Since vampires aren't living it could be that they weren't included in the Snap. Suddenly with only half as many victims whether balance there was in a populace of vampires that allowed them to be undetected is gone.

I'm unsure about She-Hulk. I want to like her, but I wouldn't have as much patience as Bruce has when dealing with her. I get not wanting to be a superhero, not all people want that, but maybe she should be a little more respectful when her cousin wants to help her avoid his traumatic experience of being a monter? And the obsession with Cap's virginity is a very questionable thing to add to her character.

 

The Cap thing is hilarious. Its what most people would think about when discussing someone as straight laced as Cap.

However, I agree with you that her attitude towards Bruce was kind of baffling.

There is a moment where she equates being catcalled and having to deal with one asshole co-worker as similar to Bruce's decades of mental anguish over having no control of himself and having to wrestle and come to terms with that.

I don't know, that scene just kind of felt odd to me.

Just feels odd that the world of the MCU is sitll so backwards that some women are constantly angry and having to deal with sexist shit.

 

So, I basically stopped giving a shit about the MCU around the time of the first Guardians of the Galaxy. Mostly because the movies all started feeling too similar to each other in tone, looks and themes. But there I was, trawling Youtube at midnight because Sleep and I have an unhealthy relationship. And I see the title Why Marvel Phase Four Sucks! and I think "Ballsy title, I'll give it a watch." Like I said earlier, I don't really give a shit so I haven't seen any of the Phase Four stuff, or anything newer than Doctor Strange (maybe Thor: Ragnarok, don't know which came first but they were the last two I really intend on seeing) so I can't really say if the critiques in the video are accurate. But if they are, damn the franchise went to shit.

 

I'm gonna be honest, this take is really treading the line.

I'm firmly of the opinion that 'woke' culture war bullshit has been blown up out of all proportion and used as a rallying cry by right-wing types. Somehow, they managed to change the meaning of 'woke' to simply be synonymous with 'bad' (amongst themselves) or 'pandering' (amongst the groups being represented) in the wider public perception. Must have been a great day for them when it turned up, because before it, they had to make do with airquotes representation airquotes as their rallying cry, which was much harder to get buy-in on from the general populace.

Put simply, movies and tv-shows are not bad because they feature representation. They are bad because the writers did a shit job.

Look at my commentary on many of the new Marvel offerings in this thread and hopefully you'll see that there are plenty of issues with the writing which do not boil down to 'woke bad'. All of these shows could have been fine. Some could even have been great. And it wasn't the ethnicity or genders of the characters that would have to change. It would be the writing.

Takes like the one you linked really tread that line. They point out a few valid criticisms of the writing (unearned character payoffs, Worf-ing established characters to prop up new ones, one-note villains) and then wave their arms about and say words like 'woke', 'agenda', or 'the message' and act like that means anything. As if Eternals would magically be less of a mess of a movie if Ikaris and Sersi had swapped roles, or if Phastos hadn't been a gay black man. As if the first and the last were not issues which already plagued Marvel movies, long before Endgame. I am sure this plays well for their audience, but it is a frustratingly black-and-white take, which really only serves to deepen the cultural divide.

They talk about how these characters are 'woke' because they aren't anything but representation, but that's simply not true. Eternals had a lot of big ideas at play, and every character stood in for something important, and their actions and choices were meant to resonate at a level far deeper than 'hey, look, that person looks like me'. They were meant to, but for most they just didn't. And if you didn't see the meaning that those characters were meant to have, then it did indeed look like they were empty shells, present in the movie only to exist.

And make no mistake, if the wider audience is failing to appreciate the narrative purpose of your characters, then that is a failure of the writer. But their failure is not in the bits of the character that the audience did see, but in the bits that they didn't.

Basically, it's like they looked at a collapsed building. In the centre is a single, broken, concrete column, the only bit of structure still visible, and proclaimed that the building failed because that column was not strong enough. No, it failed because the other structural columns were so weak that they are not even visible amid all the rubble.

 

I would also say having watched part (though not all) of the video, that it's one that makes a few good points and then tries to inflate its argument by adding a lot of much more dubious ones. There's a section where they list a bunch of "plot holes" as evidence of why new characters aren't struggling enough. Their examples include things like Black Widow walking off falls and impacts that should've put her out of action, which is a fair critique. But then they include others that are just kind of embarrassing, like deriding Kate "easily being able to face off against a Black Widow" when across that whole scene Kate is barely able to do a thing, despite Yelena clearly going easy on her. And they sound so smug doing it, too, like they aren't talking out their ass.

