dmydfilmreviews - Tumblr blog

dmydfilmreviews · 5 years

Text

MARVEL MOMENTS

So what they really did, as well as making a good load of films, was actually make a vast tapestry of genius interwoven moments like flicking through a big comic book! Ten years! Twenty something movies! A load of rubbish images at the end of the list because the last three films weren’t officially out on Blu Ray! Avengers assssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

Tony Builds the First Suit

Really it was a stroke of brilliance to start the whole shebang with Iron Man the self-made superhero. The backbone of the whole universe is that of Tony making himself and that all kicks off here, in a sequence that’s hugely thematically satisfying given what comes later. There’s also the fact that back in the day all this construction stuff was just fucking cool, a Nolan-lite bedrock for a blend of realism and fantasy that comic-book cinema had never quite nailed before. Seeing Tony improve his tech step-by-step is a quiet pleasure of these movies, the suits getting more and more outlandish but staying absolutely believable, just like the films, and that all kicks off here with one guy and a non-magical hammer.

Pepper Pulls Out Tony’s Heart

I noted these all down before Endgame, honestly. Sob. It was always his story really. The best example of the foundational relationship of the MCU: They finish each other’s sentences!

‘Truth is… I am Iron Man.’

They knew what they’d got from the very first. This ballsy coda sets the tone for the whole MCU, one of backed-up swagger, a willingness to fuck with the source material in the name of story and the general feeling that Robert Downey Jr. was God. All in like two hours. That they flipped the egotistically iconic line into an era-defining declaration of responsibility, growth and heroism a decade later is nothing short of remarkable.

Hulk and Betty in the Rain

It’s uh… it’s a nice comic-book visual of a classic comic book romance, I guess? Look, Hulk came a long way later, but his forgotten love for Betty was the closest they ever came to the source material outside of the Hulk generally smashing and being awesome. It was sweet!

The Bit Where Hulk Suplexes a Giant Zombie Wolf on the Rainbow Bridge of Asgard

wait was this in the Incredible Hulk

I’ve Successfully Privatised World Peace!’ ‘Fuck you, Mr Stark.’

They got Garry Shandling in these movies!

The Suitcase Suit

Now that is a cool-ass adaptation.

Black Widow Kicks Asses

Yeah, after a whole movie of being reductive eye-candy she was still reductive eye-candy here. But the scene as a whole’s basically a perfect realisation of her moves in the comics, and showed Marvel were capable of doing someone who wasn’t Iron Man. Then they did EVERYYYYOONNNNNNEEE bonus points for Happy taking out that one guy and yelling ‘I got him!’

Tony and Rhodey in the Japanese Gardens

Look, they just look cool, OK? No one said this was going to be deep.

Tony and Pepper as the Stark Expo Explodes

They haven’t managed a lot of great romance, but this one hella works: Tony’s overblown mess of a movie expo exploding behind the true love of his life is a visual so great that Shane Black nicked it wholesale for the climax of Iron Man Three: Christmas in Croydon.

The Frost Giant Throwdown

Wait, what’s happening? I thought these were the movies where Jeff Bridges rode a Segway? Are we in SPAAAAACCCCCEEEE?

Thor Can’t Pull It Off

Out of the big three Thor’s arc of mythology to humanity might be the deepest and most satisfying of all. That starts here with his tearful inability to be worthy of his father, his world and, crucially, himself, leading directly into the first great Thor/Loki exchange, then a whole host of movies that eventually put him through the emotional wringer to self-acceptance. Hopefully?

Thor and Loki Battle on the Rainbow Bridge

Yeah, it looks kind of goofy, but this is pure sixties Kirby, shorn of the irony the series would develop later. Beautiful.

Erskine Points To Cap’s Heart

That’s it. That’s the character.

The Star Spangled Man!

Who’ll hang a noose on the goose-stepping goons from Berliiiin?

That Whole War Montage That Ends With Bucky Falling From The Train

Just smash after smash after smash of wartime Cap goodness that we’d never see again, ending with the ‘death’ that’d define the rest of his story. Steve lost as much as Thanos in his quest for peace but, y’know, he wasn’t a total fucking intergalactic dick about it.

‘I gotta put her in the water!’

Man alive he waited for that date... whether you think the ending of Endgame ruins the moment somewhat (it doesn’t. sort of), this was still the biggest heart-tugger in the MCU at that point, and defined the characters of Cap and Peggy for years to come. Watch Agent Carter! Just bloody watch it!

'Lemme Put You On Hold’

The stand out moment of The Avengers is basically all of it, but let’s start with the moment Black Widow finally becomes a character, a sequence of broad-strokes skill from Scarlett Johansson and Joss Whedon that begged for a movie she finally got way too long later. Bonus points for possibly the greatest Coulson reaction shot in a history of great reaction shots.

The Helicarrier Ascends

OK, shit – this is series is big now.

The Whole of Stuttgart

Whedon’s love of classical posh entertainment is seen in Angel’s superior ballet episode and his fondness for Sondheim, and he even gets a bit of the ol’ jewellery rattling in here in a perfectly pitched Loki-loving sequence that culminates in some fantastic bits for Cap before Iron Man AC/DC’s all over the place. This is where the comic book stuff really kicks off.

‘YOU COME HOME!’

This Hemsworth’s fella’s really got something...

Forest Bro Down

Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. The first real Avengers mash-up is just wonderful. This is where the wish-fulfilment really begins, in a quiet clearing, where three superheroes nearly beat the shit out of each other in classic comic-book style. The Avengers assembled.

The Whole Fuckin’ Helicarrier Sequence

An absolute masterpiece of blockbuster juggling that had never been done before, this could be the third act of any other film. Over what plays out weirdly like a piece of theatre we get terrifying Hulks, mewling quims and awesome heroics, all expertly laced with wonderful character mash-ups and action we’d never seen before. Then Coulson dies. This is what Joss Whedon does.

‘There was an idea…’

Fuck shit yeah there was, and it made for a hell of an Infinity War trailer six years later.

ALL OF NEW YORK

Yep, all of it, but if we’re being picky it’s Hulk v Loki for the comedy side, the tracking shot for the action. As a sequence it’s never been bettered in the MCU, even in the open-mouthed joy-gush of Infinity War and Endgame. FIGHT ME

Go Fish

Iron Man Three is a wonderful movie that works best as the sum of its parts, but there’s one bit that’s up there with the pantheon: the sky-diving rescue above the bay is such a joyous subversion of the usual third-act super-fisticuffs that it’s like something out of a 70’s Superman movie, only with a hilarious capper at the end where Iron Man explodes under a truck. Beep beep!

Running the Lemurian Star

The Russo Brother’s action calling-card for their incredible MCU run, this sets up their vision of Cap’s super-subtle-super-serum-super-moves. From the off it’s a game changer in the way action’s shot across the MCU, clean-cut raid-alikes becoming the order of the day. AND THEN HE FIGHTS BATROC ZE LEAPER

Elevator Throwdown

Yeah, yeah, we all know the actual bit in the elevator that’s spoofed to tremendous effect come Endgame, but remember this sequence ends with Cap TAKING DOWN A FUCKING QUINJET SINGLE-HANDED. The look on his face at the end says it all.

The Winter Soldier Street Fight

HE FLICKS A KNIFE MID PUNCH

Come and Get Your Love

We’d seen a lot of cool shit from the MCU by this point, but this was something else again. It’s funny! It’s funny as fuck! What the fuck is this movie? And again, they know their own best bits: the return to this in Endgame is top drawer. What a moron.

The Kyln Sequence

This whole breakout is the Guardians at their very best; squabbling in space, reluctant teamwork, loads of cool shit and leg theft. The bit where it all goes anti-grav is a treat.

WE ARE GROOT

That’s it. That’s the movie.

