"It's about damn time", said Evangeline Lilly's Hope van Dyne in one of the post-credits scenes of 2015's Ant-Man, and now, eight full films and the best part of half a decade later, the meta-promise of that short scene has finally come to fruition - far too late by any measure, but still. In Captain Marvel, the Marvel Cinematic Universe at long last has its first film led by a woman, an origin story (of sorts) for the titular Captain that while almost inarguably imperfect, gets far more right than it does wrong. The result? A movie that I enjoyed considerably more than I expected to based on the rather lackluster trailers, only making the upcoming Avengers: Endgame all the more tantalizing in the process.
Set in the mid 1990's, we follow an amnesiac member of the Kree Starforce known as Vers as she and the rest of her squadron (led by her mentor, Yon-Rogg) are tasked with rescuing an undercover Kree spy from the Skrull, a race of shapeshifting aliens with whom the Kree are at war. After the mission goes badly wrong, Vers finds herself stranded on Earth with the Skrull hot on her tail, only to learn that she may once have lived here before she lost her memory. Teaming up with SHIELD agent Nick Fury, the two of them start investigating how she ended up losing her memories and joining the Kree, all while trying to avoid the Skrull as she waits for Yon-Rogg to arrive on Earth to pick her up and take her home.
James Gunn was fired from directing Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 because he criticised Donald Trump.
There's a lot of context and additional information behind this whole shitty situation that I'm hoping to get to in a second, but ultimately, that's exactly what has happened here. After repeatedly speaking out against Trump on Twitter, known alt-right (read: Neo-Nazi) Internet personality Mike Cernovich dug out some old, bad taste tweets made by Gunn and screamed about it until someone was stupid enough to listen. The people stupid enough to listen were Disney, and Gunn was fired. He's the latest victim of a culture war that's been particularly ugly since 2014, all because Cernovich, a self-confessed rapist and all-round piece of shit, didn't like someone speaking out against an equally awful human being.
It's too damn big.
I mean, no doy, right? All but one of Marvel Studios' previous "event movies" have felt at times overstuffed, and they were only trying to juggle a fraction of the characters - Avengers: Infinity War is attempting to balance an unprecedented twenty-two, and that's not even including those who only show up for a couple of scenes. Something with this many moving parts was always going to be far too big to function as an actual movie - that it still somehow ends up being a quite entertaining (and at times genuinely shocking) piece of blockbuster entertainment is frankly nothing short of a modern miracle.
You know the story, or at least how it starts. Thanos, the big purple guy in the chair who was first teased in the post-credits scene of Avengers Assemble some 6 years ago, has finally gotten off his ass in order to unite the Chaos Emeralds and become the most powerful being that the universe has ever known, and the only people standing in his way are... well, almost everyone that we've ever met over the last ten years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That's Avengers: Infinity War's main selling point - it is also quite obviously the source of all its biggest flaws.
I don't think it's going to come as a massive shock to anyone to learn that Black Panther, the 18th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is worth seeing. Marvel Studios have been releasing films that are good at worst for so long now that it almost feels like a foregone conclusion, which means that the real question at this point is if each new instalment in this mega-franchise can meet the expectations set for it. In the case of Black Panther, those expectations are sky high thanks to the character's impressive debut in Captain America: Civil War and the fact it's written/directed by the brilliant Ryan Coogler - and unfortunately, I don't think it quite manages to meet them.
Don't get me wrong, it's without a doubt one of the stronger films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date, introducing us to a ton of great new characters and telling an interesting, thematically complex story that I'm sure people will be analysing and talking about for a long time to come - but it's also Ryan Coogler's weakest movie by a fair margin, lacking the sense of craft and rich emotional substance that made both Fruitvale Station and Creed as deeply engaging as they are. It's a really good superhero film for sure, certainly one with more ambition and intelligence than most, but the realities of making a Disney-backed Marvel Studios film means that it's also ultimately *only* a really good superhero film, rather than the legitimately great piece of cinema it often feels close to becoming.
Up until now, has anyone really cared about the Thor films all that much? Even as a pretty big fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they're two of the movies I'm least likely to revisit - not because they're outright bad (they aren't), but because they're rarely anything more or less than just purely functional, coming across as uninspired and uninspiring in a way that makes them stick out like a sore thumb when compared to the rest of this franchise. When Marvel Studios first announced the slate of films that would make up Phase 3 of the MCU, no-one seemed particularly interested in whatever the fairly blandly titled Thor: Ragnarok would be, leaving the studio with just pressing one question: how do you solve a problem like the Thor films?
The answer, as it turns out, is to bring What We Do in the Shadows and Hunt for the Wilderpeople director Taika Waititi on board. With Thor: Ragnarok, Waititi has taken all that didn't work about the previous films (so, almost everything other than the relationship between Thor and Loki) and thrown it straight in the garbage, clearing the table for him to completely reinvent the franchise and making a damn good movie in the process.
