examination bare could just as easily exist solely for Naishuller's mischievous little boy instincts to indulge in vandalizing gaming's most sanctified narrative device. But it can’t be avoided that video games - the type being referenced here, at least - live and die by their ability to give the player a cathartic fantasy of omnipotent power and absolute control precisely by limiting their options ("you can interact with anything so long as 'interact' means shoot-with-your-gun'") and locking in their goals: Go to X, kill Y, obtain Z, do it again, the box says you're the hero and the cutscene says this end goal is very important to you. Nor can it be avoided that applying that kind of setup to live-action humans can’t help but push all of the ever-familiar choice/fate quandaries right back up to the surface of a movie that’s already very proud of almost everything being on the surface.
And so as HARDCORE HENRY’S eponymous protagonist struggles bloodily to his feet at the midpoint of a particularly gruesome climactic battle, suddenly awash in questions about exactly what he's done (and has been prepared to do) because this or that person handed him a task and told him what an awesome badass he was whenever executed the correct sequence of actions; it's hard not to reflect (if just for a moment) on how much that same quietly-insidious method of incentive exists outside of video games or their action-movie tributes - whether the "goal" in question is fighting a war, going through the motions of schoolwork (or an office job) or just getting through the day in one piece. As thematic underpinnings go, "who's pulling your strings?" may not be the most original question for a movie to ask, but it's certainly something to think about...
...for however long until it's time to strangle a bad guy to death with the sinews of one's own detached eyeball, course.
Another week, another "just fine" Season 3 episode that makes for a good watch but continues to feel like we're running out of time to arrive somewhere more interesting by the finale, with the broader Inhumans storyline once again being waylaid for a chance at using the surprise-superpower gimmick as a way to get back into the monster of the week business that made so much of Season 1 so tiresome. Still, the idea this time is a novel one and the episode itself has some above-average direction, so call it a win.
Anyway... The "Inhuman of The Week" this time around is a homeless guy with a variation on the DEAD ZONE power: He touches you, and you both get a premonition of witnessing someone's death. That feels a little bit specific, sure, but trying reasoning out how Peter Parker got only those specific vague abilities of a spider sometime - spider's don't even have a "sense," they know what's coming because they've got lots of eyes and crazy-sensitive body hair.
But whatever. Circumstances contrive that Daisy and company show up to try and stop HYDRA from collecting the guy, only to not simply lose him to the bad guys but for Daisy to get hit with a premonition that appears to depict (among other things) Lincoln getting a beat-down, Fitz/Simmons standing inexplicably in a snowfall, Coulson shooting her - possibly to death - and May somehow not being involved in any of this.
This sets up the interesting part of the episode, wherein the Agents try to change the future by using Daisy's vision to pre-plan their strategy (up to an including leaving the should-be participants off the mission entirely) while Fitz argues that it's impossible by way of fourth-dimensional thinking. It's a time-killer, as the first half of "change the future" stories often are (no prizes for guessing that May ends up not going after all because Lash business comes up) but the execution is charming in that low-tech AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. kind of way and it does set up a nifty-looking one-take fight scene for Chloe Bennett.
Also, a "of the week" stories go, the situation for the homeless Inhuman is pretty affecting: A suburban dad whose life has been completely ruined by his ability and is running away from accidentally giving his loved ones (or anyone) unwanted death-visions. For a change, it even makes sense for HYDRA to be spending resources to acquire him, since Hive/Ward finds an immediate practical use for his powers - and the fact that a final touch from Daisy gives her a slightly longer vision of the "bloody spaceship" dream from the beginning of this half of the season certainly makes things (theoretically) interesting.
The B-story, though (C-story is May and Andrew finally having it out as he prepares to transform into Lash for what he's pretty sure will be the last time) is sort of a snooze: Hive/Ward makes Mallick buy a company that makes powered-armor, mostly so we can get fun scenes of Powers Boothe throwing people and things around wearing what sort-of looks like a 90s X-Files prop; but it very clearly all about setting things up for Mallick (who got a death-vision of his own) to have a "What have I done?" moment between now and the finale. Also, everyone is now on the same page re: "Hive is running HYDRA and looks like Ward now," so that should speed things along.
