Marvel Cinematic Universe, Phase 4 & Beyond (and a chance to change your vote)

i just found it weird since he’d been throwing fireballs in every battle we’d seen
& like oh THIS battle is a no? ok. plus they kept killing off characters so i thought it was just a lame handwavey story device so that they didn’t have to have like 20 people in the final battle scene lol

They were fighting Deviants, not each other. As soon as the conflict went from arguing to physical confrontation, he leaves.

i never said i was right or logical to think that! it’s just how i took it when i watched the movie. i liked chloe’s explanation of hid reasons bc they were not clear to ~me~ & if you already got it then there’s nothing to talk about & i feel kinda stupid for bringing it up so i’ll stop talking about it

We tried to watch this last night but ended up bailing halfway - just couldn't find myself caring about any of it.

Felt like there were some clear problems with the script - as VG suggests upthread, it was like being dropped in the second half of a book that you haven't read (ok some people have read the comics, good for them). they're introducing us to these characters who have thousands of years of history together, but expected us to be deeply invested in their interpersonal relationships and conflicts based on the thinnest of backstories.

stopped at when they killed off Gilgamesh - y'all should watch Ma Dong-Seok/Don Lee in any one of his Korean movies, dude was utterly wasted here.

This was really bad. I'd rather see a spinoff film about the comedy chauffeur guy than see any of these main characters again.

for the record, I didn’t say the absence was unexplained. just that he was wise to get himself out.

It should’ve been a series, not a movie.

Forget Kingo being gone, why did his human valet get to stick around the entire movie as peripheral comic relief, but Jon Snow is basically introduced as Jane to a bunch of Thors and then is told "go home, loser." Would have been funny if we literally didn't see him again until the end credits, though I guess the movie comes pretty close to doing that anyway.

So much of this felt like she only had access to two actors together at a time, max, and they were all filmed separately and CGId together on screen. That could explain why possibly someone in this thread noted you never once get the impression these space gods have been around for thousands of years, let alone have known each other for as long, let alone have lived on *Earth* for that long. They're kinda bored, sure, but in the most neutrally boring way possible. They act like they've been killing time for a couple of years, not millennia. Only Kingo has something akin to a hobby, and even that only covers the last 100 or so years.

Anyway, if this movie were not so generally competent it might have made a good midnight watch with a rowdy crowd. There are certainly moments that would earn a hoot or two, but it's mostly too consciously sedate and slow to generate any steam. It's like Zhao figured out how to subvert big budget fun. "What if space gods, but bored and boring? Also, humanoid lizard monster with blurry motives that comes and goes but needs to exist to give them something to occasionally shoot laser eyes at."

xpost Would have been a much better series.

Would have been funny if one of them was killing time working in an Amazon warehouse. Though I guess one of them was working (or doing ... something) *in* the Amazon, or as titled, "Amazon."

Hey, if Sprite had such issues with being a forever kid, then why didn't she at least change her name to something other than Sprite? Start small. Anyway, theres your spin-off. An ancient space god with eons of experience and memories but no powers must face her greatest battle yet: high school!

Teacher: Sprite, could you explain Archimedes' principle?
Sprite (under her breath): Bitch, I was there when we *taught* Archimedes' his principle ...
Teacher: What was that you said, Sprite?
Sprite: Nothing, Miss (insert easter egg name of person who becomes yet another superhero in Phase 6).

Anyway, who is up for Oscar Isaac with an English accent?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7Krla_UxRg

🙋🏻‍♀️

ooooooh

Dick Van Dyke currently trending on Twitter

There's the hook: the entire season is in fact a musical.

Cool. Moon Knight is another character I know nothing about. That trailer is cut and presented like it's a feature film, but I've liked the run of TV projects so far, so fingers crossed.

the character is different depending on who's writing it for sure but the key to the character is that he's probably the fist of konshu but he's definitely crazy

The shorthand is "what if Batman had multiple personalities?"

and spoke to god

So, the usual.

criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot

BTW Inception or something

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPC049JCdMg

Please pic.twitter.com/RXJT1Ph7c3

— Kate Sánchez⁷ (@OhMyMithrandir) January 18, 2022

https://www.theroot.com/black-panther-wakanda-forever-production-delayed-again-1848390454

Yeah, delayed again, more cast and crew testing positive for COVID. Half expecting an announcement that they are recasting Shuri.

lol

In terms of Raimi’s next directorial project, the sequel to “Doctor Strange,” the filmmaker wasn’t as willing to reveal details. He did share an uncertainty if the film was done filming, responding to reports that the Benedict Cumberbatch-starring sequel faced “significant reshoots” back in November.

“I wish I knew the answer to that question,” Raimi said, responding to the question of whether the movie was complete. “I think we’re done, but we just cut everything. We’re just starting to test the picture and we’ll find out if there’s anything that’s got to be picked up. If something’s unclear or another improvement I can make in this short amount of time left, I’ll do it. One thing I know about the Marvel team is they won’t stop. They’ll keep pushing it until it’s as close to being great as it could.”

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that all the ding dong marvel shows that aired in 2021 - Loki, Wanda, Falcon, Hawkeye, whatever - are nominated in the ILX TV poll, with voting ending this weekend:

ILX's Best Television of 2021 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends After January 31, 2022

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (3 minimum, 25 maximum, ranked by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

Just saw Spider-Man, and... gosh, I thought it was just terrific. It was fun and fast and bouncy and silly – then got super emotional and resonant. I thought the "uniting the universes" thing would just be played as a cheap gimmick (and some of the inter-Spidey banter did almost start to feel like an SNL sketch); but instead, it gathered decades of lore and turned it into something that felt as heavy and affecting as Spider-Man can feel.

