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Namor Was Never Really the Villain

by Hutch Morzaria September 3, 2026

written by Hutch Morzaria

In my 2022 review I called the peace treaty at the end sub-par and asked whether a man whose people have been drowning outsiders for centuries really warrants being left alone. I still don’t think it’s morally coherent. What I missed completely is that it was never meant to be an ending, and four years later it’s the most useful thing in the film.

That’s the big shift on a rewatch. In 2022 Namor is the antagonist of a self-contained film with an unusually good argument behind him. In 2026 he looks like something else entirely: an unaligned power with an intact nation, a functioning military, and no obligations to anybody at all. Nearly every other force on Earth in this franchise is allied, absorbed, or dismantled by now. S.H.I.E.L.D. is long gone, the Avengers are scattered, the various government teams all answer to somebody. Talokan answers to no one, owes the surface world nothing, and specifically has a private understanding with the one other nation sitting on technology at that level. That isn’t a defeated villain, it’s a piece on the board that nobody has moved yet.

Which is the correction I’d make to myself. I read that ending as the film flinching, and in moral terms it absolutely does, because Namor gets away with a great deal so the story can have two grieving nations recognise each other rather than keep fighting. But look at what the treaty actually produces: two hidden, technologically superior countries with an arrangement between them and no obligation to anyone else on the planet. If a film ever needs a force that arrives from outside every existing alliance, it now exists, and it exists because of this ending. So it’s bad ethics and good chess, and I’d still have preferred the film to look harder at the body count. I understand rather better now why it didn’t.

Shuri hasn’t worked out, and it isn’t her fault

I said in 2022 that I wasn’t sure about her as Black Panther, that her real strength has always been her brains, and that the suit forces her into being the brawn instead. Four years on I’d say the same thing with more confidence, and I’d add that the franchise seems to agree with me by omission. We have seen almost nothing of her since. For a character handed the title role of one of the most successful properties in the whole operation, that’s a striking silence, and it isn’t a performance problem.

The suit turned the most inventive person in Wakanda into somebody who solves problems by hitting them, and then nobody found anything for her to hit. I’d still much rather have had her building the answers while somebody else wore the thing, which is what the first film understood about her and this one traded away. Riri’s thread did continue at least, into her own series, which makes her one of the very few things this film planted that actually grew.

Angela Bassett needs no revision whatsoever. She’s superb, the film’s middle belongs to her, and what’s clearer now is how much the rest of it depends on her being that good. Take her out and it’s a much thinner picture, because she’s the one carrying the argument that Wakanda is a country with obligations rather than a superhero base with a throne in it. Her death still lands. The funeral sequence at the start is still the best thing the film does, and I’d still point at it as proof these films can handle grief properly when they decide to bother. Not recasting T’Challa remains the right call and it’s the decision the whole film is built around.

The Fantastic Four question got answered, sort of

In 2022 I wondered aloud whether Marvel would ever introduce the Fantastic Four, and noted that Namor has a long history with Sue Storm in the comics that would give this character somewhere considerably more interesting to go. They have now been introduced. Whether anybody intends to use that particular thread is still an open question, and December is the obvious place for it to surface if it’s ever going to. I’d like it, because it’s one of the few genuinely charged relationships in the source material that the films haven’t touched, and it would give Namor an actual reason to be in a room with people he’d otherwise be entirely content to ignore.

As for what December should do with Talokan: leave them out until it can’t, and then bring them in properly. The temptation with a film this size is to use Namor as a cameo, a mid-battle arrival with one line and a trident, and that would be a waste of the best antagonist this corner of the franchise has. The interesting version is a nation that watches three universes collide and calculates, entirely correctly, that none of this is their fight until the water is threatened. He’s the only major power here whose position is genuinely his own. Make him choose, and make the choice cost him something.

Better or worse than I remembered? About the same, which after this many rewatches I’ve learned to treat as a good sign. Three and a half stands. Still not my favourite, still quite well done, still let down by a third act that becomes a fight on a boat after ninety minutes of carefully building two nations with real arguments. The grief is genuine, Bassett is excellent, Namor is one of the best antagonists in the MCU, and the ending badly wants everybody to be reconcilable. The reviews landed in roughly the same place, for what that’s worth.

What’s changed is what the film is for. In 2022 this was the picture that had to solve an impossible problem and did it with real dignity. In 2026 it’s also the one that quietly set up a wildcard and walked away, and December is where we find out whether anybody remembers they left one lying around.

Next in the rewatch: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which was built to be the foundation of a saga that no longer exists.

September 3, 2026 0 comments

Whatever Happened to Hercules?

by Hutch Morzaria September 2, 2026

written by Hutch Morzaria

I closed my 2022 review by saying the Hercules stinger arrived with a great deal of ceremony and that I wasn’t holding my breath. Four years later I can confirm the breath was correctly not held. Hercules has never been seen again. Neither has Love. Jane is in Valhalla and hasn’t been mentioned since. This film set up three separate things and delivered on precisely none of them, which is a remarkable strike rate even by the standards of a franchise I’ve spent this whole rewatch project complaining about on exactly this point.

That’s the honest summary. The pitch was Thor building something to care about after losing everything, and he gets Jane back, loses her again, and inherits a daughter. Then the franchise simply moved on and left all of it where it fell. Love is, as far as anybody can tell, still out there being raised by a god nobody has checked in on in four years. I said at the time that I didn’t get the daughter thing and wasn’t sure she’d ever appear again, and that was a guess. It’s now just a fact, and it makes the ending considerably worse rather than better, because an emotional resolution you never return to isn’t a resolution at all. It’s a scene. And knowing that none of those kids Thor hands power to ever appear again makes that sequence even harder to defend than it was. I called it lame at the time, the superhero equivalent of everybody becoming Shazam or the Buffy finale where every potential Slayer everywhere gets switched on at once. It solved one fight in one film and cost the concept of godhood something permanent. If anybody can be handed this, it isn’t worth very much.

Ragnarok looks better because of this film

The comparison I drew in 2022 was that Ragnarok put its jokes on top of real loss and this one had nothing underneath them. Four years on I’d sharpen that into something slightly different and slightly more forgiving of the earlier film. This one didn’t expose a weakness that was already sitting there in Ragnarok. It created one by copying the surface and leaving the foundation behind.

Ragnarok’s comedy is precise, and it works because the man being funny has just lost his hammer, his eye, his father and his entire planet inside two hours. Every joke is sitting on something. Take that away and keep the jokes, and what you get is a very powerful man who is mostly a punchline, which is what happened here and what has largely happened to the character since. So Ragnarok is a better film than it was, in the specific sense that watching this one demonstrates how hard the thing it pulled off actually was. That’s not a defence of this film so much as an accidental compliment to the last one.

Bale is still stuck in the wrong movie

Christian Bale’s performance hasn’t aged a day, mind you. The desert opening, the dead daughter, the god who couldn’t care less, all of it is still the strongest material in any Thor film and it’s still sitting inside a movie that keeps cutting away to screaming goats. My logic complaint stands too: any of those gods could simply have left rather than stood still to be killed, and nothing in four years has made that read better. What I’d add now is that Gorr’s argument, that the gods are indifferent and deserve nothing from anyone, was the most interesting idea the franchise had that year, and it was raised and settled inside a single film. Nobody picked it up. The MCU has an entire pantheon problem sitting right there and has never gone back to it, which is becoming the theme of this whole rewatch.

The Zeus material I called pretty bad and a misuse of a very good actor, particularly measured against the gravitas Odin brought to the earlier films, and that’s held completely. It’s also become part of a bigger pattern I can see much more clearly now: introduce something enormous, mine it for one comic set piece, abandon it. Zeus and the assembled gods should have been a threat, an institution, a future direction. Instead it was a gag with a lightning bolt in it. The reception at the time was rough and I don’t think it was unfair.

Has my opinion softened or hardened? Hardened, mildly, and not on the film’s quality. I gave it two and a half in 2022 and I’d still give it two and a half. It has good action sequences, some real surprises, that excellent gag about the jealous weapons bickering over Thor’s attention, and a great performance stuck in the wrong movie. That’s exactly what I said then and exactly what I found again. What’s changed is that I reviewed it as a setup and it turned out to be a dead end. In 2022 you could reasonably assume the daughter, the stinger and Jane’s death would all lead somewhere. None of them did, and a mediocre film that plants seeds is a lot more forgivable than a mediocre film that just stops.

Thor should still be in December, and he should be there as the Ragnarok version: funny, formidable, and carrying real damage. The version from this film, weightless and mostly ridiculous, would be a waste of a seat in an ensemble that size. There’s unfinished business the film could use too, if anyone remembers it. A god who was handed a child and then vanished from the story is an interesting person to bring back.

Honestly though, if you’re prioritising your rewatching before December, this is the most skippable film in the project so far, and that’s the verdict in itself. Nothing in it is required. Watch the first fifteen minutes for Bale, watch the weapons bicker, and take or leave the rest. Four years of the franchise not referring to any of it suggests the franchise agrees with me.

Next in the rewatch: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which had to solve a problem no film should ever have to solve.

September 2, 2026 0 comments

poster doctor strange multiverse of madness

Marvel Movies

The Room With Everyone In It

by Hutch Morzaria September 1, 2026

written by Hutch Morzaria

Near the end of my 2022 review I noted that this film says “incursion” quickly and then moves straight past it, and that I suspected the word would come back. It came back as the spine of the entire saga. Two universes colliding and both being destroyed is now the engine everything runs on, and this is the film that said it out loud first, in what amounts to a throwaway line, four years before the film that pays it off.

At the time this played as a loud, messy, horror-tinged sequel with one great cameo scene. Watching it now it’s doing more work than anything around it. It establishes that universes can be killed by contact. It establishes that there’s a body of people who police this and that they can be wiped out in an afternoon. It establishes that the mechanism for crossing over is a person rather than a machine, which matters more than it sounds. Almost every rule December is about to operate under got set here, in a film I ranked below its predecessor. It’s the more consequential one and the less enjoyable one, and those have never been the same measurement.

The Illuminati scene means something completely different now

Here’s the strange part. In 2022 that room was a tease, a glimpse of actors we were never really going to get, in a universe that gets destroyed twenty minutes later, offered as fan service with a body count attached. Then the Fox actors actually came back for real. Patrick Stewart is in Avengers: Doomsday. So is Ian McKellen. What played as “look what we could have done” turned out to be a trial run for something that is now genuinely happening, and that reframes the whole sequence.

I said John Krasinski as Reed Richards was really cool casting and that I’d like to see him get to do it properly. He didn’t get to. The role went elsewhere and the version I liked exists only as a corpse in a film about a woman tearing through a wall, which is a genuine shame and the one piece of this film I’d most want back. As for whether Xavier dying here cheapens his return in December, I don’t think it does, and the reason is the same one I landed on about Logan coming back: it wasn’t him. That Xavier belonged to a universe the film explicitly destroys minutes later, so nothing happening in December is undoing anything that happened here. What it does do is slightly cheapen this film in retrospect. The Illuminati sequence was doing something bold in 2022 by killing recognisable faces to show how dangerous Wanda had become. Now that those faces are turning up elsewhere, the stakes of that scene deflate a little, because it was shocking largely because it looked final.

My complaints, meanwhile, have not softened at all, and two of them have got worse. Reed explaining Black Bolt’s weakness out loud, in front of the enemy, before anybody has used it, is still the single most irritating thing in the film. I called it pathetic for the smartest man in any universe and I’ll stand on that. Four more years of turning it over hasn’t produced a reading where it isn’t simply the script clearing the room so Wanda can look unstoppable. And Black Bolt’s death is still lame, still an instant counter to a character built entirely around one power, still over before it registers. The film’s reputation has settled roughly where I left it, which is to say people remember the room and not much else.

Love conquers all, four years later

The ending I complained about has only looked worse as time has gone on. I said Marvel keeps stopping its most powerful characters by having them choose to stop, that it happened here and had happened repeatedly, and that across infinite universes there is obviously one where Wanda’s children would want her and she’d get the ending she’s after. Nobody has answered that, because there isn’t an answer. The film supplies its own counter-argument in its own premise and then walks past it.

I still think letting her win would have been the better film by some distance. Marvel has done it before, at the end of the film where Thanos got everything he wanted, and it produced the best cliffhanger the franchise has ever had. Do it again here: Wanda takes what she wants, Strange fails outright, and the next film is about him working out how to use the Darkhold and undo it. That’s a proper story, it uses the thing the film spends its whole runtime establishing as dangerous, and it doesn’t require a character to suddenly develop a conscience at the exact moment the runtime needs one. What we got instead is a story that ends by deciding it didn’t happen.

And Mordo, four years later, is still nothing. I opened the 2022 review complaining that Strange’s mentor was set up as his eventual enemy in 2016 and then quietly dropped, and that a variant of him doesn’t count. That remains true. It’s now a decade since that setup and the character has never been paid off in the universe that established him. I’m repeating it here because it’s part of a pattern I flagged then and which has only got clearer, which brings me to the complaint I’d most like to formally close out. In 2022 I said these films keep ending on a promise nobody intends to keep and pointed at the Eternals stinger with the man and the sword. Four years on, still nothing. This film’s own stinger introduces a new companion for Strange and I said I had very little confidence it’d be picked up, and it wasn’t in any meaningful way. And I can now add the one I couldn’t mention at the time because it hadn’t happened yet: Thor: Love and Thunder ended by introducing Hercules with enormous ceremony, and that has gone precisely nowhere either. Three loud promises, three dead ends, all inside about eight months. Doing this and abandoning it teaches an audience not to care, which is an expensive lesson to teach.

