Big Jim is BACK...Sort of: A Review of Avatar: The Way of Water

 directed by James Cameron

written by James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno

Here's a fun fact: famed auteur Quentin Tarantino, who auspiciously burst onto the filmmaking scene in 1992 with Reservoir Dogs, and who is quite well-known for taking his sweet time in making films, so much so that in thirty years he has only made ten feature films (nine if one counts Kill Bill as one movie), has actually made just as many movies as film titan James Cameron, who had a ten-year head start on him, having made his first movie in 1982.  To me, it is such a strange thing to consider that the quirky arthouse darling has made just as many films as one of the most commercially successful filmmakers of all time.  

After a fairly prolific run in the 80s in which he made four films and in the 90s in which he made three, Cameron has made a habit of making his audiences wait for his next movie.  The 13-year-gap between 2009's Avatar and its sequel Avatar: The Way of Water, is the longest that Cameron has ever made us wait for a new film from him. Inevitably, we have to ask, it is worth the wait?

Well, the answer is yes, and no.  

An undisclosed number of years after the events of the first film, in which the Na'vi, the native population of the fictional moon Pandora, expelled the marauding humans of the Resource Development Administration (RDA) from their planet, the formerly hero of the first film, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) has long since discarded his paraplegic human body and is living full-time in his Na'vi/human hybrid avatar, is living in peace with his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and their children. He has assumed leadership over the Omaticaya clan of the Na'vi and is living in relative peace and happiness, when the RDA come back, this time with bigger ambitions, and better guns.  They also have a bunch of grunts who died during their first tour of Pandora but whose consciousnesses were "saved" and who are back now, with new Na'vi/human hybrid bodies, and a score to settle. Foremost among these is Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) who died at Neytiri's hands in the last film and is now itching for some payback.  

The renewed threat from the RDA is no laughing matter and in a little over a year, they have Jake, whom they have identified as the leader of the Na'vi resistance, and his family on the run. They end up taking refuge among the Metkayina, a tribe of Na'vi who live along the ocean led by Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and Ronal (Kate Winslet), many kilometers away from the forest that Jake and his family have had to flee to keep the RDA from laying waste to the Omaticaya.  Will they be safe there, or will the RDA find Jake and destroy everything he holds dear?   

To get straight to the point: I enjoyed myself.  I must qualify, though, that I think a large part of this was down to the conscious management of my expectations from the film. The first film has often been derided, (and not entirely incorrectly) as a high-tech version of the Australian-American cartoon "Ferngully: The Last Rainforest," so the decidedly derivative story was never the main draw of the first film. It was always about the visuals, and Cameron's remarkable world-building, which he kicked off in spectacular fashion back with the first film and actually manages to continue this time around.  The movie is truly a visual masterpiece, with just enough story to string the gorgeous imagery together. Presented in IMAX 3-D, the movie is astonishing to behold, and reminded me of what the format is really capable of. As much as I have enjoyed most of the offerings of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I must readily admit that they rarely ever came up with movies that justified the hefty IMAX 3-D premium. This, however, is not the case with Avatar: The Way of Water; it takes full advantage of the format and then some.   

Unfortunately, that really is all the movie has  going for it, as the film's characters are mostly flat and forgettable, with nearly no discernible arcs, and the story just trots out one trope after another. The ham-handed "save the whales" message near the end feels like it was shoved in with a crowbar. It was just fortunate that it was fun to behold. I will say, though that anyone who praises the storytelling here while putting down all Marvel movies as empty spectacle needs to have their head examined. And yes, the film was considerably too long.

Ironically, the one character in the entire film who displays anything even approaching some form of development is the antagonist, Miles Quaritch, who has to come to terms with the fact that he's basically a copy of his former self and the fact that when he died, his son was left on Pandora and has grown up fatherless. He is initially indifferent to his son Spider (Jake Champion) who has  grown up feral and actually more fond of the Na'vi than his own species, but this changes as the narrative progresses.  Quaritch actually gets to make the beginnings of a transition from one-dimensional cliche to nuanced character, which is more than one can say about any of the other characters in the story.

