Latest entry in the NETFLIX MARVEL GRITVERSE: Iron Fist

twitter thread
https://twitter.com/Lexialex/status/844196477941432320

leaving aside the issue of race for a minute (hard to do when that roy thomas quote is staring me in the face, admittedly) iron fist just straight-up feels like a bad fit for marvel's netflix shows - daredevil, luke and jessica have (relatively speaking) fairly straightforward origin stories and powers and then you've got a guy whose supernatural ability in kung fu was gifted to him after he bested a dragon in mortal combat on a mystical mountainside

there's an inherent mismatch there that could maybe have worked if they'd taken a cue from matt fraction and played up the inherent batshitness of the premise, which could be a cool contrast against the 'real-world; setting of the other shows, but it all just seems so half-assed and finn jones is so, so terribly miscast

good twitter thread mh, cheers for the heads-up

the comment from someone in there that finn jones' posture outside the action scenes doesn't fit that of a trained fighter is otm

i kept hoping they'd cut to the stunt double faster because when he's standing on one foot he wobbles like me wth a hangover

Even with 56 cuts, you get this moment:
http://oi68.tinypic.com/16qona.jpg

They couldn't even find a bearded stunt double...

The underlying assumption about the character of Iron Fist, that the netflix show's creators ran with even if it was never stated, is that the whole glowing fist thing is secondary to his main character aspect: he's a white man who's the best at this mystical, ripped from film, kung fu.

A number of writers have come at the character from different angles, but that's always been the back-of-napkin pitch. There are so many new takes you could do on the character: maybe he's not white or rich but the origin is mostly the same; he's not dropped into a mystical city but instead some sort of secret order takes him in; he's actually born into being the Iron Fist and shows up in NYC an outsider.

The show compounded that with the casting and quick shooting schedule (the writing is a separate, equally culpable aspect in the awkwardness of the show). Another interview mentioned that Finn Jones (had to look up his name again) had like a month of training followed by shooting all week and extra practice on the weekends. So casting someone without the right martial arts background, and having him fight against actors who have done this for years, if not their whole lives, when his character has supposedly done little but train for fifteen years is ridiculous!

I really have no idea what they cast him on, other than appearance and maybe line reading (and again, that script, wtf) so their take was literally "we need a guy who looks like a blonde white guy."

I threw this on in the background while I was doing some cooking until I finally got to the episode with Lewis Tan, which is one of the actually good fighting sequences -- just skip to it, you'll miss nothing.

Although I did hear a line where Danny admits he got hit in the head during the plane crash, which is something I kept asking my friend -- did he land on his head in the crash and that's why he's so hopelessly naive all the time?

https://twitter.com/GailSimone/status/844428725504692230

:)

REVIEW: WEAK 'FIST' DILUTES BRAND OF RAND AND HAND

omg the Hulk tweet

lol

I was sick home yesterday so I binged on the 2nd half of this. It really suffered from being repetitive in the extreme. I felt like the same things were happening over and over. I didn't hate it but I couldn't find a whole lot to love about it. Hand Academy, come on.

oh you're from k'un-lun, do you have the iron fist, too?

did danny buy like ten of the same uniqlo hoody that keeps getting ripped up

are he and Luke going to bond over how many hoodies they run through

the CW shows are much better at all of this imo.

So we finally blasted through like 2/3 of this over the weekend. And, yeah, easily the worst of the Netflix shows but not actively terrible. An interesting perspective shift would've been to have the Meachums as the central characters who suddenly have to deal with the reemergence of this total douche who ruins their lives with his douchiness.

And Iron Fist is for sure a douche. It's hard to know how much of that is the character as written (which is pretty thankless) and how much is the actor. But having actually seen enough of the show to judge, I am now strongly supportive of the decision to cast a white actor in this role. Every other Netflix protagonist has had to overcome obstacles and grow into their roles as heroes. Iron Fist is a rich white dude who coasts on overinflated confidence but who's actually an ineffectual turd. That rings true to me.

Probably the best thing they can do is kill this iteration of the character off in the first episode of The Defenders and pass the Iron Fist on to Claire.

I feel like this material could've worked if they punched it up a bit and had cannier people running the show and making Iron Fist's awfulness more intentional and comical.

'I'm the Iron Fist. I cannot be beaten.'
(immediately gets put in the hospital)

the main thing which bugged me about this show - finn jones' corpselike performance aside - was the super-cheap-looking set design and dressing. the office sets are fucking dire and i found it really distracting that the views across the city were so obviously backdrops

at one point the meachums are waiting for a lift in their office and there's a visible gap between the wall and the lift doors which clearly shows the interior of the lift sitting there - i wish i'd taken a picture of it but it's embarrassingly obvious

I watch so many cheap old sci-fi and horror movies that things like that tend to pass right by me unnoticed (see also: discussion upthread of the shitty fight choreography which I didn't really notice probably because it's still on the polished end of the spectrum of fight choreography I've seen).