One thing to note: The TERMINATOR exchange between Lincoln and Coulson ("I've actually never seen the original." "...You're fired.") was cute, and it's interesting to see two episodes in a row based on establishing rapport between these two characters. Yes, the writers seem to be in "try out new pairings" mode lately (see also: May and Simmons, sure to be exacerbated now that Lash is on ice and the "cure" might be a thing.)
NEXT WEEK: Somehow, Daniel Whitehall is back for "Paradise Lost," which is also supposedly going to give us some backstory on Mallick presumably related to whatever he saw in his vision. It also looks like we'll get a look at what Hive "really" looks like, so put me down for hoping for another big rubbery monster to wrestle with Lash at some point.
The MovieBob Anthology, the eBook series collecting the best of my work writing about film, video games, television and pop-culture over the last decade, is now available for purchase on your Amazon Kindle! Here's a search-query that brings up the lot of them, hit the jump for individual links.
Okay, since this basically concludes the list of major platforms the book is now available in, I'm going to post all the links for each individual title. If it makes a difference to your purchase, I get the highest profit from ePub-format versions purchased directly from Lulu.com. However, the difference is fairly minor, so by all means please purchase based on your format of choice:
AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D's third season has felt the most disconnected from the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not necessarily because it's had fewer tie-ins (it's about even with usual, so far) but because the series has doubled-down so much on its own mythology (the Inhumans, HYDRA's "secret origins," Maveth/Hive) that it's largely traded in its previously-ubiquitous references to the bigger events being depicted in the MCU films for references to bigger events that aren't being depicted anywhere - which leaves things feeling a touch on the awkward side.
Case in point, the last two episodes have been all about the supposedly global-scale panic being caused by the continuing emergence of new Inhumans; which we're assured is happening largely through news reports and regular cast members talking about it - some of which is cleverly staged but most of which has had the effect of making it seem like the series is rushing to establish that "No, really, it's suddenly a really big problem" in order to hit a crossover-point with CIVIL WAR.
Anyway... PARTING SHOT: Not much to be said here, other than that it's a pretty solid episode hurt a bit by its need to function as a backdoor pilot for the MOST WANTED spin-off. The basic caper stuff all works, and the one-off (I think?) Inhuman villain who can control his own shadow is a fun effect, but the big "emotional" goodbye for Hunter and Mockingbird I never quite bought.
One infrequent weakness of the series "one foot in fantasy" approach to its spy-games storytelling is that problems seem to become untenable because they need to without much real consistency: Given that Coulson has already parachuted into a portal to another planet on a whim this season, it feels contrived that, now that we need these two characters to leave for another show, he suddenly arrives at a paperwork problem (Hunter and Bobbi, framed for an attempt on the Russian Prime Minister's life, can either end their tenure as field agents or disappear into the wind) that he doesn't have a gadget or an owed-favor for fixing.
The "spy's goodbye" business at the end was a good scene, a testament to how far the cast has come as performers (and, maybe, a tease at the supposedly more oldschool-espionage flavor to be expected of MOST WANTED?); but it breaks down once you remember that the two central players being payed final respects to aren't even members of the original cast, have only been around for a season and half and for about 1/3 of that time we thought at least one of them might be a villain.
WATCHDOGS: So, here's the thing about me and the Mutants/X-Men thing: My favorite aspect about the whole "superpowers-as-minority" thing is the part that's the most bullshit when you get right down to it.
For all the platitudes about how it's an MLK/Malcom thing, adding powers basically makes it into Objectivism by proxy i.e. an inferior majority of normals trying to hold back the self-realization of their betters either out of jealousy or because they fear the upheaval that the presence of superior leaps-forward are bound to bring - and like Objectivism, it's equal appealing (if you fancy yourself marginalized because of your not-just-different-but-better-ness) and appalling (if you're in touch with you basic humanity.) "Watchdogs" is AGENTS' slow-build for The Inhumans as the MCU-brand Mutants getting to part where this becomes explicit, which means I dig it but then grumble at myself during the commercial breaks.
