Category: Marvel

One thing I liked in Thunderbolts* was during the end credits, as a series of newspaper and magazine covers and clippings move across the screen to show how the media is reacting to the events of the movie. One item shown blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quickly is the quote “I like them!” attributed to David Brooks.

Brooks is the commentator for The New York Times who’s become infamous — at least in the parts of the internet that I spend the most time in — for having some of the shittiest, most tone-deaf takes. I’m not completely sure that the quote was included with that connotation, but it fits perfectly with the tone of a self-aware, highly meta-textual movie about a team that describes itself with “we suck.”

Based solely on the premise, you might think that this was just the MCU equivalent of Suicide Squad — or I read one comment online that it just looked like “Guardians of the Galaxy but grayer and less fun” — but I think it’s perfectly placed in the timeline of the MCU, both within the fiction and outside of it. The movies haven’t been subtle about gradually setting up a team of anti-heroes (and a team of younger heroes at the same time), and the public hasn’t been subtle about getting tired of superhero movies. There’s a strong sense throughout Thunderbolts* of “yes, we get it.”

Since the story focuses on Yelena as its protagonist, it makes a lot of callbacks to Black Widow, which incidentally I still think is one of the most under-appreciated of the Marvel movies. But in retrospect, I feel like Black Widow was more or less the culmination of the “phase 1 formula” of the MCU: big action sequences, a great cast, a tone that was self-aware enough to be funny and charming but didn’t treat its over-the-top comic book moments as a joke. In other words, making Hollywood action movies out of comic book characters. Thunderbolts* feels to me more like making a 1990s comic book out of all the elements of a Hollywood action movie.

In the late 80s and through the 90s, which is when I got back into the hobby, comics seemed to be in full-on metatext mode. Characters were getting rebooted and reimagined, with creators seemingly more interested in asking questions about what it means to be a superhero, and how these stories can be relevant to adults, than in making straightforward superhero stories. I never read any of the comics that the characters in Thunderbolts* were based on, but the comics I was reading in that era had characters fighting metaphors more often than supervillains.

And Thunderbolts* is full of metaphors, most notably depression and grief, but also the explicit question “what are we even doing here?” That means it feels a bit more grounded than previous entries in the franchise. Characters swear more than usual, and there’s straightforward talk about drug use. (But still all within the confines of a PG-13 rating). I liked that John Walker was allowed to just be an unlikeable asshole, even if not an irredeemable one. And it doesn’t spoil anything to say that the villains in this movie are way too powerful for the team to defeat in a typical super-powered fight — they say as much in the trailer — but they still turn out to be uniquely equipped to defeat them.

My main complaint, in fact, is with Julia-Louis Dreyfuss’s character of Valentina de Fontaine. It seems like she was cast largely because of her performance in Veep, which would’ve been an excellent addition to the MCU. But here, it seems like there are too many guard rails still up. She’s never allowed to just cut loose, and always seems to stop just short of being reprehensibly nasty.

A bunch of ragtag misfits learning to work together as a team to beat a seemingly unstoppable foe could easily turn into the corniest, most predictable story. But I think Thunderbolts* works by having exactly the right combination of actors, writers, and a franchise that’s self-aware enough to recognize when it’s in danger of overstaying its welcome.

It’s aware that its characters aren’t Marvel’s A-listers (or even C-listers), but it has a fantastic, charismatic cast. It’s aware that it can’t keep repeating the MCU formula over and over again and expect another Avengers or Infinity War level of response, so it tries to do something different and more relevant. It manages to honor all of its franchise commitments, not just with a feeling of obligation, but by making them feel fun again. And it dispenses with the wide-eyed “you’ll believe a man can fly!” wonder and optimism, but instead of descending into cynicism, it insists on reminding us why we watch these movies in the first place: for stories about heroes, redemption, and people working together to make the world a better place.

PS I normally hate when studio marketing departments try cute things with titles like Se7en and refuse to use them (I’ll make an exception for M3GAN because it seems to be part of the joke), but I like the asterisk in Thunderbolts* and don’t mind using it because I thought it was so cleverly handled at the end of the movie.