Sam Raimi’s horror instincts remain the most distinctive thing about it, and they’re worth more now than they were. The possession material, the reanimated corpse, the genuine nastiness of a few sequences. In a run of films that mostly look identical, this one looks like somebody actually made it, and I’d take a flawed film with a director’s fingerprints over a competent one without them every time.

Three and a half stands. Good elements, good fight sequences, one unforgettable room, one deeply annoying five minutes inside that room, and an ending that takes the easy way out. But if you’re only rewatching one film to understand the rules Doomsday operates under, this is a much stronger choice than it looks, and I’d never have said that in 2022.

Next in the rewatch: Thor: Love and Thunder, which is where the Hercules scene I just complained about actually comes from.

September 1, 2026 0 comments

Marvel Movies

About That Signal

by Hutch Morzaria August 30, 2026

written by Hutch Morzaria

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.

August 30, 2026 0 comments

Marvel Movies

The Reset Nobody Stuck Around For

by Hutch Morzaria August 19, 2026

written by Hutch Morzaria

In my 2014 review I said I had mixed feelings about a film reaching back to undo previous films, and that I’d probably be arguing with myself about it for a while. Twelve years on the argument resolved itself in a way I genuinely didn’t expect. The reset happened, and then almost nobody used it.

That’s the thing that jumps out now. Days of Future Past ends with the timeline repaired: mansion standing, Jean and Scott alive, Xavier back at his desk, The Last Stand quietly erased. Then Logan arrives in 2017 and that world is simply gone. No mansion, no school, the mutants dead or scattered, and a future every bit as bleak as the one this film spent two hours preventing. It doesn’t argue with the reset or explain its way around it. It just declines to be in that continuity at all, and it’s the best film the franchise ever made, so nobody complained. I wrote about Logan at the time as its own thing and barely mentioned this film, which was the right instinct even though I couldn’t have told you why. Logan works precisely because it isn’t carrying anybody else’s continuity on its back. Apocalypse turned up in between and managed to make the timeline messier rather than clearer, which was becoming the house style by then.

Which accidentally turned it into something more useful

Here’s the consequence nobody planned, and it’s why this film matters more to December than it did to 2014. If Days of Future Past had held, the Fox X-Men would now be one continuous timeline with a patch in the middle. Because it didn’t hold, because Logan went one way and Apocalypse went another and none of it reconciles with anything, the whole Fox run ended up being what it always secretly was, which is a set of branches rather than a line.

Deadpool & Wolverine eventually made that official, treating the Fox films as one more universe among many rather than a history that needed tidying up. In fairness that’s the only honest reading of a continuity which never once added up, and the first Deadpool was already breaking the frame years before anyone formalised it. So the repair job was real, the franchise stopped caring about it almost immediately, and the failure of the repair turned out to be more productive than its success would have been.

The popular theory now is that this film explains how Stewart and McKellen walk back on screen in December, since it already established that this franchise can move a mind through time and rewrite what happened. I don’t buy it, and the rewatch made me less convinced rather than more. What this film does is time travel inside one timeline: one history, edited. That’s a completely different operation to pulling actors out of a defunct continuity and dropping them into a live one, which is a multiverse move, and this film has no concept of parallel universes anywhere in it. Using it as the explanation means retrofitting a mechanism it doesn’t contain. My honest guess is that Marvel isn’t going to explain it and doesn’t need to, because the groundwork for characters crossing between universes got laid thoroughly elsewhere and December can simply use it.

The two-cast trick is the actual legacy

This film’s real contribution is smaller and much more interesting than the time travel, and it’s the part I underrated in 2014 when I called it something I’d been sceptical about and ended up enjoying most. It proved audiences will accept two casts playing the same characters in the same film without the story collapsing.

Doomsday is attempting exactly that at a far larger scale: multiple casts, multiple franchises, decades of separate continuity, all in one film. The reason that sounds feasible rather than absurd is that Days of Future Past did the small version first and it worked. McAvoy and Stewart in one film. Fassbender and McKellen in one film. Nobody was confused, nobody walked out, and the reviews at the time treated it as the franchise’s recovery rather than as a gimmick. Get that wrong and you have a mess on your hands. This is the proof it can be done, and it’s held up far better as a proof than as a plot.

McAvoy’s Charles is still the best performance in the run and I’d say it harder now than I did then. The broken 1973 version, walking because he’s medicated the telepathy away, choosing to move at the cost of being able to hear anybody, is the most interesting thing anyone has done with this character on screen. It’s a genuinely good idea about what that power would cost a person, and McAvoy plays the recovery as work rather than as a switch being flicked. Across everything I’ve rewatched for this project, that first act is the sequence I’d most want to show someone who thinks these films are just people in costumes hitting each other.

And the Pentagon kitchen is still the best scene in the film. Twelve years and a lot of imitators later, nothing has bettered it. What makes it last is that it isn’t a power demonstration, it’s a joke with a character inside it, built by somebody who sat down and thought properly about what that room would look like from his side of it. The franchise had a hundred chances to do that kind of thinking about other powers and mostly couldn’t be bothered. Fifteen minutes of screen time, walks off with the entire film, still true.

I gave it 3.5 or 4 in 2014 and I’d leave it exactly there, which is worth saying because plenty of things in this rewatch have moved. It’s not the best Fox X-Men film. It might well be the most useful one. It adapted the biggest story in the comics without embarrassing itself, put both generations of the cast on screen and made that feel natural rather than like a stunt, and demonstrated something about audience tolerance that the entire current strategy is now leaning on. The Sentinels remain the franchise’s best villain, and there’s something quietly funny about the most frightening antagonist in twenty-six years of X-Men films being a robot that wins by copying you.

Watch this one for the two-cast material rather than the time travel. When Doomsday puts Stewart’s Xavier in a room with people from a completely different studio’s continuity, this is the film that established the audience would go along with it. The rest, the careful repair of a broken timeline, turned out to be a road nobody took. Next in the rewatch is Logan, which is where that becomes very clear indeed, and which I already think is the best thing this franchise ever produced.

August 19, 2026 0 comments

Marvel Movies

Twenty-Six Years of Xavier and Magneto

by Hutch Morzaria August 18, 2026

written by Hutch Morzaria

In December, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen walk back onto a screen as Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, twenty-six years after they first did it. That’s the whole reason I’m doing this. I’ve decided to rewatch my way to Avengers: Doomsday: running from now until December, working through everything the film looks like it’s pulling from. And I’m starting here rather than with an MCU film, because the X-Men were always my team and it would feel dishonest to pretend otherwise.

I should be upfront about the lens before I start using it. I don’t watch these as a comic book movie fan. I watch them as an X-Men fan, which is a worse way to watch a film and a much more interesting way to write about one. It means I’ve never once seen any of these without the version in my head running alongside. The Dark Phoenix Saga. Days of Future Past. The Mutant Massacre. Some of the Savage Land material. Those stories are extraordinarily well built and every film in this run is competing with them whether it wants to or not, so my love for these comes with an asterisk. I spend a lot of the runtime thinking about what could have been, or how the storyline should have gone. That’s not really the films’ fault. It is unavoidably how I watch them.

Taken as films rather than as adaptations, they were quite fun the first time through. I’ve seen them on and off over the years and they hold up as entertainment. If you’ve somehow never watched them, they’re genuinely worth a watch, and that’s the verdict. Everything below is me picking at it, because picking at it is the enjoyable part.

The first one built the whole genre and gets no credit for it

X-Men in 2000 is a small film. Rogue puts her boyfriend in a coma, runs, falls in with an amnesiac cage fighter, and ends up at a school for people like her. Magneto tries to forcibly mutate the world’s leaders on Liberty Island without realising the process kills them. That’s it. Two hours, modest scale, leather costumes everybody made fun of at the time and which look considerably better now than the alternative would have.

What it actually did was establish that you could take this material seriously on screen at all, and every superhero film made since is standing on it while a fraction of the credit goes anywhere near it. It also set the franchise’s argument in the first act and never wavered from it: assimilate or resist. That’s a real question, and it’s why these films have more on their mind than most of what surrounds them. And the reason it works is the two men at the centre. You cannot beat Stewart and McKellen. Not for gravitas, not for sheer ability, not for the sense that both of them have thought their positions through and arrived somewhere they can defend. Magneto isn’t wrong. He’s a Holocaust survivor who has already watched one society decide a category of people shouldn’t exist, and when he says it will happen again he’s speaking from evidence. Xavier’s optimism is much the harder position to hold, and Stewart plays it as a discipline rather than a temperament. Put those two performances in a room and the film improves regardless of what the plot is doing, which turned out to be extremely useful over the following decade.

X2 is where the run is at its most confident. Stryker raids the mansion, takes Xavier, tries to use Cerebro to kill every mutant alive, and the X-Men and the Brotherhood have to work together. The alliance is the good idea, because it puts Xavier and Magneto on the same problem from opposite ends, which is the most interesting configuration these two have, and the film knows it. The Nightcrawler material is the best writing in the whole run about what it actually feels like to be one of these people. And then it hands the next film the biggest storyline in X-Men history.

The compression is the real fault line

Here’s my main complaint about how these were built, and it applies across the run rather than to any one film. Several of these should have been multi-parters. Not because longer is automatically better, but because the stories they were adapting are genuinely too big for a single runtime, and every time these films compressed one they lost the thing that made it work on the page in the first place.

The Phoenix is the clearest case. That’s a story with a slow corruption at the centre of it, where the horror comes from watching somebody you know get gradually replaced by something else. Give it half a film alongside a completely separate premise about a cure for mutation, and you get neither. Two good stories, one runtime, both damaged. The franchise repeated this mistake later and it cost them the same thing every time. If you want to see what these arcs look like with room to breathe, the source material is right there and it’s the reason I keep being slightly disappointed by films I otherwise enjoy.

Which brings me to my two long-standing complaints, neither of which a rewatch softened. Jean Grey is supposed to be operating at a completely different level to everyone around her and what’s on screen never sold me on that. I’m genuinely unsure whether it’s the casting or the writing and I’ve gone back and forth for years. My honest read is she was never given the right story, and possibly never the right actress for the story they were trying to tell, and either way I never believed the ceiling was as high as the character requires. Cyclops is a different problem. He’s a bit of a mistake on screen, though in fairness he’s also a bit of a mistake in the books, so the films were working with awkward material rather than inventing it. Scott is the field leader of the team and the least interesting person in every room he’s in, and putting him next to Wolverine makes that worse rather than better.

Logan doesn’t drift, and the recast worked

The thing that struck me most this time through is that across four films, two casts and eleven years of production, everyone changes except Logan. And it makes complete sense. He regenerates. He doesn’t age, doesn’t accumulate damage, doesn’t get the arc where a character grows into the next phase of their life. Hugh Jackman plays essentially the same man in 2000 and in 2011, and rather than reading as stagnation it lands as the point: everyone around him is on a clock and he isn’t. That’s the loneliest thing about the character and the films manage it without ever stopping to make a speech about it. His best comic material is a different animal to what the films use, but Jackman found something durable in there and held onto it for seventeen years.

I was not sold on First Class going in. Recasting Xavier and Magneto seemed like the kind of decision you make when you’ve stopped caring about the thing you’re making. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender did quite well. Better than that, honestly. Fassbender gets the strongest version of Erik anybody has written for the screen, a man hunting the Nazi scientist who murdered his mother, entirely justified, becoming something terrible anyway. The friendship breaking in real time on that beach, Charles taking a bullet to the spine, Erik picking up the helmet, is as good as this franchise gets: two positions hardening into permanence while both men are still young enough to have chosen differently. The Cuban Missile Crisis framing is the part that wears, because building real history around your mutants works better in theory than in practice and the film keeps stopping to walk you through the geopolitics. The performances carry it past that easily.

So which pair do I want walking into December? Stewart and McKellen, and when I say you can’t beat those two that’s exactly what I mean by it. No disrespect to the younger pair, who earned their place and then some. But the argument I’ve been watching since 2000 is the one I want resolved, and it belongs to the actors who started it. If Doomsday is putting these characters in a room with the Avengers, let it be them.

That’s the foundation: fun films, real ideas, a couple of performances nobody has improved on, and a habit of squeezing great stories into far too little space. Next in the rewatch is Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which is where the MCU stopped being a run of origin films and became something with an argument of its own.

August 18, 2026 0 comments

Movies

Nine Years On, Logan Hasn’t Softened

by Hutch Morzaria August 15, 2026

written by Hutch Morzaria

I ended my 2017 review by saying Logan might be the best film in the entire X-Men universe, and that time would tell after repeated viewings. Well, time told. It’s a five out of five, and it’s one of the best comic book films anybody has made, and I’ve stopped hedging about it. That’s the rare case where going back to something confirms the high estimate instead of quietly sanding it down, which almost never happens with films I loved on the first pass. Usually you rewatch the thing you raved about and find the seams. This one has fewer seams than I remembered, not more, and the bits I thought were merely good in 2017 turn out to be the bits holding the whole thing up.