As the title implies, it's an intro-episode for the MCU version of The Watchdogs. In the comics, they're an ultra-conservative right-wing militia outfit who figured prominently in the "Captain America: No More" storyline, so it makes sense they'd show up now reconfigured as the militarized arm of the growing anti-alien/superhuman movement that's expected to drive the plot in CIVIL WAR. In an amusing bit of writing, their new origin is being "Alt-Right" (read: wannabe neo-nazi dorks who know they'd get their asses kicked by legit skinheads) internet trolls who've been outfitted with military-grade hardware by outside benefactors - so, GamerGaters who do their own SWATing, basically. Clever.
In the comics, the Watchdogs turned out to be unwitting pawns of The Red Skull. Here, the top-baddie at first seems to be Titus Welliver's returning Agent Blake; who's hacked-off about being permanently injured by Deathlok in Season 1. I like that turn, but the secondary reveal that he himself is being jerked-around by HYDRA (so bad Inhumans using Inhuman haters to kill good Inhumans) feels like twist-overkill.
Anyway, their presence in the episode-proper is mostly about laying out foundation and establishing connections (they've got their hands on "Nitramine," the implosion-bomb tech from the first season of AGENT CARTER); wrapped around a story about Mack being interrupted while trying to hang out with his brother on his weekend off - and yes, they do both the "family member who has no idea I'm a spy" angle and the "family member is angry about issue I'm on the other side of professionally" angle. As checklist cliches go, they work well enough.
More interesting is the non-worldbuilding C-story about Simmons wanting to learn how to do more active Agent stuff because she's got survivor's guilt about how often she has to get saved. Nice bit of lampshade hanging, and it looks to be leading into a May/Simmons thread which should be interesting for a few episodes (at this point I feel like the writers are making a lot of decisions based alternately on "Who hasn't had any extended interaction yet?" and "Who would Tumblr most like to pretend is fucking?" - not sure which this would be.
We also get to see the seeds being planted of what will, presumably, be AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D's side-contribution to CIVIL WAR, with Daisy getting impatient about anti-Inhuman bigotry and getting big into using her powers (and S.H.I.E.L.D. backup) to knock around and threaten the Watchdogs while other Agents want to be more conciliatory and understand the other side... we've all seen/read an X-MEN story at least once so you get where that's heading, especially since they've already got an "Inhuman cure" plot thread cooking in the background. My question: If we're going to do "Daisy almost goes rogue because S.H.I.E.L.D won't let her be militant enough," do they pull the trigger on bringing Jaiying back in some way?
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Transcript Below: I’m an unapologetic proponent of the superhero movie. The genre has yielded enough genuinely great works during its relatively brief run at the pinnacle of international popular-culture so as to forgive a lot of its missteps, and I firmly believe that it offers tremendous artistic and cultural value to those who would take advantage of it: Superheroes can make us laugh, give us catharsis, embody our fantasies, challenge our perceptions and give mythic weight to political metaphor.
Sadly, they can also be stupid, ugly, wrongheaded, intellectually-offensive and boring… and sometimes, they can be all that and more; and you wind up with a movie like BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE – a malignant, puss-bleeding cancer on the ass of its own genre. I’m sitting here trying to decide where to even start this one, guys. DAWN OF JUSTICE is a terrible movie – I literally cannot recall the last time I was so shaken (literally shaking with rage!) at the climax of something I should hypothetically have liked since the first TRANSFORMERS movie. It’s bad on a level that would seem to defy even the worst vulgarity to mete out a proper condemnation; the kind of bad that begs to be conveyed by frantic vaudevillian sputters, a futile flailing of the arms and a stream of old-timey white profanity: I am agog at it’s awfulness. Flabbergasted by the depths of its failings.
Billed as 2 ½ solid hours of Universe-building DC Comics fanservice, the resulting film plays more like a “Producers Gambit” gone sentient and homicidal: If it were to come out tomorrow that a billionaire philanthropist with a pathological hatred of the superhero genre spent $400 Million to create a perfect embodiment of every negative prediction the old-guard film press ever made about the apocalyptic influence of comic book movies that would suck hard and swallow deep enough to choke to death and take the entire genre down with it... not only would I believe you, it would be more plausible than the actual plot of the film; which attempts to build a foundation for a prospective slate of features to rival the Marvel Cinematic Universe by smooshing together the plots of the two most overrated DC stories of the last 30 years.
