No, you're right. Infinity war is the better movie but endgame was the better event. Endgame is almost a perfect fanservice movie and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Infinity war is not that good either. Everything is preventable but the heroes forgot how to heroe and make very bad decisions
Everything is preventable but the heroes forgot how to heroe and make very bad decisions
Welcome to every single movie that's ever been produced. Most things in movies could be prevented if the heroes just made reasonable decisions. But then you wouldn't have a movie, so heroes have to be stupid at just the right moment to make the movie work.
Nahh, that's just cheap Hollywood shit that's written so poorly.
It's hard to tell living in the US, because our media is dominated by Hollywood. You only get to see the one or two gems that get shat out randomly once a decade sitting amongst a giant field of dumbed down Disney fairy tales. That's if the gems were even advertised all that well in the first place. So much ADD advertising that spoils the climax of the movie 'and' gives you the wrong idea of the plot, it's impossible to tell what's actually good without watching it.
Hmm, it's been a long time since I've seen a movie in theaters, let alone a hidden gem or grossly misadvertised one. I try to avoid ads like the plague.
The only recentish thing that comes to mind is Barbarian, but I don't think I even saw an ad for it. Not one I paid attention to. Just went randomly, it was not as expected, and we had fun not taking it too seriously anyways, which seems appropriate for that movie.
Others elsewhere in the convo are making some banger recommends, though.
Go watch Die Hard, The Day Of The Jackal, Rope, Seven Samurai, The Martian. It is possible to write a movie that isn't moved forward by passing around the idiot ball. Characters can take reasonable actions, and still have stuff go wrong and have to take new reasonable actions to adjust.
Go watch Die Hard
If the hero just minded his own business and did nothing, no one dies and his wife is never in danger but millions of dollars worth of bonds are stolen. It's a fair trade off, and might have even saved their marriage.
The Day Of The Jackal
Based on a book with no actual heroes. Just a cold-blooded assassination attempt. This isn't the type of movie I'm referring to, though I should have said "almost every single movie..." or "hero movies".
Rope
Uh...yeah...
In the play, two homosexual college students become fascinated by their philosophy professor’s ideas about the “innate superiority” of some people over others. Convinced they have found a victim who is inferior to them, they murder him, conceal his body in an unlocked trunk in their apartment, and then throw a dinner party with the trunk as the brazen centerpiece of the living room.
That's just a whole lot of fucked up. No heroes there, except maybe someone not realizing they are friends with psychopaths that have a dead body in their living room.
Seven Samurai
The heroes lose 4 of their own. I'll give you this one, this is the most realistic depiction of a hero movie.
The Martian
Poor mission planning. They can monitor, predict, and plan for dust storms on Mars today. But in the future, all that goes out the window when humans are involved? This entire scenario depends on someone not doing their job properly.
Seriously? Only one hero literally has multiple superpowers including clairvoyance and precognition, but he can't sense what the villain with no superpowers is doing right in front of him because of something that hasn't happened yet? That one has always bothered me...
Agreed. Infinity War was so dumb, I never even bothered to see Endgame. In that sense, it had the same effect on me as The Last Jedi, but at least MCU had an overarching story planned which is more than can be said for the Disney SW trilogy.
Infinity War has its faults. It's paced a little nonstop and the Wakanda bits are a bit weak. That being said, I saw it ten times in the cinema and it's the perfect movie for me. I swear -- the tail end of Thanos being on Titan to the end of the movie, you can feel how somber it was and I feel that's because of the connection to the characters. We can always say "oh they're coming back" but I like to watch the movie on its own and remember just how it felt watching the movie for the first time.
Yeah infinity war was better, I knew this the moment Thanos ripped that planet down with the power and space stones
Exactly. Endgame is great in terms of fanservice, but IW is just a far more solid film
Less of a hill and more of a well constructed 15th century fortress with about 100 loyal defenders at your service.
I'm still pissed that the McGuffin in that movie was basic-ass time travel, when they had the way cooler McGuffin of the Quantum Realm they could have explored.
To make matters even worse, it's seeming like the real reason they did the time travel BS was so they could start the multiverse BS, so they had a justification to continue pumping out garbage content.
Completely agree! Though time travel wasn't a MacGuffin, it was just a plot contrivance. A Macguffin is an interchangeable irrelavent object used to drive the motivation for the plot. The "tesseract" in Avengers, or the "Philosopher/Sorcerer's Stone" in Harry Potter for example.
Sorry to be pedantic, I fully agree with your actual point, and just thought you might want to know.