It feels like they decided on a theory for why most of Phase 4 has been lackluster before they actually looked at the shows themselves. The result is a bunch of cherry-picked or misrepresented examples tossed in with a bunch of (mostly) false correlations (like Steelbadger said, the villains in multiple 'meh' shows being white men isn't what's making them 'meh', it's that those shows aren't done well).

 

People who think Phase 4 sucks because some characters are gay are not worth listening to. Phase 4 sucks because it goes all in on the comic books problem of scale (why do I give a shit about some silly gang Hawkeye's having a slapfight with when gods that make Thor look mundane are reshaping the multiverse?), introduces eleventy dozen new characters very fast and apparently now the MCU has taken the quantity over quality approach.

Of the Phase 4 movies I've seen, Black Widow was 1) Winter Soldier but with Black Widow in the Title and Also Worse 2) completely misplaced in Phase 4. Shang-Chi was fun, but I don't know how well it will fit into the larger universe. Eternals was a miss for me for exacerbating the problem of scale I mentioned. Spider-Man 3 was phenomenal, the only movie in Phase 4 so far that works on every level. Doctor Strange 2 was very poorly executed, it wanted to be 3 movies in one and failed at all of them. Haven't seen Thor 4.

I saw half of the Falcon and the Soldier TV show, none of the others. The shows are where the MCU overstepped. If they're gonna ask for so much of my time, it better be good stuff. Mainline, huge-budget movies of Phase 4 are mostly meh and the reviews I've read here on DLP did ittle to dispel my apprehension.

Wokeness has nothing to do with any of this.

 

I think there's a fair amount of anachronistic thinking going on here.

Marvel Phase 1 was... mediocre at best. Iron Man was very good - good enough to launch the whole franchise - but the movies that followed were all average at best. Thor 1, Captain America 1, Iron Man 2, were all merely OK. The Incredible Hulk was bad enough that it still has a weird status as only having one foot in the MCU.

It wasn't until Avengers came along and drew them all together that Phase 1 really had a movie that lived up to the promise of the first Iron Man movie. And in so doing, it kinda retroactively enhanced the previous movies. Thor 1 and Captain America 1 in particular become a lot better when watched as episodes in a continuum leading to Avengers rather than standalone movies.

And even after Avengers, there were still a lot of dud movies in Phases 2 and 3. Phase 2 in particular was spotty in quality, with maybe 50% of the entries being actively bad.

The above point about Phase 1 applies by analogy to the MCU as a whole. A lot of average and outright bad standalone movies which are held together by the tent-pole Avengers movies which bring them all together, make them episodes in a larger tale, and thereby enhance them by giving them greater context.

Phase 4 is pretty much par for the course so far. A few good movies, a few average ones, a few bad ones. A standard MCU phase. What it's really lacking is a tent-pole Avengers movie to bring the phase together.

Edit: as an aside, I have so very weary of the "Marvel fatigue" line. It's one of those YouTuber and Reddit lines that people endlessly repeat because it gets easy views/upvotes, part of the phenomenon (which far predates the internet) that being negative about popular things makes you sound cool by showing how independent and anti-mainstream you are - even when your negativity is universally echoed in every form of media.

You hear it with all sorts of franchises, not just Marvel ("sequel fatique", etc). And it's always 100% bullshit.

Over the 2 year period 2021-2022, and assuming an average running time of 130 minutes for Black Panther 2, Marvel Phase 4 will have consisted of a total running time as follows:

Movies: approx 16 hours

Television: approx 40 hours

So that's 56 hours of content across 2 years, or 28 hours of content a year. A standard procedural TV show like NCIS will have around 18 hours of content per season. So in terms of volume of content, we're talking less than 2 seasons of standard TV a year.

Or to put it another way, you could keep up with it all by watching just over an hour's content a week.

I cannot take seriously anyone who says that an hour a week is so much content so as to produce fatigue by sheer volume. Not when the average person spends approximately one third of their waking life watching TV/online video content - a daily average of 5 hours 40 minutes. Even if you watch everything Marvel produces, it's still less than 2.5% of the average person's media consumption.

