Marvel Media (Spoiler Thread)

The roster of Midnight Suns, on Bite Size Geek!

Finally braced Wakanda Forever's 2:45 runtime, and it was...ok. It was 45 minutes too long, or 45 minutes too short. Still, Coogler's a good director and can generally keep me engaged with a scene even when his movie is sprawling into a mess.

(Except when Julia Louis-Dreyfus is in one. I like her, but her energy did not gel with this movie.)

It also keeps up the Black Panther tradition of naff cgi finales - wow some of that final battle rough.

Just got back from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

Non-spoiler review:

This is as good as Black Panther. The storytelling is amazing, the fight scenes are great, and it opens up a whole lot of possibilities for the MCU in the future.

Shuri and Queen Romanda dealing with the death of T’Challa really drive the entire movie, and they do an amazing job at it. They both deal with it their own way, and they bring the audience with them.

They did stay true to Namor (from what I recall of the comics) not a hero, not a villain, but whatever is best for his people. It will be interesting to see where that angle goes from here.

I did like the return of the one ancestor, and thought that part was really well done.

Oh, and the mid-credits scene? Jaw dropping.

Why didn't y'all tell me about X-Men 97?!

Just saw it on a list of upcoming Marvel projects and supposed to be out this fall. Most original cast returning, plus Jennifer Hale.

Rewatched the whole thing in 2021 on D+ and still love it.

Oh yeah we watched Wakanda Forever this week. Took 2 nights, very long. Very good. Very emotional. Whew.

I made it all the way to like Monday avoiding a spoiler cameo and then f*cking Jimmy Fallon spoils it days before Disney+ when interviewing someone about a totally different movie.

So that sucked. But everything else was surprising and fun.

Also holy sh*t was it that dark in the theater? We paused for a couple scenes and tried to brighten the TV so I could see WTF was happening.

Stele wrote:

Also holy sh*t was it that dark in the theater? We paused for a couple scenes and tried to brighten the TV so I could see WTF was happening.

Some directors genuinely just don't seem to understand how HDR should really work and you end up with movies looking like that on a lot of consumer TV's and displays.

If you don't have a TV with a very good HDR tone mapping feature to deal with it it's just gonna be too dark.

It looked great on my set that both supports Dolby Vision and has good tone mapping, and my Samsung set's tone mapping also did fine with it in HDR10, but on the one Vizio set I have in the house it was straight hard to see anything at all in some of the night time scenes.

I didn't watch the movie three times but the first Black Panther movie had this exact same issue and I was curious. Turns out, same issue is present.

It should have been fine in a good theater though.

OMG please be played by Nick Cage.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is not very good apparently

53% currently on RottenTomatoes

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania mostly lacks the spark of fun that elevated earlier adventures, but Jonathan Majors' Kang is a thrilling villain poised to alter the course of the MCU.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is a chaotic, woefully unfunny mess that has forgotten why its hero was such fun. The thrill isn't just gone, it's been buried beneath a swarm of plot contrivances and truly hideous CGI.
It's not actively awful in any kind of meaningful way, because it's not remarkable enough to be that. Instead, it's a filler episode in the TV-ification of the MCU. It's fine if you miss it, because the next episode / movie will catch you up on it.
The post-Endgame MCU continues to be a slog.

I still am going to see it. It looks fun

I liked it, but I'm a Marvel fan and easy to please, plus i like all the actors. My wife did not like it. My 18 year-old son thought it was ok.

Seeing the Loki mini-series helped fill in some multi-verse gaps, but isn't necessary.

I also liked it, but it's definitely mid-grade Marvel. I think I prefer Ant-Man when it's smaller in scope (pun?). Probably the best one is still the first one.

Watched it last night. It was very "C"
I found the redemption of MODOK to be weak, I didn't understand why Bill Murray was in it at all, and I completely agree with one reviewer I posted above "It's not actively awful in any kind of meaningful way, because it's not remarkable enough to be that. Instead, it's a filler episode in the TV-ification of the MCU. It's fine if you miss it, because the next episode / movie will catch you up on it."