…Stark…

It’s a shame they didn’t delve deeper into Scarlet Witch’s hatred for the man who murdered her parents, but her barely contained rage is the keystone for Age of Ultron: deeper, nastier, more questioning of it’s heroes and their heroism. This one they brought on all by themselves.

Sun’s Gettin’ Real Low

Yeah, maybe it’s for the best the slightly bumbled Hulktasha relationship was forgotten about, but this moment was pivotal in the character development of both. Beautifully shot, and leads to a primo Ragnarok gag.

Lift That Hammer

You genuinely could have made a whole movie of these characters hanging out at an open bar. The Stan cameo’s great, the War Machine story bit gets an Endgame alien planet boost much later, but it’s the drunken worthiness competition that’s the real highlight, a seemingly fun throwaway that actually almost single-handedly sets up the whole character of Vision and the most fist-pumping moment of Endgame, a movie nearly entirely composed of fist-pumping moments.

Hulk vs Hulkbuster

Pure comic-book wish fulfilment again, and how. From Hulk spitting out a tooth to Tony desperately pleading ‘go to sleep go to sleep go to sleep’, this mad clash of science pals knocks every Transformers movie straight through a freshly-bought-building. Veronica!

Well Done.

Alright, Vision’s no one’s favourite Avenger, but he’s one who’s the satisfying product of several movie plots, one beloved supporting AI and the combined brains, magic and cool red capes of his team. Whedon performs his own mad-skillz level script trick to make us accept this fucking weirdo, first by giving him Jarvis’ voice, then having him stare out at a world and see his reflection in it, then having him lift an unliftable character-establishment hammer. None of this could be done by any other film series.

The Geometry of Belief

Ultron’s climactic church-a-maggedon is short but perfect, a swirling mass of splash-page insanity that culminates in a glorious trinity of Vision, Iron Man and Thor blasting the shit out of their mad son like a magic triangle. The Avengers at their peak.

Vision and Ultron Have a Chat

Whedon pops out these gems of detached humanism from time to time, and his sundown final exchange between The Avenger’s success and failure is a doozy. The most poetic little scene in the whole MCU, voiced by two creatures who look like nightmarish dildos. ‘A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts’ is an all-timer.

Big Bathtub

Ant Man’s bedrock might be its family values, but it’s the shrinking that makes it stand out. The first time Scott drops into tiny-town is a Pixar-esque fun-burst akin to Stephen Strange’s nutso jump into infinity later, with deadly bath taps, thunderclap vacuum cleaners and mid-day apartment raves (?) all bringing a new level of threat and adventure to a series already teeming with variety. They should carry these ones on foreverrrrr

Cassie’s Room

There’s something about this scene that sums up Scott’s whole character and hopefully sets up his daughter for future ant shenanigans: he is (was) unique as a hero with a family, and no matter how many Pym Particles he stuffs into his suit he’s always looked like a giant to his daughter. Plus, y’know, Thomas the Tank Engine.

Some Guy Crashes a Car at Night

The catalyst for the great middle schism. Civil War is a masterclass of twisting, gut-churning reveals, and this is the quiet moment that starts it all.

QUEENS

The perfect Marvel character, introduced into the perfect realisation of the Marvel Universe, perfectly.

Running Into Each Other At The Airport

LITTLE MAN IS BIG NOW I’M CLINT WE HAVEN’T MET YET I DON’T CARE WHERE YOU FROM KID QUEENS BROOKLYN I’M YOUR CONSCIENCE WE HAVEN’T SPOKEN IN A WHILE YOU GUYS KNOW THAT OLD MOVIE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK HOW OLD IS THIS KID ETC ETC OH MY GOD MY BRAIN HAS EXPLODED

Cap vs Iron Man

‘I don’t care. He killed my mom.’

The Big Brain Burst

They keep doing bits to expand themselves, and this is one of the best, with the most potential for the future. Fleeting, but dazzling.

New York Mirror Fest

If the next Strange movies delve into this deranged nonsense then they could end up the greatest of all of them. This is the tip of the iceberg, and it’s still unlike anything else being done in mainstream cinema.

Mr Blue Sky

In a movie that frequently reaches big and misses, at least it hits the spot at the beginning. This glorious celebration of family, space-craziness and genre subversion is everything Guardians does best. The Gamora / Groot bit is adorable.

Peter’s Civil War Adventure

The perfect tone-setter for the story’s most-average joe, this ground-level view of the universe’s biggest clash acts as a whippet quick intro to Peter Parker’s world in the big bad MCU. It’s always a thrill to see him where he belongs.

The Homage to Getting Buried Under a Tonne of Crap

Homecoming’s riffs on classic Spidey-lore are generally pretty subtle, but when it comes time to show what Peter’s really made of Watts rips directly from the best, first with the iconic Parker/Spidey face split and then with him holding up a whole fucking building like he’s nerd Hulk or something. The added ‘come on Spider-Mans’ are the adorable icing on the homage-o-cake.

Anytime That Immigrant Song Plays

Another!

Thor vs Hulk

Yeah, it’s not perfect and it’s a little CGIey. But it’s Thor fighting the Hulk in a fucking galactic gladiator arena place run by Jeff Goldblum and it smashes and it’s full of fun callbacks to previous movies. Yes! That’s what it feels like!

Thor and Loki Do Get Help

The perfect encapsulation of Waititi’s irreverent-but-with-tonnes-of-heart freshgasm on the story of Thor, this bit of hilarious dumb shit acts as amusing action beat and neat character resolution all in one. They’re friends again! They’re brothers! Thor throws him around like a rolled up carpet!

What Are You The God of Again?

Oh right, so he’s the best Avenger now.

Killmonger in the Afterlife

The bloody heart of the most emotional Marvel movie, when Erik Killmonger enters the Wakandan afterlife he finds himself in his own tiny Compton apartment, exiled with his father forever with the plains of eternity just out of reach beyond the window. Heartbreaking, and brilliant.

Thanos Arrives

The opening of Infinity War is another example of their absolute mastery of tone; after the megaton funblast of Ragnarok we’re thrown into the end of that movie being ripped apart, before Thanos appears, dragging a battered Thor into frame, beats seven shades of green shit out the Hulk and murders two beloved supporting characters, all without breaking a sweat. If you weren’t excited before you were now.

New York Tussle

The opening New York section of Infinity War is all very clever, acting as the only grounding Earthy moment in what’s a pretty out-there narrative in terms of existential stakes. You get Tony and Wong helping people off the sidewalk and Strange winking after halting the space-death-machine, but from there on out it’s full-bore comic-book smackdown fun, clashing characters who’ve never met and providing top-drawer banter about wizards and children’s parties. This is the page, up there on screen.

BRING ME THANOS!

The Thanos Fight

Jesus fucking Christ. Up there with the end of Avengers and the Civil War airport battle, this is a perfect realisation of superhero action, with a bigger dose of high-level insanity courtesy of the Infinity Stones and Doctor Strange. Sublimely realised, incredibly satisfying, with real weight and thought put into the spectacle, it’s also fantastic in the narrative of the film, the culmination of its themes of desperation and inevitability. The first time you saw them try to rip off the gauntlet was unbearable.

The Snap

Well, yeah. You’ll never get back the first time you saw this. And imagine seeing it as a fucking kid.#

Just a Girl

Sure the big level-up CGI fest at the end is good, but it’s the comedy smackdown on the Kree ship that’s the most satisfying part of Captain Marvel, the shit-eating joy on Carol’s face as she discovers she’s way more powerful than the assholes who’ve been holding her back. It’s corny sure, but it’s hella fun.

Thor Goes For The Head

Endgame is a shocking, disorientating blur to begin with, all the characters you loved acting in strange, desperate ways in a super-hero version of post-traumatic stress disorder. Tony’s meltdown is bad enough, but it’s when Thor just straight up fucking murders Thanos that you know this is going to get dark and serious. It doesn’t, it remembers it’s a Marvel movie, but the shot of him walking out into the blurred alien sun, cape aflutter, is a fitting goodbye to a more innocent time of heroics.