Ultimately, the only serious argument is about quality. If the quality were consistently good, then no one would experience fatigue from that volume of content. And if the quality is bad, then the problem is the quality, not the quantity.

 

When people talk about fatigue in this context, marvel fatigue, sequel fatigue, etc, hardly any of them mean actual exhaustion from keeping up with it. It's just a way to say "the formula is old and tired and I'm bored of it".

And honestly, I hit that point after Thor Ragnarok. I just... Stopped caring about the MCU entirely and barely managed to force myself to watch infinity war and endgame, and I still don't think I would care if I had never watched them. I couldn't point to any one aspect that's bad or turned me off or whatever, but there's just zero interest in the franchise anymore. And I can't think of any other way to describe it than marvel fatigue.

 

What he said.

 

So I just got to watching Thor: Love and Thunder finally, and the movie is...fine.

But the lesson I learned from this is, damn, Christian Bale would have made a fantastic Voldemort.

 

Finally saw the Thor as well. What a clusterfuck. It's like someone took 2 hours of their Tik Tok feed, slapped it together, colorized ir and bam! new Thor movie.

 

It was certainly a different, more comedy-focused, formula. Didn't mind it, the whole thing was funny enough.
Just felt like a different style.

The only thing that bothered me was the chemotherapy and hospital scenes. Complaining about how long the chemo is taking when the line is still clamped and there are no drips in the chamber. No label on the chemo bag, no infusion pump in sight. Just a simple IV instead of doing a PICC Line or a Port.
0/10.


I will say that they hit the whole "Living longer vs Living meaningully" conversation pretty well. It's a large part of the discussion around chemotherapy and cancer care, and honestly one that should be more prominent than it is. As much as we always conflate "longer life" being the superior choice, it's often not the case. Chemotherapy will absolutely kick peoples' ass sometimes, and when it's stage IV and there really is nowhere to go, a lot of the time it's just better to take those last few months and actually enjoy your time.

 

It was just fine. Maybe it's because I was prepared with how everybody was complaining about the humor that it was not that bad. Some scenes would be really improved if they did have less jokes, or be a joke like the gathering of gods, but when it got serious it stayed serious instead of adding a joke to the scene.

Scenes I would change and remove the jokes are leaving the Guardians, the battle was funny and the scene after could be more serious. Next the scenes with Thor making speeches in New Asgard. I would keep the first one serious and remove the second. And I would completely redo the Omnipotence City and its gods. Make them at first these powerful and divine figures before revealing them to be petty and frivol instead of making them a joke from the beginning.

At the same time a lot was good. Thor and Jane's relationship was the best of all three movies with them. While it probably need more time, Jane's illness was done as well as it could with what it got. All Gorr's scenes and especially the beginning and the ending of his journey.

I'm not against Taika getting another one if he can listen to complains and improve with his humor timing in the next one.

 

Humor wasn't really a problem with Thor 4 imo. I think the vibes were great. It was a fun space viking adventure with some heart. I liked it, but I won't pretend it was anything above average.

I think actually had more of a narrative structure problem, not a tone one. Just the basic issue of pay offs without proper set ups and an under-explored character arc for Thor. My first instinct is that they should've actually let him keep some of the gut, to better dramatize his recovery. While Endgame had him snap out of his depression and find faith in himself again, this movie (wisely) doesn't hop right back to old Thor and instead has him grappling with the massive grief, I just think they didn't do it as well as they needed to. Hemsworth does pretty well with the material imo, but I just feel like they never actually got at the depth of the issue the way they needed to. Taika's perfectly capable of it, so I wonder if he was just kinda stretched thin and didn't manage it or if there was some sort of studio imposition blocking him from diving too far into Thor's mental health.

Great arc for Jane though, really happy with that. Definitely worth bringing back Natalie Portman.

 

I mostly enjoyed the movie, stupid as some of it was. The speech at New Asgard definitely knocked the enjoyment out of me for a minute. You had the people shouting over each other about what to do, with Valkyrie being simply one voice among many, unable to lead. Then Thor projects his voice, not shouting, calling upon his royal upbringing, and the entire room instantly quiets, and I'm like, "Hell yes! King Thor!"