We rejoin the titular God of Thunder two years after the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron, in which time he has been travelling around the universe in an attempt to learn as much about the Infinity Stones as possible. After finding out that it is Loki, not Odin, who sits on the throne of Asgard following the events of Thor: The Dark World, Thor confronts his brother and travels with him to Earth in order to find Odin and return him to the throne - but ends up accidentally gets himself stranded on the junk planet Sakaar in the process, leaving Asgard vulnerable to attack from Hela, the Goddess of Death.
Between the love still held for Sam Raimi's original Spider-Man trilogy and the damage done to the brand by Marc Webb's abortive Amazing Spider-Man rebooted franchise, Spider-Man: Homecoming was always going to find itself in something of a difficult position, culturally. Even ignoring how unlikely it was to live up to Raimi's Spider-Man 2, a film that's still arguably a genre high-point over a decade after release, Spider-Man: Homecoming is tasked with offering a fresh take on a character already well-established in pop culture while also delivering on the promise of finally seeing Peter Parker exist as part of the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe - maybe more than any other MCU film to date, Spider-Man: Homecoming is burdened by some heavy expectations, to the point where it would have been far too easy for it to end up disappointing.
Fortunately, that simply isn't the case. It may not reach the dramatic or emotional heights of Spider-Man 2, but by giving us a Peter Parker who looks and acts like a genuine teenager, avoiding any hint of an origin story and maybe most importantly delivering hard on the comedy, Spider-Man: Homecoming manages to avoid retreading the same ground as previous films without leaning too heavily on its links to the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is, in short, exactly what it needed to be, and the result is a film that's simply delightful.
After just under a decade of consistently producing some of the best blockbuster entertainment each year, you can be pretty sure that you're in for a good time if you go to see a movie with the Marvel Studios title card in front of it, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 - the fifteenth(!) film in the ever expanding franchise experiment that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe - offers no exception to that. Fans of the first film are going to find a lot to enjoy here, and while this review may come across as very critical at times, it's important to take that alongside the knowledge that despite being noticeably more flawed than its predecessor, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is still an entertaining, engaging film in its own right, and one that I personally enjoyed very much.
The comparisons that you might have seen made between Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back are apt, and not just thanks to this films status as a space opera sequel. It too makes the decision to split up its core characters for much of the film's running time, allowing it to tackle its two main threads at once - one following Peter Quill and some of the Guardians as they meet Peter's biological father for the first time, and the other following Yondu Udonta and the rest of the Guardians as he re-examines his life (and his relationship with Peter) following a chance encounter with an old ally.
As we neared the finale of Doctor Strange, I suddenly realised that I was more interested in seeing the after-credits scenes than I was in watching the film perform its conclusion. My investment in this movie rested more in seeing how this story and these character would go on to interact with the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe than it did in the story and characters themselves, and although that's fantastic news as far as the Marvel Cinematic Universe is concerned - a testament to how well these 14 movies have come together in order to create something greater than the sum of its parts - it's also a fairly good indication that Doctor Strange itself simply isn't all that engaging a movie.
Following a career-ending car crash, we follow talented ex-neurosurgeon Stephen Strange as he attempts to master the mystical arts in order to heal his hands back into the condition they once were. Travelling to a place called Kamar-Taj in Nepal, Strange starts to study and train under the guidance of The Ancient One, who eventually reveals to Strange that he now has a responsibility to protect the Earth from the kind of mystical threats that the Avengers cannot.
There is a lot to like about Luke Cage, the latest Netflix series set in the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe. For a start, it's an unabashedly black TV show in a time when the default remains lily-white, and it's full of the kind of things that great TV relies on - interesting characters, a great cast, and a strong sense of style. Unfortunately, this is all undermined by a lack of direction that comes close to derailing the entire thing at times, which raises the questions - at what point does something stop being flawed and start being... simply not all that good?
Set in Harlem, we follow the super strong, bulletproof Luke Cage as he attempts to get his life back to normal after the events of Jessica Jones. He's working multiple jobs off-the-books, including sweeping hair at a local barbers and washing dishes at Harlem's Paradise, a club owned by gangster Cornell "Cottonmouth" Stokes. But after three kids ruin a gun deal between the local gangs by stealing the money at gunpoint, Cottonmouth starts searching all of Harlem for them, bringing him to conflict with Luke.