What’s strange about coming back to it now is that both of its goodbyes have since been cancelled. I wrote at the time that it was bittersweet watching Hugh Jackman pop the claws one last time, and that this was Patrick Stewart’s last ride on the X-Men train as well. Two farewells, both treated as final, both written about as final by everyone including me. Neither of them held. Jackman came back for Deadpool & Wolverine, and Stewart’s Xavier is walking into Avengers: Doomsday in December. The most definitive ending this genre ever produced turned out to be a pause, and I expected to be far angrier about that than I actually am.

Why the returns don’t bother me as much as they should

The reason, I think, is that Deadpool & Wolverine was genuinely careful with it. It didn’t resurrect this Logan. It went and found a different one, from somewhere else entirely, and built its whole premise on the fact that the Logan who died in Texas is still dead and his absence broke his world. That film treats this ending as something that mattered rather than something inconvenient to work around, and whatever else you think of it, and I’ve always had time for what that character does to the genre, it didn’t reach into this film and take anything out. The grave still counts. Laura still turned the cross sideways. Nothing that happens later is watching over this film’s shoulder, which is more restraint than I would have predicted from a franchise that has spent five years undoing its own endings.

Stewart’s return in December is the one I’m less settled about, and I’ll come back to that, because it’s the only thing in this whole rewatch project I’d genuinely rather not get wrong.

The Reavers were always going to get me

Small confession that explains a chunk of my enthusiasm. The Reavers are personal. They’re one of my favourites from the comics, from the run where they fought the X-Men out in the Australian desert, and I’m fairly sure I still have those issues in a box somewhere. So seeing them turn up on screen at all was going to land for me regardless of what the film did with them.

In 2017 I said this was where I’d have liked the film to stick closer to the source, that Pierce and his people were sadistic and effective but that I wanted more of what the comics did with them, and that the film simply wasn’t interested in building a big imposing enemy. I stand by the observation and I’ve stopped counting it against the film, because the more I watch it the clearer it is that the villain was never the Reavers. The villain is the adamantium. It’s the thing killing him, it’s what Transigen made more of, and X-24 is that idea given a face and set loose. A bigger, better-explored antagonist would have pulled focus away from a film that knew exactly where its focus belonged, and I say that as someone who wanted more Reavers. The film was right not to give them to me.

My other 2017 note was that the story dots the i’s and crosses the t’s without ever surprising you, and that’s still true. Get the girl north, get chased, lose people, reach the border. It’s a hundred westerns and the film is completely open about being one, right down to quoting Shane at you. What it does instead of plot is character, and it does that better than anything else in this genre, which is why the “unremarkable” complaint has aged into something closer to a compliment. The plot is a road for the performances to walk down. Complicate it and you lose the quiet motel scenes, and the quiet motel scenes are the entire film.

Stewart and Keen are doing the heavy lifting

Heartfelt and poignant is what I called Patrick Stewart’s work in 2017, and reading that back it seems far too polite. Charles in this film is the most powerful mind on the planet losing custody of it, in a body that can’t get to the bathroom on its own, apologising for something terrible he can’t quite remember doing. The seizures aren’t a superpower set piece, they’re a symptom, and the film has the nerve to make the most frightening thing in it a very old man having a medical episode. That scene in the motel where he thanks Logan for a night that was almost nice is the best thing Stewart has done across twenty-six years of playing this character, and it’s also close to unbearable. I don’t put it on casually.

Dafne Keen was the standout in 2017 and nothing since has displaced her. She’s silent for most of the film, fights exactly like him, and has to build an entire person out of physicality and a handful of lines right at the end. I said at the time she may have had the hardest job in the movie, and having watched it several more times I’d cut that hedge as well. She did have the hardest job. Calling her his daughter isn’t quite right and it’s close enough. However you want to classify what Transigen made, the film knows precisely what it is, which is a man who has spent seventeen years refusing to be responsible for anyone being handed someone who is unavoidably his. The critical consensus has only hardened in its favour in the years since, and for once I think the consensus and I are looking at the same thing.

One genuine nag I’ll put out there rather than pretend I’ve solved: why is the adamantium poisoning him now? He’s had it for decades across this whole franchise and been perfectly fine. The film’s implication is that the healing factor was always holding it at bay and the healing factor is failing, which works if you don’t push on it, but it does raise the question of what started first. If the metal is degrading the healing, and the healing is the only thing surviving the metal, something has to have kicked that off. I should read up on it properly instead of hand-waving every time. If there’s a clean answer in the comics this film borrows from I’d like to know it. It doesn’t dent the film at all, it’s just the one bit of machinery I’ve never been able to make click.

What December could take away from it

Nothing has displaced this as the best of them, and Apocalypse the year before is the useful contrast — everything this film refuses to be, enormous and weightless, an ancient god and a collapsing city and no reason to care about any of it. Then this arrives twelve months later with a limo, a water tank and three people, and buries it. The acting, the underlying story, the way every death in it is earned rather than shocking, all of it is really, really well done. When someone tells me a comic book film can’t be serious drama, this is what I point at, and it’s the one I singled out looking back at that year.

Which brings me to the worry. Charles Xavier dies in this film, badly, in a motel in Oklahoma, and it means something. Stewart is now back. If Doomsday treats that as a door that was never really shut, if the multiverse becomes the excuse by which no ending sticks, then something does get taken from this film after all. Deadpool & Wolverine showed it can be done respectfully by going and finding a different version rather than undoing this one, and I’d like December to follow the same rule. Let this grave stay dug. I don’t really believe a film this good can be damaged by what other films do around it, but I’ve been wrong before, and this is the one I’d least like to be wrong about.

Next in the rewatch is Thor: Ragnarok, which is about as far from this film’s mood as the MCU has ever travelled.

August 15, 2026 0 comments

Movies

Asgard Is a People, and Then It Isn’t

by Hutch Morzaria August 10, 2026

written by Hutch Morzaria

I finished my 2017 review wondering what would happen when Thor met whatever was on that very large ship pulling alongside the Asgardian refugees. What happened is that roughly half of them were murdered in the first four minutes of the next film, Loki among them, and the triumphant ending I’d just spent a paragraph enjoying turned out to have a shelf life of about six months. That’s the single biggest difference watching it now. This is a film about a man losing absolutely everything and finding it funny, and it ends on the one note of pure hope in the whole trilogy, and you simply cannot watch that ending in 2026 the way I watched it in 2017.

“Asgard is not a place. It’s a people.” I called it a good line, earned, and it is. It’s also a promise the franchise breaks almost immediately. The people are the thing that survives, says the film, and then Infinity War opens on that same ship with most of those people dead on the floor and Thor spending the rest of the film building a weapon out of grief. I don’t think that’s bad storytelling — it’s brutal, it’s clearly deliberate, and the contrast does exactly what it was built to do. But something is genuinely lost. The last five minutes of this film used to play as relief and now they play as a setup for a punch you already know is coming, and I can’t get the 2017 version back.

Did the funny version save him or break him?

This is the real argument about Ragnarok, and my answer is that it saved him and then everybody misread why it worked. The comedy here is precise. Thor is funny because he’s a confident, slightly thick, enormously powerful man who keeps being humiliated by circumstances he doesn’t understand, and the film never once suggests he isn’t formidable. He loses the hammer, the eye, the father and the entire planet across two hours. Every joke is sitting on top of a real loss, and Taika Waititi holds that balance the whole way through without ever letting one cancel the other.

What came afterwards kept the jokes and quietly dropped the loss. By the time of Love and Thunder the funny had become the entire personality rather than a coat of paint over a badly damaged man, and Thor got noticeably lighter in a way that made him harder to take seriously in a room with anybody else. So the diagnosis I’d offer now is that this film didn’t break him. It demonstrated something delicate and the franchise treated it as a formula. I said in 2017 that lining him up with the Avengers version was the right call, and it was. The mistake happened downstream, and it’s a shame the thing that gets blamed is usually this film rather than the ones that copied it badly.

Endgame is where it first went wrong. It puts Thor in a genuine depression, which is exactly the right destination for someone who has lost his brother, his father, his home and half his people inside about a year, and then it shoots most of that for laughs. The joke is the body, largely, and the film keeps going back to it. Watching Ragnarok again makes that worse rather than better, because this film is proof the balance was achievable. It puts a devastated man on screen, gets enormous laughs, and never once invites you to laugh at the devastation itself. The tools were right there and nobody picked them up.

The best idea in it got left on the table

In 2017 I said the best thing about Hela isn’t Hela, it’s what she reveals: that Asgard’s golden age was built on conquest Odin painted over, that she was the vanguard of all of it, and that the truth was sitting a few inches above his sons’ heads under a coat of gold paint. I said the film raises it, lets it land, then gets on with the gladiator plot, and that I’d rather it raised it than not. Nine years on, nobody has picked that up either. Not once.

That’s a genuine disappointment, and probably my biggest one about this film’s legacy. An empire that rewrote its own founding, whose surviving heirs have no idea what they inherited, is a strong idea sitting in a franchise that has had plenty of room to use it. Asgard gets rebuilt as a fishing village and a tourism gag instead. Cate Blanchett is obviously having the time of her life and the film hands her the strongest idea in the trilogy to carry, and it ends up a loose end. Go and read what the film actually establishes about Odin’s conquests and then try to name a single thing built on it since.

Goldblum needs no revision at all. The Grandmaster is still the most purely enjoyable thing in the film and I’d still lead with him if somebody asked what to expect. Nine years of Marvel comedy since, most of it broader and much less confident, has made that performance look better rather than worse. He isn’t doing bits. He’s playing a specific man who has never once been contradicted by anybody and has therefore stopped bothering to finish his own sentences. The film is still rated absurdly well and most of that goodwill is him and the fights.

What December gets, and which Thor turns up

I wrote in 2017 that Hemsworth and Hiddleston had finally stopped playing two actors performing brotherhood and started playing brothers, and that’s held up as the most durable thing in the whole film. It also became the most costly. Loki dies in the next film’s opening scene and it lands as hard as it does entirely because of the work done here. This is the film where their relationship finally warmed into something real, and it gets used as ammunition about twenty minutes of screen time later. Loki got a strange second life afterwards through a version of himself who never had any of these scenes, which is the multiverse for you. The brother in this film stayed dead.

Thor deserves his seat in December, mostly on seniority. He’s one of the last originals standing and Hemsworth has been doing this since 2011, which counts for a lot in a film built on history. My worry is which Thor actually turns up. The one from this film, funny and formidable and quietly wrecked, belongs in that ensemble and would be one of its best assets. The one from his last few appearances is a comic-relief slot holding a hammer. Doomsday will have an enormous cast and very little room for anyone, and the temptation to use him as the joke will be strong, because the joke is quick and character takes minutes nobody wants to spend.

Better as a film than I remembered, sadder as an experience. I gave it a four, possibly four and a half, and I’d keep that exactly. It’s still one of my better Marvel films and still one I’d put on happily. What’s changed is that it now sits in the middle of a story rather than at the end of one, and everything it resolves gets taken away almost immediately afterwards. That’s not a flaw. It might be the most useful thing about watching it right now, going into a film that’s going to ask an awful lot of characters to have survived things.

Next in the rewatch: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the question of what a shield is actually worth.

August 10, 2026 0 comments

poster captain america the winter soldier

Movies

The One Where They Burned S.H.I.E.L.D. Down

by Hutch Morzaria August 5, 2026

written by Hutch Morzaria

I finished my 2014 review saying I didn’t know whether burning S.H.I.E.L.D. down was the right call, that something would grow in the space it left, and that I’d quite like to find out what. Twelve years later I have the answer, and it’s the reason this film has aged into something more important than it was at the time. What grew in the hole is, more or less, everything. The whole institutional shape of the MCU is downstream of a decision Steve makes in the third act of a film most people remember for the lift fight.

Once S.H.I.E.L.D. is gone there’s no organisation watching the horizon, no oversight worth the name, and nobody with the standing to say no to anything. So what fills the vacuum is exactly what you’d expect: governments improvising, private operators, and eventually a woman named Valentina running black projects with no meaningful supervision because the body that would have caught her doesn’t exist any more. Every “why did nobody stop this” problem the franchise has had since 2014 traces back to that scene. I asked at the time whether it was the right call, and my honest answer now is that it was the right call and it was also catastrophic, and the film is smart enough to have known both things simultaneously. It doesn’t present the file dump as a triumph. It presents it as the only available option, which is different.

The television thing never did get fixed

This is the one that still annoys me, and time has made it worse rather than better. In 2014 I praised the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. tie-in and said what I really wanted was for the traffic to run both ways. The show reacting to the films was impressive, but the films never noticing the show existed was the wrong shape for something calling itself a shared universe. I said do that properly and it becomes genuinely new.

They never did it properly. The series ran for years, did some of its best work in the space this film opened up, and the films carried on behaving as though none of it had happened. The show absorbed consequences and generated none of its own. Whatever the corporate reasons were, and I’m sure they were real, the effect is that a genuinely impressive piece of coordination turned out to be a one-off rather than a model anybody built on. I’d still take the trade. The HYDRA episodes that followed are excellent and they only exist because this film pulled the floor out from under the whole organisation. But it remains the clearest case of this universe being shared in one direction only.

