Marvel Cinematic Universe by Slider_Quinn21 (Page 6 of 8)

I don't get why people think season 2 of Daredevil was such a big fall from season 1. It had some solid new characters and the arc was pretty smooth, compared to JJ or LC.

I guess it's also possible that season 1 earned the show a little more wiggle room from me.

Further proof that critics are useless idiots. Iron Fist has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 17% from critics! Audience score of 87%... Which is closer to where it should be. And the critics comments are largely political, with cries of racism, cultural appropriation, "mansplaining"... It's like they don't care about the writing, acting or directing, and only care about their SJW bingo cards.

From my understanding, it's set in the lead-up to and during Peter's high school homecoming dance.  They've said they really want this to be a John Hughes movie (Breakfast Club, 16 Candles, etc) mixed in with super-heroes.

Informant not knowing what a homecoming dance is only deepens my grief for him and his genetic inability to have fun. Stay strong, buddy. We'll get through this.

**

I sure hope Claire shows up soon! I only got around to watching LUKE CAGE now. Honestly, while Luke Cage is one of my favourite Avengers (he plays the straightman to the insanity of Tony Stark and Thor), I'm not really into stories about street gangs. But once I got past that, I really enjoyed this series -- and I've decided that Claire is my favourite MCU character.

Luke Cage sucked though. It was painful to get through. Claire didn't save it. I might rather go to the dentist and get my teeth drilled than sit through that series again. It was horrible. Which is sad, because Luke was a strong character on Jessica Jones.

I'm still watching Iron Fist. Still liking it.

The movie looks good.

The trailer seemingly tells the entire story, beat by beat.  In chronological order.  I haven't read a single online spoiler, but I can basically tell you the entire plot based on this one trailer.

It's baffling why studios do this.

Star Wars was able to do it.  You can watch all the trailers and promos and not really learn much of anything.  I think the Deadpool trailers created the right feel without ruining the movie.  Guardians has done a pretty good job.

The trailers for Life apparently did the same thing - tell the movie in two minutes beat by beat.  I think the BvS trailer (and I know I'm banned from talking about it) shouldn't have spoiled the Doomsday bit.  I think they need to do one of two things:

1. Let the directors edit the trailer (or they can let someone they trust do it).  Having 3rd parties make the trailers creates a situation where their goals (making a cool trailer) don't mesh with the goals for the movie (get people interested in movie).

2. Only provide scenes from the first two acts to the 3rd party.  Most genre movies have a big action setpiece in the first two acts, and all you really need to know is the inciting incident to get a feel for what the plot is going to be.

Well, I just think we've moved to a place where people assume that stuff is going to be spoiled so they show it.  How cool would it have been for Doomsday to show up with absolutely no reference to him in the trailers?  Apparently the ending to Life was spoiled by the trailers (and it's a twist ending, allegedly - I haven't seen the trailer or the movie).  And the Spider-Man trailer spoils a great deal of the relationship between Peter and Tony Stark, almost the entirety of a huge action setpiece in the middle of the film, and Peter's entire motivation throughout.

It was just too much.  Maybe the director would've spoiled the same stuff, but I doubt it.  Maybe you tease the boat splitting in half and have you wonder "how's he going to get out of this one?" like they did with the skydivers in Iron Man 3. 

Guardians didn't do that in their trailer.  Justice League gave a lot of character information without really giving much away.  These are big movies that didn't feel the need to make the same mistakes.

Maybe there's a great ending to Spider-Man.  Maybe the rest of the movie is great.  But if they're going to show so much (which looks great), my first instinct is to assume that the rest of the movie wasn't worth showing.

I don't understand the IRON FIST series at all. Why did Marvel TV commission a series about a martial artist character but fill the series with corporate intrigue and boardroom debates instead of martial arts action?

Why did Marvel TV hire an actor with no fighting skills and no time to learn how to fake it to play a master martial artist in this show?

Why did Marvel TV greenlight a show about Iron Fist when the Iron Fist superpower is barely present and Danny Rand never wears the Iron Fist costume?