And when it comes to this rectum-puckering garbage fire of a story, for once, I legitimately believe it when Snyder says the R-rated Blu-ray director’s cut absolutely needs to be at least 3 hours long, because at 2 ½ hours the theatrical cut has so clearly been hacked to the fucking bone the first and second acts occasionally feel like an exercise in seeing how many different locations in a row you can cut to without using any establishing shots. I’d compare it’s baffling lack of structure and complete disinterest in having a single character behave with adherence to any basic outline of rhyme or reason to the plotting of bad pornography but even bad pornography tends to at least fade in on whichever San Fernando Valley McMansion the gangbang will eventually take place in.
Speaking of pornography – though, to be honest, I can’t imagine any psychological healthy soul being able to pleasure themselves to anything happening onscreen in this clusterfuck (unless of course they’ve got money invested in CIVIL WAR…) - once the two solid hours of relentlessly tedious setup for a plot that somehow manages to be at once overcomplicated yet so simplistic it wouldn’t pass story-time muster in a Florida kindergarten has given way to the supposedly “action packed” finale; the whole production devolves into a high-contrast CGI trainwreck so narratively uninvolving and visual unconvincing that it feels less like The DC Holy Trinity teaming up to fight Doomsday than it does like watching four different screen-savers awkwardly fuck.
But I’m getting ahead of myself: The “epic” storyline that Zack Snyder, David Goyer and Chris Terrio spent three years and a rumored $400 million-plus getting made and that Warner Bros has potentially mortgaged its next decade as a solvent business on goes something like this:
(deep breath!) Lex Luthor dislikes superheroes because reasons and he hates Superman most of all. So when he finds out that Batman is also mad at Superman because people who worked for Batman got killed during the ending of MAN OF STEEL he undertakes a ridiculously complicated master plan to goad Batman into killing Superman that involves the triggering of a Benghazi-esque foreign policy disaster in North Africa, the staging of a suicide-bombing during a United States Congressional hearing and a jar of piss (I’m not even kidding, a MAJOR plot-point of this movie involves a jar of Lex Luthor’s piss.) Except Lex didn’t really need to go to all that trouble because Batman already wants to kill Superman because he had a psychic nightmare about Darkseid except Darkseid was played by Evil Superman and also The Flash (I think?) popped out of a time portal and yelled at him about Lois Lane. Who herself then gets kidnapped by Lex Luthor along with Superman’s mom in order to force Superman to attack Batman whom Lex has also tricked into building kryptonite weapons and the anti-Superman battle suit from THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS so maybe he actually can kill Superman. But even if he can’t it doesn’t matter because Lex has also used alien science-magic to turn the body of General Zod into Doomsday whose stronger than both of them put together. Fortunately it turns out a mysterious lady whom Batman had been flirting with earlier in the movie is actually Wonder Woman, who shows up at the very end of the movie to punch Doomsday multiple times, buying Superman the opportunity to use Batman’s kryptonite weapons to kill Doomsday but then also get killed himself. With Superman now dead, Batman and Wonder Woman decide to invent The Justice League in case anything like Doomsday ever happens again or if Batman’s weird nightmares come true somehow. Also, yes really Superman is dead.
(exhale!)
Holy shit. Now that I’ve actually said it out loud I hate this goddamn thing even more.
Everything from the characters to the dialogue to the plot points to the moment-to-moment storyline feels crammed in from somewhere else with no amount of forethought, which means damn near every major element sticks out like a metaphor for how much this bloated, internally rotting corpse of a film doesn’t work. No really, it’s so goddamn shit-curdlingly bad that there are TOO MANY moments of self-symbolizing badness to choose from. The entire production is a full-blown, top to bottom, all-encompassing disaster rolling into theaters.