It's also just a bad time travel movie because the purpose of it was to be appeal to self-contained nostalgia. Like, "hey, remember all these OTHER movies you saw that built up to this one? Well, they're going to revisit these in minor, superficial ways at the very end of our huge event." Yeah, dog, I don't care about those movies anymore and they weren't very entertaining to begin with. Just get to the ball numbing action violence.
Agreed. My main takeaway from it was that my butt hurt after sitting in the theater for that long.
Ma...ma.... Marvel movies are mostly redundant bullshit without even a single relevant thought in them. Just like these mass-produced romcoms, same level. They will probably be the first movies written and produced by inferior AI soon and it won't even make a big difference.
The worst part of Marvel movies is how they expect you to remember everything from every other Marvel movie and TV show going back to Iron Man in 2008. I gave up after a while. I can't keep all of that in my memory and I should be able to skip the ones that are less interesting to me and not get confused in a movie that isn't a sequel to those.
I'm a big One Piece fan. One piece has thousands of characters many with fleshed out back stories. They all feel fresh and unique and the universe is coherent. But marvel? Most if not all super heroes are interchangeable and the universe makes no sense.
That's a perfectly valid criticism of most manga, One Piece included. Especially shonen manga. The "same-face" issue is part of the reason anime and manga have women with crazy hair colors. It's easier to color code a character than give them a distinct face.
Well, not in the live action. If you'd compare the marvel comics I wonder which would be more diverse...
A one piece will at least flash back when your reintroduced to someone. Bellamy second appearance.
Well I know nothing about One Piece, but the way they do it in Marvel is absurd. I was lucky I had Disney+ at the time and saw Wandavision or the Doctor Strange sequel would have made no sense. And it was shortly after realizing that when I gave up. I honestly don't know why I stayed with it for so long.
Ya know, I'm actually okay with that. Up to endgame it wasn't really all that much. You had Ironman x3, GoG x2, Strange x1, Thor x3, Spiderman x1 (x2 if you want to watch the one right after endgame), Captain America x3, Avengers x3, Ant-Man x2, and Black Panther, all of which set you up for endgame. Thats... a grand total of 20 movies, plus the spiderman right after endgame.
Is that a lot? Sure, 40-50 hours. But let one company have a cool, big, tied together place in movies. I liked my invincible comic read. One book, straight through from beginning to end. I also liked when I read through the Marvel Ultimate comics, with about four or five of the serials that I was reading interweaving. I can't think of any other setting that was tied together like that in movies. The closest you'd get would be the television types, with a few hundred episodes.
I'll agree that the tv show styles were too much. I personally couldn't even watch the first trial of those, the agents of shield, right? That first episode was just such terrible writing. I definitely don't want to take that 40-50 hours (over 11 years, too, so that helps) and multiply by exponential scales.
My memory can't handle the intimate details from 20 movies. That's the problem. They make references to things in movies that happened a decade ago and expect people to remember them. So sure, tying them all together can be fun- if you can do it without expecting people to get the constant references. Honestly, I spend half the time in Marvel movies wondering what the fuck they're talking about lately.
Here’s a mnemonic technique that I have found works: Nothing about Marvel movies is worth remembering.
You’re watching the dramatic equivalent of that retouched Ecce Homo painting, a mass media product constructed by Hollywood on top of the palimpsest of the creative output of young Jewish men trying to come to grips with feelings of powerlessness in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Nothing much of the original remains, and it’s not worth looking at, beyond remarking at its absurdity.
When you strip away the trappings and just look at the scripts, it's incredible how generic all of the dialogue is.
It would be trivial to re-purpose any script to be for any other character because of how little they truly differ.
I'm entirely unconvinced that they haven't already been algorithm -assisted
at least then marvel will have a future, for whenever the inferior ai eventually gets replaced with superior ai
They will probably be the first movies written and produced by inferior AI soon and it won't even make a big difference.
While watching Quantummania I already had a feeling that the entire script was written by ChatGPT.
Endgame was stupid. The solution to Thanos was have Tony conveniently invent time traveling and then save the day. Infinity Wars was the peak.
Infinity Wars was stupid. Have some super heroes run around fighting bad guys trying to destroy the world for some stupid reason. There was no pick. It's all stupid.
I don't know, I thought it was kind of fun that they mixed things up for a change and had the protagonist be the villain and the central plot be about his triumph over the antagonists who are the heroes; the movie ending with him relaxing and enjoying the sunset now that his great work was over and so he could retire and put down his burdens was a really nice touch.
You ignorant. Thanos was the hero. Ironman is just another billionaire denying the obvious responsiblity for the death of all life on earth Thanos was preventing.