Between the super-powered brawl that opens the episode, an assault on SHIELD by the primitive Inhumans, a last-ditch attempt to stop Hive's master plan and the death of a series regular, you'd be forgiven for thinking that "Ascension", the third season finale of Agents of SHIELD, runs the risk of feeling rushed. It's not like Agents of SHIELD hasn't produced it's fair share of episodes that are overstuffed, after all - even the first half of this season suffered thanks to how much it tried to do in just ten episodes, a focus on telling the story quickly over telling it well that robbed the show of it's ability to properly dramatise it's most important moments.
Fortunately, "Ascension" understands the difference between story elements that can be dealt with quickly and story elements that need some real time devoted to them, and in doing so offers us what may well be the most emotionally engaging episode of the show to date. Individual moments are given plenty of time in order to allow us to really feel them rather than just see them, an aspect of "Ascension" that also helps highlight how good the writing and performances are here.
My biggest fear going into the third season finale of Agents of SHIELD was that it would constantly be passing YoYo's cross between characters in order to keep us on our toes about who is going to die. Character death can make for excellent television when done well (hell, just see the latest episode of Game of Thrones for proof of that), but by having the advertising for the finale lean heavily on the fact that someone would die, I began to worry that Agents of SHIELD had nothing else to offer beyond that. It felt cheap, an easy way to raise the stakes without doing any of the legwork required to make it actually matter.
Thankfully, Agents of SHIELD has proven me wrong. Although there is an element of "Who's it going to be?!?" here, I'm glad to see that it isn't even close to being to focus of the episode. Instead, "Absolution" is content to simply let the SHIELD vs Hive story that the show has been building to since the mid-season finale play out, and in that respect it doesn't disappoint.
Now that's more like it. After last weeks "Failed Experiments" disappointed in a big way thanks to it's status as filler, this weeks "Emancipation" chooses to make up for that in a tight, important episode that smartly acknowledges the events of Captain America: Civil War before quickly getting on with what the show has been building up to for some time instead.
This week sees Coulson trying to convince General Talbot that the Secret Warriors need to remain a secret in the wake of the Sokovia Accords (which apparently included a clause on the registration of enhanced people - new to anyone who saw Captain America: Civil War), while Hive continues his experiments to turn regular people into Inhumans. But the main plot has Daisy hacking into SHIELD and talking to Lincoln, who is still cooped up inside his own little quarantine and getting more frustrated with his situation by the minute.
Opening with a brief flashback that shows us how Hive was first created by the Kree, the main plot of "Failed Experiments" sees SHIELD on a mission to try and kill Hive, or at least find out if they even can. At the same time, Fitzsimmons continue their work on an antidote for his ability to control Inhumans, while Hive starts work on a process that will turn regular humans into Inhumans.
I've got to say, I find myself quite disappointed with "Failed Experiments". Last weeks "The Singularity" was a surprisingly good episode of Agents of SHIELD that went to some interesting places while dealing with the consequences of "The Team". "Failed Experiments" seems to want to do the same, the problem being that it ends up hitting many of the same character beats as last weeks episode without really adding anything new. Again, we see Daisy threaten someone we know she cares for deeply thanks to Hive's influence; again we see the lengths Lincoln is willing to go to in order to help Daisy. It's repetition for no reason, something that even the first season of Agents of SHIELD managed to avoid.
It's no secret that the best part of Agents of SHIELD is and always has been the duo of Leopold Fitz and Jemma Simmons, collectively and affectionately known as Fitzsimmons. Their semi-romantic, will-they-won't-they friendship has been an important part of the show since the first season, and people genuinely care about them; something well-known by the shows writers, who take every opportunity they can to tear them apart, test their friendship, and break them in every way they know how. Fitzsimmons have been through a lot over the course of the last two seasons, so when an episode finally gives them the break that they deserve it feels both hugely satisfying and totally earned.
It is that which makes "The Singularity" such a good episode of Agents of SHIELD. The main story sees SHIELD dealing with the fallout left from last weeks "The Team" while also trying to get to various Inhumans that they know about before Hive can, but it is the side-plot that sees Fitzsimmons searching for someone who might have created a cure for Hive's mind control that really held my interest throughout.
A common criticism of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that each film only exists to set up the next. It's an unfair one, in my eyes; for the most part, the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are in the habit of reacting that which came before more than than they are setting up future ones, something that helps make this constantly evolving world feel incredibly natural. Yes, Avengers: Age of Ultron can only happen thanks to the events of Avengers Assemble and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but it never feels like those films only happened so that Avengers: Age of Ultron could. It's a careful balancing act that Marvel Studios haven't always pulled off, but when it works it works wonders.
As such, Captain America: Civil War is a reaction to... well, a lot. The world has grown weary of the Avengers since Sokovia fell out of the sky in Avengers: Age of Ultron, and after another Avengers mission results in civilian casualties an international agreement called The Sokovia Accords is created to stop the Avengers from operating without oversight from the United Nations. Those that sign the Accords can continue to work as an Avenger under the UN, but those that don't - such as Steve Rogers - have no legal right to involve themselves in those kind of conflicts; something that becomes a big issue when a still in-hiding Bucky Barnes is becomes the primary suspect behind a terrorist attack.
