MCU Phase 4 Discussion

Pop Culture & Media Film & TV
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I finished up She-hulk last night and went into the final two episodes not feeling great about the show based on how people were talking about it. Really just the revenge porn plot point seemed iffy out of context. But I left feeling pretty good about it.

As others have pointed out, the ending with K.E.V.I.N. falls a little flat when taken along side every other marvel tv show. And unless She-Hulk is going to completely buck trends in season 2, will ultimately feel a little empty to me. But it was enjoyable and I love seeing Charlie Cox again. Interested to see where a second season goes, especially now that we have the character pretty firmly established.

As for future speculation, I’m also not sure how well She-Hulk works in Hell’s Kitchen. Matt showing up in LA works because he has a secret identity and nobody knows who he is. Given that Born Again is supposed to be a reboot, I’m not sure who is going to know about Matt/Daredevil and having Jen/She-Hulk show up in New York may lead to people asking questions that a more serious show wouldn’t want to engage with.

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Sans spoilers:
I continue to be delighted with Charlie Cox, who has both serious range and maybe the best “Middle American” accent I’ve ever heard out of a Brit.

With spoilers:

Hilarious. But you only get to do that once. And not only because they basically burned all the jokes in one go.

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Guess they’re not planning on doing a Gwenpool show anytime soon, unless they start off with a gimmick infringement bit :wink:

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Paul (Rudd) having no good car ideas is now MCU cannon.

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Did they decide that they were just going to make their own Guardians of the Galaxy?

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  • Cassie Lang suited up as Stature! Going back to banging the drum that says “Young Avengers when?”
  • Jonathon Majors sure is busy lately (this is a good thing)
  • Surprisingly non-comedic tone for an Ant-Man movie. I wonder how much of that is just this trailer, how much might be the effect of bringing in a character like Kang (I’d speculate about the general reaction to Thor: Love and Thunder being far too comedic for its own good, but other than some reshoots I don’t know there’s enough time between that release and Quantumania for a really major tonal shift to be a “more serious” movie)
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Planet Blue: I’m thinking of ending things with the MCU. - Bumping this thread (I dunno if this is the right one or what) to share my thoughts on Black Panther 2.

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in case some missed it: the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special out on the 25th (in 3 days) is the official end of Phase 4 and Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania will be the beginning of the Phase 5.

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I kinda feel like they threw the whole “phase” thing out the window after Endgame both for lack of narrative structure and Covid but that’s interesting to know

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oh yeah phases really feel meaningless now lol. the announcement suddenly at SDCC that phase 4 was ending in november and showing off 5 and 6 at once really felt like them trying to reignite public interest in the MCU since the pandemic , the lack of a clear future for the universe , an absolute deluge of content to keep up with and most people feeling satisfied to call it quits at endgame has caused some big time fatigue.

i still haven’t seen eternals , thor 4 or BP2 and i really don’t know if i care to ever get around to those.

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You can 100% skip Eternals, unsure yet about Thor 4 (though I wasn’t super digging it) and BP2’s worth checking out when it hits D+

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i’ve gotten to the point with my home movie watching (the majority of it) where if i’m gonna watch a movie over 2 hours it better be really good. my attention span is bad at home. it’s much easier for me to focus in a theater but disney has done nothing to make me wanna see their movies in theaters since they just show up on disney + 30 days later anyway

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I worry that movie is so dim that it will be Season 8 of Game of Thrones level of unwatchable on your home television.

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So, given DarthTythus has just ushered in the New Order of Every Marvel Movie having Jonathan Majors in it over in the Phase 5 thread…

…the timing is just right for me to bump this thread with some thoughts on Wakanda Forever, before the thread settles for all time to the bottom of the ocean.

I’ll admit it, I tend to get hung up on little details that throw me out of things, and Wakanda Forever threw me out of things pretty near the start with T’Challa’s funeral. Entirely correct things: the funeral being in Xhosa. Weirdly dissonant things: the funeral being in Xhosa apart from the words “Black Panther”, which are always said in English.
I mean, brand recognition, sure, but we’re trying to have a poignant moment here!