For quite a while now, the consensus around Captain America: Brave New World was a shrug and “it’s fine.” Critics were eager to dismiss it as yet another symbol of Hollywood’s cultural bankruptcy, a sign of how the MCU is destroying the very notion of art itself, but that’s nothing new. But even long-time fans seem to have been giving it a tepid response.

So I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it! It jumps right into some Mission: Impossible-ish action sequences, playing like a modern action-heavy spy thriller but with a hero who has giant wings that absorb energy. Then it picks up the storyline about Isaiah Bradley from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier¹Or more accurately, from Kyle Baker’s Truth comics, and before you know it, we’re at the White House and Harrison Ford is the President on a futuristic podium talking about the Celestial buried at the end of The Eternals and how it’s giving the world adamantium.

I’ve said lots of times how I was never a Marvel guy when I read comics, so it still comes as a pleasant surprise whenever I see an MCU reference work on me the way it’s supposed to. As soon as they mentioned adamantium, I was mentally doing a fist pump and silently saying “Hell yeah!”

There’s one scene in the midst of all that which I especially liked, because it was so odd that it took me out of the movie. The scene had new Captain America Sam Wilson in a room somewhere in the White House having a private conversation with newly-elected President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross. The topic of the conversation is that Ross wants Wilson to re-start the Avengers.

I didn’t put a spoiler around that because it’s about the least surprising thing he could’ve said. Even if you didn’t assume (as I had) that this was the whole reason for having a Captain America in the first place, you’d know that it was going to happen because they’ve already announced the titles of the next two Avengers movies.²It was more surprising when they mentioned Celestial Island, since I’d assumed they were just going to pretend like The Eternals had never happened. This conversation was about as unexciting as it gets… which is why it was so odd that they scored it with suspense movie tension music.

It actually took me a minute to notice it was happening; it just kind of washed over me like the lingering Big Action Movie Soundtrack meant to make every punch and explosion seem momentous. But this was different. It was going for actual tension, clearly implying that I was supposed to be on the edge of my seat while watching this innocuous conversation between an old man with heart problems and a superhero I’d just seen take out an entire castle full of bad guys.

I don’t think that the choice worked, exactly, but what I like about it is that it reminded me just what a weird mashup of genres this movie is. And how remarkable it is that the MCU has grown so huge while making these bizarre, nerdy movies that, for the most part, don’t give a damn about awards season. Captain America: The Winter Soldier was one of the best in the franchise, and a huge part of that was how it transitioned from big-budget action movie to super-paranoid 1970s spy thriller and then to something far weirder.

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  Or more accurately, from Kyle Baker’s Truth comics
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  It was more surprising when they mentioned Celestial Island, since I’d assumed they were just going to pretend like The Eternals had never happened.

I’ll come out as a grouch right of the bat: I didn’t like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse nearly as much as the first movie.¹To be clear, when I say “the first movie,” I mean Into the Spider-Verse, and not that one with the naked guy running in profile.

That’s to be expected, though: Into the Spider-Verse was a once-in-a-generation masterpiece. It seemed to come out of nowhere and not just do every single thing right, but to be so relentlessly imaginative that it tricked you into believing that anything was possible.

And the moments when Across the Spider-Verse works best are truly astonishing. It is near-flawless technically and artistically, seemingly designed and art directed with the overriding rule being that absolutely nothing would be dismissed because it was too difficult, or because it didn’t fit.

It builds on that feeling of confidence that made the first movie so exciting: mixing and matching art and animation styles not just between universes, but between characters and even between shots in the same scene. You can see the sketch marks and guide lines on some characters, the crisp lines on others, and more than one is made from paper or newsprint²And for two completely different story reasons!. When it’s working, the movie captures that feeling of “anything goes” experimentation from comic books, but applied to animation.³The various comic book-style captions from the “editor” explaining throwaway gags or blink-and-you’ll-miss-it references were an especially nice touch.

