[FILM REVIEW] - MCU 31 : Black Panther 2 : Wakanda Forever

MCU 30 : Black Panther 2 : Wakanda Forever

To my great shock, this film is actually one of the better Disney-Marvel movies to come out in years.

I hate using terms like "Woke" or "M-she-U", but it is hard to ignore, that besides the bad guy, there are only 3 males in this movie. Apart from extras or minor parts that are not much more than extras. We have a faceless "top henchmen". An Odd-Job style dude. Arthur Dent who is in the film for not much more than 2 minutes and there is the big King guy that bashes his chest a lot, who is also in the movie for almost no time at all. The movie does revolves around old female characters, or new female ones. There are jokes about white cops, jokes about "colonials in chains", an entire subplot about the Spanish invasion of South America. Black Panther is of course a gender swap and it also, bafflingly, they chose to feature Iron Heart for some reason. Iron Heart was a Iron Man race / genre swap from the comics. Her comic series btw turned out to be the worst selling Marvel Comic in history of Marvel Comics at the time of release. So why did they bring over a failed hero into the MCU? Makes no sense to me. So the thing is, if that kind of stuff really annoys you, then there is plenty of fodder in this film to fuel a rant about it all. 

The thing is, while all that can be intrusive at times, surprisingly, most of this movie is actually solid. It is much darker than the average Disney movie. Darker in tone, and even in the pallet. This is so refreshing and much more aligned to what I want to see in a soup-movie. The story feels more sophisticated as well. I mean, sure, it's a comic film, do not expect too much. Still, this is not the typical Disney film with random out of place jokes all the time and people acting like sexless, dogooder Star Trek type people. Namor has been completely reimagined in the MCU and this version is actually excellent. I dig the new history and the look of the Atlanteans. All his scenes rock, the actor nails this role, and I think the entire way his plot was handled, just worked. The subplot of new Black Panther reconnecting to her spiritual roots, which she feels are at odds with her scientific mind, is done well and interesting.  And just when they could pull out the stinky Pont l’Eveque cheese, they switch it up with a boss camo scene that steels the entire movie. Her arc was just cool.

Still, this is an MCU film and it suffers from all the normal stuff that I despise about these movies. I know I gate watch them MCU a little, but as a life time comic book reader who has never not once bought comis every week since I was a little boy... I just can't not see a comic book movie. Though I do so at home now, I have not been to the cinema for a MCU movie since Infinity Wars.

The disappearing helmets are back and it is still the most fucking stupid shit ever, and it is beyond ridiculous in this particular film. Even worse than normal. In the final fight scene the characters fighting and chatting away mid fight, already dumb, but they have their helmets appearing and disappearing every camera change and practically every sentence. Zip away. Say line. Zip on. Punch. Zip away. Say another line. Zip, punch, etc. It really is the gold standard for this disappearing helmet, magic communication bullshit that has become a staple of this series. It felt like a visual strobe. This fucking hat turning off and on again. The strobing effects being exacerbated by this all these helmet vanishes happening in near full screen close up and in tandem with full screen close ups to inside Iron Hearts helmet. It was so ridiculous. 

Also the film tries to do to much. Nothing gets the time it needs. There is just to many things pulling focus. Also, the entire Iron Heart thing was a colossal fuck up. Every scene she was in sucked and she is completely unnecessary to this film. If I was less bored, or more busy, I might have bailed on this movie in the early Iron Heart scenes. They are that bad. The character sucked, not the actress herself I think, but her lines gave her nothing to work with. They should have done some minimal tweaking to remove Iron Heart and that entire fucking buckets of cunts could have been avoided and the film would have been better off. 

As expected nothing in the film really stands up to any application of logic. I mean the events in the film do not really make sense. World Nations do not interact like that, and wars are not fought by 10 dudes on a highway. I am not some tactical genius but if I was a fish man and someone attacked me in a massive boat, I would swim down under the waves and then away. 

Also with bringing in big guns like Namor the MCU is running into the Superman problem that DC has. When a guy can take a punch from Sentry, there always needs to be some kind of "kryptonite depower" scene. These scenes are as old and cliché as Batman's Origin Story. I am just sick of seeing it, and if you spent 5 mins reading comic you can see how you can have these superpowered people battle without powering them down. It is a soup-story. Them being ubr-powerful is the point. I do not want to see them depowered, I was to see other people powered up.

