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

"This show also made me enjoy watching Ethan Hawke for the first time possibly ever!"

not a fan of the Before Sunrise/Sunset films?

Seeing Strange tonight. Will be hard to top MoonKnight which is clearly top-tier Marvel IMO.

This was a notable enough, mainly because of Raimi. Didn’t like the first 15 minutes at all though, throwing you in like that was simply confusing and weird. I did think it was interesting to release this on Mothers Day weekend given the Wanda plot.

No idea why that autocorrected to “notable”. I meant it was enjoyable enough.

god they really hate Wanda huh

what a waste of the Yesterday Quest material… and of America Chavez… and of Stephen Strange really

some fine shots tho. the beach stairway in particular was sublime, and the let’s call it spirit cloak really worked and hinted at what I’d hoped for in a Raimi MCU joint

There's a fair amount of Raimi horror in this as well, the shots of the charred bodies, revived dead bodies; it feels more Raimi than the original Spiderman movies, for instance.

There's also that fun sequence where they fall through about 15 universes in a row which is a hoot and reminded me of, of all things, the scene in the Pixar movie The Good Dinosaur where the kid and the dino eat hallucinogenic berries and you get a quick cut of total insanity.

I loved Strange 2 a lot

I figured there was no good way for Wanda to be anything other than an antagonist given the way WandaVision ended but it was still very sad and tragic that they couldn’t find a path for redemption for her given everything she went through. The scene where she was terrifying Billy and Tommy while repeating “I’m not a monster” was heartbreaking; like, of course you are a monster, look at why you did not only in your universe but in all of these others. Look at what you did to the Illuminati. Look at what grief drove you to do. I enjoyed the story for what it was but I wished they’d made a different choice, even though when she started slaughtering sorcerers it was obvious that she was gone. Hell, it was obvious she was gone at the end of WandaVision.

thank u sam raimi for the runtime
love him for that

personally I loved the Raimi-ness - the middle section was very “Dr Strange Me To Hell” and i dug the hell out of it

is this the first marvel movie with actual blood in it?

however i found a lot of the story kinda baffling & very hard to lock into, lot of ppl just saying nonsensical things imbued w deep meaning and me being like uh huh ok sure

and i didnt get why Wanda has to have this (to me) massively eyeroll storyline when we’ve kinda done a version of this already?

Am amused that both this and The Suicide Squad both had big ol’ eyeballs suffering horrible fates.

yes! i loled v hard

Verily did I lolz loudly at the flying eyeballs, yes

Blank Check’s David enjoyed it: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/05/doctor-strange-multiverse-madness-sam-raimi-marvel-review/629744/

Meantime, new promo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8usJNFvVS4

lmao

Just saw Dr. Strange 2, why was Professor X in a Zamboni?

— voudou’s dad (@fullblackarmor) May 9, 2022

I know it's cheesy, but I love a good "you never told me her name, did you?"

There's a fair amount of Raimi horror in this as well, the shots of the charred bodies, revived dead bodies; it feels more Raimi than the original Spiderman movies, for instance.

Yeah, the relatable zombies too, but especially the spirits!

I saw it in a quiet cinema on purpose, but I kind of wish I'd been in somewhere loud on a Saturday night to experience Black Bolt blowing his own head up. I wonder if there was a "I can kill all of these superheroes, right?" conversation (I'm also kind of assuming that Sam Raimi had a hand in the script).

finally finished moon knight — pretty good. i appreciated its stand-alone nature

hadn’t realized that ethan hawke is turning into nick nolte

also dag is the layla actress stunning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gim2kprjL50

that looks great! love Tatiana Maslany <3

First nine episode arc since WandaVision too.

I love Maslany and I've been really excited for a She-Hulk series, but the CGI for her looks like complete ass. It's weird, because Ruffalo's Hulk still looks good (guessing they still have rendering from Endgame), but Maslany's She-Hulk is really uncanny valley looking shit.

big woman pick up man

Hopefully the CGI will be better in the actual show?

