Avengers: Infinity War

that's a terrible way to make a movie imo, it can't stand on its own as a piece of work

xp

nn otm on that point

shakey otm about everything else

did u go into Superman 3 wondering why there was a d00d flying around in a red cape

it’s a pretty bad way to make a lot of comics, but here we are

they really should just number the main ones past a certain point because despite movies being “tangential” a bunch are essential. it’s a serial story across a franchise

some of the mcu ensemble movies work brilliantly tbh

some are a fuckin mess

they all suffer from presumed gravitas when really theyve the emotional depth of a medium-warm fart.

lots of the stand-alone ones are good tho. and the casting and quipping are fun

plots, as a rule, totally embarrassing

black panther, gotg2 and dr strange real low points, latest spiderman and thor/hulk prob best

the hyper-finely defined backgrounds and settings just made it incredibly ugly to look at imo, like they were trying to make up for a lack of storytelling ability, characterization, coherence, emotion or anything that makes movies interesting by cramming every single pixel of every frame with some bright and shiny doodad. It reminded me of 90s comics artists who seemed to think the pinnacle of comics art was using as many tiny lines as possible, or those guitar magazine metal guitarists that think every song should be non-stop shredding finger-tapping and whammy bar pulloffs. just stop it.

xp

really they could just start putting “an avengers story” as a subtitle, awkwardly

it's clearly not a terrible way to make this particular movie. The resonance it has for fans is built on the many hours they've spent watching these characters prior to this. It's fine that it doesn't work for you, and your other criticisms are perfectly valid matters of taste, but to argue that the non-standalone nature of this movie is a failure is to fundamentally misunderstand what Marvel were attempting to achieve with it

I liked the last Thor movie a lot! It had a self-contained story, characters with identifiable motives and relationships, a lot of character-driven humor, good art design underpinning it etc

xp

the avengers throughline is a big challenge. it clunks now.

better when it can be referenced without the universe-threatening, dire consequences and contracted minimum screentime for each of seventy stars

cpt america movies probably achieve a good balance here?

avengers 1 was really good tho

they coulda spent 45 minutes recapping everything and then had a pop quiz afterwards before moving the story forward

I feel like the movies have become too true to the Avengers, which is the most boring team comic Marvel has ever done. That’s my challop

haha that's totally true. the Avengers are such a non-entity as a team, there's no particular reason for any of those people to be together beyond "did not have own comic at the time"

X-Men, FF, hell even the Defenders have a better reason for existence

The resonance it has for fans

this is exactly why it fucking sucks! Cuz it's for "fans" and not, y'know, people.

second avengers was i think where it lost balance, i get that there were far reaching consequences for the group and the world arising from that plot but tbh it wasnt anything that hadnt been covered in cap movies and otherwise it was two hours of whizzing waste as described by shakey above. exhausting, lacking charm and honestly the cheapest "am i really meant to care about this death" gambit in manys the year

I read 40 random pages from the middle of this book and it made no sense whatsoever. F-!!!

this is exactly why it fucking sucks! Cuz it's for "fans" and not, y'know, people.

it made 2 billion dollars. The fans are the people

that was a tenner each from the cast tbf

I read 40 random pages from the middle of this book and it made no sense whatsoever. F-!!!

this is a funny point and makes me think it would be hilarious if they just released one long 16-hour Avengers movie, which would probably be 3 times as grueling as Shoah

I don't even know what 'fans' we're discussing here anyway. There are tons of kids who have grown up on this stuff who probably couldn't give two shits about the comics. These movies are def for those 'fans'.

nn if we set aside shakeys criticism based on walking in twenty hours in and being confused, what did you reckon of the latest avengers?

or gotg2

or bp?

or avengers2?

think they all suffered badly from a fair whack of his other points, like

Avengers 2 - awful

GOTG 2 - unpleasant

Black Panther - wildly overpraised, but better than most box office fare

Infinity War - largely did the job for me

black panther was a failure for me mainly because i found killmonger too sympathetic. also the art direction for wakanda seemed like it could've been more afrofuturistic

Usually when I've seen 1-2 movies in a series or franchise which I consider to be Not Good I tend to throw in the towel but hey if masochism is your kink who am I to judge really

out of the recent stuff I rate the last Spider-Man at the top just ahead of Ragnarok

have yet to see Spider-Verse

largely agreed with those ratings, im wait-and-see re infinity war

bp turned into a hot mess tho, shouldve been a triumph

Usually when I've seen 1-2 movies in a series or franchise which I consider to be Not Good I tend to throw in the towel but hey if masochism is your kink who am I to judge really

