I hear the twist is he figured out how to ruin other movies now!
MCU complete watch-through continues!
Captain America: Civil War
We watched this a few weeks ago, once we had caught up to the right place in Agents of Shield season 3. To be honest there wasnât a lot of crossover, except for Shield to clear up any remaining Hydra remnants before the movie so the Avengers didnât have to worry about them, and then do a bit of Sokovia Accords fallout after.
I saw Civil War in the cinema, but it was fun to catch up with it again. Mostly because in the cinema I REALLY needed a piss at one point, and left for a few minutes. I missed the setup to the Ant Man introduction and a bit more, so was confused as to who he was (having not seen Ant Man at that point), which airport they were smashing up (Leipzig, which was cleared up later in the movie) and why Captain America was kissing the CIA agent (on the second watch I remembered she was the undercover agent who lived across the hall from him).
Itâs a movie you really have to just turn your brain off to enjoy fully, but the action is all top notch, the special effects believable (except for the final shot in Zamunda), and the pacing mostly works.
Main bad guy:
This movie was more about watching the main guys fight (Iâm Team Cap!) so the main bad guy was just some guy who made them do that. I love the fact that he was an agent who used fun spy craft to be a bad guy, and didnât just use the magical âcomputer/hacking expert who can move the plot forward any way they wantâ trick.
Comments from Juliane:
âThatâs Berlin, not Budapest!â
âThatâs not what the Reichstag looks like!â - note: Julianeâs father works in the building Captain America did his helicopter grabbing scene.
Stan Lee cameo:
Delivering a package to Tony Stank.
Overall:
Lots of fun, but not as good as Captain America: The Winter Soldier as a movie. In fact, due to the massive numbers of super people in it, it felt a lot more like an Avengers movie. But way better than Age of Ultron, mainly because it could mostly ignore lots of the characters except during the set up and execution of the central battle. Do we really need to spend a lot of time with Hawkeye? Nope! Just bring him in to shoot some shit with arrows, then move on!
Next up in the MCU order: Doctor Strange, but we watched that recently enough that we donât need to see it in the correct MCU timeline spot during Agents of Shield season 4.
Next up in our viewing order: Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 (spoilers: already watched it).
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Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 2
I saw a bit of the trailer for this, and hoped seeing a big fight with a massive monster on a platform wasnât going to spoil anything. Turns out I shouldnât have worried, because that was just a setup to one of the funniest opening credit sequences Iâve ever seen. Oh my god I was laughing so much by five minutes into this movie, I thought I wasnât going to make it.
It was way better and way funnier than a sequel has any right being, and exceed my expectations. I donât think itâs a better movie than Volume 1, as there are issues with pacing and storytelling, and character motivations that werenât so apparent in the first one, but it was equally funny and entertaining, and thatâs pretty much all I want from Groot and the gang.
My major complaint was the use of music. The Awesome Mix in the first movie was a great gag, and a great storytelling device, and it always felt natural. In Volume 2 itâs something thatâs given too much weight, even to the point of it giving the movie its name. I could get past a few heavy handed uses of music, but it got a bit clunky. At one point a track came on again, and I turned to Juliane and said âThis is going to be the turning point of the movieâ and, sure enough, it was.
And then, at one point, Quill is off on another planet, but the director still wanted to play some cool music. I think it would have been fine to just have some cool music playing, but Rocket had to say a line like âHey, do we have anything from Quillâs mix tape?â and then they play it⌠for no reason? It feels like thereâs a disconnect from the first movie, where this is Quillâs favourite music, and everyone else thinks heâs a dumb dork for liking it and dancing to it, and Volume 2, where everyone thinks itâs cool.
Secondly, I found the tone of the movie switched about a bit. I personally liked it, but it was jarring how much they pushed the âdeath is coolâ thing from the first movie. In that movie there was the whistle arrows killing lots of people instantly, and Groot smashing lots of baddies against walls. But they were diffused by the baddies being non-human (and Groot smiling) and the whistle arrow killing so fast it was funny.
In Volume 2 there is a scene which lots of people die. It count have been accomplished by a space ship blowing up, and pretty much every other movie would have taken this step. But in Volume 2 we see every single death, both the person killing and the person dying, mostly in slow motion. For me it went right up to the line of âHey, this is not coolâ but somehow didnât cross it. While I donât think Iâd show it to a 10 year old kid, I appreciated the confidence of the director to show this on screen.
Main bad guy:
Not a surprise to anyone.
Comments from Juliane:
âI want a Baby Grootâ
âAgain, can Rocket Racoon be in every movie?â
Stan Lee cameo:
As far as I could tell, heâs recounting his stories from all his other appearances in the MCU movies to aliens. Does that mean heâs an inter-dimensional being who is in the MCU, learning the stories of heros and villains, ready to come back to our universe to share the stories with us via comics? I havenât read the speculation, but that interpretation works for me.
Overall:
Funny! And not just funny lines. Actual funny movie making. It made me think of this youtube video, and made me wonder if, after Ant Man, the producers got Edgar Wright to do a pass on the script or storyboard to make sure there was funny visual comedy going on, and not just get Joss Whedon to look at the dialogue to make sure it had enough quippy lines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FOzD4Sfgag
I mean, shit, Groot and the bomb at the end was some of the best material Iâve ever seen in a climactic battle, both in terms of comedy AND raising the tension.