Why did Marvel TV want to do an Iron Fist TV show about the character's origin story where the mystical city in which the story takes place -- K'un Lun -- is never shown onscreen and where the magic dragon -- which each applicant must fight to become the Iron Fist -- never appears in person?

Why is Harold Meachum the final villain of the first season when Harold has been established as weaker than the Hand ninjas and subservient to villains that Iron Fist has already defeated and dispatched?

If Marvel TV felt uncomfortable with the martial arts, the costume, the mystical city from which the martial arts came, the superpower and the origin behind the superpower, why are they doing this show at all?

IRON FIST is a series that doesn't seem to have any concrete goals and it keeps sabotaging itself throughout its run.

It's almost as though somebody decided years previous that Netflix would have a DEFENDERS series featuring Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist who'd first appear in their individual shows, but the Iron Fist show was thrown together at the last second to justify the character appearing in DEFENDERS without any sense of what IRON FIST would be and no commitment or interest in the aspects of Iron Fist that are present in the comics.

Dr Strange was harmless fun, I thought.

I don't really know how to describe AGENTS OF SHIELD, and every time I try, I ramble endlessly. I think the best way I have to explain the show is that it has constantly reinvented itself with each season and with Season 4, they did the annual reinvention early, in the middle of the season, wrapping up the Ghost Rider arc and shifting into the artificial intelligence war.

Season 1 was the children's version of a spy show and the series only seemed to find its footing when SHIELD was destroyed and the agents were made fugitives and outsiders which is a more Marvel-approach than having them as agents of the establishment. Season 2 were the agents trying to do their jobs when it wasn't their job anymore and it set up the Inhuman arc of Season 3 which did a really neat job of finally creating Inhumans to truly represent the best Marvel characters as misfits and freaks.

With Season 2, there was a cinematic, crisp, fast-paced approach to the show with tight editing and a snappy sense of rhythm. The series also pushed the actors to their limits with Clark Gregg, Chloe Bennett, Elizabeth Henstridge and Iain De Caestecker playing characters who were increasingly strained and maddened and pushed to their limits. And Brett Dalton as Grant Ward found deeper and more disturbing layers of horror and twisted monstrosity in a character who initially seemed incredibly bland and flat. The Ghost Rider arc was very fulfilling and exiting. The AI war has really grabbed me with the nightmarish Framework environment.

But I honestly can't point to any coherent throughline or central purpose to the series beyond being an exciting, PG-13 espionage series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It isn't a film noir adventure like DAREDEVIL; it's not a detective drama like JESSICA JONES; it's not a street-level exercise in atmosphere like LUKE CAGE; it's not a goofy space comedy like GUARDIANS and it's not a charming character piece like ANT MAN. It was a supernatural procedural thriller in the Ghost  Rider arc and it's currently a techno-action spy adventure. Who knows what it'll be next week?

I think Iron Man worked the best, because it was its own movie. It wasn't bending over backwards to establish some character to plot device that will become important 75 years down the line. It wasn't trying to be cute, with references to things in every other movie and jabs at characters from other movies. Iron Man was... pure.

Then you get to Iron Man 2 and it's a sea of character setups and building up to something down the line. Captain America never got to have his own movie, outside of the machine.

The Marvel machine is great for marketing. It's like Apple... at some point, it doesn't matter what they point out, because you've invested too many hours into this thing and you refuse to give up on it. But the machine is the killer of stories and characters. It's a parasite, feeding off of every movie. And it's completely unnecessary. Not every future movie needs to be teased in three otherwise unrelated movies before it. When something big happens in my life, there isn't always a post-credits scene from three years ago that set it up in advance.

One of the things that I'm really looking forward to with Wonder Woman, for example, is that she doesn't get frozen and wake up 100 years later. She can have ten movies set in the first quarter of the 20th century. Her romance with Steve doesn't have to be rushed and then thrown away. She can marry him and watch him grow into a 100 year old man without stepping on the toes of the Justice League movies in any way. This is what they should have done with Captain America, with his final movie having him frozen and waking up just before The Avengers. As it stands, his first movie feels like a rushed setup for The Avengers. His relationships in his first movie are a waste of time, for the most part. His transition to the present is glossed over. He makes out with the niece of the love of his life, about five minutes after said love of his life died unceremoniously. The actual Captain America character is like an afterthought in his own movies, because of the big machine that he is serving.