It occurs to me that Danny & Co.'s trip to China is an unintentional self-critique of the show. 'I'm going to China! I don't really have a solid reason why, and I definitely don't have a plan, and I'm not really sure what I hope to achieve when I go! And there's no reason for you guys to go with me and endanger your lives but...might as well! And naturally everything is going to go to shit when we get there. But we're going to totally bring Madame Gao back to the US........somehow!'

usually stuff like that doesn't bother me but in this case it seemed particularly emblematic of the shoddy nature of the show in general

like, if i'm noticing the sets it's because the onscreen conversation isn't holding my attention

They could've at least filmed the scene where they're affecting nonchalance while they go through Chinese customs with a squirming oversized duffel bag.

i wish they'd cast a squirming oversized duffel bag in the title role

it'd show more life than finn jones ever manages to muster

It's just now dawning on me that using MacGruber as the model for this show's tone would've made it perfect.

the main thing which bugged me about this show - finn jones' corpselike performance aside - was the super-cheap-looking set design and dressing.

lol I was joking a few weeks ago that Danny bought a bunch of the same hoodie from Uniqlo on his return to NYC. I have the same one and can only assume the costuming budget was like $200

Dad Meachum's "lair" is so corny-looking

The costume design for Hand academy was dreadful. '10-15 EXTRAS NEEDED. MUST BE YOUTHFUL IN APPEARANCE AND OWN AT LEAST 1 PIECE OF MAROON CLOTHING'

Okay so we finished this tonight, and speaking as the unabashed cheerleader who reps for absolutely everything MCU-related like he's getting paid to do it...this actually was kind of fucking bad?

He looks like a leftover from the 90s hippie revival, lika Kula Shaker leftover or something

And he's so dumb & bland & DONT TELL DOCTORS YOU HAVE SUPERPOWERS DONT YOU KNOW ANYTHING YOU FKING TWIT

I honestly feel like the writing is the real problem here. Character development and motivation was on some '80s Saturday morning cartoon level of complexity and consistency. And it was sooooooo repetitious. OH, DID YOUR PARENTS DIE, DANNY? OH, IN A PLANE CRASH, YOU SAY?

I was riffing on Danny's everyday life after things settle down, where he randomly drops his parents death into the most casual of daily interactions (with cashiers and baristas and what have you), where people are initially sympathetic because this is clearly a thing that just happened because the guy's so messed up about it but then they back away slowly when they discover that this is a dead (parent) horse he's been beating for thirteen years.

I also posited that the show would've been improved 1000% if Danny and Colleen and the younger Meachums were all like twelve a la Bugsy Malone. The dialogue would be so much more congruent if it were issued from the cracking voice of someone going through puberty.

Omg yes - we are still only 3 or 4 eps into season 1 and it's like okay when are we gonna be done establishing the plane crash because there us literally no-one in this show who doesnt know this now or repeat it on command like fkn north koreans

*is

Is Defenders' writing possibly going to improve him? Couldn't make him much worse really.
Not seen the comics since my brother's 40+ years ago so assume he was better there or he'd be forgotten totally innit?

tbf there's only so much that writing can do when the guy delivering the dialogue has all the charisma and screen presence of a damp sock

Not seen the comics since my brother's 40+ years ago so assume he was better there or he'd be forgotten totally innit?

For such a second or third string character, Iron Fist has had some unusually classy creators over the years - Gil Kane, exquisitely inked by Dick Giordano, on the origin issue, a short run by Claremont and Byrne that tied into X-Men continuity, a long run of the Power Man/Iron Fist title by Mary Jo Duffy that is fondly remembered, and more recently, even the Matt Fraction written iteration had pages drawn by the late great John Severin. He's definitely punched like unto a thing of iron above his weight.

liked this well enough, obviously the main actor is terrible and the character he plays is even stupider than daredevil (netflix version) which is going some. But 'Bunker' from Banshee is in it so that gets a tick. I'm not a comics person and Jessica Jones is the one out of these 4 series I enjoyed the most but really I'd be all in on a Madame Gau origin story. She's the best character by far in any of these.

The worst parts of Iron Fist were when they had the potential for dialogue that'd actually establish his disconnect from the world and completely left it on the table. For instance, Danny is walking around with a first or second gen iPod that he's apparently held on to throughout a plane crash and being stranded in an otherworldly place.

Could he charge it when he was trapped there? Is he grateful that he can listen to music again now that he's back? Claire compliments him on his musical taste as a kid and they leave it sitting there -- is there a reason why this silver spoon kid had those musical tastes? Why has no one helped him transfer his music on to a new phone or something?

apologies if they actually riffed on any of this in the couple episodes where I left the show rolling while I went to wash dishes

Could he charge it when he was trapped there?

ha, that's what i said about this too

it also briefly plunged me into a well of existential despair when i realised that the ipod, which seems to me like it only came out like five years or so ago, was actually released nearly 16 years ago and is now old enough to act as a signifier of the passing of a significant amount of time

xpost Yeah, no, of course they didn't. That was the first thing I thought of when they showed his iPod: what, has he been charging it with his chi?

I have a perverse desire to rewatch this and construct a writing class based around all of the things they did wrong.

I was plunged into existential despair every time an adult on the show mentioned some cultural touchstone from their childhood that I remember from my late college years.

lol yes

my other thought was that the ipod shown had a hard drive and was the one right before drop protection, so there's no way it'd have survived the crash if he was listening to music at the time

I had the second gen one in what, 2002? sometime when it was newish

The victim approaches

Iron Fist: Finn Jones Ready to Start Training For Season 2 https://t.co/zlUijuBItP pic.twitter.com/VgrRxe10Sg

— Comic Book Resources (@CBR) August 23, 2017

The murderer acts

Exciting. Maybe he'll be in a couple of fight scenes himself https://t.co/xCuJ3xUNUU

— Lexi Alexander ‎ (@Lexialex) August 23, 2017

https://rkcblog.dragondoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/MK_FlawlessVictory.jpg

Shot.

Finn Jones Promises #IronFist Season 2 'Is Unlike Anything Seen Before' https://t.co/kWkZY2oAcQ pic.twitter.com/f4GJuPirZf

— Comic Book Resources (@CBR) May 10, 2018

Chaser.

It’ll be good? https://t.co/YjV3XnN4AP

— Ira Madison III (@ira) May 11, 2018

Really, this will be endless.

Worth noting again that Scott Buck was fired as showrunner after running this show and Inhumans into the ground.