Snyder’s preference for photographing the masculine form like the bastard offspring of Robert Mapplethorpe and Vince McMahon, which means that Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill look alternately like gigantic bulging scrotums painted-up like easter eggs when wearing their superhero costumes and a pair of poorly-tailored shaved gorillas wearing literally anything else – at one point Affleck strips down to his slacks for a ROCKY IV training montage that mainly involves pounding on a bus tire with a sledgehammer because how can we be expected to respect Bruce Wayne if we don’t know that his CrossFit WODs are mad legit bruh??
Cavill is somehow even more stiff and unlikable here than he was in MAN OF STEEL, rendered aloof and absent by an existential panic over whether or not he’s actually doing any good that never manages to resolve itself – though at least since he can generate action scenes he gets off better than Amy Adams who the movie keeps trying and failing to find a place for with embarrassing results. During the climax she nearly drowns trying to retrieve Batman’s kryptonite weapon from a pool of water which sounds hypothetically heroic until I tell you that she threw it in herself a moment ago for no apparent reason other than the screenplay really needed her to almost drown.
Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor, however, gets off worst of all – this fucking guy might well be the worst comic book movie villain of all time. Nothing about him makes sense, his personality changes from scene to scene, he’s terminally obnoxious, for some reason we never find out exactly what it is he does or is “about” when he’s not doing bad guy stuff and despite his actions driving literally the entire plot we never get an answer as to WHY he’s done any of it: At first he says he hates Superman just because, then later he has a weird hangup about God, then later he’s mad at his abusive father and by the end he’s barking about being aware of some unseen menace looming in the distance.
And that big Title Fight? It goes on for about five or ten minutes, and it’s mostly just a fistfight because Batman keeps hitting Superman with kryptonite gas that makes them evenly matched… but then Batman gives up because he finds out Superman’s mom was also named Martha. No, for fucking real, that’s not even a joke. The incidental “oh, isn’t that funny” bit of comic book nerd trivia that Batman and Superman both had mothers named Martha is here treated as a huge goddamn revelation that makes Batman want to be Superman’s friends and fuck. This. Movie. So. Hard.
Oh, and if you’re wondering about JUSTICE LEAGUE cameos… they’re in there. Oh boy, are they in there. Y’know how they typically do the worldbuilding stuff in the Marvel movies as post-credit scenes or random background references that don’t (usually) interrupt the main movie? Well, that’s apparently too fuckin’ subtle for Zack fuckin’ Snyder. So instead, right in the middle of what passes for a pivotal scene in this shitpile, Batman gives Wonder Woman a hacked hard drive from Lex Luthor’s place that’s full of surveillance footage documenting the existence of herself, The Flash, Cyborg and Aquaman. No bullshit, that’s really how they do it: Wonder Woman gets an Electronic Press Kit and shows us all trailers for the next four fucking movies.
But unlike Nick Fury showing up at the end of IRON MAN, this didn’t feel like a promise – it feels like a threat. Not merely of more terrible movies, but of some kind of cosmic balancing of the scales: “Oh, did you really think the tendrils of nerd ephemera could ensnare and colonize the machinery of pop culture and there wouldn’t be a downside??” It’s as though geek culture is being made to suffer for enjoying itself too much, like we’ve gorged ourselves too gluttonously for almost a decade at a highest-quality AVENGERS-catered buffet… and now BATMAN V SUPERMAN is the rock-hard, rectum-shredding, anus-prolapsing rectal blockage we’re to be punished with for indulging too long without consequence.
And if that sounded pretentious to you, you should hear the characters in the movie drone on about their own mythological significance with a humorless self-regard that perfectly compliments the droning faux-Wagnerian percussions of the impossible-to-take-seriously soundtrack and Snyder’s increasingly garish aesthetic, which aims for Alex Ross but lands somewhere closer to compositions you’d airbrush on to the side of a panel van.
I could more folks, I really could, but by now I think you get the point: BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE is a travesty wrapped in a disaster inside an obscenity. It is steaming, rotten, sunbaked, oozing shit. As a critic, I can’t conceive that we’ll see a worse major studio movie this year. As an observer of the film business, I’m perversely fascinated to know what happens next now that one of the biggest studios on the planet has built multiple Summers worth of release slates around follow-ups to what’s turned out to be a Hindenbergian catastrophe. And as a comic book fan I am… suddenly feeling very, very old. And tired. I imagine it won’t last, but… for now… “tired” would indeed be the operative fucking word.