Still this film really surprised me. The trailers looked beyond terrible and if I started vomiting blood during this film, it would not have been totally unexpected. The big difference for me is that I didn't have that bone chilling boredom I had with the original Black Panther and much of this phase's films and tv shows. The fights while typically ridiculous, lacked that completely boring "time-wasting" feeling that so much of the MCU has.

So what we have here, despite my initial conceptions, is a cool action film. Mostly cool characters I enjoyed watching. A awesome set of baddies. A main character with a cool and interesting arc that actually showed change and dilemmas she had to over come, both physical and spiritual. Also, it is a Disney film, and these guys know how to make a great looking blockbuster. It is a slick film in many ways.

Verdict : The darker tone, the film having actual emotional motivations and stuff that I enjoyed and a surprising lack of cheese (there is still plenty of cheese, I guess it is all relative)... This film is easily the best of the recent movies and TV Shows. It is a good MCU film, up there in the upper-middle of the stack.

[Film Review] - DCMU 3: Suicide Squad (Spoiler Free)

The third instalment of the DC Movie Universe, Suicide Squad comes to us from yet another relatively new talented director / writer. This seams to be a trend in Hollywood at the moment. Instead of having big name artists behind the biggest films to the year, Hollywood seams to instead be hiring budding new talent who are on the rise after some impressive, if only a smattering, of lower profile movies.

[Film Review] DCMU 2: Batman vs Superman - Dawn of Justice [NO SPOILERS]

 

 DCMU 2: Batman vs Superman - Dawn of Justice

NO SPOILER REVIEW

Most films are part of the landscape of popular culture that simply passes by as you move through life, but some movies are so much more. There are films that speak to people on such a basic level that individuals have dreamt of them long before any actual film was ever a serious discussion to be made let alone released. There are films that have played in people's minds a thousand ways as they hope for it to actually one day get made. Star Wars was one such film. Over the decades before Phantom Menace, the idea of a new Star Wars film fueled fan-dreams.

DCMU 2 : Batman vs Superman is also one of those kinds of films. A personal movie, dreamed of by children, by adults, by fans, dreamed by me but I do not think anyone, including myself, was ever salivating for a "Batman vs Superman" story. We were near rabid over the idea of seeing these character alive on screen, though. When comic fans dream of comic book films they really dream of the characters, the actual films themselves could be anything and nowadays they often also promise so much more than a single movie. Much anticipation is more to do with the idea of what is coming after the film than the film itself. So the pressure on this film is tremendous, not just in the normal way that a film of this size gets pressured, but because it is attempting to launch something so much larger, and it is this, the idea of a DCMU that the fans are really dreaming of.

BvS has many problems which are indicative of this new style of narrative, the shared universe. The movie is pulling so many parts from so many different locations while at the same time trying to construct a future which the actual film you are watching is not even about. So like most comic book movies the film is a mess of loosely interconnected threads all vying for screen time, with none getting the attention it deserves. This is Age of Ultron all over again, all the same, mistakes.

While the movie gets so much right, there are structural problems with how it is made that must fall squarely on the director and the editor.  The most glaring problem is the seemingly disconnected scene by scene assembly of the movie. There is no flow of the narrative from one scene to the next, instead, we are left with what feels like a series of independent scenes walled off from the next. It reminded me a little of  how a comedy sketch show works. Each scene from a given act could be cut and moved around with little effect on the outcome. This could be one of the worst examples of horrid editing I have seen in a big blockbuster in a long time. BvS simply fails to follow the tried and tested rules of film language and as a result, we see a series of the book ended sequences that produce no feeling of pacing and most importantly of all completely fails to convey the plot of the film itself. This failure, probably in the scripting itself but definitely in the editing is especially galling due to the fight sequences being superbly constructed.

The biggest surprise in the film for me was the performance of Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor. It really stands out as not only one of the best performances in the entirety of DC films and easily the best representation of Lex outside of the comics, but also a great example of what I believe is a core idea in the DCMU and DC in general.

DC is all about a concept called the multiverse. Each verse or "earth" completely different, yet the same, there is no "Lex Luthor" or "Batman" in DC, not in the kind of defined way you see at other publishers. For me, this is one of the towering reasons why DC is so fantastic, as artists have the freedom to play with ideas and concepts without the rigid conformity that you find at other publishers which can restrict imaginative writing.