Ant Man and Cassie

A moment that could be worthy of a whole movie itself, a desperate Scott Lang meeting his five-years-older daughter gives a joke character a serious moment in the same way Infinity War did for Guardians. It’s very odd, very sweet and very Marvel.

Love You 3000

Morgan H. Stark is almost a little too on the nose as a wrap-up for Tony, but hell, she’s still sweet as all hell and a perfect capper to his story of fatherhood and responsibility. It’s a mark of the work they’ve put in that we’ll almost immediately accept the tired trope of kid-taking-over-mantle when she inevitably puts on the armour in a few years.

Steve and Peggy / Tony and Howard

This is the bit in Endgame where I finally started tearing up: a lot of it is too-neat fan-service, but fuck it, they’ve put in so much effort that it works. This is the scene where you realise both of these long arcs are coming to an end, the resolution of Steve quietly making his decision to go back to Peggy and Tony getting the closer of discussing parenthood with his unknowing father. It’s corny sure, but so are comic books, and setting the whole bit at the height of seventies Marvel Comics mania is a loving nod to the imaginations that made all these crazy possibilities possible.

Widow and Hawkeye

There’s a theme here. All of these moments are kind of cheesy and rely heavily on callbacks to previous bits… but at the moment it doesn’t matter because ENDGAME WOW. Maybe we’ll look back at it as a corny misstep, but for the moment, Clint and Tasha having one last, ludicrously overblown tussle for who gets to live is a sweet capper that never goes as deep as the others because they’re supporting characters. It still stings, and it’s a neat mirror to Gamora and Thanos in Infinity War. The red’s gone from her ledger! It’s on the rocks! Urrrgh

Nebula Kills Herself

Again, they’re so good that they can spend a big chunk of time in what’s ostensibly the last big movie for their most beloved characters on making a lesser character beloved. Endgame spotlights Nebula even more than Infinity War did Gamora, using her self-hatred and fear of her father for compelling, wibbly-wobbly plot and character beats. The resolution of her story and her newfound place with her team should make for a whole different Guardians before we even get to Fortnite-Thor joining up.

Cap Wields The Hammer

‘I KNEW IT!’

Thanos’ Army

One last escalation of scale. When Thanos’ army finally arrives it’s like something out of those apocalyptic Turner paintings, where the hordes of a ship-wrecked hell confront eternity under skies ripped from heaven. Only this time they’re facing one guy called Steve, and they’re fucked. Incredible.

Avengers… Assemble

It almost lives up to what you always had in your head. The Marvel Universe, somehow done right.

Tony Hugs Peter Back

Awwww!

New Avengers Run the Gauntlet

A surprising amount of Endgame’s grand finale is given over to the future hopes; while Strange gets stuck in with holding back a Biblical flood it’s up to Black Panther to grab the Infinity Gauntlet from Clint in a delightful callback to Civil War, before embarking on an intense relay race across the entire battlefield that begins with Scarlet Witch crushing the shit out of Thanos’ testicles and ends with Captain Marvel engaging the Mad Titan in a bone-crushing show of super-strength. And along the way if finds time to have Peter Parker dragged through the air by Thor’s hammer which was thrown by Captain America before landing on a Pegasus flown by Valkryie across an exploding sky of alien whales. Maybe the most satisfying run of action since the first Avengers.

I am Iron Man

It was always going to be him really. Bonus points for Downey Jr. originally telling Thanos to ‘Fuck off’. Did anyone else keep thinking he was going to wake up and quip and everything would be OK? That’s how you make movies.

The Funeral

It looks a little weird actually, like they weren’t all on set. But they were! The Marvel Universe again, holy smokes.

The Kiss

Now that’s how you end ten years and twenty one movies. They’re movies! It was romantic! It was exciting! It was fun!

For TEN FUCKING YEARS.

Swing a Ding Ding Sir

After five movies of fresh shit they've finally starting dumping some classic Spider-Man on us; the Euro stuff's fun and all, but it's Far From Home delirious climax that sees Spidey and MJ thwipping through the canyons of New York before bumping into ugly ol' J. Jonah JJ Jay Jay likes it's a freakin' comic book or something. Delightful, and also serves as a wonderful image of hope and joy post-Endgame.

What a fuckin’ ride. Here’s to the next... seventy six? Seventy seven?

wait did I leave any out

9 notes · View notes

dmydfilmreviews · 5 years

Text

SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME

There's an Ant-Man and a Spider-Man now? Yup, and one of them's edged out the other as the MCU's premier every-guy. As still the most popular superhero in the world it's no surprise that Spidey's cracked out five appearances in these movies in just three years, but chucking him in at the deep end of the Marvel Universe while retaining his street-level appeal has been a stroke of franchise-freshening genius. In that short time he's scrapped with bad dads and muggers sure, but also had six shades of shit kicked out of him by half the Avengers, been smushed by a big purple alien Bruce Willis and rode on the back of Valkyrie's Pegasus while clinging to Thor's hammer for dear life. This is a side to Spider-Man that's long existed in the anything-goes comics but one we've never seen on screen, and one of the many reasons that Homecoming was such a fresh revelation with it's Stark junk and Chitauri clean-up. Far From Home juggles all this stuff again, delving further into MCU lore while going some way to return to the 'classic' Spider-Man from the Raimi movies and the sixties years. It's not big but it is clever, it quietly builds on its own stories and characters, it doesn't rock the big boat but it pauses to reflect. It's such a masterful water-treader that it even has a Hydro Man, and it's all done better than that other guy in the insect suit.

There is a sense of cruising though, which is the longevity of the MCU's fault rather than any of the individual players. Holland, Zendaya and a having-a-ball-with-a-ball-for-a-head Jake Gyllenhaal all continue breathing new life into the series, but it can't help but feel like a coda rather than something new. It riffs on the tiredness of the genre, taking the piss out of it's own CGI dust-ups, twisting one of its oldest hands into weird green shapes. But crucially amongst all this director Jon Watts still has an absolute grasp of Spidey lore, continuing his exemplary adaptation work with its villains and the essential crux of Parker's character while chucking in all sorts of new MCU wrinkles. It's a nice epilogue for Tony Stark, and a thematic set-up for what's to come; presumably all this paranoia's heading for some Kree-Skrull war shenanigans, and it'll be interesting to see how they handle something a little more nuanced than chinny guy with a big magic fist.

So yeah, a mixed one. It's great, but it doesn't really push anything. It's a spectacular Spider-Man story and a nice nudge for the universe, but it doesn't provide any big leaps, like how the Captain Marvel, Black Panther and Doc Strange sequels presumably will. It feels like they're also holding back on the seriousness for Parker, waiting for some more adult shapes in the form of the Sinister Six, foaming Jonahs or Goblins. With this kind of set-up it'll be amazing if they get to it, but this'll do for now. Put it this way: Far From Home is another breather, and it's still a riot. This is how good they are at making a stop-gap in their overriding story, while everyone else can only dream of taking one.

4 notes · View notes

dmydfilmreviews · 5 years

Text

AVENGERS: ENDGAME

Alright, so now the dust has settled, and there was a lot of dust, both of the snapped variety and the kind that gets in your eye, was it any good? A decade of build-up, a hype train that chugged into your face every time you looked at a screen, a whole year's worth of cliffhanger waiting? Did it live up to it?

Endings are hard. You can grab people with something fresh, you can twist it in the middle to add new depth and shock ‘em. But if you manage both of these then people have fallen in love; they’re fans now, and they start making up their own versions in their head, wondrous, endlessly percolated visions that the actual finished product can never really live up to. You only need to look at Game of Thrones, Star Wars or Doctor Who to see the range of disappointment this headfuck can bring, even if a lot of is just entitled whining. People hate old franchises while claiming to love them, it's just a thing. That Endgame manages to even satisfy its insane build-up and expectations, is, well, a Marvel. Another one.