SPOILERS after the jump (and in the video): When the first season of DAREDEVIL hit it kinda blew everybody’s mind. Not because of it’s much touted extra helping of sex and violence to set it apart from the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though that was certainly novel and eyebrow-raising, but because of that plus it turned out to be really, really good.
Granted, at this point it feels like Marvel is either getting to that PIXAR point where they’re so consistently excellent at what they do *or* that STAR WARS/ROCKY/JAMES BOND point where they’ve created so much a permanent cultural niche for themselves that it’s difficult to apply the same kind of conventional criticism to them you apply to everything else; but it was worrisome all the same that they were going to try building a whole new venture around the “dark and gritty superhero” thing – a recurring trend in the medium that always manages to produce one or two clever works shortly before driving the whole genre into a fucking wall.
In other words, when you pair that with the… “mixed” results of Marvel’s TV division thus far it almost felt like someone had practically gift-wrapped this to be the moment where Marvel actually, finally fucks something up – I mean, Jesus, even their bad movies are still better than some other bad movies I could name…
But then DAREDEVIL came out and, pretty much across the board, the reaction was: Holy shit, this is good! I like this cast, it’s got all kinds of intrigue and drama and crime stuff, and it’s super violent in that nasty Tony Scott 80s cop movie kinda way and the writing really pops and I like all these gangster characters and they’ve obviously put a ton of work into these fight scenes and it clicks together so well you hardly even notice that Charlie Cox doesn’t really seem to have much range… or chemistry with anyone else in the cast… or that they make you wait until the last episode for him to get his costume… and then it sucks… like, really, really sucks… and that it really drags in the middle… and that there’s a shitload of plot but very little story… or that JESSICA JONES came out afterwards doing a lot of the same kind of schtick but somehow felt like it was made by and for actual adults and not an angry 10 year-old dressed up in his dad’s clothes… wait, why do I remembered Season 1 being so good again?
Oh! Right: Vincen’t D’Onofrio’s Kingpin was such a perfect fucking character – seriously, hands down the best Marvel villain and probably the acting MVP of the entire Marvel Universe at this point – that the sheer magnitude of his presence didn’t just overshadow and overwhelm Season 1’s myriad flaws; it literally filled-in the cracks and spackled over them. For example: That whole thing where Daredevil solves the big mystery of the season in the first couple episodes but then we have to watch Karen, Foggy and Ben Urich try to also solve it again on their own? Yeah, you barely even notice the first time because all the stuff they’re investigating leads back to more Kingpin! Hell, he’s so damn compelling that when he finally turns up for a two-episode guest spot in this season it’s hard not to want him to him to stick around and swallow everything up all over again – even though he’s right in the middle of all the Punisher stuff and everything about The Punisher fucking rules.
DAREDEVIL Season 2… has pretty-much the exact opposite problem: Overall, it’s *probably* better all around than the first season: There’s an actual fully-realized storyline with sensible character-arcs for everyone involved, there’s several genuine mysteries that are legitimately intriguing with (mostly) agreeable payoffs, it doesn’t sag as much in the middle-episodes which is an improvement over most Netflix shows and it feels like there’s a lot of pretty interesting worldbuilding being laid out for (one has to assume) THE DEFENDERS… hell, even Daredevil’s costume looks kind of less than terrible when there’s enough light to be able to see it which is basically never.
So yeah, good stuff but not without flaws – unfortunately, whereas last time said flaws were papered-over by one great element, this time they’re all highlighted and exacerbated by one terrible element, and that terrible element (shockingly) is… ELEKTRA, who is easily the worst-adapted character the Marvel Cinematic Universe has yet attempted and might even belong somewhere near the semi-tolerable end of a roster of its worst characters, period
And the tragedy is, you can really tell because she doesn’t show up for about 4 or 5 episodes, before which the Season is straight-up awesome because everything is all about THE PUNISHER – and The Punisher stuff, again, fucking rules. Fortunately, his story keeps going and kind of extends across the whole rest of the season… but yeah, every time we cut away to deal with the Elektra storyline it just feels like such a huge, deflating distraction.