Iron Man didn't have that problem. It was clean and had its own soul. Not unlike Guardians of the Galaxy.

AGENTS OF SHIELD continues to impress with a story that shouldn't work. The Framework is a simulated dreamworld, so why should what happens in a dreamworld matter in the slightest? But the AGENTS OF HYDRA arc has found all sorts of ways to make it immersive, first through the disorientation of Daisy waking up as an agent of HYDRA and Simmons having to dig out of her own grave to find herself in a hellish dystopia. Then there's the history of this simulated reality where the regrets each character had cost them the strength, honour and compassion they would have otherwise had to defeat HYDRA.

There's also the sense that the Framework reality is not a simulation even if AIDA and Radcliffe may have programmed it, first indicated by Fitz being a sadistic monstrosity whose memories cannot be unlocked, then by the Grant Ward revealed as a hero with his alternate history being that Victoria Hand was his SHIELD recruiter instead of John Garrett -- these potentialities are not a video game but a genuine path not taken that, while having only simulative form in the Framework, may gain reality in our world through Project Looking Glass.

Despite the fact that the Framework isn't real, there's been such beautiful poignancy and horror. There's Fitz's increased depravity as his love for his father and AIDA are used to transform him into a psychopath. There's Grant Ward apologizing for what his counterpart may have done and Daisy realizing that the self-justifying villain who deluded himself that he was a hero could've actually been one had Garrett never gotten to him. There's Coulson seeming more natural as a schoolteacher than a secret agent before embracing his secret agent identity. There's the grief of Mace's sacrifice in a world that isn't real.

It's beautiful.

There was a time when I thought like you did -- that Sylar was a played out character that the writers were burdened with, that the character was a serious problem -- but now I think that's total BS. At the end of the day, the character is a fictional construct and all the choices and consideration and planning is being carried out not by a character, but by the writers. Which leads me to my position that the problem was not the character as much as the choices made by the writers controlling him. Volume 1 established Sylar as a serial killer. Volume 2 was a replay of his Season 1 arc except he had no powers which stretched out his story while contributing nothing new.

Volume 3 toyed with the idea of making Sylar a hero, then abruptly abandoned it and reverted back to the Volume 1 playbook. Volume 4 actually found a new angle: Sylar joined the government task force to hunt evolved humans, and you can tell that it's the Volume for which Volume 1 writer Bryan Fuller returned. Volume 4 created a Sylar who was the devil in Nathan's persona, then created an amnesiac Sylar, then reverted back to the Volume 1 playbook, then took away his ability to kill and have him live out decades in a dreamworld in which he changed... but we didn't get any further development and Tim Kring's interviews indicated he would have made Sylar villainous again in Volume 5 had he returned.

So, the problem isn't the character; it's that despite raising numerous avenues of development, the writers reverted back to the original template over and over again.

I don't see that problem with Grant Ward; he was killed off in Season 3 and the actor stayed on playing a different character who'd possessed Ward's body. Frameward, as Reddit seems to have dubbed him, is another new angle: this is the same character with the same sense of loyalty, except in this reality, his loyalty was to Victoria Hand and then the Skye/Daisy, so Frameward was never twisted into a detached killer constantly engaging in sick and bloody efforts to justify murder after murder after murder. This is something new, something they can continue develop, and AGENTS OF SHIELD has shown that it's willing to reinvent its playbook every season has reinvented itself three times alone this season.

It's funny, though, to see a fan of SLIDERS protesting a show being able to retain its cast. ;-)

While I understand the view that some characters run their course, surely a television show should be designed to carry on with its core cast indefinitely. And surely writers working on a TV show should be able to keep their cast and characters a going concern because if they can't, why are they working in TV in the first place? That's the format of serial fiction whether it's a five to ten season show or a comic book that's run since 1962. That's the job.

I never hear Spider-Man and Batman writers saying there aren't any stories left to tell with their leads and if they did, are Spidey and Batman the problem? Or is it the writers?

A TV writer saying they can't come up with new stories for a TV character is like a truck driver complaining they hate long drives.