Bucky’s road is the longest thing anybody has built here

Here’s what my 2014 self could not possibly have seen. The near-silent weapon in this film has had a twelve-year story since, and it’s the most patient thing Marvel has done with anyone. From here he goes to Civil War, where the entire team splits partly because Steve won’t hand him over. Then a long stretch of trying to become a person again, a decent run of grief and amends and court-mandated therapy, and eventually a seat on a government-assembled team of damaged people. That’s a real arc with a beginning, a middle and consequences that actually stick, which is rarer here than it should be.

poster the falcon and the winter soldier

What strikes me most on the rewatch is how little of it is set up in this film. There’s no plan visible in 2014 at all. He’s an antagonist with a tragic origin and precisely one flicker of recognition on a bridge. Everything after was built rather than seeded, and it worked anyway, which makes me a lot more forgiving of the ending I complained about. I said the love-conquers-all beat was too quick, that decades of conditioning shouldn’t visibly break inside one scene. Watching it now, knowing it takes him three more films and a television series to genuinely recover, that scene plays completely differently. Steve doesn’t fix him. Steve cracks him. The repair takes a decade and the film was only ever claiming the crack, and I read it as a cheat because I didn’t yet know there was a decade coming.

Sam turns up here as a helpful veteran with a wing suit and no stake in any of it, and eleven years later he’s carrying the shield in his own film. Was any of that planned? Almost certainly not, and I don’t think it matters. What this film does is establish him as the only person in the story who helps because somebody asked, with no agenda and nobody behind him, and when Endgame hands him the shield the reason it lands is five years of watching him be exactly that guy. Retrofitted arcs usually show the seams. This one doesn’t, because what got planted was a character trait rather than a plot device.

Redford, and why nobody learned from him

Nothing has changed about Robert Redford and if anything the rewatch makes it starker. Pierce works because Redford walks in carrying institutional authority the film never has to establish, and because he plays a man who thinks order is worth almost any price in the same tone you’d use to discuss the weather over breakfast. Twelve years of Marvel villains later, almost none of them are as unsettling and most of them have vastly more power. The lesson nobody took: the scariest antagonist this franchise ever had is a well-dressed man being reasonable, and he doesn’t have a beam weapon.

The film holds up as a paranoid thriller better than it did, for a slightly uncomfortable reason. Project Insight is three helicarriers that pre-emptively kill anyone an algorithm flags, and in 2014 that was a good science-fiction premise with a whiff of the surveillance arguments of the day. Watching it in 2026, after a decade of arguing about what algorithms should be allowed to decide about people, the premise has stopped being speculative at all. The film’s central objection, that a system predicting who will do harm is a system that has already decided, is just a live argument now, and it’s a bit unnerving how little updating it needs. The action holds too. Fights in lifts and on freeways with weight behind every hit. Set it next to Infinity War and you can see exactly how much the franchise gained in scale and lost in physicality, and the reviews at the time clocked that this was something different.

In 2014 I called it one of the better Captain America films and one of the better MCU films and landed around 3.5 or 4. On this rewatch I’m comfortably at the top of that range, not because it got better but because a decade of the franchise has shown how hard this is to do. Plenty of Marvel films since have been bigger. Very few have had an argument. What this one has is a spine: it believes something specific about institutions and security and the price people will pay to feel safe, and it never softens that to make the ending nicer.

Bucky’s on the roster for December, which is the direct line from here to Doomsday, and it means the character who couldn’t speak in 2014 is now expected to hold his own in the largest cast Marvel has assembled. I’d watch this before December for one reason above all the others though. It’s the film that explains why the institutions are so weak. When Doomsday arrives and there’s no coherent global body ready for it, that isn’t sloppy writing. That’s the bill for a choice Steve made in a bunker in 2014.

Next in the rewatch, back over on the mutant side: X-Men: Days of Future Past, the film that existed to repair everything The Last Stand broke.

August 5, 2026 0 comments

Movies

The Fantastic Four: First Steps: Great Retro-Futurism, Undersized Galactus

by Hutch Morzaria August 7, 2025

written by Hutch Morzaria

Marvel finally got the Fantastic Four right, and then made Galactus too small. That’s the short version, and I’ve watched it a couple of times now to be sure I wasn’t being unfair.

I enjoyed this one. The retro-futuristic vibe is the best thing about it, and it’s the first time this team has felt like it belonged in its own world rather than being awkwardly retrofitted into somebody else’s.

The world is the win

The whole look of it works. A 1960s that never happened, with the technology imagined by people who thought the future would be chrome and optimism rather than screens and grey. Every set, vehicle and gadget belongs to that idea, and the film commits to it completely rather than hedging with a modern framing device.

That commitment does a lot of quiet work. The Fantastic Four have always been a product of the space-race era, a family of explorers rather than a team of soldiers, and putting them in a world that shares those assumptions makes the characters legible in a way the previous attempts never managed.

The character portrayals are good across the board. They read as a family with a working dynamic, which is the entire premise and the exact thing the 2015 version most conspicuously lacked. That film is bad enough to be entertaining, in fairness, but it never had four people who seemed to like each other.

The Silver Surfer is better than we’ve had before

I’d put this as the best Surfer we’ve seen on screen. The design works, the movement works, and the film understands that the character should be melancholy rather than menacing. He’s a herald, not a monster, and the tragedy is that he does the job anyway.

That’s a hard note to hit with a silver CGI figure and no facial detail to speak of, and it mostly lands.

Galactus should have been enormous

Here’s where the film loses me, and it’s a big one.

The Fantastic Four have had some genuinely great villains over the years. Galactus obviously, but also Annihilus out of the Negative Zone, and above all Doctor Doom. Galactus is the one that ought to be unmissable, because he isn’t a villain in any normal sense. He’s a force of nature that happens to have a face. He eats planets, not out of malice, but because that’s what he is.

The portrayal here is much better than what we’ve had before, and I want to be clear about that. It’s a real attempt at the character rather than a cloud.

But he should have been bigger. Much bigger. What we got is something on the order of taller than the Statue of Liberty, and that’s not the right scale for a being who consumes worlds. He should be Celestial-sized, something that doesn’t fit in the frame, something where the camera can’t get far enough away to show you all of him at once. Shrink him to a size a person can look at comfortably and you’ve made him a very large man rather than an appetite the size of a solar system.

That cost the film its fear. When he arrives, the reaction should be that nothing can be done. Instead it’s that something very large has turned up and will presumably be dealt with by the end of the runtime. Infinity War understood this: Thanos worked because the film let him be right about his own logic and let him win. Galactus needed the equivalent, and got a fight scene.

For a comparison closer to home, Thanos at his most cosmic still operated at a human scale emotionally. Galactus shouldn’t. The whole point is that he’s beyond negotiating with.

What the previous attempts kept getting wrong

It’s worth spelling out why this landed when three previous goes didn’t, because the answer isn’t budget.

Every earlier version treated the Fantastic Four as superheroes who happen to be related. This one treats them as a family who happen to have powers, and the order matters enormously. Their powers aren’t combat abilities, they’re personality traits made literal. Reed stretches because he’s spread too thin. Sue disappears because she’s the one nobody looks at. Johnny burns hot. Ben is armoured and can’t be touched. Read them that way and the team makes sense. Read them as a fighting unit and they’re a badly balanced one.

The other thing this version gets is that they’re explorers. The whole origin is a trip nobody had to take. Putting them in an optimistic retro-future where going to look at things is what people do makes their entire outlook coherent, rather than making them oddly cheerful soldiers.

The family, and why it holds

What saves the film for me is that the domestic material is genuinely good. Reed’s anxiety reads as a person rather than a quirk, Sue holds the group together without being reduced to that function, Johnny is fun without being only fun, and Ben gets more interiority than the character usually receives.

Compare it to the original Avengers assembly, which had to spend a whole film convincing you these people could stand each other. This one starts from a family that already works and puts pressure on it, which is a better engine and a less common one.

Marvel has always been better in short form when it comes to family material, and if you want the version of that done properly on the page, the best one-shots get further in twenty pages than most films manage in two hours. This gets closer than I expected.

The scale problem, more precisely

I want to be fair about the Galactus complaint, because “should have been bigger” sounds like a fanboy note about a number.

It isn’t about the measurement. It’s about what the size does to the storytelling. A threat you can frame is a threat you can fight, and the moment the audience can see all of something at once, they start estimating whether it can be beaten. That estimation is fatal to dread.

The version that works keeps him partially off-screen, glimpsed, too large to establish in a single shot. You’d feel him arriving before you saw him. What the film delivers instead is an impressive figure standing in a city, and impressive figures standing in cities are the most common image in this entire genre.

There’s a decent argument that a fully Celestial-scale Galactus is unfilmable on a practical level, and that the compromise was deliberate. I’d accept that if the film hadn’t already shown it could do scale everywhere else. It can. It chose not to here, and the fear went with it.

The Surfer, and what the film understood

Worth dwelling on the Silver Surfer a moment longer, because getting that character right is harder than it looks and this film managed it.

The temptation with a herald is to play them as a lieutenant, a lesser threat who softens up the target before the boss arrives. That’s the wrong note. The Surfer works when you understand that the job is a sentence being served, and that the person doing it has made a bargain they can’t unmake. Every world they mark is a cost they’ve already agreed to pay.

This version plays it that way. There’s a stillness to the character that reads as resignation rather than menace, and it makes the few moments of hesitation land properly. Given the character has no face to speak of and moves like something out of a physics demonstration, that’s a real achievement of design and performance together.

And then Doom

The mid-credits tease does what it needs to. Doom is the correct next step, he’s the character this franchise has been circling for twenty years without ever getting right, and the film is confident enough not to over-explain.

I’ll say this carefully because there’s nothing to go on yet beyond the tease itself: Doom is the most interesting villain Marvel has on paper, and the version of him that works is the one who is genuinely certain he’s the only person competent enough to run things. Whether that’s what we get is another question, and one for another year.

Good movie. I’ve watched it a couple of times and enjoyed it both times. I’d give it a 3.5. The world-building is a clear step up for this team, the Surfer is the best version we’ve had, and I’d take another film in this style tomorrow. Just make the world-eater look like he could eat a world.

August 7, 2025 0 comments

Movies

Thunderbolts*: Good Cast, Good Effects, Slightly Thin Story

by Hutch Morzaria May 12, 2025

written by Hutch Morzaria

Thunderbolts* is a perfectly decent film with a cast better than its script, and I came out of it entertained without being especially convinced.

Fair warning before I go further: I’m going to talk about the ending, including what the asterisk in the title turns out to mean. The marketing worked hard to hide it. If you haven’t seen it yet, come back after.

Yelena is the reason this works

It’s good to see Yelena again, and Florence Pugh does a genuinely strong job carrying a film that leans on her more than it probably intended to. I’d watched the Hawkeye miniseries, so I came in already sold on the character, and nothing here dented that.

She’s playing the only person in the group with a functioning interior life, which is both the film’s biggest asset and a sign of where it’s thin. Everybody else is a collection of traits waiting for a scene to justify them. Yelena is a person.

The vault fight is the best action in it

The early sequence in the vault is a lot of fun. Yelena against Taskmaster, Ghost and John Walker in a confined space, everybody fighting dirty, no clean lines of sight. It’s well staged and it has actual stakes because none of these people can absorb damage the way an Avenger can.

The effects across the film are really good and the action generally holds up. This isn’t a movie that fails on craft.

What surprised me was Taskmaster being demolished as fast as she was. In Black Widow that character put up a serious fight, and the whole premise of the ability, copying anybody’s movements on sight, ought to make her one of the hardest people in any room to put down. Dispatching her that quickly felt like the script clearing space rather than a fight anybody actually lost.

The Sentry is not the Sentry

Here’s my main structural complaint. The Sentry in the comics, at least as I remember him, isn’t a villain. He’s a tragedy. The Void is his own darkness rather than a separate antagonist, and the interest comes from a man with the power of a million exploding suns who is fundamentally too damaged to be trusted with it, including by himself.

The film gets the damage right and loses the tragedy. What’s left is closer to a conventional big bad with a sad backstory, and at that point the character stops being distinctive.

It also creates a problem going forward. In his powered-up form he’s so overwhelming that I’m not sure what the MCU does with him next. He’s either the solution to every threat or he has to be written out of every room, and neither is a story. They’ve built something they can’t really use.

Marvel didn’t shy away from the psychology, then took the easy way out

Credit where it’s due, this is a Marvel film that puts depression and trauma at the centre of its plot and doesn’t treat it as a quirk. It’s good to see Bucky again, and good that his history isn’t played for either laughs or angst. Coming a couple of months after Brave New World, which had its own thin patch where a psychological hook needed a real ending and got a speech instead, the pattern is starting to look like a house style.

But the resolution is where it loses me. It comes down to love conquers all, more or less, and that’s a very tidy answer to a problem the film spent two hours arguing isn’t tidy.

Watching it, I kept thinking of that Pixar film where a girl’s emotions are characters in her head and the plot is about getting her back to happy after sadness takes over. This is a live-action version of the same idea, with punching. That’s a perfectly nice thing to be. It’s just a long way from what the setup promised, and the gap between the two is where my reservations sit.

The rest of the roster

Bucky is the other reason to watch this. He’s been in this franchise for fifteen years and has spent most of that time being either a weapon or a wound, and here he finally gets to be a person with a job. Sebastian Stan plays him tired rather than tortured, which is a much more interesting register and one the character has earned.

