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Post by mr. excellent on May 25, 2022 21:58:24 GMT -5
So, I'm most excited for Thor: Love and Thunder of all the movies that have been announced that have yet to come out. However, after that it's Quantumania. Now, that could change once we see the first trailer for Wakanda Forever and also depending on what Ryan Coogler reveals about the project. For now though, this is the one. I really enjoyed the first Ant Man, and I thought the second one was one of Marvel's most fun films. Not saying it was the best, but it was so much fun, I enjoyed myself beginning to end. The action was pretty great too. These days it's hard for the MCU to just take us places we haven't been yet. Or, I shouldn't say it's hard, but they've taken us to so many strange new places that now we're starting to revisit them and I get excited for something new to come around. When I go to these movies I'm somewhat chasing after those feelings of seeing Asgard for the first time, or Wakanda, or earth during WW2 in the MCU. It may sound dramatic but for myself and many fans, those are formative movie going experiences. So I'd love to see them take us somewhere we've never been before and haven't been to in modern blockbuster history: the quantum realm. I was a little underwhelmed with the strange new locations shown in Loki season 1, and the same goes with Multiverse of Madness oddly enough. However, if we can go to a place like the Quantum realm and really have some time to inhabit that space and breath in it, this could be a lot of fun. Godzilla vs. Kong wasn't the best thing to come out during 2021, but when they went to the center of the earth in that hollow earth space, I was on cloud 9. So much fun. Here's hoping.
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Post by BackinBlack on Oct 25, 2022 9:10:04 GMT -5
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Post by mr. excellent on Oct 30, 2022 19:47:16 GMT -5
This looks like Phase 3 MCU, which is peak MCU. I really hope it delivers. That huge city in the Quantum realm looks incredible! This is what I wanted from the new universe's in Multiverse of Madness. Something that feels truly like another realm with its own physics and realm specific life forms. This is actually my most anticipated of the Phase 5 films that we know of. I loved Ant Man and the Wasp, it's one of the MCU's most fun films and the action rocks.
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Post by BackinBlack on Jan 10, 2023 8:42:35 GMT -5
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Post by mr. excellent on Jan 10, 2023 20:41:03 GMT -5
Watching this trailer, I myself was pleased with it, but my lingering question was: Is this the type of trailer that would entice the average joe off the street to go watch it? I can't say it is. Some people might be interested in all the zany, wacky, quantum realm environmental stuff. However, I'm not convinced someone's grandma would hear so much chatter about the movie that she'd be interested in going to see it. That wasn't the case with Top Gun Maverick or Avatar, which has everyone up in arms about it. For a movie with almost no pop culture footprint, it sure has a lot of regular joe's stopping by their local cineplexes.
I love the type of deep cut story telling that we've been getting on a grand scale, and I think that was appropriate when it came time to release Infinity War and Endgame. However, now that that saga has concluded, I really do wish that they had taken that Harry Potter approach to the Multiverse Saga. A couple years back Kevin Feige did an interview where he credits the Harry Potter franchise for making movies that the general audience could all go and enjoy, regardless of whether they had read the books or even seen the prior movies for that matter. You could just jump on at any point and enjoy yourself at the movies, and the MCU did a good job of that I feel during phases 1-3. It's almost not even up for debate, they continued to build their audience with new fans even as their film count increased. I'm not sure why they didn't continue with that approach in Phase 4, their building phase. While I think the fact that people complain about not knowing what we're building toward could be used as evidence that the movies are stand alone endeavors, the fact is, the audience doesn't feel that way.
I think the MCU has plenty of potential and opportunity to win back the attention of the general audience, but to do that, their movies need to start feeling like movies again. Not episodes of a tv show that people haven't seen. This trailer looked great to me, a fan, but I have my doubts it's going to pull people back in who tapped out a year or two ago.
Edit: One last thing, I also feel that this grand experiment of story telling across multiple platforms has run its course. It was exciting at first, and with proper execution could really be something special, but considering the level of organization and synergy that has to go into it on all levels, I just don't see it servicing the MCU going forward. I will admit that the possibilities were exciting for a while, but considering that the audience and even the actors are starting to show their own fatigue, I think it's time to buckle down on multi platform story telling and focus more time on quality over quantity. Perhaps James Gunn will be able to do something special with his multi platform DCU universe? That's still an exciting prospect. Time will tell.