I think it's a delicate balance.  I have no problem with shows keeping their casts together, but I think it's different when it's heroes and villains.  No one gets mad when, say, Coulson escapes death over and over again because he's the hero.  When he survives, it's a win.

When Sylar survives, the "win" is either minimized or taken away completely.  In the audience, it's frustrating.

There are clearly ways to keep villains around when they're interesting.  But sorta like "will they, won't they" romances in sitcoms, there's a delicate balance.  Most of the fun is watching them go bad.  Once they go fully evil, then there's a countdown clock that starts.  And once it hits zero, the character needs to go away.

What's funny is that it doesn't really matter what the villain does...just whether the hero knows it.  Look at Hannibal.  Hannibal is an evil, awful person from the start of the show.  We're supposed to hate him, but he's charming.  His friendship with Will Graham is fascinating.  So we're cool with whatever he does....and we're thrilled watching Will try and catch him.  But once Will knows, the countdown starts.

It was fun watching Lex and Clark on Smallville.  Lex would bend a rule here, compromise his morals there, and he was a lot of fun.   But once his villainy became cartoonish, he stopped being fun, and I wanted Clark to take him down.  If Clark didn't take him down, it was a failure of our hero and less fun.

With Sylar, he was always 100% evil.  He's a serial killer.  A villain.  Beating him was the whole point, and when he kept coming back, it was a failure.  A problem.  I didn't have any interest in his redemption because I didn't think he was worthy of it.  And I knew, sooner or later, he'd be back t his old tricks. 

I think the same can be said for Ward.  He went fully bad, and the team took him down.  The show had some fun with him as Hive, and then he died again.  The show as able to move on, and I think it was better for it.

I know he's technically a different person, but if Ward comes back to life, it's going to be like Ward (season 1-3 one) found a loophole and redeemed himself.  When I still see Ward (fairly or unfairly, including the fake one) as being evil.  Like Daisy, I don't trust him.  Even though it'd be like holding one twin accountable for the sins of another one.

It just feels cheap to me.

Daisy trusts Frameward. That said, it's a moot point -- Jed Whedon addressed the question and says that the Framework will not be used to bring Ward back as a regular character. It seems his appearance in the Framework was simply to deepen our understanding of the real Ward and realize that he could have been a hero if he'd had the right influence.

But wasn't Ward crazy as a kid too? I thought he was evil on a deeper level.

http://www.superherohype.com/news/39634 … er-is-here

The trailer for the Defenders.  More hallway fight fun!

(It does look good.  And is only 8 episodes.)

AGENTS OF SHIELD continues to impress. Mallory Jansen, who plays Agnes/Aida/Madame Hydra, is terrifying and chameleonic in these multiple roles and quite possibly the best villain of the series since Maveth. It's fascinating how Jansen can illicit sympathy while being completely contemptible. I hope they can find some way to keep her around next year even if her character doesn't remain.

Anyone else find it weird that Sony is insisting on doing all these Spinoff (but not Spinoff) movies of a defunct Spider-Man universe?  They're moving forward with a Venom movie (with Tom Hardy) and a Silver Sable/Black Cat movie (a director was announced today).

I'm still not 100% how these movies are gonna work.  Is Tom Holland able to do cameos in this universe?  Will the Venom movie be in the same universe as the Black Cat movie?  Does anyone think a "Spider-Man's guest characters universe" is sustainable?

Venom could be a decent horror / anti-hero movie; Black Cat / Silver Sable could be a decent buddy movie with a thief and a spy.   The problem is that Sony doesn't really need the trademarks to do those movies - the brand awareness will likely help Venom, but it's going to do nothing for Cat / Sable.

Stallone was the leader of the original lineup of the Guardians of the Galaxy....which will apparently be used in a future movie somehow.  Miley Cyrus was the voice of one of them.

It's not as terrible as I was led to believe.  But I did notice that Finn Jones' action sequences (especially at the beginning) seemed like they were at 3/4 speed.  If he was truly learning the fight moves the day of shooting (or something like that), then it makes sense.  I just don't know how that was allowed in the first place.

But I like the characters so far.  I'll watch the rest.