Which, to be fair, is kind of the point of the story this time, so… kudos for doing the job perhaps too well, I guess. Our arc this time is that it’s a year later and Matt Mudock has settled into his comfy routine of lawyering to the indigent by day and punching his crime-ridden neighborhood into behaving itself by night; but now suddenly he has to deal not only with gangsters but with a rival vigilante who’d rather just straight-up murder everyone in Manhattan who’s so much as nodded approvingly in the direction of organized crime.
Daredevil can’t abide that but as Matt Murdock he also ends up defending The Punisher aka Frank Castle in his murder trial because he’s pretty sure the city is trying to cover something up about the gangland shooting incident that figures Big Pun’s standard family-killed-in-crossfire origin story… but then Murdock keeps fucking up the case because he’s distracted every other night by the reappearance of his crazy-hot-but-also-just-plain-crazy ex-girlfriend who needs his help taking down the cult of magic ninjas that apparently never went away from last season.
Now that right there is a really good outline for a season of a TV show about DAREDEVIL, not just plotwise but thematically: If they really are going to insist on sticking with the premise of Matt Murdock as a walking avatar of a uniquely Irish Catholic masochistic martyr complex, you’re not going to find a better literalization of that theme than making the pretext for the superhero stuff he keeps shirking his grownup job and potential emotionally-healthy love interest for than an “exotic temptress” he just can’t say no to. I mean, that’s pretty goddamn basic stuff and the male psyche hasn’t changed THAT MUCH since Frank Miller thought Elektra up in the first place.
Problem #1, though, is that Elektra – as in the specific Marvel character, Elektra - is NOWHERE to be found anywhere in Season 2’s baker’s dozen of episodes. Oh, she’s called “Elektra” and to her credit Elodie Yung has a lot of raw charisma and struggles mightily to do something with the unbelievably stupid character they’ve given her to play… but along with being stupid said character is completely unrecognizable as Elektra; and no, I’m not just saying that because she never wears the costume, although the one she does wear manages to somehow be worse than Daredevil’s which is kind of an impressive bar to not clear.
It’d be one thing if this radical reimagining of Elektra was at least interesting in her own right, but instead she’s the absolute worst kind of female character: The kind who has no interior life, exterior existence or even function in the plot apart from the needs, wants and projections of the male cast. The original Elektra may have been conceived, top to bottom, as a concentrated collection of Frank Miller’s hang-ups and fetishes but she at least had agency and an agenda – indeed, an identity – of her own, informed and driven by own (however poor) decisions.
This version of Elektra, on the other hand, has no such thing: In her new origin story, everything important about her from her martial-arts training to her attitude to her initial relationship with Daredevil to her re-emergence in the present turns out to have ALL been manipulated and managed by Scott Glenn’s Stick - and not only that, he supposedly did so in order to stop her from instead being manipulated and managed by… ugh, yup… her "destiny;" which here involves a really dumb payoff to the leftover “Black Sky” mystery involving The Hand from Season 1. And yes, it’s as dumb as it sounds.
And it’s a shame, because the stupidity of everything surrounding Elektra really does creep up and ultimately overwhelm the Punisher storyline, which is awesome and really should’ve remained the whole focus. Jon Bernthal is, quite simply, *extraordinary* as the best version of Frank Castle ever. Let me be clear about that: Ray Stevenson in Lexi Alexander’s PUNISHER: WARZONE remains the most faithful adaptation of the original Punisher comics and I love it as much I love those comics; but what Bernthal and the makers of DAREDEVIL have done is something next level – actually attempting to make Castle a three-dimensional character beyond the one-note Paul Kersey/Mac Bolan/Bryan Mills righteous murder-machine fantasy that birthed him.