And the way it ended, undoing all the irritating BS that I never liked about the MCU version of Spidey (or at least revealing it all to be prologue) – i.e., techno-suit Spidey, Parker having no Uncle Ben moment (and thus no apparent "motivation"), etc. – the whole thing felt so much bigger and more satisfying than everything it was drawing from, as if it was elevating all those older (sometimes good, sometimes crappy) movies though a grand unifying effort.

One random q about the ending: even though Strange took away everyone's memories of Peter, wouldn't there still be a world full of old newspapers, archived newscast,s and cached Web pages reporting on the events of the past few months? Wouldn't a Google search for "Who is Spider-Man" still pull up "Peter Parker" and his picture? Or did Strange's spell work on a deeper level than I understood?

A few other random thoughts:
* Zendaya was great, a real highlight.
* The de-aging of Molina & Dafoe was done so well, I honestly thought they weren't de-aged (I spent the movie like: "Damn, Wooster Group looks good!"). I had to Google afterward to settle the question for myself.

Searching around for something else, I found a listicle that raises the same question I put in hidden text (probably stated better): https://screenrant.com/marvel-plotholes-mcu-movies-tv-shows-2021/

Nowhere near as perplexing as the seeming contradictions and confusion introduced by "The Eternals," which who knows, maybe they'll address. Though unlike Spider-man, which can just be sort of hand-wavy about it, it's a lot harder to do that with giant space gods making appearances on Earth.

My daughter complained about the No Way Home (maybe my least fav Marvel since the second Iron Man) ending/Dr. Strange stuff, too, but being in the middle of college applications herself she had a tougher time buying that so many kids from one school could get into MIT. I thought this was amusing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJBfvzLogdI

As they add more super teams to the mix (X-Men, FF, Defenders, etc.) and ultra-powered individuals, the interconnections will become more complex. Being Disney, they will saturate their market, so even more hand waves and "they were ... busy elsewhere" will be coming.

They're all going to form a giant superhero Voltron and then die saving the world from an even bigger, more powerful space god. And then they will reboot "Spider-man," hopefully this time revealing how he became Spider-man.

I'm kind of excited, if the MCU rolls on undefeated, for actors' availability/age to push generational and identity changes. Instead of the 4th iteration of Peter Parker, let's grow Spider-Man to Miles or Spider-Gwen or Spider-Girl or ... Growth eliminates the stasis of Spider-Man being a 60 year old comic.

being in the middle of college applications herself she had a tougher time buying that so many kids from one school could get into MIT

This was an extremely accurate part of the movie based on my experience at the school down the street; one of my roommates was one of four kids from Uniondale High School on Long Island, which to my knowledge isn't even set up as an advanced top university/college feeder in the same way as, say, Hunter College High School, who sent at least 10 kids in my class alone.

Knowing how old you are (which is to say, around my age) I gotta say, the game has changed *radically*. I graduated high school in 1993. Admissions that year at MIT, for class of 1997, were 32% of 6,410 applicants.

https://news.mit.edu/1993/class-0331

Last year, for the class of 2025, MIT's admissions rate was 4.1% of 33,240 applicants.

https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/stats/

That doesn't mean certain schools aren't more-heavily represented, particularly reputable magnet schools and private schools.

By the end of the movie, 3 kids from the top math and science magnet high school in NYC got into MIT; this is not far-fetched, particularly since the acceptance for two of them were put into motion by Peter's heroics midway through the movie.

An analogous real-life school is Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, VA, who had 35 former students graduate from MIT between 2015 an 2017: https://www.washingtonian.com/2018/10/10/which-local-schools-have-the-most-graduates-go-on-to-the-ivy-league/#:~:text=Number%20one%20on%20the%20list,%2C%20or%20MIT%20(35).

the kid in real genius was only 15

You'll believe a man can get into MIT

lol it's definitely *possible* for three best buds from one school to get in to MIT, but the class of 2017 acceptance rate to MIT was already somewhere around 7% and now it's down even further to between 3.5% and 4%. But sure, Spider-man and his friends do all probably have a leg up on the competition. Good for Spider-man. Though to be fair, he and his spider-friends were initially all denied from MIT, so maybe it was pretty accurate after all.

We just saw a good doc called "Try Harder," about the #1 ranked public school in San Fan, where everyone thinks they can get into Stanford, and most are probably qualified, but who all get a rude awakening come application season:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4WZ6nDz-3w

lol that school got turned into a normal school during the pandemic (no more testing kids to get into "the one good high school in SF"), and parents are freaking out.

Tell me about it. I'm not even a parent and I couldn't miss the noise that happened over that.

I love it. Why should one school get all the "smart" (ie rich) kids and resources?

Eh, 35% of the kids there are categorized as economically disadvantaged. Apparently, from what I saw, Lowell High is in the middle 50% of schools by income level.

"I can't believe this movie about superpowered humans battling each other and traveling through multiple parallel universes doesn't accurately reflect the college application process!"

Tbf, counterpoint: I can't believe this movie literally hinged on Peter Parker asking Dr. Strange to cast a magic spell on the entire world so that he and his friends could get into MIT (and Dr. Strange saying yes).

That did lead to one of the better exchanges in the movie, when Strange was all “wait, what do you mean you didn’t talk to anyone at the school”

Strange comes off as a pretty hapless knucklehead in this film... was he like that in the comics, too? (In the issues I read, I guess later in his career, he seemed rather more... mature.)

Wtf does the superhuman genius need to go to college for anyway

Connections? You know literal gods!

Peter? I can see why – Tony's not on the scene any longer, his gf is going there, he wants to be sort of a regular guy