Another quibble I have is actually with the presentation of the film, which for reasons I truly cannot understand jumps from one frame rate to the other repeatedly throughout the film.   In other words, without any discernible transition or narrative reason, the film jumps between the normal frame rate of 30 frames per second rate that film's are shown in and the 60 frames per second.  It was extremely jarring and felt distinctly out of character for Cameron, who is normally on top of this kind of thing.

 In the end, I don't have any regrets. This was a good time at the movies, and really demonstrates quite emphatically why streaming is simply no substitute for the theatrical movie experience, but it definitely isn't the masterpiece that its promoters are insisting it is. 

7/10

Quo Vadis, MCU? (Spoilers for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever)

 SPOILER WARNING!

In the inevitable mid-credits stinger for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Letitia Wright's Shuri, who has assumed the mantle of the Black Panther but has handed the opportunity to serve as Ruler of Wakanda to the tribes to sort out among themselves, pays Lupita N'yongo's Nakia a visit in her adopted home of Haiti, only to find that Nakia and her late brother have had a son whom she has also named T'Challa.

And so the question of how to keep T'Challa's story going without recasting the role has been answered. Personally, I didn't care for this approach, but I guess it beats having a multiversal variant of T'Challa hop into universe 616 through an errant Doctor Strange portal. 

Crucially, though, even though there was an obligatory "Black Panther will return" text in the final credits crawl, the generally somber mood of the film and the absence of an end-credits teaser kind of had me wondering...exactly when will that be, and who will be wearing the mantle then?

Yes, I know the film ended with Shuri taking her synthetic heart-shaped herb and donning the Black Panther suit, but her doing so felt less like a passing of the torch and more like designating her as a placeholder until the new T'Challa is old enough to assume the identity, something which, barring an Avengers: Endgame style time-jump, won't happen for a very long time.  Shuri didn't hold the Black Panther mantle for very long in the comics either, after all. Maybe after telling this very cathartic story about grief, Marvel really does need to lay the character to rest, at least for a while. 

That actually got me wondering; how does Marvel plan to "retire" the second batch of Avengers, i.e. those introduced mostly in Phase 3? The likes of Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Sam Wilson as Captain America, by the next Avengers movie, will have been around for nearly ten years. James Gunn has openly said that the current incarnation of the Guardians of the Galaxy will end with the third movie.  Avengers: Endgame was the perfect way to retire at least three of the O.G. Avengers, while the Hawkeye series may have provided a convenient road to retirement for Jeremy Renner's Clint Barton as well as a low-key passing of the torch to Hailee Steinfeld's Kate Bishop. As much as I despised Thor: Love and Thunder, it does make sense that Thor, being a god, is still around, as is the case with the ultra-powerful Hulk. One does wonder, however, how much longer Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo will agree to appear in these roles, especially given Hemsworth's recent discovery that he is genetically predisposed to Alzheimer's disease and Ruffalo's, well, age.  Will these characters be allowed to retire, or will they get barbecued by an Infinity-Stone-like McGuffin? It's not particularly pleasant to contemplate but considering how Black Widow and Iron Man met their ends in Avengers: Endgame I can't help but think about it. 

Another issue I have with characters being retired, whether through death or otherwise, is that I can't help but wonder: what happens if audiences don't embrace the replacements that Marvel is lining up for them, much in the same way that Star Wars fans have, by and large, rejected the poor copies of Luke Skywalker and his crew that were trotted out in the Disney-era sequels?

In the last few years, it has been made clear that nearly all of the "OG" Avengers have replacements lined up, with Anthony Mackie's Falcon having taken up the Captain America mantle, Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova clearly being set up as the new Black Widow, and Tatiana Maslany's She-Hulk rather blatantly being set up as the replacement for the Hulk.  Ironheart, or Riri Williams was introduced in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever to set up her upcoming Disney+ show and it's pretty obvious that she's basically the next Iron Man.  It would seem that all of the MCU characters are fair game for this treatment, with the exception, of course, of Sony-held Spider-Man, who will likely live forever.   The thing is, how will audiences feel about it? I can't help but wonder. 