It does it by staying true to its characters. The MCU knows its strengths, and its strongest is a feature that still nobody else has managed; we've lived with these big, weird superheroes, we like them and we want one more go-round with them, and that's what we get. After its bleak, disorientating opening the shocks and subversions are largely out of the way and we can get on with what's ultimately been the point of these movies, one last hang out, shooting the shit, quipping and eating sandwiches and swapping facial hair. There's time travel in more ways than one, all of these Avengers older, comfortable with each other in tessellating arrangements; Thor is comforted by the Hulk, who's a loving ex with Black Widow, who has her sense of fun and adventure re-kindled by her old pal Hawkeye, who still fires some arrows and gets a temporary tattoo. These are characters with depth! Characters with names like Hawkeye and Hulk!

This giving-every-Avenger-a-satisfying-arc-like-the-first-movie does come with costs. As an actual story it's disjointed, a collection of moments rather than an interesting plot. It does weird stuff with a villain it did so well last time, it relies a lot on past glories and callbacks. Until the very end it's actually short of awesome superheroic action, shorter than the other three Avengers joints. But fuck it. It does everything right where it counts, and where it counts is heart. That heart comes mostly through two guys called Steve and Tony, the lynchpins who swap iconic sacrifices while still living up to their journeys. Yeah, it's all wrapped up a little neatly and comic-booky, but these are comic books, and its all hugely satisfying. These are simply near-perfect endings, Tony fulfilling his twin arcs of tech-expansion and proving he has a heart (this is a guy who goes from making a helmet out of an old bucket to building a gauntlet that can contain the infinite energies of the universe), Steve seemingly giving up on heroism but actually leaving a backdoor of potentially endless adventure where he swings a hammer and fistful of magic gems into alterna-Nazis across an entire multiverse. They're wonderful. They're the Avengers.

So yeah yeah, character, great. But how good did they punch? Well, they punched good. They punched real good. The last act murkathon never quite hits the same faultless clarity of New York or the battle on Titan, but the final outright war is still like something out of a dream, from the moment Thanos' whole army appears over the charred remains of the Avengers compound to face a lone Cap you gasp, feel yet another burst of scale, another level up, and from then on it's a permanent gush-rush: the assembling, Cap tossing Thor's hammer, Captain Marvel crashing to Earth and beating eight shades of shit out of the Mad Titan. The little ant people and their van. It's pure, glorious comic book, riffing on classical apocalyptic paintings, taking the score to new heights, putting a whole universe on screen for fleeting moments of magic. God, it was good.

This whole write-up sounds kind of down, huh? Kind of flat? Well it is. It's sad that this has all ended. Those ten years gone. Tony Stark grooving to Christmas tunes in his workshop. Steve Rogers recording PSAs about tooth decay for high-schoolers. Black Widow calling Hawkeye's baby fat, Hulk eating several fistfuls of scrambled eggs, Thor flying a spaceship through the Devil's Anus. Leaving Endgame for the first time the people I went with felt kind of deflated, a little empty. Not because the movie was a let-down, but because it was over. That's the best kind of entertainment. It leaves you sad, leaves you wowed, leaves you somehow wanting more. These guys provided that, and they somehow did it across twenty one films, ten years and like a billion characters. It was an impossible feat, and they pulled it with style, and if anyone can deliver the impossible twice and top it, it's them. If we're nitpicking then Endgame might even be the worst Avengers movie. But we're not, because we love it, because they earned our love, through ten years of skill, dedication and a clear love for what they were doing. Like a lot of it, it just boils down to what Stan said, what he built, and what they carried on: Make Mine Marvel. 'Nuff said.

0 notes

dmydfilmreviews · 5 years

Text

CAPTAIN MARVEL

They’re kind of victims of their own success by this point – Phase 3 has seen the introduction of a whole host of Doctors, web kids, panthers and now a Captain, and the new guard’s origin stories have had to rub up against the old guard’s greatest triumphs. With the exception of Homecoming none of them have quite hit the heights of yer Ragnaroks and Avengers spectaculars, but Black Panther and Captain Marvel have come closest, both with new thematic depth but in largely different ways - Panther is a measured, stately building of a whole other world and its fault-lines, while the new Cap is a straightforward fucking blast.

That’s not to say it ain’t clever; a seemingly simple homage to nineties action cinema ingeniously uses the genre’s tropes to showcase its theme, making for a movie that just builds and builds until it explodes into the story of a woman who is all women being stomped on and held back and kept down until she embraces her emotions and becomes more powerful than anyone ever has before. It’s a champagne bottle popping. It’s orgasmic. It has a cat in it and everything.

Simple but effective, basically. It’s far from perfect; the music’s more shoehorned than Guardians, the world ain’t as deep as Black Panther. There’s the usual sometimes crappy CGI of all the ones that aren’t avenging and it’s links to older movies are so slight they’re actually kind of a let-down. But these are small ACUSATIONS RONAN IS SHIT. Captain Marvel’s by the numbers but most of the numbers are good; it has a couple of daring twists, some funny bits, a couple of good action scenes before the massive scope-shift at the end. It has at least three great performances, with Ben Mendelsohn being as great as he always is in a role with a whole host of stuff going on and Samuel L. Jackson revelating all over the place in a way old actors who just play themselves rarely get to be; they’ve finally mastered the whole de-aging thing, and while we should be very, very worried about the endless host of re-animated Marilyns and Raiders-era Indy’s we’re about to be bombarded with, it’s actually Jackson’s good old-fashioned performance that makes his young Fury pop, a delightful, cat-loving fun guy who sings Marvelettes songs with a sweetness the older version only ever winks at. The story of his missing eye is perhaps the best long-form joke in the whole MCU, and leads to one of their very greatest post-credits scenes if you enjoy cats throwing up.

And then there’s Brie Larson. She’s got a tricky role here; by her nature Vers is a subdued, lost character, someone the audience doesn’t know, someone who doesn’t even know who she is. But Larson enbues her with glances, little hints of the character within, enough to make us like and respect her. She’s the stoic with a glint her eye, the dependable one. The new Cap, and someone new. Though we never really see the full Carol Danvers until the very end, the fact that it doesn’t matter is another feature of this unique movie universe; this one can wave away its faults because it’s prologue, the cinematic equivalent of one of those ‘who she is and how she came to be’ intro pages from the old comics. As a starter it’s deeper than Thor’s first go round, as rich and potential-filled as Iron Man or the old First Avenger. It does its job of setting up this character as the ideal leader of a new team of Avengers, a team that as a result of the work they’ve finally put in with female characters could now easily be made up wholly of women. Or, y’know, just a fun Steven Universe kind of thing with Parker and aunties Valkrie, Hope Van Dyne and Danvers. V Squad and the Spider-Boy baby!

It gets better then more you watch it, like a lot of them do. There are hints of indie cinema in the disorientating opening visuals and memory scan backstory, while Boden and Fleck’s usual quality character work holds steady at the centre. It actually works better on repeated viewings, everything hewing to the theme, everything building to the climax. And ultimately it does what most of the Marvels do, even if it’s not up there with the best ones: it leaves you wanting more. If Endgame does cluster murder every raccoon, God and archery-dad we’ve loved for the past ten years, at least it’s nice to know the new universe is in good hands.

8 notes · View notes

dmydfilmreviews · 5 years

Text

ANT MAN AND THE WASP

I’ve been big and small and big and small and big and small and… Guardians 2 does this as well. The first Ant Man and Guardians spend time setting up their worlds, making them real spaces you could walk around in. Their sequels don’t really bother. They feel like they’ve done the heavy lifting and now they can jump straight back into character. They feel smaller. It doesn’t work so well.