But still I was a bit disappointed simply because I could see the seams in this one. Into the Spider-Verse was relentlessly inventive but also felt “tight,” as if every detail and every stray idea was in the movie for a reason. Plus it never insulted the audience’s (or at least my) intelligence: you pretty much figured out things at the same time as the characters did, and there were no overly drawn-out revelations, or twists meant to blow your mind that you’d seen coming a mile away. Across the Spider-Verse was frustrating at points, because I was either wanting it to hurry up and get to the point already, or because I was wanting it to just calm down and be quiet for a second.

So much of it was manic. I felt like the first movie was able to throw everything together and make it all work, while the second often felt over-stuffed to me. It often seemed like the team knew they had made a masterpiece, and were now desperately trying not just to recapture lightning in a bottle, but to stretch it out into a franchise, Peter Jackson-style, even if it didn’t fit the story.

But this post is supposed to emphasize what I liked about the movie, and what I especially liked were the moments when it stopped the chase scenes and the constant one-liners and asides, and used all its artistic mastery not to overwhelm, but to just tell a story.

The beginning is excellent, deliberately deviating from the format of the first movie’s manic introductions (with a self-referential first line setting up exactly that) to re-introduce characters and introduce one of the main themes of the movie: that these stories are about characters defined by tragedy. It worked wonderfully and was one of the highlights of the entire movie, combining art and music and melodrama and humor in a way that only this series has been able to pull off.

There’s a lengthy scene with Miles and his mother that had me in tears, just because it was such a fearlessly earnest (but not quite maudlin) description of how much a mother can love her son, and the inevitable sadness that comes from realizing that letting a child reach their full potential means losing a huge part of them.

But my favorite scene in the movie is one fairly late in the movie, when (mild spoiler) Gwen returns to her home and has an extended conversation with her father. The scene itself is well performed by the actors, although I don’t think it’s quite as powerful as the one between Rio and Miles. But what makes it so remarkable is that every single aspect of the scene goes towards expressing all the emotion contained in the scene. The backgrounds gain and lose detail. The characters shift between more and less sketchy, full clarity to black shadow, as their moods change. The entire color palette of the scene changes with the characters’ emotional state.

It feels as experimental as the pinnacle of the most inventive Warner Bros shorts, but all in the context of a feature film, and all for a purpose.

I guess that it’s good that I didn’t like Across the Spider-Verse quite as much — and to be clear, it’s like the difference between a B+ and an A++ — because Into the Spider-Verse was almost too perfect in execution. Since these movies are so technically proficient and seemingly capable of absolutely anything, it’s nice to be reminded that there are real, talented, artists behind it all, trying to express something real and personal.

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  To be clear, when I say “the first movie,” I mean Into the Spider-Verse, and not that one with the naked guy running in profile.
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  And for two completely different story reasons!
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  The various comic book-style captions from the “editor” explaining throwaway gags or blink-and-you’ll-miss-it references were an especially nice touch.

Reading reviews about Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania gives me the impression that a lot of critics have negative reviews pre-written, much like celebrity obituaries. Ironically, they complain about the corporate-driven sameness and lack of imagination in every installment, in a way that’s so repetitious and over-familiar that I’m getting deja vu that I’ve made this exact same complaint in previous blog posts about MCU projects.

Somehow, they never seem to mention that it’s corporate-driven content that keeps them submitting reviews for movies that they’re predisposed to dislike. Imagine going back to a pre-Siskel & Ebert/Pauline Kael world, where critics only had to write about things if they had an interesting observation to make!

To be fair: Quantumania does have plenty of signs of Creeping Marvel Fatigue. It never reaches the level of “why exactly does this movie exist, again?” that Eternals did, but it does lapse into the feeling that it’s going through the motions. They’re grand, sweeping, extremely expensive motions, granted, but still.

When I saw the trailer for Werewolf by Night, I thought that Marvel had finally abandoned the notion of making multi-billion dollar global entertainment product, and had become a boutique art house making stuff personally tailored just for me. It felt as personalized as a custom-recorded birthday card.