It’s also weird that this is the second Black Panther movie where… the villain has a very good point. In fact, the movie really relies on Wakandans being idiots for most of the plot (yes, I know it’s a tragedy and they’re blinded by rage/loss, but still, you should be cheering for the Talokanan army in the final action scenes, not for the Wakandans here. The Wakandans become effortlessly the bad guys for much of the movie)

(Also, I have to say, Riri Williams does not play well for me as a character - there’s just something about her attitude that’s kinda grating. I think they’re going for “college tech genius who’s just the right side of arrogant/confident in her own abilities”, but that’s what they with Tony Stark too, and he only pulled it off half the time, and only then because he was played by someone incredibly charismatic. Also, her cool final act suit looks awful, it’s so bulky - and unfortunately, so do those goofy power suits that Shuri makes for Okoye+Ayo’s girlfriend, Okoye was right about how awful they look!)

Anyway, because I was thrown out of things by the start, I couldn’t stop picking at nits. Like, how Shuri’s (even in the opening scene) experimenting with DNA has her moving atoms around on the outside of the base pairs maybe? She’s not even changing gene sequences, just sort of moving stray hydrogen or carbon atoms around, which really should probably just break the DNA or something if it does anything.
Or how no-one seems to talk about how basically all of the “technology” that Talokan has seems to be magic - you can’t just make that much water store in a tiny box, and in something like 1600 the first people of Talokan had already apparently invented those magical holding-water-over-your-gills-and-mouth mask things. Now, that’s fine - there’s magic in the MCU of course - but no-one talks about it! Shuri should pick on this and be also super confused - she’s being specifically cast as the Straw Atheist in this thing, again despite her already having seen magic done and having no reason not to believe that spirits might actually exist as a result - but she just assumes she has technological solutions and interpretations of things.

Anyway, at least the movie (unlike Falcon and the Winter Soldier) recognises how the world order is changed in a world where Wakanda exists. (And maybe that’s why Haiti is being held up as a great place to be in this MCU future - I get the impression the real Haiti isn’t doing so great these last few years.)

So, you know, mixed feelings here. The death of Chadwick Bozeman hangs over the film even more than the death of T’Challa does, in a way, and I think it’s a burden the film ultimately doesn’t manage to lift.

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I’m kind of in the same boat with Wakanda Forever. It was fine, had a lot of plot holes, but it sent off T’Challa respectfully and didn’t fall into the godawful trap that was Carrie Fisher’s scenes in Rise of Skywalker. Also, the character work, especially with a vengeful Shuri coming to terms with her grief, a tireless Ramonda carrying on as she endured loss after loss, and M’Baku of all people becoming the voice of reason. Talokan was fine, but I tend to think of Namor (and Aquaman) as inherently silly characters that I’ll never be able to take seriously. If they ever do a Namor movie, that might be the first MCU movie I skip.

Only thing I have to disagree on is this:

I don’t think the MCU is trying to come up with a fictional utopian Haiti. We’re only ever shown Nakia’s school, which makes sense given her humanitarian acumen. But the bigger point, to me, is that this is a major Hollywood movie putting a place like Haiti in a positive light. The nation has its problems, but I have no doubt it has places of beauty and people working together in functional communities. These types of representation are important, as growing up all I ever saw of developing countries in movies was crushing poverty and war. It honestly was quite refreshing.

Anyway, Wakanda Forever was ok. I’m glad I waited for the home release, and don’t think I’ll be going to the theatre for these movies anymore. Looking forward to Ant-Man in 6 months, I guess.

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To clarify, re Haiti - my understanding is that various people in Haiti have claimed that their current political issues, beginning with the Coup d’Etat in 2004, were precipitated by action by France and the USA behind the scenes to cause that very coup.
If true, then presumably the “changed world” with an active, dominant African state with an extremely effective secret service and technological+economic power to rival+surpass the USA might well have prevented anything post this from happening.

So, this is explicitly a ‘MCU countries that (perhaps) Western powers messed around with in our own world might be better of’ statement.