The main problem with the Ant Man films, and it’s more apparent here, is that Scott Lang is just a bemused audience surrogate. He did it in Civil War, he’s probably going to do it in Endgame. He’s Paul Rudd, marvelling at Cap’s muscles, disbelieving in his own incredible powers in the airport. He’s outside of it all, riffing on it, wondering what he’s doing there.

In Ant Man and the Wasp he’s outside two pretty boring people. There’s a lot that’s wrong with this movie but Hope and Hank are kind of the worst element, because they’re never given a chance to make us really give a shit about them. They’re just two uptight serious assholes who don’t really like each other, who don’t seem to like anyone else, fixated as they are on saving their wife and mother. That’s hard to sell, and the script never quite manages it, despite Evangeline Lilly’s best efforts. Michael Douglas – well, he just looks happy to be there. The other problem is Scott; the movie he’s been plonked on the outskirts of isn’t very good, and he even points it out, in the exposition scene with the Ghost, the literally half-formed villain who barely does anything. The plot’s a case of ‘let’s go there, let’s find this, let’s get that back, who’s got what’, the tone is smug, there’s not enough conviction in the emotional bits. Cassie’s more annoying. Janet gets magic healing quantum hands. The whole film builds up to her rescue and they just rescue her really easily and she’s out. The bit with her possessing Scott looks like it was dumped in just to give Rudd something to do other than look bemused at everything.

So it’s low on their pile, all told. But even their worst has its moments; still light and fun sometimes, still some awesome shrinking and at least one laugh-out-loud visual gag. The whole set up is still fucking weird when you take a step back from it. As a palate cleanser it’s fine to be simple and fun, but it would be nice if it was all just a bit better too. You know what sums it up, what makes it as clumsy as this whole review? Scott’s cardboard ant house thing at the beginning. It’s too good. I know he’s been under house arrest forever, it took him ages, yadda yadda yadda. But it’s like the movie – it wants to be sweet and cute, but it’s drenched in too much cash, it can’t be an underdog. It all looks too good, but it lacks real heart and conviction. He bought that cardboard ant house! He bought it from some kind of cardboard ant house store!

What an anthole!

I still kind of like it, they’re that good. Their next one’s much better.

0 notes

dmydfilmreviews · 5 years

Text

AVENGERS INFINITY WAR

There’s a bit early on in Infinity War where Doctor Strange wiggles his hands at the gigantic alien death machine spinning its way into several New York bodegas and stops it and winks at his new douchebag mate Tony Stark: he’s got this. It’s a moment that’s great for the character – Strange 2.0 is a vast, adult-in-the-room upgrade from his stumbling own movie version, but it’s a moment that also symbolises Marvel’s now near-mastery of something that hadn’t been done before. It’s OK. They’re winking. They’ve got this.

For all its auteurist risks and world expanding, Phase Two of the MCU still never quite managed the ‘continuing story’ aspect that remains the universes’ unique cinematic draw. For all their continued brilliance at drip-feeding names like Stephen Strange and narrative progression like Tony’s murder-bot obsession the actual balance of spectacle got a little out of whack in an effort to match the first Avengers’ New York stomping denoument; it could be said that Winter Soldier would have improved an already incredible movie with a more subdued third act, while Guardians’ planetary-protection actually feels bigger than it’s Celestial Pac-Man jousting sequel. Phase Three is where they sorted this out. It started in Civil War, essentially an Avengers movie with a literally gigantic set-piece in the middle that said ‘hey, this is the real story, this is what’s important.’ Spider-Man Homecoming, Guardians 2, Black Panther and even world-destroying Thor Ragnarok are all essentially character pieces, smaller scale. Bottle episodes. They’ve done it by this point, they’ve made the biggest TV show in the world. Infinity War is where the season ends, and it’s where stuff matters for the story.

They’re very, very good at this. From the start Infinity War is a masterpiece of tone- the opening on the Asgardian ship, so recently seen as a rock-man led gag-factory in Ragnarok, is a mausoleum now, with a guy who beats the shit out the Hulk proclaiming himself as inevitability itself. Then you watch characters die, one after another. Properly die. Then the movie starts. The movie you’ve been waiting for for nearly a decade. Infinity War isn’t exactly clever plot-wise; the inevitability and unstoppableness of Thanos is about the sum of it all, as each beloved character in turn slips and fails to stop him, resulting in loss and catastrophe. It’s the way they fail that’s glorious, a movie of moment after moment, clashing beloved characters into incredible scene after incredible scene. Fan service sure, but then isn’t everything? It helps it’s all done so expertly; the grounding of the New York clash, Stark picking up people off the street before the cosmic insanity later, seguing effortlessly into one last fun-gasp of ‘catch the wizard’ before everything gets more serious. The tone’s there, the importance; this all means something for once, while still being buckets of awesome. The decision to split the characters into groups is the right one, and probably necessary; they’re going to all get together in Endgame, but for now it works like three great movies playing chopped up. Oh, we’re back with Spider Man and Strange! Oh, that’s where we were with the Guardians! Thor! THOR!

Obviously it’s weighted towards certain heroes. Cap and Black Widow get fuck all to do, presumably because they’re being saved for the next one. But this might be the best Guardians movie, in some ways the best Thor movie. The Guardians stuff is astonishing because the whole fun, flippant tone of their adventures hits a brick wall of horror. You can watch the colour drain out of Peter Quill’s face in this thing until his last, destroyed ‘oh man’, while the stuff with Gamora finally plunges into the Shakespearian depths her own movies hinted at. And Thor – fucking Thor – recruits a tree and a tragic raccoon to RESTART A SUN with a GIANT DWARF by SWINGING A SPACESHIP AROUND. His whole story is brief but utterly incredible, the fullest expression of comic-book grandeur yet seen on screen, bundled with movies worth of character growth and the catalyst for the film’s greatest moment. All utterly fantastic.

This has just been a gush, huh? An outpouring of how incredible it all is, rather than a reasoned, thought through analysis? Yeah, pretty much. Fuck it, there’s more; how it has the balls to have a ‘new’ villain as its main character in a film stacked with eighty six people you already love. How it does so much with so little, thanks to the pay-offs of its ten-year prologue. How they brought back Alan Silvestri to score the thing, leading to moments of pure wonder whenHulk flies along the Bifrost, or Cap arrives to save the day in Scotland, or the entire cosmic wonder of Nivilidir . Infinity War isn’t really a film, it’s a sequence of astonishing, fully-earned moments, culminating in a battle on a dead world that’s the greatest realization of super-powered action yet seen on screen and an ending that traumatized a generation of new viewers and shocked every comic book reader who knew what was coming but was still amazed that they had the balls to pull it off. Hey kids, you like Spider Man? He’s dead! You enjoyed Black Panther? Dead! Ninety percent of the Guardians of the Galaxy? THEY’RE ALL GONE. Imagine seeing these movies when you’re a kid. Imagine.

It’s too much. It’s an astonishing pay-off for years of artistry and dedication, a showcase of blockbuster film-making skill and, in it’s ending, sheer daring and assuredness. It’s a wonder. And it’s the first half.

0 notes

dmydfilmreviews · 5 years

Text

BLACK PANTHER

Finally, relevance. It took them long enough, but Black Panther was the Marvel movie that finally had something to say about the real, sometimes awful world that we live in, and when it did say it it was heart-breaking. A series that had previously dealt exclusively with entertaining the shit out of you was now holding up a mirror, and doing it very well. It’s just a shame it fudged some of the entertaining.

As a polished film Black Panther’s kind of a mixed bag. Some of it looks cheap and soundstagey, particularly towards the end. The plot runs along too fast for its Shakespearian grandeur, with some hastily sketched character beats and a sense that T’Challa isn’t even the lead in his own movie. There’s not really a whole lot of everyday Wakandan society, though there’s probably as much as there is of Asgard, while the final CGI reckoning looks like someone grabbed some deleted scenes from 2007’s Spider Man 3. The one with the sand guy. But fuck it, none of that really matters.