What I find sad about this development is that, apart from the characters who have made it to the big screen, Marvel has literally thousands more at their disposal, especially with the return of the X-Men and the Fantastic Four to Marvel's stable.  They went the right route by introducing characters like Shang-Chi and Moon Knight, neither of whom has any connection to what came before.  This was what made most of the characters introduced from Phase I through Phase III endearing: they all felt  fresh and new.  Shang-Chi and Moon Knight both have that feeling, and if people had responded well to the Eternals, well, they would have benefited from that too. 

By trotting out "replacement Avengers," however, Marvel could be setting themselves up for a serious fall in the not-too-distant future.

That's just me speculating, of course; in the end the market will determine what stays and what goes, just like it's done with the comic books for decades. 

 

Not The Disaster I Was Expecting: A Review of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

 directed by Ryan Coogler

written by Joe Robert Cole and Ryan

I'll be honest; I was firmly in the camp of the "recast Chadwick Boseman" viewers. I had my choice of actors who could have filled in his shoes, and quite frankly didn't see the point of indulging the sentimentality that had attended his death. For one thing, recasting roles vacated by actors' deaths is nothing new; Warner Brothers didn't kill the Joker after Heath Ledger's death and that worked out pretty well for them eleven years later. Also, T'Challa felt like far too important a character to bury so soon after his introduction.  All that said, I understood the imperative that pushed Marvel Studios and Ryan Coogler to forge ahead with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever without T'Challa.  Even so, I was basically expecting an absolute train wreck of a film. I ultimately watched it because I wanted to see where they would take the story, but my expectations were as low as they could possibly be.

I was, as a result, pleasantly surprised by what I eventually saw.

The film starts with King T'Challa (Boseman, depicted later exclusively in old footage) dying offscreen, with his sister Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright) trying and failing to save him from a disease that is never named.  Shuri, together with her mother Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) and the entire nation of Wakanda mourn the passing of their king. 

A year later, Wakanda,  now under the rule of Ramonda, is fending off attempts by the "developed" world to steal its precious metal, Vibranium, which they are constantly searching for in Wakanda's outreach centers. 

What not even Wakanda knows, however is that the United States has built a Vibranium detector and has started poking around under the Atlantic Ocean in search of the precious metal, where its machine found some. The Americans are then attacked by an all-new threat: blue-skinned, superhuman adversaries, led by a mysterious, extremely powerful flying assailant.

As Shuri grapples with her grief, Ramonda takes her to the riverbanks in an attempt to help her process it, when both of them are visited by the Namor (Tenoch Huerta-Mejia) king of the sea people who attacked the Americans. Namor blames Wakanda's act of opening itself to the world for the Americans' rapacious hunt for Vibranium which was brought them to the depths near his kingdom. He therefore commands Ramonda and Shuri to bring him the American scientist responsible for creating the machine, threatening to bring war upon Wakanda if they do not comply.

Wanting to head off disaster, Shuri and General Okoye (Danai Gurira) travel to America where they visit their old friend Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) and get him to tell them where to find this scientist, who turns out to be a prodigy studying at MIT named Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne).  Realizing they cannot bring themselves to turn her over to Namor, with his clearly murderous intent, Shuri and Okoye attempt to bring Riri over to Wakanda, but when Namor and his forces attack, Shuri goes to his kingdom of Talocan in an attempt to talk him down, only to realize that Wakanda and Talocan are basically on a collision course, a problem made worse by the fact that Wakanda is still without its greatest protector, the Black Panther, unless she can do something about it.

 If I had watched the first Black Panther movie and this one movie back-to-back without knowing the real-life event that inspired it, I can honestly say I would have been far unkinder to this movie than I am feeling now. A lot of the changes would have felt nonsensical.  Boseman's shadow looms large over the entire film, which struggles to fill the shoes he has left behind.

The good news, though, is that they manage to tell a coherent story even despite this massive handicap.