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Post by brotherandbassist on Feb 7, 2023 13:37:40 GMT -5
Didn't realize it was that soon! I thought it came out at the very end of February. Ten days baby!!! Woo
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Post by mr. excellent on Feb 17, 2023 20:45:44 GMT -5
I'm going to check this out on Monday on account of having a super busy Saturday and Sunday and also having Monday off. Bums me out that this doesn't seem to hit the same way the first two did but I will see it for myself. Regardless, there were decisions that were made with regard to building the next epic saga for the MCU that just aren't panning out. One of them being the quantity of products. Who made that decision is hard to say, but one thing that's sort of ironic is that their ability to plan so far ahead is sort of biting them in the ass at the moment. It's as if this is a freight train that is on a course to crash but there's nothing that can be done to stop it.
Bob Iger coming back and making major decisions is definitely going to have an impact on the MCU going forward, but how many projects were completed or too far along to course correct on? How many "Thor: Love and Thunders" and "Hawkeye's" have to release before we can get to the movies and projects that are in line with the level of quality we saw in phase 3? I haven't seen Ant Man yet, and I hope I like it, but the pattern is clear. Marvel had to have known they were putting out a product that wasn't going to be as universally well received as the prior two installments, but they had to release it because it was on their schedule and delaying these things costs them a lot of money in interest. How many of these "we have to release it" products do we have going forward?
I don't believe "it's over", but we definitely aren't in the sweet spot anymore. Hope I like this movie, regardless. As always, we'll see.
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Post by BackinBlack on Feb 17, 2023 22:59:51 GMT -5
I saw it tonight. It's not gonna win over everyone, but I really enjoyed it. It's less comedic than the previous two films, but I see it as a reverse-Ragnarok. Where the first two Thor films were serious before getting more comedic with the third, it's the opposite with Ant-Man. It kind of works considering they're setting up the new saga's big bad, and Majors kills it as Kang here. I don't think it deserves to be near the same RT score as Eternals though.
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Post by mr. excellent on Feb 20, 2023 17:27:30 GMT -5
I liked it! Didn't love it, but I actually want to see it again. I still need to write about it in the "Rate the Last Movie..." thread, but when I do, I'll come back here and give my thoughts.
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Post by mr. excellent on Dec 21, 2023 22:44:00 GMT -5
Stupid Rant Inbound:
One thing that has been incredibly annoying this past year is the assertion that the Kang from Quantumania was light work because he was "defeated by ants". While I've seen some defenses of that Kang's potency as a powerhouse, even those defenses seem to imply that the ants were not a force to be reckoned with. I vehemently disagree with that insinuation. People are so proud to tout arguments that completely misrepresent what actually happened, while others merely parrot the stupid arguments that don't hold merit beyond "ants are so tiny!" If we get right down to it, the ants didn't defeat Kang. He lived on to fight Scott Lang, which leads to another sore spot for people: the fact that Kang is just a regular human who lost a fist fight to another regular human. However, if we're going to dismiss Kang for his lack of physical super strength we'd also have to be dismissive of characters like Sam Wilson's Falcon, Cross Bones, the entire Dora Milaje, Nick Fury and all of Shield, etc. Kang isn't dangerous because of his physical abilities. He's dangerous because of his mind and the technology he possesses as a time traveler from the future. He was only able to be outmanuevered because M.O.D.O.K. betrayed him at a crucial moment in battle.
Back to the ants though. The fact is, regular ants in and of themselves can lift objects 10 times their body size. Ants are incredibly tenacious and durable, and their numbers are so exponentially beyond most of Earth's species, the dismissal of them as a powerful force of nature is downright asinine. I'm talking just regular ants. Now, if we're talking Hank Pym's uber evolved, incredibly giant sized ants that he can command at his whims, that's something beyond what most fictional forces are capable of opposing. It's one thing to poke fun to take the piss out of a character, but it's another thing to be a part of a community, create content, be invited into the business by the industry itself, and still neglect one of the most basic tenets of that character. That is this: Ant Man is so fun because you have this pint sized hero that's able to achieve feats that go above and beyond his microscopic frame.
Perhaps we are done with Jonathan Major's version of Kang from Quantumania and maybe even Kang himself, but the fact remains that his Kang wasn't weak for having been defeated by Ant Man, with the aid of some crazy evolved (proportionally) giant ants. Those ants would've kicked most of the MCU's armies asses regardless. Quantumania's Kang was simply outmaneuvered, and given the circumstances, most other MCU villains would have been too.
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