This is a film that created an Afro-futurist utopia that people had waited decades and decades to see, and created it gloriously. The design work here is arguably the best in the entire MCU, a series with incredible design work, with Wakanda feeling like an ancient wonderland from the future. The aircraft! The tribes! The Dora Milaje! This shit means something to a lot of people, and it’s glorious to see it as the best realised world in the whole of Marvel, with the most potential for future stories. It can run and run.

And then, this film had the balls to take that utopia on the first go-round and rip it apart. Killmonger might not be the very best Marvel villain; despite an incredible, at times devastating performance from Michael B Jordan, he’s not really given enough screen time or plot in Wakanda proper to be the greatest. But when he’s on he’s phenomenal; a living, breathing avatar of the difficult, real world questions the narrative asks. He’s a murderer sure, but he’s truths and anger, his scene in the heart-breaking afterlife and his final lines all-timers and the deepest stuff Marvel’s done. He’s frightening because he might be right.

When the whole movie’s on, it’s on; Boseman plays a difficult, Cap-alike straight-edge character with charm and presence, it has fantastic supporting characters in Shuri, M’Baku and a scene-guzzling Andy Serkis. The soundtrack is Johnny Greenwood-esque, the scene in Busan where Kendrick kicks in is buckets of fun. All in all it’s a great but flawed set-up to future movies, the best ‘origin’ film since the first Guardians. The possibilities for Ryan Coogler to take this are endless.

But as a film that means something to a lot of people, it’s a timeless classic. Wakanda forever. That’s the line.

2 notes · View notes

dmydfilmreviews · 5 years

Text

THOR RAGNAROK

Holy shit Ragnarok / Homecoming is a one-two punch. Both films are near-masterpieces of balancing irreverence and fealty to their source material, but it’s Ragnarok that really acts as an apocalypse to everything that’s gone before. Marvel gave Taiki Waititi almost full reign to do whatever he wanted with their bunch of most pompous, kind-of-ridiculous characters and the guy responded in kind with their most auteury work since Whedon collapsed from robot exhaustion. The result was a riot.

It’s obviously hilarious. Safe passage through the anus. Piss off ghost. Tony wearing his pants ‘super tight’. But what’s also incredible about Waititi bringing a deconstructionist mind to this world is how well it works in terms of spectacle. He takes a basic plot and slathers it in who-gives-a-shit-why awesomeness that in retrospect should have been there from the first Thor: why doesn’t he fly away from a massive dragon at the beginning? Why don’t we have a deranged eighties junk planet run by Jeff Goldblum, why doesn’t Thor fight the Hulk, why doesn’t it all end on the rainbow bridge, where everyone smashes up an army of zombies to Immigrant Song? Played for the second time in the film? Why not?

It’s fantastic. It’s the wild imagination inherent in the comics winningly realised on screen for the first time since the first Guardians, with effects that almost match the incredible design almost every step of the way. Waititi and Jon Watts on Spider Man are two of Marvel’s very best examples of their creative choices; in his other work, from Boy to Hunt for the Wilderpeople there’s an absolute solid undercurrent of heartfelt character work beneath the seemingly mocking tone, and that’s the same here. Ragnarok is the best Thor film by quite some way because it rips its central character to pieces amidst all the fun, denting his pomposity, severing him from his people, destroying his home. It’s one of the few Marvel films of lasting emotion and consequence, a deranged Rocky if Rocky had to get back in the ring against Cate Blanchett and could flick lightning from his fingertips. Hemsworth responds in kind, hitting every comedy beat perfectly, embodying every awesome crack of his new thunder fists. He is Thor here, the combination of performance, story and style finally dragging the third main Avenger up to the status of the other two. The way that Marvel were able to pivot from this fun-fest to the mournful, desperately-self-mythologising lost warrior of Infinity War is an absolute triumph of tone, and one of their finest achievements. Plus it works as one of their ultimate beer-and-pizza joints. What a God.

5 notes · View notes

dmydfilmreviews · 5 years

Text

SPIDER-MAN HOMECOMING

There’s a strong argument for this being their best one. In terms of sheer storytelling skill this is an incredible movie, one that balances light and depth even better than its fantastic Thor Ragnarok pal a couple of months later. Essentially Spider Man Homecoming is a tale of two halves, of being incredibly fresh in terms of its film language and style but also a fantastically astute honer of its source material.

And what’s more amazing is that that source material is the Amazing Spider Man. Spider Man! Three thousand times-done-before Spider Man! The most popular super hero in the world Spider Man! Everybody knows him! Everybody loves him! Everybody was bored of him! Even after that wonderful glorified cameo in Civil War most moviegoers were still snarking about how many Spider-Men they’d had dripped into their eyes, how all these movies should just go away for a while. Marvel’s answer to this fatigue was to a: Strip away everything but the character’s bare essentials of teenage wonder and responsibility and b: Be basically perfect. Homecoming is a new style for the MCU and possibly blockbuster film at large; look at the short bit where Aunt May tells Peter she ‘larbs’ him while they’re eating larb. We know their relationship, but we’re seeing it fresh. This kind of shorthand plays on decades of pop-culture familiarity while spinning it into something funny and new, and it’s all over Homecoming; its biggest set-piece involves Spider-Man simply climbing something, the classic, dumbo go-to visual in everyone’s minds, it’s big villain reveal echoes the Maguire movies’ iconic Willem Dafoe thanksgiving nightmare, its attitude towards the hero’s classic rogues gallery throws loads of them in, re-configuring them to how they’d work in this new universe. Despite feeling completely new it has a complete understanding of the character, from the giddy high-school scenes dating back to the anything goes teen drama of the Lee – Ditko years to the scene at the swimming pool on the spelling bee, a perfect encapsulation of Parker’s eternal mantra of ‘with great power’ without ever saying the words. He’s a kid with a normal life, who has to do these things, because someone does.

Everything about it is fantastic. It’s beautifully shot, beautifully edited. It takes elements of Edgar Wright and John Hughes but makes them its own, it somehow, again, even better than the super-praised Ragnarok, manages to be completely serious and still glide over itself in its use of tone – an example of this is another Aunt May bit, where a waiter asks her if she wants pudding. The way this is staged is in the language of a big reveal in any other Marvel film, the tension rising, the exhalation when the question is asked. But it’s about pudding. This movie is fucking funny.

And all this raving is even before we get to the MCU integration. The surface level stuff is great, from all the alien tech to the fascinating motivations of the Vulture. But it’s Iron Man where it really shows off. This is a film that is incredibly sure of itself, and this surefootedness continues to an almost laughably great use of Tony Stark. Although he’s only in the movie for like five minutes, those five minutes serve as a mini Iron Man 4 in themselves; the end is an astonishingly succinct capper to years of character growth that couldn’t be done by any other series, but it’s the video call before the Staten Island Ferry bit that’s just taking the piss, with Tony arriving for two seconds to sum up his entire character arc in a couple of lines. Effortless stuff, that took ten years of effort.

All in all one of their very best, and one whose style and assuredness points to their future. The only things Homecoming falls short on – a slight lack of weight to Peter’s character, a slight lack of great action – can be remedied later. This is the first of the stories for this character, and while it helps that they can rely on and subvert years of audience expectations, this is still the best opening gambit for a series-within-a-series in the MCU since Guardians. This tone, this style, this skill, could make for ten Spider-Man movies, from boy to man, getting deeper and more emotionally resonant as they go on, building him up to the greatest hero that he always has been. I think that’s what they’re going to do. And if Homecoming is any indication, it is going to be Amazing.

2 notes · View notes

dmydfilmreviews · 5 years

Text

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2

We’ve all been there. A dog, under a pile of blankets. Blankets with demeaning slogans on them, crocheted to keep you down. But you leap up. You smile, you yap. You’re a good boy. You’re a good dog, and you directed a good film, and now everyone loves you for it and you’re not an underdog you’re James Gunn and you let it go to your head.