 The bad news, however, is that even though Coogler, screenwriter Joe Robert Cole and the whole crew lean heavily into Boseman's death as a story point, they remain unable to fully overcome the challenges that  his absence from the story has created. Letitia Wright does a commendable job portraying Shuri's grief throughout the film, quite likely inspired by how broken-hearted the actress was at the death of her co-star two years ago, but though she is clearly written as the lead, she is simply not enough to carry the film by herself. She does, however, get able support from her  co-stars like Bassett, Gurira, Lupita N'yongo who returns as Nakia, and Winston Duke who returns as M'Baku, but the net result is a film that feels very much like it's missing its lead. Then, of course, there's the usual Marvel malaise of the big CGI battle at the end, punctuated by the fact that when Riri Williams finally goes into battle in her Ironheart suit that fans knew as coming, it does not look anywhere near as convincing as the original Iron Man suit that Stan Winston Studios and Industrial Light and Magic built all the way back in 2007.  Given the fantastical nature of Namor and his army, Coogler had to have known that the final battle would be CGI-heavy, but he doesn't seem to have learned his lessons from the truly awkward CGI mess that was the first film's final battle. Plus, the film was at least twenty minutes too long.

All of that said, the storytelling was genuinely affecting, especially when it focused on how the characters involved dealt with the grief of loss.  It informs their decisions, and in Shuri's case her compassion shines through as she seeks to honor her brother, even as she longs to avenge her own losses late in the film.  The acting is pretty solid all around, with Angela Bassett turning in a particularly powerful performance that elevates every moment she's in the film. 

Also, apart form the CGI, which is the usual melange thrown together by ten thousand different contractors, the production work on this film is rock solid, with most of Coogler's key collaborators like composer Ludwig Goransson, costume designer Ruth Carter and art director Hannah Beechler all having come back to lovingly render once more the world they brought to the screen for the first time four years ago. Goransson's score was, for me, a particular highlight as I was happy to note that he didn't lean into his themes and leitmotifs from the first movie but rather composed a whole new set of tunes for Coogler to work with, including a haunting siren song for the denizens of Talocan. Carter and Beechler, apart from bringing back the color and power of Wakanda, also bring a whole new world with the Kingdom of Talocan and its underwater denizens. While I doubt this movie will walk away with the brace of Oscars that the first one did, some of its technical work is bound to get some kind of recognition.

Also, I was glad to see how Marvel had addressed the problem of Namor appearing to be an Aquaman clone, despite his comic-book counterpart actually being older than the DC Comics character (for a change). I wasn't particularly bowled over by Tenoch Huerta-Mejia's performance, but I thought it was all right, and I look forward to seeing what Marvel can do with the character. 

Do I think Marvel could have made a better movie if they had simply recast T'Challa? Honestly? I still think so, but it is what it is.

7.5/10

Is Marvel Fatigue Real?

 It seems silly to even suggest that the Marvel Cinematic Universe, officially the biggest box-office franchise in the history of movies is in any sort of trouble.  As of writing, the MCU has an unbroken and unequaled streak of 29 films that have opened at number one, the aggregate global box office gross of which, as of writing is $27.1 billion.

Since restrictions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic have eased, the MCU has released six films theatrically, all of which have opened at number one, all but one of which spent at least two weekends as the number one movie in North America, and one of which, namely Spider-Man: No Way Home has the distinction of being the first movie released during the pandemic to gross over a billion dollars at the global box-office. 

It's not all happy news, though; of the six MCU movies released during the pandemic, four of them, namely Black Widow, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness, and Thor: Love and Thunder,  shed over roughly two-thirds of their audience in their second weekends.  Black Widow was arguably a victim of Disney's idiotic day-and-date release strategy which saw the movie released in theaters at exactly the same time as it was made available for a fee on Disney+. In the case of, Spider-Man: No Way Home, there were extenuating circumstances, namely the second weekend coinciding with Christmas eve. That movie is an outlier, though, as it has since gone on to recover quite well from that first-to-second weekend drop, grossing over three times its mammoth opening weekend of $260 million. 

The steep second weekend drops of the Doctor Strange and Thor sequels, however, don't have any particular explanation behind them, other than that, perhaps, the long-dreaded Marvel fatigue may finally be setting in. 