The key? They don’t try to make The Punisher “cool.” Oh, he’s a bad-ass and people are going to love him and Marvel would nuts not to have already agreed to give Bernthal his own series and/or movie, but there’s a deliberate lack of self-conscious style to his mannerisms and his actions that demonstrate a deliberate choice to avoid making him an “action-hero.” He doesn’t have catchphrases, he doesn’t strike poses, there’s no sense of irony or gimmickry to how he takes out his targets and on the few occasions that we get a glimpse of who he might’ve been before the general impression is mostly an exceptional but not “legendary” soldier and a normal, probably even sort of boring suburban family man – what makes him interesting is contrasting that with what he’s become; and Bernthal does amazing work making it feel like everyone is constant immediate danger every time Castle is onscreen.
Hell, he even has the one thing virtually no one else in the cast does: Actual chemistry with Charlie Cox’s Daredevil. Don’t get me wrong, Cox was fine in the first season and he’s fine here, but they still haven’t solved the problem of Daredevil being the least interesting character in his own show thematically and in terms of presentation: The fight scenes are just as brutal and less obviously-choreographed this time around, but it’s mostly the same brawls in the same underlit hallways from Season 1 (seriously, DAREDEVIL loves underlit hallways like the POWER RANGERS love rock quarries) and don’t really change-up until he (finally) gets his adjustable billy club from the comics in the finale.
More amusingly, the producers are so clearly in love with him as the bleeding, gasping, brutalized suffering-savior that there’s almost zero logic at play concerning the training and strength-level of the fighters: Daredevil gets his ass kicked in almost every fight even though he usually walks away the default winner, and it seems to be just as brutal and physically taxing for him to defeat a handful of pissed-off bikers as it does to fend off fifty or sixty highly-trained ninja assassins. Cox is doing what he can, but it feels like both Season’s worth of showrunners just aren’t interested in developing Matt Murdock beyond a costumed embodiment of working-class Catholic self-penance: He wants to mete out vigilante justice but he needs to do it in a way that almost kills him to pay off the guilt. We get it, we got it the first time, please find something additional for him to be “about” between now and THE DEFENDERS.
I mean, what else is a shared universe for if not to be able to say: “Okay, sure, here’s a one-dimensional character; but maybe if we bounce him and 30 or 40 other one-dimensional characters off one another they’ll all eventually get more interesting!”?
It probably sounds like I’m ragging on this season and the series in a general and, I should stress, I’m not. Apart from the existing issues with the costuming and the pacing and the lighting (or rather lack thereof) and the huge Elektra-shaped dead weight dragging down the back half I actually really dig and have a lot of fun with DAREDEVIL – including some of the stuff that doesn’t totally work.
DAREDEVIL is the most “serious” Marvel production so far, which, paradoxically, often makes it the silliest Marvel production: I mean, we’re supposed to laugh during ANT-MAN, but as much I enjoyed ANT-MAN none of the *intentionally* funny parts in it were anywhere near as funny as watch Cox’s Daredevil seethe and glower and clench his fists and grit his bloody teeth with all the turgid solemnity of an angst-ridden middle schooler determinedly etching Pantera lyrics into his Alegbra textbook while the soundtrack thunders and rages with funereal self-importance while up onscreen he’s… doing rhythmic Cirque Du Soliel kick-flips with a bunch of ninjas straight out of a Godfrey Ho movie against the backdrop of a cartoon anachronism of Hell’s Kitchen circa-1982.
Intentional or note, that kind of mismatched tonal whiplash is right the hell up my alley. The great thing about the Marvel productions in general is that they afford so many different entertainment experiences: JESSICA JONES made me think, AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. is a nice mellow distraction, the AVENGERS movies are (at their best) inspiring and I fully expect CIVIL WAR to be a fucking emotional rollercoaster. DAREDEVIL, two seasons in, feels mostly like a weird, nasty, lurid footnote of a thing, but a generally well made one that occasionally (as in the case of The Punisher this season) manages genuine greatness. I really wish they hadn’t tried to force Elektra in this time around – or, rather,
I wish they hadn’t decided to name this completely unrelated boring new character “Elektra” – but there’s more than enough to recommend making Season 2 worth your time. So even you’re completely burnt out on superheroes at this point (which is understandable at this point) I’d say definitely check it out.