Last week I said that I was disappointed with "Paradise Lost" thanks to how varied the quality was throughout. Although the main story of the episode was interesting, the other two side-plots only really existed to set up storylines for later on, and the episodes overall slower pace killed a lot of the momentum that the season had been building. I said at the time that it is now up to this weeks episode to not only be a significantly better episode, but also to provide a satisfying continuation of the story left unresolved by "Paradise Lost" - and "The Team" manages to do just that.
Picking up where we left off in "Paradise Lost", "The Team" opens up with Daisy and Lincoln forming the Secret Warriors in earnest before heading to the location where Coulson and Co (now fighting off wave after wave of Hydra goons) were redirected to by Giyera. But the main thrust of the episode takes place after the opening rescue mission, and deals with the paranoia experienced by SHIELD when they find out that Ward-thing (now officially referred to as Hive) may be controlling one or more of the Secret Warriors.
"Paradise Lost" is one of the most uneven episodes of Agents of SHIELD in a long time. It's a clear attempt to return the shows focus to the season-wide plot that made the first half of Agents of SHIELD third season feel so fresh, something I've been clamouring for since the mid-season finale - but "Paradise Lost" fails to really balance all three of the plots that it deals with, resulting in an episode that varies wildly from genuinely interesting to... well, a bit boring, frankly.
Now that SHIELD have learned that Ward has somehow returned from Maveth, "Paradise Lost" sees Coulson sending Daisy and Lincoln to find out more information about ancient Inhumans from someone Lincoln used to know, while the rest of SHIELD investigate a facility owned by the company Gideon Malick's version of Hydra took over last week. Meanwhile, Gideon begins to realise that he may have bitten off more than he can chew with Hive, and we get to learn more about Gideon's past in a series of flashbacks.
I've been criticising Agents of SHIELD since it's return from it's mid-season break for one very frustrating reason - for the most part, it has felt as if the season wide plot established by the seasons first half has been dropped in favour of the "monster of the week" type structure that defined the shows first season. But I'm beginning to feel like I may have been just a little short-sighted.
Without noticing it, Agents of SHIELD has been subtly progressing the season wide plot each episode, making fairly significant changes to the position of both SHIELD and Hydra within the show while focusing on smaller stories each week. We certainly aren't in the same place now as we were when the show returned after it's mid-season break, but the way that Agents of SHIELD has chosen to show those changes has made it feel very natural, to the point where it's been difficult to really notice that some fairly important shifts have taken place.
There has been a problem with Agents of SHIELD that has gone unaddressed for a long time now. It's never been a huge problem, just a minor frustration from time to time, but it's been there ever since the start of the second season and has shown up in a variety of ways in various episodes. And it all boils down into one, very simple question.
"Exactly how big is SHIELD now?"
It's not an unfair question. Between the enormous "garage" we see from time to time, the many extras that have appeared over the course of the last few seasons, the large scope of Coulson's SHIELD and the fact that they actually had a freaking Helicarrier in storage at one point, it seems safe to assume that they are fairly large - at which you point you have to ask how they have managed to stay underground given the hundreds of employees they have, the large areas of land they must use and the cost of all that military grade equipment. There is an inconsistency there, one not helped when "Watchdogs" has Coulson call Mack into work on his time off thanks to resource issues caused by the loss of Bobbi and Hunter.
It's rare that something setting up spin-offs actually works. Films like Iron Man 2, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and even Avengers: Age of Ultron to some degree have suffered by trying to set-up other films, bending over backwards to include unnecessary scenes that simply don't matter to the story at hand. It almost always feels cheap, a decision made by studio executives that reduces the quality of the thing you are watching in order to squeeze more money out of the next thing they have planned - so it's refreshing to see Agents of SHIELD do it well, especially when the show itself has been much-maligned by people because of its status as a spin-off in the first place.
After stowing away on Gideon Malick's plane at the end of last weeks "The Inside Man", "Parting Shows" opens up by showing us that Bobbi has been arrested before flashing back to explain how that happened. It's an episode focused almost entirely on setting up the upcoming Most Wanted spin-off show, but the reason that "Parting Shot" works is that it isn't trying to fit this set-up into an episode with something else going on. "Parting Shot" is very much Bobbi and Hunter's episode, putting them in the spotlight and (most importantly) giving them a proper send off, a satisfying ending even if you were to never watch Most Wanted. It sounds simple because it is, but you'd be surprised how often things trying to set other things up fail to do this.