The films of Phase 1, like the first installments of Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and Avengers, on the average, saw second weekend drops of around 50%. Captain America's first movie, with its 60% drop, was the outlier there.  With Phases 2 and 3, the average attrition of a Marvel movie in its first to second weekend shifted gradually from the low 50% to the high 50%, bordering on 60%. This was tempered, of course, by the fact that Marvel movies tended to have bigger and bigger opening weekends as the sprawling Infinity Saga neared its climax.  There were outliers, like Black Panther and Spider-Man: Far From Home, which experienced gentler-than-average drops from their opening weekends, but overall attrition tended to be higher.

Looking at Phase 4, I found it notable that only one of the six MCU movies released, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, experienced a first-to-second weekend drop below 60%, although it was also among the lower grossers of the six.  It didn't shed as much of an audience as the other films because its audience wasn't as big to begin with. 

Is it fair to say, then, that audience interest in these movies is waning? 

It is really hard to say, since these movies are still making money hand over fist. At the very least, though, these figures, coupled with the less-than stellar reviews for three out of the last six Marvel movies, should at least put Kevin Feige and his brain trust on notice that they may have to shake things up a bit in terms of how they tell their stories.  The chinks in Marvel's armor are showing. 

Another Type of "C" in the MCU (HEAVY SPOILERS for THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER)

 After posting spoiler-free reviews for tentpole movies, specifically Marvel ones, I usually follow up with a deep dive into the fun stuff like cameos and plot twists, which inevitably involves heavy spoilers. 

For Thor: Love and Thunder I'd like to do something similar but nonetheless a little different given the subject matter. 

FINAL WARNING: HEAVY SPOILERS

Though the movie itself was conspicuously flawed in a number of ways, I'd like to applaud Marvel for choosing to tell the story of a hero with stage-four cancer. 

I can't help but feel that Natalie Portman was enticed to return to the role of Jane Foster, who was basically just window dressing in the first couple of Thor movies before staying out of the third one altogether, by the prospect not only of donning the superhero tights but by the prospect of finally giving Jane her own, compelling story, especially since hers is basically the only compelling story in the whole movie.

Her severely-ill Jane Foster is basically the perfect counterpoint to Christian Bale's Gorr the God Butcher.  Both of them are empowered by their magical weapons and both of them are actually dying as a direct result.  The Necrosword which empowers Gorr is slowly poisoning him, while Mjolnir, which empowers Jane, is actually draining her of the energy she needs to fight the stage-four cancer ravaging her body.  Gorr points this out to her late in the film, and she is thus confronted with the choice to sit out the final battle and recuperate or stop Gorr once and for all at the cost of her own life. Jane, of course, chooses the latter. It's not the first time a Marvel hero has laid their life down to save the world, but Portman really sells the moment and her sacrifice at the end really does resonate as a result.

Jane's journey, drawn in large part from the comics written by Jason Aaron and drawn by Esad Ribic and Russell Dauterman, is about the only part of the film that has any real narrative heft or emotional resonance, and it can be genuinely annoying to see Waititi constantly undercutting these emotional beats with forced jokes before he finally lets the story breathe a little bit towards the end of the film.  

I've said before that terminal illness, or in particular cancer, can fit into a superhero narrative  effectively; James Gunn did it to superb effect in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, and had TLAT not been so obsessed with referencing 80s songs and making fun of itself, it could have been even more on point here. 

More to the point, though, the folks at Marvel could have taken this opportunity to salute one of their  own heroes whom they lost in real life to colon cancer, Chadwick Boseman. The joke-a-minute storytelling, unfortunately severely diluted this, as did the bad CGI, the lazy music scoring, and Russell Crowe's weird Mediterranean accent (though I confess it has a guilty pleasure quality to it). I know that the movie could not have spent its entire running time grappling with a topic as depressing as terminal illness--that would have made for an even worse story--but telling a story like this needed a delicate sense of balance which Waititi unfortunately did not strike and which, quite frankly, he didn't even attempt. 