John Walker is a harder sell. The film wants him to be a man who genuinely believes he was wronged, and Wyatt Russell plays that well, but the script keeps flinching from letting him be as unpleasant as the premise needs. You can’t build a redemption arc for someone the film won’t first let be properly bad.

Ghost and Red Guardian are mostly texture. Red Guardian gets the comic relief slot and David Harbour is having an obvious good time, though the joke is the same joke every time. Ghost has a genuinely interesting power set the film uses twice and then forgets.

That’s the recurring issue: too many people, not enough reasons. A tighter film with three of these characters would have had room to make all three matter.

Does the team work?

On paper it shouldn’t. That’s the point, and Civil War did the same trick more sharply years ago by making the ideological split the actual plot rather than a texture.

The comparison that hangs over it is the original assembly, where a group of people who couldn’t stand each other became a team and it felt earned because the film gave every one of them a reason to be there. Thunderbolts* has more characters than it has reasons, and some of them are simply present.

The asterisk reveal, the team being rebranded as the New Avengers, is a decent gag and a reasonable ending. It also raises the obvious question of whether this particular group is who you’d want standing between Earth and anything serious. On current evidence, not really. Against Age of Ultron, a film I found overstuffed and underpowered, this is tighter but working with much less.

The asterisk

Since I flagged spoilers up top, let’s deal with the title properly.

The asterisk resolving into the team being rebranded as the New Avengers is a decent piece of marketing and a reasonable structural ending. It gives the film a destination, and it explains why a movie about a group of expendable people was worth making.

It’s also a slightly cheap trick. The film spends its runtime arguing that these are broken, compromised people who don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, and then hands them the most valuable brand in the setting as a reward for surviving. The tonal gap between those two things never quite closes.

I don’t hate it. It’s the kind of ending that works better as a hook for what comes next than as a conclusion to what just happened, and I suspect that’s exactly the intention.

What a better version looks like

I keep coming back to the film this could have been, which is usually a sign the material was strong enough to deserve it.

Take the same cast, the same Sentry setup, and refuse the tidy ending. Let the resolution be partial. Let him be manageable rather than fixed, with the clear implication that the management is ongoing and might fail. That’s a harder film and a less satisfying two hours, but it’s the one the premise was writing cheques for.

The version we got wants the credit for engaging with the subject and the comfort of resolving it, and you can’t really have both. Depression doesn’t have a third act.

Where I land

Okay movie. Not one of my favourites, but an interesting enough watch and a long way from the worst of this run. The cast is doing more than the material deserves, Pugh especially, and the action is genuinely well made.

I’d have taken a harder, sadder film about people who don’t get fixed. What I got was a competent ensemble picture that flinches at the end. Worth seeing, particularly for Yelena, and I suspect it’ll be remembered more for what it sets up than for what it is.

May 12, 2025 0 comments

Marvel Movies

Captain America: Brave New World: Can Sam Carry the Shield Without a Serum?

by Hutch Morzaria March 2, 2025

written by Hutch Morzaria

Sam Wilson finally gets to be Captain America without an asterisk in Brave New World, and the movie spends two hours arguing with itself about whether that’s earned.

I’ll say the quiet part first: I always thought Bucky was the more natural fit for the shield. Sam as Falcon could fly and had the gadgets, but he never had the physical presence I want behind Captain America. Cap should feel like he can stop a moving vehicle with his shoulder. Sam feels like a very good pilot with excellent aim, which is a different kind of hero entirely.

The mini-series tried to close that gap by having him train with the shield, and the film leans on that training as settled fact. Here’s the thing that bothers me more the longer I sit with it: none of the Chris Evans movies ever bothered to show that kind of training either. Steve picked up a round piece of vibranium and immediately knew how to ricochet it off three surfaces and catch it on the rebound. Nobody asked. It just came naturally, because the serum was doing narrative work as well as physical work.

So holding Sam to a standard the franchise never actually established for Steve feels a little unfair. That doesn’t fully settle my doubts, but it’s worth naming that the goalposts here were never really planted in the first place.

The plot is a political thriller wearing a superhero costume

Thaddeus Ross is president now, trying to rebuild his relationship with his daughter and stake his legacy on a treaty over Celestial Island, the petrified Celestial left over from Eternals. It turns out to be sitting on a deposit of adamantium, and that’s the geopolitical hook: whoever controls it controls the next arms race.

A vast petrified Celestial forming an island in the ocean at dawn, glowing metallic veins running through the stone, with survey ships nearby

Sam works the case with Joaquín Torres, the new Falcon, after Isaiah Bradley opens fire on Ross at a White House event under what turns out to be mind control. Clearing Bradley’s name is what actually drives Sam through the film, and it’s the right choice. Bradley is the moral weight of this whole corner of the MCU, a Black super-soldier the government experimented on and then imprisoned for thirty years, and the film knows it.

Behind the scenes is Samuel Sterns, the gamma-scarred scientist from the 2008 Incredible Hulk, engineering a slow-motion revenge against the man who used his mind and then locked him away. Pulling that film back into continuity after seventeen years is a bold swing.

Does it land? Mostly, and more because Tim Blake Nelson commits to it than because the script does much heavy lifting. Sterns’ scheme runs on musical triggers and long-game manipulation, which is a genuinely creepy idea that the movie gestures at rather than builds. I wanted more of him and less of the treaty negotiations.

There’s also a question of whether reaching back to 2008 is satisfying or desperate, and I land somewhere in between. Satisfying, in that The Incredible Hulk has spent seventeen years as the MCU’s embarrassing cousin, the one film everybody skips on a rewatch, and giving it retroactive consequence is a genuinely nice piece of housekeeping. Desperate, in that the reach only works if you remember a film most people didn’t like and haven’t seen since. Marvel is asking the audience to do homework for a payoff that isn’t quite worth the reading.

Torres is the best thing nobody’s talking about

Danny Ramirez as Joaquín Torres is the quiet win here. He’s the new Falcon, he’s plainly not ready, and the film lets him be visibly out of his depth without turning it into a joke at his expense. The Sam/Torres dynamic gives the movie something the plot doesn’t: a relationship with actual warmth in it.

It also does something structurally useful. Watching Sam mentor someone into the Falcon role reframes his own promotion. He isn’t the guy who got handed the shield anymore, he’s the guy passing his old job down, and that shift does more to sell him as Captain America than any amount of shield choreography.

Ford is good, but Hurt was better

I love Harrison Ford, and he’s clearly having fun as Ross. But I’ll take the unpopular position: William Hurt was the better actor in this specific role. Hurt played Ross as a man permanently one bad day from doing something unforgivable. Ford plays him as a man giving a speech about redemption. Both are valid readings. Hurt’s was more interesting to watch.

That’s not really a knock on Ford. These movies don’t need Shakespeare, even when they cast people who could deliver it. Marvel has had Patrick Stewart on the payroll and still handed him exposition. The material sets the ceiling, not the cast.

Was the Red Hulk worth the build-up?

The Red Hulk turn is fine as spectacle and thin as payoff. Sterns triggers the pills Ross has been taking, Ross goes crimson, and Sam fights him across Washington with no serum and no realistic chance in a straight brawl.

A devastated city street at night after a massive fight, cracked asphalt and a large crater under red emergency lighting

Sam wins by refusing to kill him and talking him down instead, which is absolutely the right instinct for the character. It’s the most Captain America thing in the movie. My problem is the execution. The resolution lands too simple, in the same way Batman v Superman undercut its entire climax with “save Martha.” One emotional appeal, one turn, fight over.

That’s a good filler movie ending. It isn’t the win this film needed to make its case. If the whole point is that Sam earns the shield without the serum, then the moment he proves it should cost him something more than a well-timed speech.

Did the film earn Sam’s version of the shield?

That’s the real question hanging over Brave New World, and I don’t think it fully answers it. The politics of a Black man taking up Captain America after Isaiah Bradley’s imprisoned decades gives the film real weight to draw on, and to its credit it doesn’t shy away from that history.

I’ll be honest that I could also read some of this as a studio hedge, an attempt to speak to real tension in the US rather than a story decision made for story reasons. Whether it’s an honest exploration or a calculated one is a fair question to sit with, and the film doesn’t fully resolve it either way. What I can say is that it isn’t cynical about Bradley himself. Carl Lumbly gets the film’s best scenes and the script treats that history seriously.

Mechanical metal wings folded on a workbench beside a plain round metal shield, lit by a single overhead lamp

What the film does get right is closing a loop that started with Avengers: Endgame, which first handed Sam the shield and left the question of whether he’d grow into it hanging in the air. Brave New World is where that question finally gets tested against something bigger than a passing-of-the-torch ceremony.

It just tests it in a movie that would rather be a political thriller than a Captain America story. It wants to be The Winter Soldier badly enough that you can see the shape of that ambition in every conspiracy beat, and it never fully commits to either register.

Where it sits against the rest

The original Cap trilogy is far and away better than this, and it isn’t close. Even Civil War, which had to carry half the Avengers roster and a whole ideological schism, used Ross as a sharper antagonist in twenty minutes than this film manages across its runtime.

It’s also a step down from the big swings. Infinity War had the confidence to let the villain win. Brave New World doesn’t have that kind of nerve. It’s a competent, watchable, slightly overstuffed film that resolves everything it raises and surprises you with none of it.

Compare the energy to something like Deadpool, a film with a fraction of the budget and ten times the personality. The gap isn’t money. It’s willingness to take a swing and risk missing.

Worth a watch for Sam’s arc and for Ford chewing on the role. Don’t go in expecting the original trilogy. Current critic scores put it toward the lower end of the MCU’s recent run, and on this one I don’t think that’s wrong. Good movie. Not an amazing one, and not one I’ll be revisiting often.

March 2, 2025 1 comment

Movies

Deadpool & Wolverine: The Fox Era Gets the Send-Off It Deserved

by Hutch Morzaria August 9, 2024

written by Hutch Morzaria

I’ve seen this twice already and I’d happily go again, which is not something I’ve said about a Marvel film in a while. Deadpool & Wolverine is a lot of fun, and more than that, it’s clearly made by people who actually love this stuff.

I’m a huge fan of both Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, and I don’t think anybody could have done this story more justice. The chemistry between them is undeniable. All the snide back-and-forth in the ads and the TV spots turned out to be a preview of the real thing rather than a marketing gimmick covering for a thin film.

The writers are actual super fans

That’s the thing that struck me hardest. You can tell the people writing this understand Deadpool as a character rather than as a permission slip for swearing. They understand the MCU. And crucially, they’ve got a deep working knowledge of the Fox universe, which is a much less fashionable thing to care about.

That knowledge shows up in the details. Characters most of us had mentally filed away as gone get brought back and given a genuine send-off rather than a punchline. There’s a difference between a cameo that says “remember this?” and one that says “this mattered, and here’s the ending it never got.” This film mostly does the second thing.

The Johnny Storm switch got me

My favourite moment on first watch was a genuine misdirect. I was convinced we were getting Steve Rogers, and it turned out to be Johnny Storm instead. Big switch, and a properly clever one.

What makes it work is the language. Chris Evans as Cap spent the Avengers films being the man who says “language,” the walking reprimand about watching your mouth. Putting that same actor on screen and having him swear like a docker is a joke that only lands if you’ve been paying attention for fifteen years. It’s aimed squarely at people who have. Given my own history with the 2015 Fantastic Four, seeing a genuinely good Johnny Storm turn up at all felt like a small correction of the record.

Cassandra Nova and the Void

The plot is TVA business. Wade’s universe is dying because its Anchor Being, Logan, is dead, and a middle-management bureaucrat named Paradox wants to speed the end along rather than let it decay. Wade goes looking for a replacement Wolverine and comes back with the worst one on the shelf, a Logan who failed his X-Men and has been drinking about it ever since.

They both get dumped in the Void, the purgatory from Loki where pruned things go to be eaten. That’s where the film finds its best character. Cassandra Nova is Charles Xavier’s twin sister and a telepath of genuinely upsetting cruelty, and Emma Corrin plays her with a stillness that most Marvel villains never get near. She isn’t quipping. She’s just deeply unpleasant and very good at it.

Bringing the TVA back in was a smart structural choice too. It gives the film a legitimate reason to be pulling characters out of dead timelines rather than relying on a hand-wave, and it ties this into the wider machinery without making the film feel like homework.

The cameos, and why they mostly work

There’s a version of this film that’s just a nostalgia parade, and it gets close to that line more than once. Elektra, Blade, Gambit, X-23, all pulled out of the Void where the pruned timelines dump their leftovers.

What saves it is the tone. These aren’t victory laps. Every one of these characters is there because their film underperformed, or their franchise got cancelled, or the studio lost interest, and the movie is explicit about that. They’re in purgatory because nobody wanted them. Giving them a fight to go out on is a kinder ending than any of them actually got, and the film plays it closer to a eulogy than a gag.

Blade in particular lands. Wesley Snipes was doing this before the modern superhero film existed, before anybody had proved audiences would turn up, and he’s been more or less written out of the story of how we got here. Putting him back on screen and letting him be good at it is a genuine act of respect.

Does it cheapen Logan?

This is the question I went in with, because Logan is one of the best superhero films anybody has made and it had a perfect ending. Bringing Jackman back always risked undoing that.