Maybe so, but it was still a janky story. A gigantuan struggle, with epic consequences... resolved by deus ex machina.
It wasn't "resolved." Thanos won. Then some janky billionaire lying asshole undid that and then lied about fucking everything. Everyone went on like a march of idiots right over the suicidal cliff like lemmings.
That's not a fictional story. Goodbye! Forever!
Yeah, a BILLIONAIRE undoes GOOD THINGS being done by the "VILLIAN."
Of course it doesn't make sense. It DOES make sense when you undo the bullshit it's spun around. There you fucking go.
I just want things to end. It's okay for things to be over. Star wars wasn't served by it's sequels, but here we are with a new WHATEVER every year. And marvel is worse, with a new show every month or two. Realistically, how long is anyone supposed to care?
It’s okay for things to be over.
False. Mediocre content still sells, and it is literally illegal for the company to not produce profit for the shareholders.
Nobody says they were masterpieces. But they were entertaining - and excellent at it as far as cheap entertainment goes -, now they're just sad to watch. I followed it closely until No Way Home, that was my closing point. From now on, I'll only watch Spider-Man movies because I'm a huge fan of the character. Couldn't care less about the multiverse they're selling
Would also recommend GOTG3 if you enjoyed the first two films, I'd personally say it's my favourite of the trilogy
Yeah, I was worried because of how shit MCU movies have become, but James Gunn's still got it.
That and No Way Home were going to be the last I was going to watch, and I’m still trying to work up the energy (?) to watch the latter. I will, eventually, I guess, but with the Spiderverse movies being A Thing, it feels pointless.
the multiverse they’re selling
Oh they do be selling it that's for sure. I haven't checked in to Spider Man since Enter the Spiderverse, which I thought was really cool. Marvel I didn't even like the style of the first movies, but I felt obligated to see them since I was technically part of what is now "nerd culture," and I think a lot of us felt the same obligation to see them for nerd cred. Now they've just commodified it to shit and milking every drop they can out of it.
Marvel films are the popcorn flicks of the 2010s. None of them are masterpieces, but most are just a fun watch.
But now they're often not even that. Besides a few outliers (No Way Home, GOTG3), they fail to even be entertaining popcorn flicks. I'd say the line is National Treasure. If it's better than National Treasure, that's a solid popcorn flick. If it's worse, then it's not worth watching.
Guardians had the things I hate about MCU but was entertaining enough to be enjoyable, because they leaned in to how wacky it was I think. Rest of MCU was just done to a crisp even then.
National Treasure is fucking awful though.
It's certainly no The Mummy (Brendan and Rachel obviously, not Tom's shitty effort that killed the whole "Dark Universe" franchise two movies in), which is about where I draw the line on popcorn guff.
You mean the 1999 cinematic masterpiece, The Mummy, with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz?
There was something to look forward to as all the characters got their movie and then the big team up to fight the big bad guy.
It was never Oscar worthy material, just some nice entertainment.
Yeah I'd say they were pretty bad and then got worse. They were agreeable movies for a diverse group at one point, even if they weren't all Marvel-heads. The Joss Whedon style of quippy self-referencing dialogue and unlikable protagonists is their major weak point, it got old between Firefly getting cancelled and the first Marvel movie but hadn't been overdone in pop culture yet apparently.
An MCU sex scene:
"That was so hot how you did that thing 3 scenes ago ...I guess we're alone now"
"Yeah... this is the part in a movie where sex happens..."
"I suppose if sex were going to happen, we would start like this..."
"Yes, and then I would do this"
(cheesy montage to an old classic)
"Woah... so that happened."
This is another occasion where I really hope the lesson isn’t “Female leads don’t sell”. Probably an obvious observation, but Captain Marvel always struck me as a boring, flawless, invincible hero without much personality.
The Superman problem. Main sources of conflict tend to involve depowering, fighting another godlike, or threatening people they care about. Over and over again.
Actually makes me appreciate so much more that one set of writers managed to make a semi-compelling show that focuses on Lois, including her personal growth, all while discovering that her plucky goodboy intern is in fact the man of steel. (Referring to My Adventures with Superman in case it’s not obvious)
One of the things a reviewer highlighted as very important to that show was that it didn’t praise Lois’ rebelliousness and spunk as having no consequences. I basically just didn’t see any of that journey in the first Captain Marvel movie.