 Still, the fact that Marvel was willing to tell the story of someone who was basically doomed to die tells me something interesting about where they may be willing to go in the future...but that's a topic for another day.

The Thunderous Return of Jane Foster: A Review of Thor: Love and Thunder (Spoiler-free)

 directed by Taika Waititi

written by Taika Waititi and Jennifer Kaytin Robinson

I'm going to be blunt: I was not expecting much from Thor: Love and Thunder. When it was announced some months before the pandemic I rolled my eyes a little bit, wondering why unlike Robert Downey Jr., and Chris Evans, who had wrapped up their tenure in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in fine style with Avengers: Endgame, Chris Hemsworth was insisting on having another go.  It didn't really matter that Taika Waititi, who had breathed fresh air into the Thor franchise with Thor: Ragnarok, was returning to direct and this time write the film, I just felt the film was superfluous at a time when Marvel needed to start focusing on their next generation of Avengers. Subsequent announcements like the casting of Batman himself, Christian Bale, as well as acting legend Russell Crowe piqued my interest, but I still felt jaded about it.

My mind changed quite a bit with the trailer, though, which promised a dazzling, fun romp through space with the God of Thunder with colorful new characters and some familiar old ones as well.

The film starts with Gorr (Bale), the last of an unnamed race who walks the desert with his ailing child Love (India Rose Hemsworth) and who offers the last of his strength praying to his god for her to live, all in vain, as she dies. Shortly thereafter, Gorr stumbles into an oasis where the very same god to whom he was praying is apparently celebrating the defeat of a mysterious creature with an even more mysterious sword and discovers just how indifferent that god is to his plight. The sword, which is actually called the Necrosword calls out to Gorr, and he uses it to take his bloody revenge on the god, which then prompts him to take an oath to kill all gods.

Meanwhile, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) following the events of Avengers: Endgame is a bit aimless. He goes on adventures with the Guardians of the Galaxy (Chris Pratt as Star Lord and the rest of the gang are all back sans Zoe Saldana's Gamora, of course) but when he hears reports of a mysterious figure killing gods all over space with a mysterious sword he sets off on his own in search of the threat with his best bud Korg (Taika Waititi).  Elsewhere, Thor's ex-girlfriend Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) is in a bad way health-wise, and basically at the end of her rope. Having exhausted normal scientific treatment, she heads over to New Asgard, where the broken pieces of Mjolnir are on display in a museum, and hopes to receive just a little bit of its magic. What happens next takes her by surprise and she soon finds herself reunited with Thor in a way neither of them had expected. `

Suddenly, Gorr then kidnaps the children from New Asgard, and Thor, King Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), and Jane, realizing the scope of the threat, seek help from the gods themselves, led by the powerful, pompous Zeus (a gloriously campy Russell Crowe). Will it be enough, and will they be in time? 

Thor: Ragnarok was, for me one of the real gems of Phase 3 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so to reiterate, I was not really thrilled to hear about this new installment, which honestly felt tacked on. Fortunately, Waititi's unhinged sense of fun, along with earnest, genuinely moving performances by series newcomer Christian Bale and the returning Natalie Portman really helped keep things interesting. Hemsworth really knows that Thor is at his best as a goofball so he brings on more of that, trying on a loud new outfit and quite notably shedding the dad bod his character had picked up in Avengers: Endgame.  

There's an energy to the production that helped me overlook most of its foibles, but not all of the jokes hit, and the shift in tone from the more serious scenes to the lighthearted ones was, at times, enough to give one whiplash. A light and bubbly superhero movie featuring terminal illness? These are not necessarily mutually exclusive concepts; Star Lord's mom died of cancer in Guardians of the Galaxy but the movie somehow balanced these scenes out.  Waititi, however, doesn't quite pull it off and for the first time I understand some of the disdain that some critics had for Jojo Rabbit's irreverent look at the dying days of World War II. 

Still, I really do enjoy Waititi's love for the more out-there aspects of Jack Kirby's work. He features the cosmic megabeing Eternity as, well, kind of a MacGuffin, and there are lots of visual nods to the Celestials as Jack Kirby drew them, not how Chloe Zhao reimagined them in Eternals. 