It doesn’t, and the reason is the variant framing. This isn’t the Logan who died on that hillside. It’s a different one with a different failure behind him, and the film is careful to keep those separate. That distinction could easily have been a cheap loophole. Here it’s load-bearing, and it lets Jackman play something he never got to play in the Fox run: a Wolverine defined by having already lost, rather than by rage.

He also finally gets the yellow suit. Only took twenty-four years. It looks great, and the film knows exactly how long we’ve been waiting, which is why it doesn’t make a bigger deal of it than it needs to.

Where it sits

The meta-humour is relentless and I can see it wearing thin for some people. It didn’t for me, mostly because the film keeps undercutting its own smugness. Every time it gets too pleased with itself, somebody gets stabbed.

Against the rest of the X-Men material on screen, it’s in a different league from something like X-Men: Apocalypse, which had scale and no soul. It also does more with Wolverine as a character in one film than most of the comics runs I’d point people to manage across whole arcs, though the comparison isn’t quite fair given what it’s borrowing from. And as a Deadpool film specifically, it’s a clear step up from the first one, which I liked a great deal but which was working with a fraction of the budget and none of the toys. If you want the version of Wolverine that gets closest to the best fights in the comics, it’s in here.

I enjoyed this one a lot. Four and a half, maybe a five. Comfortably top of my list for the year so far, and I suspect it stays there.

A note on the rating

I’ve gone back and forth between four and a half and five on this, which is unusual for me. A five normally means a film I think is genuinely excellent rather than merely enjoyable, and by that standard this probably isn’t one. The plot is thin, the middle sags slightly, and a lot of the emotional weight is borrowed from other films rather than generated here.

But there’s a category of film that does exactly what it set out to do, for exactly the audience it was made for, with visible affection and no cynicism. This is that. I had more fun watching it than anything else this year, and I’ve already gone back once. Whatever number that is, it’s a high one.

And then, two weeks ago, this happened

I can’t write this up without mentioning the other thing, because it’s all anybody has talked about since.

Robert Downey Jr. has been announced as Doctor Doom. Not Iron Man. Doom. Announced at Comic-Con the day after this film opened, with the Russos back directing.

I genuinely don’t know what to make of it yet. Part of me thinks it’s a bold swing, and this franchise has needed one. Part of me wonders whether bringing back the actor whose death was the emotional full stop on Endgame reads as confidence or as an admission that they can’t move past him. Recasting him as a different character is either the cleverest possible solution to that problem or a way of having it both ways.

There’s no plot, no cast list, nothing beyond a title and a man in a mask on a stage. So I’ll leave it there. It’s a strange piece of timing, though, landing the same week as a film about one universe being absorbed into another. Ask me again when there’s something to actually go on.

August 9, 2024 1 comment

Movies

The Marvels — Kamala Carries It, and There’s a Blue Man in the Credits

by Hutch Morzaria November 24, 2023

written by Hutch Morzaria

There’s a blue, furry, unmistakable man sitting in the post-credits scene of this film, and he has just made the X-Men real inside the MCU. That’s the headline, and it’s a strange one for a film that’s otherwise fairly ordinary. A two and a half, maybe a three.

Kamala is the reason to watch it

Iman Vellani is the best thing here by a distance, and as a fellow Canadian I’ll admit to being extremely pleased about it.

What she does is harder than it looks. She’s playing the only person in the film who is thrilled to be there, a fan who has ended up inside the story, and she has to carry that without becoming annoying. She manages it in her first feature, which is remarkable, and the fact that she got the part essentially by being a genuine fan rather than an established actress makes it better rather than worse. Exceptional, honestly.

Her family are the other success. They’re cool, they’re relatable, and the way they look after everyone who comes into their orbit, including two superheroes who have wandered into the flat, is the warmest material in the film. When the story stops for them it improves.

The swapping is a genuinely good idea

The body-switching mechanic works and it’s the one structurally inventive thing in the picture.

Every time the three of them use their powers simultaneously they swap places, which turns fights into a co-ordination problem rather than a strength contest. It’s funny, it’s enjoyable to watch, and the sequence where they have to learn to fight around it is the best action in the film.

Good idea, well executed, and it isn’t enough to carry ninety minutes on its own.

Carol still underwhelms me, and it’s a power problem

Here’s my long-standing issue, and this film hasn’t fixed it.

Carol’s abilities come from an Infinity Stone. That should place her at a level nothing else on screen approaches, and she has never once been portrayed that way.

Run the comparison. Thanos took the Hulk apart with his bare hands and no stones at all, and adding the power stone to that just made an already overwhelming being more so. So why is Carol, whose entire origin is stone-derived, consistently written as somebody who can be knocked through a wall and inconvenienced? I’d be genuinely astounded if she turned out to be as powerful as the premise implies, because she never has been.

She needs to show a great deal more. That’s been the gap since I first wrote about her, and four years later it’s still the gap.

Monica doesn’t land for me

I’m not a huge fan of the character, and I wasn’t engaged by her here.

She’s less interesting than the two people she’s sharing the film with, which is a difficult position to be in. Teyonah Parris is fine, and the writing gives her a slightly sullen competence and not much else. Whenever the film cuts to her I found myself waiting for it to cut back.

The story is a bit boring

That’s the honest problem underneath everything else.

I like that the film is following through on the consequences of Carol’s earlier decisions, what that did to the Kree, and the mess she left behind. That’s a real idea and it deserves attention. I just wasn’t very interested in the execution.

Dar-Benn is a poor villain. Nothing exciting about her, no argument worth engaging with, and she exists to move a plot from one planet to another. After a year of Marvel antagonists who mostly haven’t worked, this one is near the bottom.

The film also moves very quickly and is very short, which I’d normally welcome, and here it means nothing has room to develop.

And then the credits roll

Which brings us back to the blue man.

I loved that scene. It made me sit up in a way nothing in the preceding film managed. Kelsey Grammer, in the makeup, in a version of the world where the X-Men exist, casually treating it as unremarkable.

The X-Men were far and away one of my favourite teams for the longest time when I was collecting, and seeing that door open inside this universe is genuinely exciting. I’ve no idea how they intend to tie it together. Monica ends up somewhere she shouldn’t be able to reach, and the film declines to explain any of it.

I want to know. I’m just aware that this is a very large promise to attach to a film that, by all accounts, almost nobody has gone to see. The box office numbers this weekend have been rough, and putting something this significant in the credits of a film with that reach is a curious decision.

Where it lands

Two and a half, possibly three. Kamala is great, her family is great, the swapping gimmick is clever, and the film around all of it is thin.

It’s a better time than some of this year’s other efforts and it isn’t going to change anyone’s mind about where the franchise is. What it might have done, in its final thirty seconds, is set up something considerably more interesting than itself.

November 24, 2023 0 comments

Movies

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: Rocket’s Story All Along

by Hutch Morzaria May 17, 2023

written by Hutch Morzaria

Three films in, it turns out the Guardians trilogy was always Rocket’s story. Vol. 3 is the one that admits it, and it’s the better for finally saying so out loud.

I really enjoyed this one. That’s not a given with late-period Marvel, where I’ve spent more time being mildly entertained than actually moved, and this is the first in a while that got under my guard.

The flashbacks are the film

Adam Warlock attacks Knowhere, leaves Rocket dying, and the team discovers a kill switch buried in him that stops any attempt to operate. He is patented property. Somebody owns him. That somebody is the High Evolutionary, and finding out how that came to be is what the film is actually about.

The origin material is the best thing here. A baby raccoon, designated Subject 89P13, experimented on by a scientist obsessed with engineering perfect societies and discarding every version that disappoints him. Rocket’s friends in the cage, Lylla, Teefs and Floor, are the only affection he has ever had. When Rocket turns out smarter than his creator, the Evolutionary decides to cut his brain out to find out why, and when Rocket escapes, has the friends killed in front of him.

That sequence is genuinely hard to watch, and I mean that as praise. It’s informative and it’s useful, in the sense that it retroactively explains a character who has spent two films being the funny one. Every bit of Rocket’s abrasiveness suddenly has a source. That’s good writing, and it’s the kind of work Marvel usually skips.

The High Evolutionary is exactly the right size of villain

He’s an interesting one. Vicious, mean, genuinely hateful in a way that’s rarer than it sounds, but with an underlying motive that makes complete sense from where he’s standing. He isn’t evil for the sake of it. He believes he’s improving things, and the cruelty is a byproduct of that belief rather than the point of it.

Chukwudi Iwuji plays him at a pitch most Marvel villains never reach. There’s no winking, no quips, no late-stage redemption arc. He’s a bad man doing bad things for reasons he considers excellent.

He’s also clearly a one-shot villain rather than a saga-spanning one, and I think that’s the correct call. Not every antagonist needs to be a multi-film arc. Some of them should turn up, be appalling, and get dealt with inside two and a half hours. Building him into a decade-long throughline would have diluted exactly what makes him work.

Where it sits in the trilogy

Vol. 1 is still my favourite, and I don’t think that’s going to change. It had the advantage of surprise, a soundtrack that felt like a discovery rather than a formula, and a group of characters nobody had any expectations about.

But this is a definite step up from Vol. 2. Two was a bit funky and weird. It had some good moments but didn’t do much to expand the universe, and it spent a lot of its runtime on a father-son plot that never fully landed for me. Three has more purpose to it.

I do realise the Guardians were never the Avengers in terms of interconnected storylines, and I’ve made my peace with that. They’re off doing their own thing at the edge of the map. That’s fine. They were always a fun group to watch, and the fun survives even when the material turns dark.

What the rest of the team gets to do

Worth saying that the supporting cast is better served here than in either previous film. Nebula has quietly become the most interesting person in the group, and Karen Gillan plays her as somebody permanently exasperated by having to be the competent one. Drax gets to be more than a punchline generator, though the film still can’t entirely resist using him as one. Mantis finally reads as a character with her own wants rather than an empathy dispenser attached to the plot.

Adam Warlock is the exception. He’s introduced with a great deal of ceremony, does very little, switches sides at a convenient moment, and gets parked. Will Poulter is good in the role and I’d happily watch more of him. I just couldn’t tell you what the film wanted him for beyond giving Peter a rescue at the end. He feels like a setup for a story that may or may not ever arrive.

The Gamora problem, handled better than expected

Peter spends the film drinking because the Gamora who came back through time is not the one he lost, and has no interest in becoming her. That’s a thread the film handles with more discipline than I expected. Infinity War killed her and Endgame brought a different version back, which was always going to leave a mess.

The easy version of this story has her gradually remembering, or falling for him again. Vol. 3 refuses. She’s a different person with a different history, she doesn’t owe him a relationship, and the film lets Peter sit with that rather than solving it. Given how much of the character’s arc runs through her, and through her and Nebula’s father, that restraint is worth noting.

The adult turn

This one’s more adult than the previous two, and specifically in how Rocket is treated. The animal experimentation material isn’t softened for a family audience, and the film doesn’t cut away when you expect it to.

I’m honestly not sure how well that sits with the marketing, which is still selling a jukebox space comedy. Parents taking small kids on the strength of Vol. 1 are in for a surprise. But as a creative choice it’s the right one. You can’t tell this particular origin gently and have it mean anything.

I’ve never read any of the comics, so I can’t really comment on how accurate any of these characters are to the source. What I can say is they’re all fun, they’ve been consistent across three films, and the version of them that exists on screen has earned its own standing regardless of what the page says.

The soundtrack, and why it works less hard this time

The music has been the trilogy’s signature since the first Awesome Mix, and it’s doing something different here. Vol. 1 used its soundtrack as characterisation, a dead mother’s taste standing in for a whole relationship. Vol. 2 leaned on it as a mood generator. This one mostly uses it as counterpoint, cheerful songs playing over genuinely grim material, and the contrast does a lot of the heavy lifting in the flashback sequences.

Whether that’s clever or manipulative probably depends on your tolerance for the technique. It worked on me. I’d also say it’s the least memorable of the three mixes as a standalone listen, which may be the price of using it structurally rather than as a jukebox.

Does it land as an ending?

It feels like a real one, which is more than most of these manage. Everybody leaves. Rocket takes over as captain of a new roster, Peter goes back to Earth to find his grandfather, Gamora returns to the Ravagers, Drax and Nebula stay behind to raise the rescued children.

Right now the crew is scattered and not really a team anymore, and I genuinely don’t know what the future holds for them. James Gunn is off to DC, which has been public since last October, so whoever picks this up next won’t be the person who built it. That’s a real question mark hanging over anything that comes after.

Let’s see. But I did enjoy this one, and if it turns out to be the last time this particular group is together, it’s a considerably better send-off than most franchises manage.

May 17, 2023 0 comments

Movies

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania — I’m Not Sold on Kang

by Hutch Morzaria March 4, 2023

written by Hutch Morzaria

Marvel has announced that this man is the villain of the next decade, and after two hours in his company I don’t believe it.

My least favourite of the three Ant-Man films. A three, and that’s the ceiling rather than a rounding down.

The Kang problem

Let me be specific, because this isn’t a complaint about Jonathan Majors, who is committed and does interesting things with the voice.

It’s a structural problem. Think about how Thanos was built. Bits and pieces across years, a shot here, a chair there, a name mentioned and not explained. By the time he arrived you’d been waiting so long that his presence did the work before he opened his mouth. He was an event.