― The Mandal Brah Set (Old Lunch), Thursday, 3 January 2019 00:21 (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

valid if there isnt twenty odd movies in the franchise which you know to vary wildly in quality, tone, scope, style and cast.

right?

tbc my problem w continuity and how incomprehensible it is was foregrounded in this movie by virtue of the fact that there are like literally two dozen protagonists. I get that the point was to tie all of the franchise together, but that is a *bad* point to make from a storytelling perspective - it just means there's too many fucking people and not enough screentime to make all of them consequential, or interesting, or worth including (beyond a wink-wink "spot the hero" cameo). It's just an extension of fanboy collector-mania ("collect them all!"), it runs counter to fundamental requirements of narrative.

even with something like LOTR, which had a similarly huge cast, the filmmakers were right to follow Tolkien's lead and make the hobbits the fulcrum of p much every narrative strand. that cut it down to four people you really follow, with these other ppl dodging in and out. in IW it's all flattened out, *everybody* gets their 15-minutes or whatever and it's just one half-baked course of bullshit after another.

Usually when I've seen 1-2 movies in a series or franchise which I consider to be Not Good I tend to throw in the towel

― The Mandal Brah Set (Old Lunch)

this is patently untrue based on your posting history

Spider Verse was 10x better than all the MCU shit I've seen tbh

maybe that's pushing it but man they should stick to that style or a variant of it

there's an argument to be made that Infinity War is a post-narrative movie of sorts

Everyone get a quip or two, their splash page moment, and you fill in the rest based on what you know about them from their own films. It's essentially a delivery vehicle for these big "moments" - I guess more akin to a theme park ride or something

I definitely don't disagree that it's overstuffed, but as an attempt to realise the giant comics crossover on screen I think it's pretty successful (certainly more succesful than 99% of giant comics crossovers)

lotr had only nine really central characters, four of whom are comic relief and one of whom gets proper killed pretty quickly

i dont even know where youd begin totting up how many central characters avengers movies have, let alone the dozen-movie strands of backplot and supporting. im not convinced theres a way to make it work tbh.

should have started killing em off starting at avengers 2

xp i think nn is right. i just think its bad.

fuckin psyched for when abrams picks up wheel of time tho but

whedon

fuckin whatever

LOTR is also a direct adaptation of an existing three-act narrative (and it still managed to be unwieldy as fuck)

well jackson yknow

not someone I would invoke as an exemplar of narrative discipline alright

what a huge waste of resources, money and effort

why do you hate job creators

Fwiw I think giant crossover events suck in comics form too, for all kinds of reasons, some of which apply for films as well.
Xps

not someone I would invoke as an exemplar of narrative discipline alright

except that he was, right up until the first LOTR

that was a different guy

shakey and dm otmfm, I have been marched through these wastelands of CGI sludge and thumbnail plots by my otherwise delightful daughters, and nothing can redeem most of them

oh dang the emperor has no clothes

I have been debating watching Infinity War on Netflix, and the problems shakey outlined are pretty much why I've been holding off. They've been building up to this film for so long, and I just don't care about this culmination or the millions of characters involved. The Avengers films have mostly been a let down for me.

OTOH, I finally got around to watching Black Panther, and I liked it well enough. Yeah, Killmonger was maybe too sympathetic, but wasn't that the point?

Usually when I've seen 1-2 movies in a series or franchise which I consider to be Not Good I tend to throw in the towel

― The Mandal Brah Set (Old Lunch)

this is patently untrue based on your posting history

― sans lep (sic), Wednesday, January 2, 2019 6:32 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sic u made the classic mistake of assuming I possess a degree of taste and discernment which allows me to identify Not Good things as Not Good which is itself refuted by my posting history and I declare this a checkmate sir, good day to you

not someone I would invoke as an exemplar of narrative discipline alright

except that he was, right up until the first LOTR

I'd say until King Kong - he cut a tonne of stuff from LOTR, then decided to make a three hour film where the best way to experience it is to walk in after an hour.

Ah Jesus he's directing the next Tintin film.

(I liked Infinity War pretty good for what it is, like if someone managed to make a cathedral out of cheese - you may as well enjoy it, there probably won't be another like it again)