There’s nothing wrong with having a little love for your creations. Hell, without it you wouldn’t be making them. But sometimes that love can tip over into a blinkered, perspective-dropping mess, where your main dude goes from plucky rebel to most important douche in the universe, and every one of your subplots also revolves around umpteen family issues. You’ve become obsessed with yourself, with your movie that literally has a character called Ego in it.

None of this would be a problem if Guardians 2 was just, you know, better. Everything that worked so well about the original’s tilted into annoying here. The writing’s too knowing. The action devolves into cartoon nonsense. Everyone SHOUTS AT EACH OTHER ALL THE TIME FOR SOME REASON IN PLACE OF GENUINE EMOTION. God, watching it back it really is kind of a chore; the plot’s all over the place too, there’s loads of lame jokes and at times it’s an absolute tonal shitshow, particularly the stuff with Mantis and Drax in light of Gunn’s creepy old tweets. The prison escape bit is meant to be insanely cool but just comes off as horrible and edge-lordy. It’s gross.

Well, alright. Take a deep breath. These are still characters you loved from the first one. There’s a balls-to-the-wall dedication to going full cosmic comic book, from having a living planet to stuffing every frame with a dizzying mix of lights and colours. It’s ambitious. But it’s so heavy, so exhausting, that it actually makes you wonder if the franchise would have been better off being taken away from its director. It’s absolutely his baby of course, and everyone involved seemed to love working with him, with a noble loyalty to a someone who should never have been fired in the first place. But on an narrative level it’s Infinity War that picks these characters up and makes them compelling again. Guardians 2 is a big, overblown piss-up that aims big but feels small. But you know, fuck it. At least now there’s a next time.

0 notes

dmydfilmreviews · 5 years

Text

DOCTOR STRANGE

By its very nature this was always going to be a disappointment, a work of art potentially endless in scope reduced to something designed to sell you twenty five dollar ‘More Than a Doctor’ stainless steel water bottles. They were never going to go full Lynch or Jodorowsky on a popcorn flick that had to sync up with Civil War, but watching it back it’s even kind of disappointing as something firmly in the Marvel template, and it resolutely fails to do for magic what Guardians did for space. The characters are all kind of unlikeable, the funny bits aren’t particularly funny. The plot and especially its origin scenes are hugely perfunctory, and it almost completely wastes at least four fantastic actors in exposition land. Even Cumberbatch doesn’t quite fit – there’s a sense of trying too hard here, a strain that loosened up come his far better appearance in Infinity War. He just looks uncomfortable among all the cool shit.

But there we are, there’s cool shit. Lots of it. The visuals in Doctor Strange are frequently dazzling, a kaleidoscope of psychedelic digitally warped imagery that you just don’t get in mainstream cinema this side of Inception ten freaking years ago. The opening London battle and the deranged mirror-dimension New York freakathon in the middle are both hugely fun, but it’s the brief big-brain explosion in the Ancient One’s tea room that shows where this series could really go; an escalation of increasingly trippy and beautiful madness wrapping around the befuddled beard of Stephen Strange, the sequence as a whole is a tidbit for something better, something that folds back in on itself narratively or expands out into a thousand different plots at once. It’s possibility given form and shape, and that’s something the rest of the movie only skirts around.

Maybe Strange just works better as a supporting character, like he does in the comics. Hell, his awesome-powers/grown-up in the room cool-fest rethink in Infinity War suggest as much, Cumberbatch levelling up his performance and the effects his character brings working better when thrown against the more grounded likes of Iron and Spider Men. Maybe Strange 2 will be a game-changing leap like Winter Soldier, and we literally won’t believe what we’re seeing and it’ll unlock the potential of the entire MCU to delve headlong into the insanity of experimental cinema. Maybe they’ll hand out mushrooms with the 3D glasses.

Either way, that leaves Strange’s first movie as the literal weird not-weird one; sometimes great, frequently perfunctory, a good-enough base for potential madness that’ll hopefully surpass it in vision and ambition. He’s seen 14,000,605 possible futures, can at least some of them be outright fucking nuts?

3 notes · View notes

dmydfilmreviews · 5 years

Text

CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR

Awww gawwwddddd. This is almost their best one. Well, almost. If the Avengers movies didn’t exist. Ultimately it’s too much of a mess to be an untouchable classic. But what a mess.

There is so, so much that is fantastic in Civil War. The way it works as both a great Iron Man movie and a thrilling continuation of Captain America’s story. The effortless introductions of two astonishing new characters. The fucking airport bit. As well as being the last Cap this is essentially the first ‘Marvel Universe’ film, a dry-run for Infinity War that would widen the scope of a single entry even more than the Avengers movies did. It succeeds, just about. The opening is a heavy slog of admittedly necessary character work, following up on Winter Soldier with some fantastic grounded action and a slow raising of stakes and tension. The misery fest is jarring compared to every other film they’ve done – it’s particularly strange to see Tony being a grown up for a change. But it’s never overdone, it’s never out of character, and it totally works for the narrative and emotional progression of the universe.

Then there’s the fucking airport bit. Giddy comic-book awesomeness has been sprinkled across the dour, real-world first hour with the pulse-pounding arrival of Black Panther and the pitch-perfect, heart-thumping introduction of Spider Boy to the world he’s always meant to be in, but by the time they start to gather one by one on the tarmac of a Berlin airport you know you’re about to see something astonishing. And it is. What it lacks in Whedon’s gift for physical space it makes up for in sheer, comic-book JESUS CHRISTNESS, an escalating series of moments ripped from the pages that you’re giddy to see finally smashed about on screen. Spider Man vs Cap! Ant Man in the Iron Man suit! Black Panther not giving a shit about Hawkeye! By the time it gets to Spider Man swinging around a gigantic Ant Man’s legs while War Machine and Iron Man blast machine guns into his face you’re at a palpitation level you only got from the first Avengers. It’s that good.

But… but… it’s out of tone with the rest. It’s a giddy blast of pop-art insanity in the middle of a serious piece. They’re good enough to pick it up again, delivering a series of devastating twists and genre subversions in the final act, as well as putting genuine emotion, character development and literal conflict into this universe’s story for the first time. This is the middle act, and they’re clever enough to tear everything apart using the character work they’ve done so well rather than, I don’t know a big grey poo monster or something. The big comic booky stuff could come later, and it did.

It’s sometimes a slog to rewatch to be honest, but it’s peaks are incredible and at the time you couldn’t quite believe what you were seeing again. That’s their thing. That thing where your mouth falls open in the cinema, and you’re a kid again and you can’t fucking believe what they’re doing. That’s what they do at their best, and they did it here.

Also it is still gay as hell.

0 notes

dmydfilmreviews · 5 years

Text

STAN THE MEN

What a guy. He loved creating things, we love arbitrarily ranking cameos he made in big-budget productions of the amazing things he created! Excelsior!

SHOES USED FOR PHYSICS DEMONSTRATION

This is from Thor: The Dark World!

‘MR SMILES’

He’s horny!

BARTENDER WITH LUIS’ VOICE

This is Luis’ superpower, he actually momentarily possesses all these people across time and space! He’s terrifying!

‘SUPERHEROES? IN NEW YORK? GIMME A BREAK!’

Yeah, OK.

REHEARSING PLAYING HIMSELF IN MALLRATS!

This is a still from MALLRATS not CAPTAIN MARVEL! CAPITALS!

GENERAL MISINFORMED ABOUT THE HEIGHT OF CAPTAIN AMERICA EITHER BY MILITARY INTELLIGENCE NEGLIGENCE OR THE RANDOM POSTULATIONS OF HIS OWN WAR-ADDLED MIND

‘I thought he’d be taller...’

PULLING AT A MYTHICAL HAMMER WITH A TRUCK

He LOVES driving that truck!