Kang is being introduced by showing us his face constantly, and the premise requires that, because every variant is a different man. So instead of one accumulating threat you get a series of introductions, none of which can carry the weight of the last, because there’s always another one coming.

And on the evidence here, he isn’t strong enough. I don’t rate him at the level of Loki as an antagonist, let alone as somebody who could stand against Thor or the genuinely cosmic end of this universe. He’s a man who explains his plans at length and is beaten by a man who shrinks. That’s a hard sell for the next ten years.

The Council of Kangs is the best thing in it

Which makes the mid-credits scene genuinely frustrating, because it’s excellent. A stadium of them, all variants, all differently mad, bickering about what to do with a universe. The way they carry themselves is really quite awesome, and for two minutes I could see the version of this that works: not one villain, but a fractious empire of the same man, none of whom agree.

That’s the best part of the film by a distance, and it’s in the credits. If that’s the direction, there’s something here. It’s just not in the two hours preceding it.

The Quantum Realm doesn’t convince

Visually this is where the film lost me. The creatures, the landscapes, the various inhabitants all feel a bit too Disney, and there are long stretches that look closer to an animated cartoon than a place.

That’s a problem when the entire film happens there. The first Ant-Man worked partly because it was small and grounded, a heist film with a gimmick, set in recognisable rooms. Dropping the whole family into a fully digital world removes the contrast that made the shrinking interesting in the first place.

Some of the design is imaginative. Very little of it feels like somewhere you could stand.

M.O.D.O.K. is going to divide people. I found him more strange than funny, and the film can’t decide whether he’s a joke or a tragedy, so he ends up as neither.

Scott is still good company

The saving grace, and the reason this isn’t lower.

It’s always good to spend time with Scott Lang, and Paul Rudd is as reliable as ever. The character has been the most likeable thing in this franchise since Civil War, largely because he’s the only one who seems to find any of this ridiculous. He’s a burglar who got lucky, he knows it, and the films have never once asked him to become a warrior.

There’s a good moment where he’s confronted with the scale of what he’s walked into and simply doesn’t have the frame of reference for it. That’s the character working properly.

The Cassie material half works. The idea that she’s grown up angry and activist while he was away is decent, and the film keeps interrupting it to get to the next set piece.

Janet is the film’s missed opportunity

Michelle Pfeiffer has the most interesting role in the picture and the least room to play it.

She spent thirty years down there. She knows what’s in the Quantum Realm, she knows who Kang is, she made a decision she’s ashamed of, and she has spent the entire time since refusing to talk about any of it. That’s a proper story, and it’s the one the film keeps postponing.

When it finally arrives it lands as exposition rather than as revelation, because it’s being delivered in a hurry to explain the plot rather than because a character has decided to be honest. Give that thread the runtime it deserves and this is a much better film.

Where it lands

A three, maximum. Not my favourite, and after the heist that made the Quantum Realm matter I expected more from a film that takes place entirely inside it.

The honest issue is that this is doing a job rather than telling a story. It exists to establish Kang, and everything else, the family, the realm, the returning cast, is arranged around that task. When the villain doesn’t land, the whole structure sags.

The Kang Dynasty is on the schedule and I’d like to be wrong about all of this. What I’ve seen so far is a talkative man in a chair, and I’ve been here before with a certain other multiversal introduction that promised more than it delivered. Show me the Council and I’m interested. Show me one of him and I’m not.

March 4, 2023 0 comments

Movies

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever — Grief, Namor, and a Treaty That Doesn’t Add Up

by Hutch Morzaria November 27, 2022

written by Hutch Morzaria

Not recasting T’Challa was the right decision, and this film is built around the hole that leaves rather than trying to fill it.

I enjoyed the first one and I enjoyed this too. It isn’t my favourite Marvel film, and it’s quite well done. Three and a half out of five. Sorry a bit of a mishmash of opinions and thoughts, but it will all make sense when you’ve read the rest!ugh

Leaving the role empty was brave

They could have recast. Plenty of people expected it, and there’s a version of this film where a new actor puts on the suit in the first twenty minutes and the franchise carries on.

Instead the film opens with T’Challa dying off-screen and spends its whole runtime on what that does to everyone left. Chadwick Boseman isn’t replaced, he’s absent, and the absence is the subject. That’s a real choice and it gives the film a weight most of these don’t have.

The funeral sequence is the best thing in it. No score for long stretches, a lot of white, a country processing a loss in public. It plays as genuine rather than as franchise machinery, which was not guaranteed.

Namor is a very good villain

I liked him a lot, and I liked how they introduced him.

He’s comic accurate in the way that matters: his war against the surface world isn’t a scheme, it’s a settled position he arrived at centuries ago and has never had cause to revise. The film gives him a proper history, a people worth protecting, and a completely coherent argument that the surface world will come for Talokan the moment it knows Talokan exists. He’s right about that. The film doesn’t pretend otherwise.

Tenoch Huerta plays him as somebody genuinely old, which is the hard part. He isn’t posturing. He’s just seen this before.

The sequence where his strength fails him once he’s kept out of the water makes sense as a mechanic and gives the third act a way to work. That part’s well handled.

The treaty is where it loses me

Here’s my main problem, and it’s a big one.

Namor and his people have killed a great many people over the years, much of it simply to keep their location hidden. That’s the film’s own account of things. Then the ending arrives at a peace, and everyone walks away.

Does any of that warrant being left alone? He’s not a misunderstood neighbour, he’s the head of a state that has been quietly drowning anyone who got too close for a very long time. The film wants a resolution where two grieving nations recognise each other, which is a lovely idea, and it gets there by not looking too hard at the body count.

That’s sub-par. Killmonger’s ending in the first film had the courage of its convictions. This one blinks.

Ramonda is the film’s centre

Angela Bassett is superb and she’s the reason the middle of the film holds together.

She makes complete sense as a queen who has lost a husband and a son and is now being circled by every power on Earth. The way she handles the UN, the way she handles Shuri, the way she goes after Riri because she’s decided the girl is under her protection. All of it is consistent and all of it is played at full weight.

Whatever else this film does, it gives her the best material she’s had here, and she takes it.

I’m not sure about Shuri

This is where I’m most hesitant.

Her real strength has always been her brains. She’s the one who builds things, solves things, out-thinks everyone in the room, and the first film used that brilliantly. Making her the Black Panther pushes her into being the brawn instead, and I don’t think that’s where the character is at her best.

Letitia Wright is okay in it. The grief material works. It’s the suit I’m unconvinced by, because it turns the most inventive person in Wakanda into someone who solves problems by punching.

I’d also have taken more of the first film’s villain than the single glimpse we get. There’s an interesting film in Shuri being genuinely tempted by that worldview, and it’s raised and dropped in one scene. A returning antagonist, or another claimant to the throne entirely, would have given her something to push against.

The third act

Not as strong as the first two. The film spends an hour and a half building two nations with real arguments and then resolves it with a fight on a boat.

That’s the usual complaint about these films and it applies here. The scale goes up, the specificity goes down, and the ending has to be a battle because the format says so.

Riri is a decent addition, though the film has more characters than it has room for. She works better as the reason the plot starts than as a participant in the ending.

Where it lands

Three and a half. Quite well done, genuinely moving in places, and let down by an ending that wants everyone to be reconcilable.

One thing I’m curious about. In the comics Namor has a whole history with Sue Storm and the Fantastic Four, and the MCU still hasn’t cast them. If that ever happens, this character suddenly has somewhere much more interesting to go, and his introduction here would look like groundwork. I’ve no idea whether that’s the plan.

Better than Love and Thunder by a distance, and a more serious film than most of what’s come out this year. It just doesn’t quite stick the landing.

November 27, 2022 0 comments

Movies

Thor: Love and Thunder — The Jokes Ate the Film

by Hutch Morzaria July 18, 2022

written by Hutch Morzaria

Christian Bale is giving a genuinely frightening performance as a man who has decided every god deserves to die, and he’s doing it in a film that keeps cutting away to screaming goats.

Two and a half out of five. It’s okay. Nothing amazing, and the gap between what’s in it and what it does with what’s in it is the whole problem.

The good bit: the weapons are jealous of each other

My favourite thing in the film, easily.

Mjolnir and Stormbreaker are both treated as sentient, and both are quietly resentful of the other. The axe sulks. The hammer has moved on to somebody new. Thor is stuck managing a relationship between two lumps of enchanted metal, and the film plays it completely straight-faced.

That’s quite funny and genuinely enjoyable, and it’s the kind of specific, silly idea that Ragnarok was full of. There are some good action sequences too, and a few real surprises. The film is not without pleasures.

Gorr deserved a much better film

Bale is excellent. The opening, with a man in a desert who has lost his daughter and then meets the god he’d been praying to and finds him indifferent, is the strongest material in any Thor film.

And the Necrosword sequences work. The way he moves through shadow, the way the weapon corrupts him while making him effective, all of that lands.

Where it stops working for me is the logic. Theoretically, any of these gods should be able to deal with one man, sword or no sword. If nothing else, they could simply leave. Fly away, don’t engage, don’t give him the opportunity to get within range. The film needs them to stand still and be killed, so they stand still and are killed.

That’s a big ask. I can live with it because the story it enables is decent, and I noticed it every time.

Zeus is the film’s worst decision

The whole sequence in his court, with the assembled gods watching, is pretty bad. Nothing great about any of it.

Zeus is played entirely as a comedy character, which would be a defensible choice in isolation. The problem is what it does by comparison. Think about Odin across the previous films, and the gravitas that brought. A serious actor, playing a king with genuine weight, whose presence made Asgard feel like it mattered.

Here you have another very good actor handed the king of the Greek gods, and the film uses him for a joke about a toga coming off. It’s a misuse, and it drags Thor down with it. He gets stripped in front of a laughing crowd, and the scene exists so the audience can laugh at him too.

That’s the film’s real failure. Ragnarok made Thor funny while keeping him formidable. This one makes him the butt of it.

Jane, and the version I’d rather have seen

Jane taking up the hammer is comic accurate, and I know that, and I was still a little disappointed.

Natalie Portman is fine and the cancer storyline has real weight buried in it. The tone keeps undercutting that weight, which is a shame, because a film that sat with it properly would have been more interesting than this one.

What I’d have preferred is the other version from the comics: the one where someone genuinely out-fights Thor, beats him, and earns the hammer that way. Beta Ray Bill, who is a much stranger and more interesting proposition than a returning love interest, and who would have given the film an actual contest at its centre. That character has always struck me as more interesting, and it would have been quite cool to see.

The ending is a cop-out

I didn’t really get the daughter thing, and I wasn’t a fan of where it leaves us.

Thor ends up raising Love, Gorr’s resurrected daughter, and I have no idea whether she’ll ever appear again. It’s presented as an emotional resolution to a film that hasn’t earned one.

Worse is the sequence where Thor hands power to a group of children so they can fight. It felt lame. Everybody becomes a god, everyone gets a weapon, everyone joins in. It’s the superhero equivalent of everyone becoming Shazam, or the end of Buffy where every potential Slayer everywhere is activated at once. That worked there because seven seasons had built to it. Here it’s a scene that arrives to solve a fight.

Power should cost something. Giving it away by the handful at the end drains it.

The comedy problem

Ragnarok worked because the jokes sat on top of genuine loss. Thor lost his hammer, his eye, his father and his planet in that film, and the comedy was how he coped.

Here there’s no equivalent weight underneath. Endgame left him in a bad place, and rather than deal with that, this film opens by having him work out with the Guardians in a montage and moves on. The register that saved the character is now the character’s entire personality, and there’s nothing left for it to sit on top of.

Whether that tips over into parody is a fair question. There are stretches where I think it does.

Where it lands

Two and a half. Some good action, a few good surprises, one great performance and one great gag about jealous weapons.

Against Infinity War, where Stormbreaker actually meant something, this feels weightless. Against Ragnarok, which it’s directly sequelising, it’s a considerable step down, and I’d say the problem is that it mistook the tone for the point.

The mid-credits scene introduces Hercules with a lot of ceremony, and given how many of these stingers have gone nowhere lately, I’m not holding my breath.

July 18, 2022 0 comments

Movies

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness — Great Cameos, Lame Ending

by Hutch Morzaria May 17, 2022

written by Hutch Morzaria

The Illuminati scene is the best thing in this film and it’s also the most frustrating, because Marvel assembles the most interesting room it has ever built and then empties it in about four minutes.

Three and a half out of five. Worse than the first one, which I really enjoyed, and I’ve come out of it more annoyed than I expected to be.

Where is Mordo?

Start with the thing that’s bothered me since 2016. The first film ends by setting up Strange’s mentor as his eventual enemy. Mordo walks away having decided there are too many sorcerers in the world, and he starts doing something about it.

Nothing. He’s never properly mentioned. We get a version of him here from another universe, which is not the same thing at all and doesn’t count, and our Mordo remains wherever the franchise left him six years ago.

That’s really disappointing. It was a genuine hook with a proper character behind it, and it’s been quietly dropped in favour of a new antagonist.

The multiverse material is genuinely interesting

The good news is that the actual premise works. Jumping between universes gives the film a structure and some real visual invention, and the sequence where Strange and America fall through a stack of realities is the most imaginative thing Marvel has done in a while.

