I ended my 2021 review saying the rings were broadcasting to somewhere unknown, that it was a very large hook to leave hanging, and that I’d genuinely like to know where it went. Five years. Still nothing. That’s the headline of this rewatch and it’s a slightly deflating one.
The post-credits scene establishes two things very clearly. The rings are far older than the thousand years everybody assumed, and they are actively broadcasting to something. Nobody has explained either, in a film, a series, or a stinger, and it’s become one of the longest-standing unpaid debts in the whole franchise. What makes it stranger is how loudly the scene announces itself as important. Wong, Strange and Banner are all in the room specifically to tell you this matters, which is about as clear a signal as a film can send. My guess now is that Doomsday is where it lands, mostly because Doomsday appears to be where everything unpaid is landing. A hook this good deserved its own story rather than being folded into an ensemble event as one thread among thirty.
The character got left sitting too, which is the part that actually annoys me. I said in 2021 that Simu Liu held his own immediately and that this worked completely as a standalone, and both are still true, but the second one turned out to be a warning rather than a compliment. He’s barely appeared since. One of the strongest debuts the MCU has had, the best fight choreography in the franchise by a distance, an ending that hands him enormous power and an explicit mystery to chase, and then almost nothing for half a decade. If you’d told me in 2021 that Shang-Chi would show up less over the next five years than most of the supporting cast of a Disney+ series I’d have laughed. He turns up in the Doomsday material and is expected to have a real role, which is good, and it’s still a long time to leave somebody on a shelf.
It arrived at exactly the wrong moment
Here’s the context my 2021 self couldn’t have. This film landed between Loki and No Way Home, in the precise window when the franchise pivoted hard into the multiverse. Within a couple of months every conversation about the MCU was about variants and incursions and cameos, and a self-contained film about a family, a hidden village and a thousand-year-old grief simply got swept aside by all of it.
That’s bad luck more than a flaw, and it explains why a film this good has a much smaller footprint than it should. It was the last confident standalone before the franchise stopped making standalones, and it got read as a side story because everything around it was busy being connected to everything else. The reviews were strong at the time and it made real money, and none of that translated into the character mattering afterwards, which tells you something about what the franchise was prioritising that year.
Nothing has displaced Tony Leung either. Best villain in the MCU, and five more years of antagonists have widened the gap rather than closed it. What strikes me now is how little he actually needs to work: no world-ending plan, no speech about inevitability, no army of identical soldiers. A man who has been alive for a thousand years, lost the one thing that made him stop, and is being lied to by something that knows exactly which grief to press on. He’s quiet almost throughout. Set him beside the villains the franchise has run since and it isn’t a competition, because most of them explain themselves at length and he just misses his wife. I still can’t tell you how he originally got the rings and I’ve now watched this several more times looking for it. The film genuinely doesn’t say. Given the post-credits reveal that they’re much older than anybody thought, I’ve come round to thinking that’s deliberate rather than sloppy and the answer is being saved. Whether anybody remembers to give it is another matter entirely.
What I’d revise, and what I wouldn’t
Two things, both small. Xialing first. I said the sister was written a bit weak and became far too powerful relative to where she started, and that the maths didn’t work. I’d soften that slightly now. The maths still doesn’t work, but the idea underneath it, that she taught herself everything while being excluded from the training her brother was given, has considerably more in it than I credited at the time. She ends the film running her father’s organisation, which is a genuinely interesting place to leave somebody, and it’s another thread nobody picked up. That’s three now, if you’re counting: the signal, the sister, and the man himself.
The third act I’d stand by completely. I called it two large CGI creatures colliding above a lake and said the interest dropped as the scale went up, and watching it again that now looks like an early sign of where the whole franchise was heading. The specificity is what made this film special. Two people fighting on a bus is thrilling; a dragon fighting a soul-eater is how every one of these films ends.
And that bus fight is still the high-water mark five years on. Nothing since has come close, in this franchise or most others, and the reason holds up: the camera stays still and lets you watch. Everything Marvel has done since has been bigger and more digital and considerably less legible, and going back to this is a reminder of how much gets lost when a fight becomes a weightless collision instead of two people hitting each other in a confined space. Katy is still awesome, Awkwafina is still the reason the tone works at all, and this remains, alongside Black Panther, one of only two films here that built a whole world instead of borrowing one. Bringing back Trevor Slattery is still the right call too. Ben Kingsley is a delight, the joke lands because it repairs an old one rather than repeating it, and it remains some of the better continuity housekeeping the MCU has done.
I gave it four and a half in 2021 and I’d hold that exactly. It’s still one of the best things in this rewatch, still the most complete single film in the run, and the only thing that’s changed is that the franchise did far less with it than it deserved. Watch it before December for Wenwu and the fights, and for that post-credits scene, which is now effectively a piece of homework Doomsday has to mark. If December pays off the signal, this film retroactively becomes essential viewing. If it doesn’t, it stays a very good story that Marvel introduced and then forgot to finish.
Next in the rewatch: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, where the pivot I mentioned above stops being subtle about itself.