Since I consider myself one of the internet’s leading evangelists for The Beast Must Die!, I was getting hit with every single one of the right vibes. My only trepidation was that the trailer seemed to be pushing it directly into Universal Monsters territory, instead of making it a 1970s period piece.¹Which would’ve been doubly appropriate considering that the Werewolf by Night comics are about as 1970s as you can get without a guest appearance by the Brady Kids. I was holding out hope, though, since the CBS Special Presentation-inspired opening, along with the narration, freeze frames, quick cuts, and fake film effects, all suggested that the movie might be kind of a mashup between 1930s-40s Universal and 1970s Castle Horror.

As it turned out, I was thinking too small. Werewolf by Night was stylistically better than either of those options, since it went for a mash-up of a bunch of different styles, instead of just a pastiche of a single one. There are stun batons, gramophones, and magic amulets, gothic architecture coexisting with art deco and brutalism. It ends up feeling timeless, as if it’s able to draw from a century of genre fiction instead of trying to emulate just one specific period.

It’s become popular to criticize the MCU for its feeling of same-ness — a criticism it often deserves, as genuinely novel concepts so frequently devolve into people flying around punching or shooting lasers at each other. So the current phase of the movies and series have impressed me by how much they’re willing to draw from Marvel’s scattershot library. Is it just super-heroes, or is it a horror story, or sci-fi, or fantasy, or legal sit-coms? The answer is yes.

Werewolf by Night often feels like it’s pushing at the boundaries of the MCU, trying to see how much it can get away with while still fitting into the universe. Unlike a lot of the other MCU entries, it’s most interesting not when it’s showing us a new interpretation of the familiar, but when it’s adding a flourish that’s completely new.²Or at least, new to me. I’m even more unfamiliar with the horror/monster side of the Marvel comics than with anything else. I didn’t even recognize Ted, for instance, until it was pointed out afterwards. The main character Jack transformed completely from a WASP-y, long-sideburned teen into a Mexican man with face paint to honor his heritage. A wind-up, talking corpse. A somber man playing a flaming tuba, for some reason.

So I was a bit disappointed to see it just turn into a bunch of fight scenes, and to see that after all the build-up to the appearance of the title character as being the most fearsome monster of them all, he ended up being only like the fourth most brutal and scary character in this movie alone. But that build-up had so much pure style that I’ll gladly give it a pass.

One thing I like in particular about Werewolf by Night is how brazen it was about simulating old-school filmmaking techniques with all of the tools that a MCU-budgeted film in 2022 has available. It does lay on the affectations so thick that it sometimes feels like it’s trying too hard — film grain, rough cuts, reel change markers, overall the kind of stuff you might expect to see in an After Effects tutorial. But I think it all balances out to a feeling of near-campy enthusiasm. Harriet Sansom Harris, who’s never been less than awesome in anything I’ve ever seen, goes gleefully over the top throughout, so it sometimes seems like the direction is just trying to keep up to her energy.

And it results in a couple of really neat flourishes. The red of the bloodstone every time it’s shown, with the added bonuses of colored lens flares in a black and white movie. But my favorite is in a sequence where the werewolf is ravaging some generic bad guys in a hallway. The action is all in silhouette against a blinding white doorway that’s slowly closing, with the only other light being the occasional flashes of stun batons. It doesn’t show any of the monster or the violence close-up — seemingly a stylistic choice to preserve the mystery instead of a technical limitation, since they don’t hesitate to show Ted in extreme detail. As the carnage goes on, blood is splashed against the camera lens, obscuring more and more of the view. By the time it’s over, you can only imagine what happened.

Was it a visual effect, or a practical one? I don’t actually know, and that’s what I like about it. I’m so used to CGI being omnipresent in these projects that I tend to assume everything is done in post-production, and I’ve gotten harder and harder to impress. However it was done, it was done with so much style and thought to its purpose instead of simply its spectacle, that I stopped caring about how it was done. Instead of zoning out during the fight scenes, like I typically do, I appreciated the point of the scene: to suggest a new monster that was so fearsome, they weren’t even allowed to show it to us.

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  Which would’ve been doubly appropriate considering that the Werewolf by Night comics are about as 1970s as you can get without a guest appearance by the Brady Kids.
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  Or at least, new to me. I’m even more unfamiliar with the horror/monster side of the Marvel comics than with anything else. I didn’t even recognize Ted, for instance, until it was pointed out afterwards.