The problem is that even Superman deconstructions get shat on. Snyder tried to do something different but everyone wanted a hokey silver age comic supes
Snyder's films were crap tho, and he didn't understand the characters - you can't deconstruct Superman and Batman if you don't understand Superman and Batman. Plus the lighting and pacing were awful. That's why they got shat on
Superman becomes the McGuffan, Clark is the main character. Superman is a social drama hero not an action hero.
this is so interesting, we were just talking marvel today with my best friend and she pointed out captain marvel as one of her favorite mcu characters. and it's specifically because she's a strong female character who's allowed to be strong without being hyper-competent or incredibly cerebral or anything like that. she's just a woman who stands up for things and punches shit occasionally and is allowed to win through sheer brute force.
and yes, she's way too powerful in many of the same way as superman, which is a narrative defect, but i find it extremely hypocritical how much more scrutiny people point toward captain marvel on that, while superman continues to be one of dc's most popular heroes, despite marvel using her better than dc uses superman.
It's new to me that Superman evades that criticism. There's a reason Batman gets so much more media than him lately, in large part because of the "What if Batman is actually bad for Gotham" philosophical junk.
Even the Zack Snyder films, for all their flaws, examine the two-toned mistakes of the hero more than the power, eg "Maybe a god X-raying us at every occasion and destroying buildings to fight his rival is perhaps too oppressive" versus "Maybe he should've used his X-ray vision to see the bomb in that guy's wheelchair before he set it off."
he doesn't evade that criticism, but there aren't constant "scandals" around him regarding that. half the time you hear about captain marvel, it's someone criticizing her for being too powerful (sometimes with accusations of "wokeism" thrown in, but not always). nearly all the time you hear about superman, he's just there, it's a regular positive-ish portrayal you'd normally see around any character, with a bit of critique thrown in of course. that's the difference in scrutiny i'm talking about, the internet doesn't tend to blow up every time they make a superman movie the same way it blew up for captain marvel because god forbid we see a woman in the same position as supes.
(also, i suppose many of her critics were the same people who criticize stuff like female thor or black captain america by saying go make original heroes -- this is the treatment you get when you comply. underprivileged groups always get higher scrutiny, and it easily propagates to otherwise well-meaning people too.)
Superman is a morality play. His powers have been secondary since the 80s.
He's Clark before he's Superman. And Clark is one hell of a good dude who's been fleshed out incredibly well.
Most people who don't like Superman don't know who Clark Kent is, and by that I mean they don't really read much Superman comics.
Not saying this is you, just commenting on the general stigma Clark seems to catch. Dude isn't even the most powerful being on Earth by a long shot.
yeah, an important clarification on that is i base my superhero stuff entirely on movies. i made a genuine effort to get into the comics but i just couldn't -- it might just be my luck but i've literally only read either canon or good stories from marvel and dc, nothing i tried managed to hit both. but for what it's worth, i presume the majority of people are the same way, comics just don't have the same degree of mainstream cultural penetration that movies enjoy.
i do agree with you though, clark is far more interesting than superman. i used to be an ardent superman hater specifically because the movie portrayals sucked and most online fans i interacted with were like "my fictional character could totally beat your fictional character" but i do really enjoy very human stories about the dude. and hell, sometimes his powered stuff can also be kinda cool -- but the same applies to captain marvel as well and that's usually the part that people don't like to accept.
Yep! I'm not a big fan of any of the modern Superman films, I think there's way too much punching and not enough super-human feats. And by that I mean rescuing people, or performing "miracles" that only he can in order to help the greater good.
Clark will let a monster punch him in the face dozens of times if he thinks he can save both the people and the creature's life. That's what creates dilemmas for me when I enjoy a decent Superman story, an ethical dilemma that can't be solved by hitting something as hard as possible.
The cool thing about Superman isn't that he has these fantastic powers, but that the person who wields them will always try to do the right thing, because they know nobody else can.
The original Superman movie nailed that aspect. Clark was confident and maybe even a little cocky because of his abilities... but when his father suffered a heart attack, all the super strength in the universe couldn't save him.
You are 100% correct in that a lot of superhero discourse online seems to aaaaaaaalways come down to "who would win in a fight", which has always baffled me, because comic books are LOADED with ethical and moral plays which are suppose to make us question whether violence is even a good answer for anything in the first place.
It's about using your own strengths to help facilitate the weakness of those who can't help themselves.
At least to me.
If anything the peak was infinity wars. But tbh just finished watching s02 of loki and it's absolutely excellent. I have tons of critique but still it's very good.
Ooo I have a new fan! I'm glad you took time out of your day to manually scrape a stranger's comment history, that's not weird at all
You keep talking of me as if I was a bot, which is sort of dehumanising. And by reading your other comments I can tell you for sure that indeed I am not your fan.