Sam Raimi’s horror instincts fit better than I expected, too. The possessed bodies, the reanimated corpse, the general willingness to make things genuinely unpleasant. It’s a real director making real choices, which isn’t always true here.

And the mechanics were laid out well enough elsewhere that the film doesn’t have to stop and explain itself. Anyone who watched a certain Disney+ series about variants and branching timelines arrives already fluent.

The Illuminati is the best casting Marvel has ever done

Patrick Stewart in the chair. The floating one, with the fancy power. I loved that.

And John Krasinski as Reed Richards is really cool casting. He looks the part, he sounds the part, and for about two minutes you can see an entire Fantastic Four film that might exist one day. It’s the single most exciting piece of casting in the film and I’d genuinely like to see him get to do it properly.

The detail that this universe’s team already defeated Thanos, and did it comfortably, is quite neat. It tells you these are the heavyweights without a flashback.

And then they’re wasted

Here’s my problem, and it’s the reason this lands at three and a half.

Black Bolt’s death is pretty lame, let’s be honest. Wanda seals his mouth shut so his own power implodes his skull. It’s a striking image and it’s over instantly, and a character whose entire premise is that his voice is a weapon of mass destruction gets removed by the most obvious counter available.

Worse is Reed. This is theoretically the smartest man in any universe, and he explains the exact nature of Black Bolt’s weakness out loud, in front of the enemy, before anyone has used it. That’s pathetic. You don’t hand over your strongest weapon in conversation.

The whole sequence is built to make Wanda look unstoppable, and the way it gets there is by making everyone else stupid. I’d much rather she’d beaten them at full strength. Let her survive the sonic attack because she’s simply more powerful than he is. That would have made her terrifying instead of making them careless.

Love conquers all, again

Marvel keeps going back to this well and it’s wearing thin.

An enormously powerful character is stopped not by being defeated but by choosing to stop, because of love. It happens here and it’s happened repeatedly, and even in the films that are genuinely about a battle, Endgame included, the resolution keeps coming back to somebody giving up for emotional reasons.

I understand what the film is going for. America shows Wanda her children recoiling from her, and Wanda sees what she’s become. Fine. But push on it for a second: across infinite universes there is obviously one where those boys would want her, where it works, where she gets the ending she’s after. The film’s own premise supplies the counter-argument to its own ending.

Let her win.

Marvel has done it before, at the end of the film where Thanos got everything he wanted, and it produced the best cliffhanger the franchise has had. Do it again here. Wanda takes what she wants, Strange fails, and the next film is about him working out how to use the Darkhold and undo it.

That’s a proper story. It uses the thing the film spends its whole runtime establishing as dangerous, it gives Strange an actual arc to walk into, and it doesn’t require the character introduced years ago to suddenly develop a conscience at the exact moment the runtime needs her to.

The stingers keep going nowhere

Related complaint. These films keep ending on a scene promising something, and then nothing happens.

Eternals finished on a man with a sword and a fairly loud implication, and that’s been sitting there ever since. This film introduces a new companion for Strange in its own stinger and I have very little confidence it’ll be picked up.

It works when they follow through. The Spider-Man films do it properly, and the Avengers ones always did. Setting up a payoff and never delivering is just a cop-out, and I’m getting tired of being asked to get excited about a scene nobody intends to use.

Where it lands

Three and a half. It definitely has good elements and some good fight sequences, and I did enjoy seeing Professor X. That could have been the X-Men proper, and it wasn’t, and it was still quite cool. Stewart’s Xavier walking into a Marvel film is a thing I didn’t expect to see.

The word this film keeps using for what happens when two universes collide is “incursion”, and it’s mentioned quickly and moved past. Given how the last Spider-Man film ended and how much of this one is about realities bumping into each other, I suspect that word is going to come back.

Not as good as the first. Still worth watching for the room with Stewart and Krasinski in it, even if what happens in that room is the most annoying five minutes of the year.

May 17, 2022 0 comments

Movies

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings — The Best Fights Marvel Has Filmed

by Hutch Morzaria September 18, 2021

written by Hutch Morzaria

The bus fight is twenty minutes into this film and it’s already better choreographed than anything Marvel has put on screen in thirteen years.

I really enjoyed this one. Four and a half out of five, and I’ve been surprised by how much it’s stayed with me.

Simu Liu holds his own immediately

A Canadian in the lead, which I’ll admit made me want this to work more than usual, and he’s genuinely good in it.

That’s harder than it looks. He has to be believable as a man deliberately living small, believable as one of the best martial artists on the planet, and believable as someone carrying a childhood nobody should have had. Most debut leads in this franchise get one register. He manages all three, and he does the comedy properly too.

The stretch at the start where he’s playing a nobody, parking cars and doing karaoke and generally being unremarkable, is quite funny and it’s doing real work. When the assassins arrive on that bus you feel the switch flip.

The action is on another level

The fight choreography here is the best in the MCU and it isn’t close.

What separates it is that the camera holds still and lets you watch. Marvel fights are usually cut to pieces, because cutting hides that the actors can’t really do it. This one lets sequences run, uses proper wire work, and treats the fighting as something to be admired rather than survived. The bus is the showpiece, and the scaffolding sequence is nearly as good.

Every one of these sequences is exceptional. If the rest of the film were mediocre I’d still recommend it for the action alone.

Tony Leung is the film

Wenwu is the best villain this franchise has had, and it’s not a close-run thing either.

He found the rings a thousand years ago, built an empire across centuries, gave it all up for a woman, and went back to it when she was murdered. Leung plays him as a man of enormous stillness who has simply been grieving for longer than most countries have existed. The motives are interesting because they’re small: he isn’t after cosmic domination, he wants his wife back and has convinced himself he can hear her.

That he’s wrong, that the voice behind the gate is a soul-eating thing using his grief as a door, is the sharpest idea in the film.

One thing I couldn’t tell you afterwards is how he originally got the rings, or exactly what turned him into the man he became before Li. The film gestures at a thousand years of conquest and doesn’t really explain the beginning of it. Minor gap, and I’d have liked the answer.

The supporting cast is unusually strong

Katy is awesome. Awkwafina gets the role that in a worse film is pure comic relief, and instead she’s the audience’s way in and eventually a character with her own competence. Her becoming an archer at the end could have been silly and it’s earned, because the film shows her learning.

Michelle Yeoh is really, really well done as Ying Nan, and I’m glad they gave her a part that actually made sense for her rather than a cameo. She’s asked to carry the exposition for an entire hidden world and she makes it feel like a person telling you about her home.

Xialing is where I’d push back. The sister is a bit weak as written, or rather she becomes far too powerful relative to where she started. She’s left behind, self-taught, running an underground fight club, and by the end she’s operating at the level of people who trained their whole lives. The idea is interesting. The maths doesn’t work.

Bringing back Trevor Slattery was the right call

Ben Kingsley is awesome, and it’s so good to see him again after Iron Man 3.

Even as comic relief, this makes complete sense. He was the man pretending to be the leader of the Ten Rings, so putting him in the film that reveals the actual organisation is a proper joke rather than a cameo for its own sake. It also quietly repairs one of the more disliked twists in the franchise by turning it into a piece of this story’s history.

He’s very funny throughout, and the film gives him a decent ending rather than using him purely as a punchline.

Where it’s weaker

The third act. Once everyone converges on Ta Lo and the Dweller-in-Darkness gets out, the film becomes two large CGI creatures colliding above a lake, and it loses the thing that made it special.

That’s a shame, because the specificity is what sets this apart. Two people fighting on a bus is thrilling. A dragon fighting a soul-eater is what every one of these films ends with. The scale goes up and the interest goes down.

Where it lands

Really good overall, and it works entirely as a standalone, which is rare in this franchise now. You could show it to someone who has seen none of the others.

It sits comfortably alongside Black Panther as the two films here that built a whole world rather than borrowing one, and it’s a much more confident debut than Ant-Man managed. Set against everything since Endgame, it’s the most complete film of the lot.

The post-credits scene has Wong bringing the rings to be scanned, and the answer comes back that they’re far older than a thousand years and are broadcasting a signal to somewhere. Nobody knows where.

That’s a very large hook to leave hanging, and I’d genuinely like to know where it goes. Some of these storylines feel unresolved on purpose. I’ve watched this several times already and I’m still curious about that signal.

September 18, 2021 0 comments

Movies

Thor: Ragnarok — They Finally Worked Out What Thor Is For

by Hutch Morzaria November 17, 2017

written by Hutch Morzaria

Thor has been the least interesting person in every film he’s appeared in, and this one fixes that by finally admitting he’s funny. I really enjoyed this. Four out of five, possibly four and a half, and I’ve come out of it more interested in the character than I’ve been in six years.

The first two Thor films played him in a serious vein and it never quite took. All that solemn Shakespearean business about kingship and worthiness, delivered by a man who is fundamentally a giant blond who hits things with a hammer and enjoys it.

What this film does is line the character up with how he’s actually been in the ensemble pictures. Go back to The Avengers and he’s already the one getting laughs, mostly at his own expense. That version was always more watchable than the one his own films kept insisting on, and Waititi has simply decided to make that the whole register.

It works. It ties much better to the Thor we know from the team films, and it means he’s no longer the character you tolerate between the good bits.

The Hulk fight is the sequence everyone wanted

Thor against the Hulk, in an arena, on a junk planet. That’s it. That’s the pitch. It’s awesome, and it delivers on something Age of Ultron gestured at and never properly gave us. Ruffalo is good throughout, too. The Hulk has been Hulk for two straight years here, has picked up some language and a considerable ego, and the version of him who sulks in a hot tub is a genuinely new thing after four films of tortured Banner.

Anyone who spotted the Planet Hulk influence on the trailers was right. The film lifts that setup wholesale and doesn’t pretend otherwise.

This movie is just Jeff Goldblum

I mean that as praise. He’s awesome. The Grandmaster could have been a throwaway eccentric and instead Goldblum does the thing only he does, where every line sounds like he thought of it half a second before saying it and isn’t fully committed to it even as it leaves his mouth. A genocidal despot playing at being a chat show host. He’s in maybe a third of the film and he’s the first thing I’d mention to anyone asking about it.

Korg is the other comic success, played by the director himself, and he gets the softest delivery of the meanest lines in the film.

Hela and the thing the film is quietly about

Full credit to Cate Blanchett, who is clearly having an enormous amount of fun and is worth watching whenever she’s on.

But the best thing about Hela isn’t Hela. It’s what she reveals. She was Odin’s executioner, and the two of them conquered the Nine Realms together before Odin decided to rebrand as a wise and peaceful king, locked her away, and painted over the ceiling murals that showed what they’d actually done.

That’s a properly interesting idea and I didn’t expect it here. Asgard’s golden age is a cover story. The warriors of Asgard weren’t protecting the realms, they were subjugating them, and Hela was the vanguard of all of it. It’s quite cool that Odin hid his own history so thoroughly that his sons had no idea, and that the truth is sitting a few inches above their heads under a coat of gold paint.

The film could have done more with it. It raises the idea, lets it land, then gets on with the gladiator plot. I’d still rather it raised it than not.

Surtur closing the loop

The other thing I liked more than I expected: bringing back Ragnarok and Surtur properly.

I’m fairly sure we saw Surtur somewhere in the first or second film, and I couldn’t tell you which, but pulling him back to be the actual instrument of Asgard’s destruction gives the whole trilogy a full arc. Thor works out that he can’t beat Hela because her power comes from Asgard itself, so the only winning move is to destroy the place. That’s a genuinely good resolution, and it makes sense of the title rather than using it as decoration.

“Asgard is not a place. It’s a people.” Good line, earned.

Thor and Loki finally read as brothers

Six films in, something has clicked between Hemsworth and Hiddleston.

I’ve always loved Loki, and he’s excellent here, but the specific thing that’s improved is the relationship. They no longer play like two actors performing brotherhood. They play like brothers: a lifetime of grievances, an established routine for winding each other up, and a mutual understanding that neither of them is going to fundamentally change. The “get help” bit is the clearest example, an old trick they’ve obviously run a hundred times.

That comes from having done this together for years, and it’s the sort of thing you can’t write your way to.

Where it’s weaker

Valkyrie is okay. Tessa Thompson is fine in the part and the character has a decent backstory as the survivor of Hela’s massacre who has spent the centuries since drinking about it. She just isn’t amazing, and next to Goldblum and Blanchett she doesn’t hold the screen the way she needs to.

The Strange sequence at the start is quite funny and slightly detached from everything else, feeling like a scene the film owed his own picture rather than something it needed.

And the comedy occasionally undercuts a moment it shouldn’t. Odin dies and we’re back to jokes fairly briskly. That’s the risk of the register, and mostly the film gets the balance right.

Where it lands

Overall a good movie, and one of my better Marvel films. I’d happily watch it several more times, which is not something I’d have predicted saying about a Thor picture.

It’s the best of his three by a comfortable distance, and I accept that’s a low bar. Set against the rest of this year’s superhero output it holds up well, though Logan back in March is still the one that stayed with me longest, and that’s a different kind of film entirely.

The mid-credits sting has a very large ship pulling alongside the Asgardian refugees, and we all know roughly what that’s building towards next May. Thor has lost his hammer, an eye, his father and his entire planet in one film, and has somehow come out of it more likeable. I’m genuinely curious what happens when he meets whatever’s on that ship.

November 17, 2017 1 comment

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