MISTAKEN FOR POPULAR BROADCASTER LARRY KING

MISTAKEN FOR FAMOUS DISGUSTING PERVERT HUGH HEFNER

This is the same joke twice! Like Iron Man one and two!

DRINKS HULKS’ PISS

GIVING BIG FAT TEN AT THE MISS CHATTANOOGA PAGEANT

He’s horny!

GAMBLER WHO FUCKS OFF MARTIN FREEMAN

Fuck off Bilbo Tim! Sherlock!

SEEN IT ALL BUS DRIVER

‘What’s the matter, haven’t you kids ever seen a two hundred and seventy eight year old man drive a bus before?’

GUY READING ‘THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION’ ON A BUS

Is this how he eventually got to drive the bus? By breaking down the constraints of reality? AGAIN? FUCK OFF SHERLOCK

FED EX DELIVERY MAN WHO CALLS TONY STARK ‘TONY STANK’

Peter’s last words should have been ‘I’m sorry... Mr Stank...’

GUY THAT REGRETS TAKING MASSIVE QUANTITIES OF HALLUCINOGENIC PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS IN THE NINETEEN SIXTIES DESPITE THE FACT THAT THEY HELPED HIM CREATE AN ENDLESS SELF-REPLICATING FICTIONAL UNIVERSE THAT WILL LONG OUTLIVE ANY CORPOREAL LIFEFORMS ON THIS PLANE OF REALITY

VETERAN DRUNK OFF HIS ASS AT AVENGERS TOWER

This guy gets fucked up.

INTERGALACTIC BARBER

He makes Thor cry! It’s very sweet that he’s dressed in clothes based on the timeless designs of his old collaborator!

HERALD OF THE WATCHERS

Of course. Happy trails Stan, have fun across the universe!

‘MARJORIE, HOW ARE YA? HOW’S YA MOTHER?’

What a nice guy.

3 notes · View notes

dmydfilmreviews · 5 years

Text

ANT MAN

Come on ,the Ant Man ones are their worst ones, and you’d still watch them wouldn’t you? WOULDN’T YOU? They’ve got Paul Rudd! They don’t seem to really give a shit about the rest of them! They’re a sweet, deranged mix of indie rom-com and 50s sci-fi B-movie! Ants! ANTS! ANT-MAN!

The first one’s quite a bit better than the second, and something of a miracle. Stitched together so you can still kind of see the abandoned Edgar Wright version, the whole thing’s a light-hearted mess of perfunctory plot, oodles of exposition and lame characters – despite a great Evangeline Lilly Hope ‘n’ Hank are kind of a drag, while evil bald ‘Darren Cross’ is so comically shit it might actually be intentional. But what it does have is Paul Rudd, fully committed and operating at peak Rudd, with a relatable homelife and shrinking. Lots and lots of shrinking. And shrinking is just fucking cool.

The powers in Ant Man are probably the coolest out of any Marvel, and definitely the most cinematic. There’s a giddy, primal thrill to be had whenever Scott drops to the size of a lump of grit, and every scene where he does so is peppered with the kind of clever delight you only really get from the best kids movies nowadays. He’s spinning around on a record! He’s dashing about through a model of the building he’s in! WATCH OUT FOR THAT THOMAS THE TANK! What starts out slow builds to a giddy escalation of cartoon madness in the second half, dotted with winning training montages and classic heist action. And while the central characters are pretty hastily sketched Scott himself is at least is given a solid bedrock apart from the other fifty-million supers on the block; a hero with a kid is such a good draw it’s amazing they hadn’t used it before, adding a whole new set of stakes to the daring-do and bullet-dodging. The final scenes are almost Spielbergian in their effectiveness, the masked villain feeling like a genuine threat in the warm glow of a child’s bedroom.

But that’s still a few minutes after he got swatted into a bug-zapper. While there are big elements of the Ant Man movies that don’t work they do their job and they do it pretty well, as a fizzy, weird palate cleanser to the increasing heaviness of the universe’s main storyline. Scott Lang acts as the eternal confused everyman to these infinity-spanning reality-catastrophes, and for his first film at least he pulls it off. There’s a giant sexy gnome!

0 notes

dmydfilmreviews · 5 years

Text

AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON

General consensus on the second Avengers is that it’s a patchy overblown mess that sits near the bottom of any universe ranking. But, you know. Look around. General consensus isn’t doing that great at the moment. General consensus is just… well. It can go fuck itself.

It depends on what you want from these movies really. Age of Ultron tries a lot of stuff, and it manages nearly all of it. If you want something simpler and cleaner then Winter Soldier’s your man, or Thor: Ragnarok if you want more knockabout fun. But Ultron is still an Avengers flick. They’re the main draw, they’re the real story. They’re the best movies.

We’ll get back to that, but what about the new stuff it tries? It’s much deeper than the first one. There’s some super-big themes going on here, most of them revolving around Tony Stark and his fracturing ego; the twin’s motivations all revolve around Stark’s journey from asshole to hero, while Ultron himself is a fantastic villain, a bad child born from humanity’s hubris and desperate to destroy it. The plot is stacked with globe-trotting, endless quippage and new character wrinkles, while throwing in three new Avengers who are bigger and more sci-fi than most of the ones that came before. It plays with religion and original sin; the church where Ultron’s body first appears, Satanic as Lucifer and rambling like a genius child about the ‘geometry of belief’ is the same spot as the end, where he sees that geometry first hand, the astonishing chaos-and-order tracking shot of the Avenger’s belief in each other smashing him to pieces before a holy trinity blasts him out of his homemade Eden. Loki had like, a portal in the sky or whatever. It’s good.

So yeah, it’s not as giddy as the first one. But it questions what heroes are, and even what humanity is, in more interesting ways than all these other movies. Can these busted-up people be heroes? Can their powers and responsibilities even offer them normal lives, or are they all too far gone? Are they killing the people they’re trying to protect? None of these are particularly new to superhero fiction, but they’re juggled with extreme skill here, with characters you deeply care about and dialogue and plotting that almost sings as sweet as the first go-round.

So what do we want from these movies? Guardians is funny and sweet, sure, Captain Marvel and Black Panther are inspiring and thematically rich. But ultimately these Marvel movies are spectacle, spectacle built on characters and a world you love, but still. They’re from comics. Ultimately you want to see these heroes punch the shit out of things. Age of Ultron has more comic-book joy and spectacle than nearly all the others. This is a movie whose little moments are big, like the Hulk bunker busting, or a set-up scuffle inside a ship that involves all the biggest characters of other movies knocking the shit out of each other before sinking into intriguing, near art-house dreamscapes. When it does go big it’s astonishing again; Sokovia isn’t the battle of New York but by fuck does it try, while the opening sequence and the South Korea chase scenes are faster and bigger than most everything else offered by the rest of the MCU. Infinity War is incredible in a lot of ways, but does it have a set-piece as big as a floating city swarming with James Spader robots? If you still have criticisms of it, and you can, just remember: this is a movie where IRON MAN fights THE HULK. And it’s FUCKING GREAT.

Not a moment’s wasted. Whedon clearly loves these characters. He never manages to make a compelling plot for each individual Avenger like the first one did, but then neither did Infinity War, and he doesn’t have to: this is a team story with a big dollop of Stark, and that’s fine. What it does have is something unique; this is the Avengers as a team at the height of their powers, the only time you see them like this outside of the last hour of the first one. Comics have years and years and countless adventures to watch your heroes do this shit. The MCU has one film. It’s still a joy to see these characters together because it actually happened so little. Age of Ultron might not be perfect, but it’s still a meticulously crafted, lovingly put together tribute to the classic Roy Thomas years of the MCU’s most beloved group of characters. It’s simple really, like that poor doomed henchman whines at the beginning: ‘Herr Strucker, it’s the Avengers.’

2 notes · View notes