"you're dehumanising me" - the guy who makes personal attacks to strangers and their mothers.
Hilarious
It's possible that they thought the first one didn't post and kept trying. Sometimes you get a timeout error and return to the editable text with the post button again but the post already went through.
It’s a common bug that the post button on some interfaces doesn’t seem to do what it should when it actually does but the interface doesn’t show it.
Usually a submission bug. User gets an error and attempts to resubmit, but each submit attempt succeeds after a delay.
Sure, fucko. I pressed submit and the site brought me back to the same page, so i thought it didn't go through. How old are you? Have you never seen this happen on the internet? It's due to the platform being new and not having anything to prevent this behaviour.
I don’t think it was total hot garbage like most. I dislike most of everything to do with the final battle, but the time travel shenanigans are fun as fuck
I mean, in spiderverse they have a pig version of peter parker, i would say anyone really complaining about female loki is really just being sexist
Series one maybe, two was a bit of a mess imo. I didn't even understand what the stakes were until everything started turning into noodles.
Look, I love spaghettification porn as much as the next guy, but Loki was a mess. The story was gobbldygook. I could not see any good interpretation of all the stuff about purifying non-übermensch timelines. The Wilson / Hiddleston chemistry was great, really that's the only reason to keep watching.
Everyone argues with me over it, but The Incredible Hulk (Edward norton) and Iron Man/Iron Man 2 were pretty much it for me.
I did enjoy No Way Home, and Thor Love and Thunder, but the rest were so watered down. Captain America & Bucky VS iron man was the death warrant. He can take a tank round, but not a punch from Cap?
Hulk pissing himself in Infinity War against Thanos with just the power stone? No. Hulk should have smashed him to a pulp.
This. Civil War's final fight scene is hugely overrated. Iron man by that point had tangled with multiple fighter aircraft, dozens of missile armed drones, Thor and more. Goes down to two strong guys punching him.
Even before Endgame, there were some stinkers.
It's one of the reasons why Guardians of the Galaxy was so popular, it changed the formula.
It was also just a straight up James Gunn movie with an ensemble cast of misfits. It's like...his thing. That's what's so weird about so many Marvel movies. They gave them to competent directors and basically said "make one of your movies, but with our characters and setting." Iron Man 2 was a Shane Black joint: took place at Christmas, lots of witty banter, there were some buddy cop elements. But the shell of it is an Iron Man movie.
The two Hellboy movies did the Marval style film before Marvel and it was only second to Iron Man.
I'd say this is just nostalgia. The iron man movies where utter trash. I guess you judt were young and impressionable then.
Marvel peaked with the first Blade movie and it's all been varying flavors of downhill since then. This is the truth.
As a teen in the 90s this was the coolest fucking fight ever! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZuZZzvJxR8
I bought the official soundtrack and listened to it on my MiniDisc every morning on the way to college! Pumped me up ready for the days battle against vampires (and maths) :D
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=mZuZZzvJxR8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I thought comic book movies were in decline until the Batman came out. The question is if Marvel is willing to part from their generic formula so their movies feel fresh.
Marvel needs some good direction from a management level, they need to build an Avengers team of writers who can really think of an overarching plot and have an end goal. They keep introducing new characters and then just don't use them at all (where is Shang Chi?), their IP is spread out too much across unnecessary TV shows, they need to get their budget under control because somehow everything costs a billion, and their end product is worsened by the fact that their VFX teams are being overrun. This is Kevin Feige's time to shine more than ever and he needs to show Disney that he can earn that pay.
Exactly. I was a big fan of the Batman, adapting the neo noir feel really helped it stand out.
Disney is kind of starting to figure this out on the star wars side with Andor and the Mandalorian. Creating unique stories with varying, structure, genre and tone. Every marvel movie just feels so generic and blends into every other, gets boring. Wanda vision had a glimmer of genius before devolving back to generic marvel meh stuff.
Is this a staged joke? Is everyone here in some conspiracy to make me believe that either the world went mad or I did? Why is everyone calling every Marvel movie "peak" but the first Iron Man? Obviously, this was the best one.
I feel like comic book movies in general, peaked. Marvel nor DC have made anything that gets close.
I think the big reason is that marvel had to make due with it's B and C suite of characters, after they sold the rights of to their most popular franchises, like X-Men and Spiderman. They had to step their writing game up to overcome the limited popularity of the characters.
My god End Game was trash. It qas terribly rushed. They should've just ended it in Infinity war with a cliff hanger.