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All I gotta say about Ant-Man 3 was that the movie wasn’t that bad. When my expectations are this low, nothing will be that bad again. But MODOK was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in a movie. Hideous in every way. A violent assault aesthetically.

And the whole character’s point in this movie is this smug, shitty vibe that the worst MCU movies do. That thing where they’re winking at you “hey, isn’t this stupid?? Ha ha!” And it constantly happens with every turn with this character. He isn’t a threat, he isn’t allowed to have a face turn, everything is a joke. It’s horrible.

Fuck you, movie, you slimy piece of shit. I’d rather you had the stupidest ideas in the world and were even vaguely sincere about them. No, I am not impressed that you think you’re better than MODOK. I don’t even like MODOK. But I don’t think you’re cool because you can laugh at your source material, I think you’re an asshole.

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pushes up glasses We have a Phase 5 thread Marvel Phase 5 - The Jonathan Majors Jobs Plan

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Sorry for not letting the Phase 5 thread thrive but since we’ve kickstarted the MCU having a recurring plot again, I decided to watch Thor: Love and Thunder to catch up after losing steam with Phase 4. And then immediately lost steam again because, wow, what a terrible film!

The Axl’s name thing felt like it was lazily parodying transphobia in a way that, by not doing anything with it, just replicates transphobia. I recognize that Axl’s dead name (for all intents and purposes) was likely meant to be read as ‘ugh my dad gave me a girl’s name’ in the way guys named Ashley sometimes do or a ‘moving to a new country and wanting a name that their peers won’t make fun of’ thing, but the entire conversation with Thor of him going “I’m going to respect the name chosen for you” was basically word-for-word a conversation I’ve had with my own Dad, just switch ‘the name your father gave you’ for ‘the name I gave you’ and we’re right there. And I don’t… understand why that had to be in this film?

But that aside, just kind of bad all around. Russell Crowe’s Greek accent was at least racist adjacent, probably not aided by the fact that it sounded a little more Borat than actually Greek. The whiplash between comedy and serious drama was so stark, it is definitely the worst in the MCU but maybe one of the worst I’ve ever seen. The film opens with a man holding his dead daughter in his arms, and then it cuts to a subpar What We Do In the Shadows bit? Hello?? Most of the jokes didn’t land, I think the funniest bit was the callback to Starlord’s feeling shitty bit, and truly things are dire when Chris Pratt was one of the funniest things in your comedy film. The goat and Korg’s narration framing device recurring gags were both insufferable. Valkyrie’s bisexuality comes in the form of a retroactive ‘actually her tragic backstory was a secret Bury Your Gays’ moment. Bold decision to spend the first half of your film establishing that Thor and Jane were kind of a bad romantic pair and then have them say they’re in love, presumably just so it’s more tragic for Thor when she does die. The aforementioned Axl thing drawing the unending use of Guns & Roses into the text made me roll my eyes once I got past the weird transphobia bit. And they abridge Dio’s Rainbow in the Dark during the end credits so they could squeeze in their intensely mid hard rock original score, and that is a crime I cannot forgive.

But a few positives, for balance: I thought Gorr was pretty cool, a fun mix of ‘sinister dude who snarls at everything’ and ‘morally correct villain who does One Thing that’s too bad to forgive’ MCU-classic. His shadow creatures were rad, even if the CGI did them no favours. Costume department went hard, I would love to have Thor’s sleeveless red leather jacket. A real rock n’ roll Quattro Bajeena-like look. In general, lots to love if you are mostly here to thirst over someone’s arms, Portman and Thompson were also looking great. I liked the desaturated planet.

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The Phase 5 thread’s mostly there because I’m The Last Guy Remaining Who Will Go See MCU Movies In Theaters and figured we could use a place to park P5 conversation when there’s actual conversation to be had.

But yeah, Love & Thunder feels like a movie that set a new record for the most uses of the phrase “we’ll find it in the edit.” Like…maybe you can do the Mighty Thor story in a Waititi movie? Maybe there’s a version of that movie that works? I don’t know. But what’s there is not good in a way that’s even less good than the middling movies Marvel’s been churning out.