I haven't watched a single Marvel series but I have a thing for strong tall women so I will probably try this one.

ruffalo’s hulk has always looked fake as shit imo

Having seen (and enjoyed) Moon Knight i would doubt the CGI gets better

While I am not a She-Hulk scholar, I’ve read some of the comics, and these criticisms were surprising to me:

Since her introduction in The Savage She-Hulk #1 in the 1980s, Jennifer Walters has been a frustrating character for a lot of comic readers because she is surrounded by regressive stereotypes. While Bruce Banner becomes a massive, mostly terrifying, green monster when he hulks out, Jennifer transforms into a sexy 6’7” muscular green lady that is almost always drawn in perverse, sexualized poses. Most of her comic runs feature her half-dressed, shielding her naked body with a newspaper, or bikini-clad on the covers. She often looks like the nighttime fantasies of a particular subset of comic book readers. Like most of the women in Marvel Comics, she has also been romantically linked with a long list of partners, and even referred to as “sloppy seconds” when torn between prominent Marvel characters. The She-Hulk trailer doesn’t seem to shy away from that, unfortunately, they just repackage it in slightly more appealing ways.

John Byrne is kind of villain

excited for the results of this poll

Roffle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go8nTmfrQd8

Hardly a new innovation but I do appreciate how this poster design is clearly meant to be seen, slightly scuffed around the edge, via a plastic security case surrounding the VHS it's on back in 1986.

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fit,f_auto,g_center,pg_1,q_60,w_965/5798f0f9f87c060750e2ca49f1885248.jpg

Gwar show looking good

i saw the preview for thor love and thunder today and it got me thinking about how the existence of the norse gods in canon in the marvel cinematic universe. so then does everyone on earth worship the norse gods? and if not, why not? like if you know thor actually exists, why are you still worshiping the christian god or allah or whoever else? i assume this has been discussed ad nauseum but i am not a comic book person, sorry.

At the end of "The Eternals" there is a giant cosmic space god that appears hovering over earth, you'd think that would raise a few questions among the faithful, too.

xp I don’t know about the MCU, or how things may have changed in the regular Marvel Universe over time… but the original (1983) Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe entry for Thor says, “Identity: Publicly known, although the general public of earth does not believe him to be the god that was worshiped by the Vikings.”

(similarly, the entry for Sif, from the Deluxe Edition published a few years later (which I grabbed at random) — “Identity: Publicly known on Asgard and on Earth, although the general populace of Earth tends not to believe she is a goddess”

so I think most Earthlings in the Marvel universe don’t know that the Norse or Hellenic gods are “real”)

(although interestingly, the OG entry for Hercules just says, “Identity: publicly known”)

the comics kind of establish there are groups that do worship particular gods, or act cult-like at times, but since there are multiple pantheons of gods that are apparently real (norse, greek, roman, egyptian, +++) it’s just like “oh these are real but since we see them they’re just like, lesser gods or mythical superheroes”

some of the comics occasionally imply that the “real god(s)” worshipped by modern people exist, and they’re on an unseen higher plane of existence, but these are also comics who have cosmic entities so lol

Yeah, Marvel has an entire cosmology of god-entities

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

thanks all for making the effort to explain the theology of marvel to me, i genuinely find this kind of stuff (the implications of epic world-building on the lives of the normal people in that world) really interesting (honestly, more interesting than the epic parts of the story)

I also find that interesting, and would like to see stories dealing with the inevitable PTSD the average New Yorker has what with frequent alien invasions and randomly getting snapped out of existence

There were posters advertising a post-Snap PTSD hotline in one of those Spider-Man movies. Marvel should do a series with, like, a psychiatrist helping ppl out.

I mean, there was a whole scene with Steve Rogers in a support group for survivors of the snap.

Damage Control but for PTSD

And Tony Stark was having panic attacks after the first Avengers movie

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

lol

I promise never to start another MCU thread.

The Thor trailer is pretty good, but not enough Jane (IMO). Also, it doesn’t seem to really capture the depths of Odinson’s “unworthiness,” but I guess we’ll see how they treat that.

First episode of Ms Marvel out tomorrow

Super late on this, but finally saw Dr. Strange. Absolutely loved it, so much fun. The first 20 minutes or so kinda dragged and had me nervous, but it really took off from there. Raimi did a great job mixing the visuals, horror and campiness (particularly loved the Fantasia nod and the Raimi-verse cameo). It was fun enough to overcome the shoehorning in of references to most of the Disney TV shows.