Between this, Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Thor: Love and Thunder I am thinking they are trying for to many "big" things and should get back to smaller stories.

And the most important question about it - is there any Luis?

No. Which is a shame but it has lots of jokes about holes.

Film Odyssey on Twitter: Variants of Kang will appear in Shang-Chi 2.

I loved his acting in Ant Man etc. but it feels like a lazy villain because they can just kill him off whenever and then have a new variant in the next project.

farley3k wrote:

Film Odyssey on Twitter: Variants of Kang will appear in Shang-Chi 2.

I loved his acting in Ant Man etc. but it feels like a lazy villain because they can just kill him off whenever and then have a new variant in the next project.

You can look at the other way too: he's a terrifying villain because no matter how many times you kill him, there will always be another one on the way.

That said, he will be a very weak villain if he does get killed every time he shows up and he never scores a win.

My son and I were discussing this on the way home after watching Quantumainia and it just feels like there are no "stakes" because there are an infinite number of timelines - there are infinite ones where he wins, but also an infinite number where he loses. So it just doesn't matter, it is a zero sum game.
Then I had a thought - since that is true all that really matters is the personal connections/relationships of a character. The fact that Steve got to go back in time and be with Peggy, the fact that Scott got to be with his daughter, etc. So what they need to work on - and failed with Ant-man (to me) - is building personal stories that matter more than the huge spectacle.

farley3k wrote:

My son and I were discussing this on the way home after watching Quantumainia and it just feels like there are no "stakes" because there are an infinite number of timelines - there are infinite ones where he wins, but also an infinite number where he loses. So it just doesn't matter, it is a zero sum game.
Then I had a thought - since that is true all that really matters is the personal connections/relationships of a character. The fact that Steve got to go back in time and be with Peggy, the fact that Scott got to be with his daughter, etc. So what they need to work on - and failed with Ant-man (to me) - is building personal stories that matter more than the huge spectacle.

I haven't seen it yet, but this problem of, "Wait, there's a universe where Magneto wins?!" has been an issue in comics for decades.

How they typically deal with it is leaning in to alternate universe stories where there is some character that knows "our" (the reader's) world who is a man out of time that convinces or otherwise sparks the alternate world's good guys to self-sacrifice into blowing up their reality to make "our" better timeline the One True timeline.

Those can be interesting stories of self-sacrifice. But they don't really solve for the nagging realization that there are infinite amounts of (fictional) characters out there suffering at the hands of Thanos, Kang, Doom, and evil Professor X.

Watched Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness today and it was just in a different league than Quantammania. Their handling of different universes, the special effect, just everything was much much better. Quantamania really feels like a step back.

A step back from Multiverse of Madness? Wow.

Initiate protocol "lowering of expectations". Yeesh.

This image highlighted the issues of time travel as a plot device.
"is not a variant but Kang himself..." huh? Are they not *all* Kang himself just from different timelines? Is there one timeline that is true? I think that is some nonsense Kang pontificated about in Loki but it makes no sense. If 10 time lines run from the beginning of time to the end then all of them have just as valid of a claim to "true timeline"
Time travel is just "turn off your brain" time for stories.

IMAGE(https://scontent-msp1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/334786709_753417626397707_1833813591535924527_n.jpg?_nc_cat=1&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=8bfeb9&_nc_ohc=a3hifFfkcU4AX-_PN5J&_nc_ht=scontent-msp1-1.xx&oh=00_AfAw9rmM-UgHS8DH5ZYJ2PNzmmMm2p4xxeuK8NLqqXvIHA&oe=6406A233)

My takeaway from Loki was that there was nothing inherently "true" or "prime" about the so-called Sacred Timeline except that it happens to be the timeline that the Kang that won their Big Dumb Offscreen Time War came from.

Like, if white Europeans hadn't succeeded in conquering North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific, no one would remember the phrase Manifest Destiny. The Sacred Timeline is only sacred because the winners write the history books.

Beat me to it. Hell yeah

He better hope Emelia's bringing Drogon.

Finally watched the newest Black Panther and enjoyed it.