Next up⌠Oh shit weâre all caught on on MCU movies!!!
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Kudos on finally finishing the MCU rewatch! Iâve always really enjoyed these posts when you make them and Iâm looking forward to more of your reviews as future MCU movies come out.
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We have not finished yet. Only the movies.
Last week we wrapped up Agents of Shield season 3, which was mostly enjoyable.
Then we watched the first episode of Iron Fist. It was pretty rough. And looked really cheap. So cheap that we spotted one of the establishing shots of New York from the Apple TV screen saver, just played in reverse.
Once that is done weâll catch up on Agents of Shield season 4, then go back and check out Agent Carter.
THEN we will be finished. But by then there will be new stuff out too.
Iron Fist isâŚBad. I look forward to you tearing it apartâŚif you can sit through it.
Yeah, still not sure how much of Iron Fist weâll watch. We want to try it for a bit, if only to get a handle on the character heading into the Defenders series coming later this year.
There are maybe one or two fights that are worth getting to.
Or just watching. XD
Prometheus was fucking terrible. Sequel Alien: Covenant is not as terrible but still not good. More ostensibly smart people doing stupid things.
Do yourself a favor and just watch Alien instead.
Spoiler
Maybe this is why Alien has a quarantine protocol.
Just watched Logan. The violence doesnât bother me but the lack of character and world development does. Where was the consequence of Logan and Xavier basically getting that black family killed? I was pretty emotionally dreading the consequences of the black father character coming home to find that his act of kindness being repaid with the death of his wife and son. Instead, Logan gets off cheap because he dies without saying a word and Logan doesnât reference that matter again.
This could have fed into the villainâs argument that having no mutants is a good thing, that their existence brings pointless suffering wherever they go. This would fuel Loganâs angst and desire to commit suicide outside of events we didnât get to see in this movie. The biggest problem this world is hardly different from 2017 when its supposed to be 2027. It didnât seem like much had happened outside of self driving trucks and big ag putting anti-mutagens in corn subsidies.
Iâm more in love with the idea of this movie than the actual movie itself. The look of movie and the contrast of a old haggard Wolverine with a young girl with pony sunglasses on a Western road trip makes for an amazing image. But the âdaddyâ and âfamilyâ moments in this movie arenât earned. It was probably a mistake making Laura mute until that far into the movie. Laura and Logan needed more character interaction moments to cement their relationship. And it was probably a mistake to have so many children survive at the end. Eden probably shouldnât have been so perfect with all of the kids arriving there safe and not dying before reaching Canada. If this was meant to be a parallel to the Underground Railroad, we probably needed to see more of how America had changed between 2017 to 2027 to make it be this way.
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Okay, Iâm done with Makoto Shinkai. Iâve watched 4 of his movies and they are all the same sentimental drivel that lacks any kind of substance. Placed Promised in Our Early Days, Voices of a Distance Star, 5 cm per Second, and now Your Name. Your Name is by far the most competent, and Iâll coincede that not a bad movie, but its still so shallow.
Fuck âmono no aware.â Fuck his fake juvenile romance. Fuck his awful, convenient, and cliche use of time travel and amnesia. Makoto Shinkai is the epitome of why Japan has a relationship crisis.
[quote=âfundefined, post:225, topic:73â]
Makoto Shinkai is the epitome of why Japan has a relationship crisis.
[/quote]I donât buy the premise that Japan has a ârelationship crisis.â
As mentioned previously, Prometheus is terrible. The problem with Alien: Covenant is that Ridley Scott is still hitched, sequel-wise to the stupidity of PrometheusâŚ
Spoiler
âŚwhile trying to chain enough sequels to get to the start of Alien. He wants us to care where the ship full of xenomorph eggs came from.
He canât make an interesting story, and he canât have intelligent characters acting intelligently. The best he can do is repeat beats that were better done in Alien and Aliens and call them homage. Heâs painted himself into a corner.
Looking back, I did a post saying âEvery Best Animated Feature for This Yearâs Oscars is good.â I was wrong. The Red Turtle is awful.
That has to be one of the most tedious, boring animated movies Iâve ever watched. Thereâs no point to this story other than to be a wordless meditation. Itâs not really about nature because The Red Turtle herself has a desire to punish the man but then becomes a partner to the man without reasoning. I can understand minimalism to a certain point, but the movie chooses to be so barren that characters canât even be animated to emote. Thereâs not enough of plot to be a reflection on nature and thereâs no message so I couldnât even call it a fable.
This movie is the definition of navelgazing and you can feel that this was made by someone who only made shorts films before hand.
Please, Iâd contend that I have a heart made of little Pharaohs that wonât let the Israelites go.
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The moral is that most of us think âKickboxerâ but remember âBloodsport.â
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Yeah.
I also shouldnât think too closely about what is in Universal Soldier and what is in Time Cop.
Universal Soldier has batshit-insane Dolph Lungren vs Timecopâs Ron Silver as Evil Politician.