The DCMU's Lex is a great example of this idea working extremely well. He is Lex, there is no doubt of that, he is absolutely recognisable. He is artfully brought to life by the actor, and yet he is something new. Something that pulls interest and discovery from the viewer, rather than them sitting in the theater with a bingo sheet ready to cry "Lex" after all the dots get filled. The entire DCMU character list is built in this way to varying degrees of susses. WB's attempt to create real characters on the screen is a bold and intelligent move which creates a far more interesting texture to the movie. After all, when your characters are 80 years old, there is no "real" version, it just depends on what period the fans are looking at. BvS for all its faults has more going on with the characters than most other movies of its type.

The tone of the film is bang on as well. It is no secret that I prefer the darker side of comics and it is a joy for me to see the DCMU continuing to be darker than its peers. I'm not interested in a DCMU that looks and feels like a cartoon, there is enough of that around and even at its best I dislike it. In the comic books, blood flows with violence and madness upon every page. I see no reasoning that compels me to believe that when these comics turn into films they should suddenly become light-hearted half comedy adventures unless the comic itself is one. There is already a very popular location to find the watered down children versions of comics, Saturday morning cartoons. The look and emotional tone of BvS are nearly perfect, only hampered by the fact that there isn't the emotional core in the writing to give it a better sense of reality.

Batman is particularly well done tonally and to my mind is the definitive Batman of film, though on a personal level I think he could have had a little more "crazy" peppered in Mad Max style. Even so his look and Affleck's performance as Bruce Wayne is another highlight for me even though I was surprised at how much of the film Batman takes up, regulating Superman into a near side character. That is not to say that Batman purists will not have a lot to complain about with this more brutal and angry Batman but like Lex the Batman of this film is an actual character to be discovered and I am completely sold, on not only the performance but on this DCMU version Batman itself.

Wonder Woman's role in the film is fun for every moment she is on screen even though her presence is small and ultimately unnecessary, as far as the story is concerned. She is a world building element for the future of the franchise and could easily be removed from the movie entirely along with Aquaman, Flash, and Cyborg. This is a problem all current comic book films have. The derailing of the films story and focus by bringing in threads that are not in any way relevant is among some of the greatest reasons that many of these films completely fail in so many ways. Brevity is the sign of a great plot. All the greatest books and films are streamlined and focused, but the very conceptual idea of the future movie tie-in produces a bloated sore upon each comic book film's storytelling. Yet, as I was saying at the start, they are ultimately necessary as the viewers are invested in the next film and beyond, sometimes more invested than they are of the film that they are currently watching. So these building scenes are greatly loved by the fans and appear as sweet spots during the movie even though they are largely responsible for the failure of the narrative as a whole, not just in this movie but in almost all modern comic book films.

BvS is far from the worst film to be released among the modern comic book movies, but it is also far from the best. I would say out of the collection of Disney, WB and Sony movies containing the property of DC and Marvel, BvS is in firmly in the middle of the awesome scale. It isn't terrible, nor is it great. The action is fantastic, its tone is perfect and it contains some great characterisations of some of my favorite characters of all time. The plot, once you decipher it from the loose connective tissue holding everything together is in fact very good. It is a real shame the pacing and execution of this film nearly completely obscure the terrific ideas behind it. It has some amazing imagery and there is no doubt seeing the DC Trinity in action was as great as we always imagined.

This film's greatest draw was the power of the icons within it, and this is also its greatest detractor. For a film like this, nothing short of a masterpiece would be satisfying and there will be a huge backlash upon this film not so much for the many things it got wrong, but also for the fact that, to put it plainly, it's just disappointing. The excellent moments, the great visual style, the performances, and superb action sequences are crippled by horrible editing, a jilted pacing, and convolution through story commitment to the films yet to come.

There was a great film in here somewhere, but it was just not on the screen. Yet somehow I fail to care. There is so much right going on here, and so much to look forward to in the future that a bad, not terrible, film is little more than a speed bump to me. I'd still prefer to watch this film again over many of the other films that have come out in this genre.

VERDICT : Must Watch for fans, worth checking out for everyone else, maybe.

I'll make a spoiler version of this post a little latter after Batman vs Superman has run for a while. There are many ideas that deserve closer attention and discussion which will require spoilers to be dissected.

(Probably should get around to this.. at some point.. but long story short.. the Ultimate Edition is a LOT better and fixes many of the problems I had with the Theatrical Cut, there is no reason to ever watch another version than the Ultimate Edition.)