And then he just...flubs the speech. Where was the dignity and pride that Thor is supposed to be known for? I can accept a bit of silliness like in Ragnarok, where most of it is him with his friends or family, or like in Endgame, where he is in deep depression and it is a sign of his degradation from what he once was. But in Love and Thunder...it's just kind of sad at points.

As a side note, I liked how the movie handled how Thor and Jane breaking up, over issues of their drastically different lifespans, and how she ended up with Mjolnir. Thor unconsciously casting a spell like Odin did, asking Mjolnir to protect Jane if he couldn't, fit very well in my opinion. She doesn't have the character of Steve Rogers that makes him worthy, but she was made a specific exception due to love.

 

Watched Love and Thunder.

I liked the idea of bringing Jane Foster back as Mighty Thor. Character design on Gorr was great. I regret the character ended up in a meh comedy because this would have been a phenomenal scary character in a horror. This is the second time this year I find myself wanting an MCU horror movie even though I typically don't watch horror. When the movie looked good, it looked good. I laughed at the goats a few times. Disregarding the asspull aspect of it, Thor imbuing the kids with the power of Thor was cool. The kid at the end (which Wikipedia says is actually Chris Hemsworth's daughter) was cute and funny, made me smile.

What I didn't like... everything else, pretty much. This movie really didn't land for me. The teaser trailer with Sweet Child o Mine was better than some entire movies.

The dialogue was just.... blergh. Bland. Actors seemed like they were phoning it in. It sounded like a terrible screenwriter tried very badly to do a "hello fellow kids" at gen z. Say what you want about Joss Whedon but goddamn did his Avengers movies have some zingers. The only actor who seemed like he was trying to do something with his dialogue was Christian Bale, everyone else just sounded tired or was a child so can't expect much there (except the kid at the end, like I already said, I thought she was legit funny).

As for the plot... the most boring kind of deus-ex-mcguffin. Ancient prophecy about an ancient portal leading to an ancient supreme uber-power that stands a weight class above literal gods. I understand the style Taika Watiti was going for, but I think he overplayed his hand with his take of everything being silly and unserious.

No time was given to develop the chemistry between Thor and Thor--which I think was there, but too fleeting. I didn't buy their heartfelt goodbye at the end. I'm also confused on when their relationship shown in a montage was supposed to have taken place. From the remark about 8 years, I'm guessing between Dark World and Age of Ultron?

Valkyrie might as well have not been in the movie, Tessa Thompson was given nothing to work with.

Gorr's origin story at the beginning hurt his character rather than establish it, imo. The turnaround from his daughter's death to seeing the oasis to the Necrosword choosing him to turning into a god slayer was whiplash-fast. Less is more. I think the character would have been stronger with a more nebulous backstory, bits and pieces delivered by other characters. It also seems like Gorr was only on his rampage for a short while.

I think it would have served the character much more, made a stronger villain, if he was more of a legend even among the gods. A god is slaughtered here and there, it goes on for years, maybe decades as Gorr waits for events to catch up to the prophecy scrolls he found and for Stormbreaker to be forged while he indulges in some god-butchering from time to time to keep the Necrosword satisfied and also searches for Omnipotent City while he waits. When Thor and company arrive there to ask for help, instead of making everything a joke, show that even Zeus is afraid of Gorr and stakes his safety on Gorr being unable to get to the City.

For me, mainline MCU movies are zero for two this year.

EDIt: I'm rewatching Endgame, because I am, and Nebula describes Vormir (where the Soul Stone is) as "dominion of death, the very center of celestial existence". I'm pretty sure the Eternity gate in L&T was also supposed to be in the center of the universe. This is another pebble on the pile of problems with continuity in the MCU. Escalation by introducing more and more uber-omnipotent superbeings diminishes the Infinity Saga and if everything is Super Speshul, then nothing is. How many incredibly important mythic locations/objects are the at the center of the universe?

 

I liked the prologue with Gorr, but I agree that they should make him the Butcher much longer. Changing the scenes in Omnipotent City from comedy to really scared gods hiding there and not wanting to get themselves killed would improve what I considered the weakest part of the film. Have them discuss another hero they talked into a quest of killing Gorr being killed and then Thor arrives saying they should fight him themselves. Then you can have some cool God Squad they teased fighting Gorr at the end.

 

ROTFL.

 

So that's what these trucks leaving Disney's headquarters were about.

 

I love it