Speaking of visuals, though, I was a bit disappointed at how, after letting Sam Raimi have his way with some incredibly moody lighting to Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness, Marvel seems to have reverted to a more generic look in terms of lighting and color grading. Also, majority of the VFX scenes were shrouded in darkness, which is never a good thing. Considering how long Marvel have been at this, it was distinctly disappointing

Equally disappointing is the seemingly half-baked work of yet another Marvel veteran, composer Michael Giacchino, who doesn't even seem to have thought of a proper theme for this film, which is even more of a let-down considering the kind of work Giacchino has previously done for the MCU in its Spider-Man and Doctor Strange films. Thor now has the unfortunate distinction of being the only solo franchise in the MCU to have had four different composers across as many films. They didn't even bring back Led Zeppelin for this; instead they made Axl Rose and company a whole lot richer by featuring a whopping FOUR Guns 'n' Roses songs.  It's somehow apt, therefore, that Thor has an identity crisis of sorts in this film considering that musically, his character, after all these years, still doesn't have an identifiable theme. 

If nothing else, though, Hemsworth, Waititi and the gang have shown that there are still a few more decent Thor stories to tell, and with any luck, they'll be better than this one. 

6/10

A Hero is Born...Sort of: A Review of Lightyear

 directed by Angus MacLane

written by Angus MacLane, Matthew Aldrich and Jason Headey

When Toy Story 4, which ended with Woody leaving his crew of toys, including Buzz Lightyear, to join up with his love interest Bopeep and HER crew of toys, made over $1 billion worldwide back in 2019, Disney took it to mean that there was plenty of interest left in the brand. They then decided that the best way to follow this story up was...with the origin story of Buzz Lightyear. Not the toy, mind you, but the fictional character within the Toy Story universe on whom the toy was based. 

The result is a movie that could have been a lot worse, but which could have been better, as well. 

Lightyear is the story of, well, Buzz Lightyear (played here by Captain America himself, Chris Evans, making his Pixar debut) a Space Ranger of Star Command who, together with his commanding officer and best friend Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba) is accompanying a team of scientists as they explore possible the galaxy.  While exploring the surface of the planet T'Kani Prime, they are attacked by hostile wildlife and have to flee in a hurry. Unfortunately, this results in severe damage to their ship, and the entire mission is marooned on an alien planet, without a functioning hyper-drive to get them home.  Buzz then takes it on himself to run the test flights for new hyperdrive fuels, only to discover that each unsuccessful flight, which lasts only minutes for him, results in a lapse of four years upon his return.  He perseveres, however, going into space again and again and losing time in four year clumps, even as his marooned colleagues, living behind a force field, have made a life for themselves on this new planet, including Alisha, who starts her own family.  Meanwhile, the closest thing Buzz has to a family is a robotic cat, Sox (Ben Sohn) that Alisha gives him. After one trip, Buzz is shocked to find that more time has passed than even he could have imagined, and that the T'Kani Prime is now facing a threat the likes of which he has never seen before: the evil Zurg.  

To be clear, the Toy Story movies were never straight-up adventures aimed at kids. The bright colors were incidental to the existential crises that the film's characters, led in all three films by Woody, felt. I've often said to my kids that Tom Hanks' greatest acting performance is actually as Woody considering he makes a near-homicidal maniac to be one of the most endearing characters in the history of animation. Those movies were all about the characters' foibles, including Buzz's delusions of grandeur in the first film. 

This movie is, to be clear, is not about any of that, and I honestly think it's unfair that a lot of people were measuring it by that metric.  One thing this film gets right, even as it tries to distinguish Buzz from his toy counterpart, is to make Buzz, like all of Pixar's best leads, a flawed character. His singlemindedness and determination to finish his mission at the cost of all else is not extolled as a virtue but rather as a flaw that causes him to basically miss out on much of his life, and this is the lesson he learns over the course of the film. There are plenty of callbacks to his Toy Story incarnation, with lines lifted directly from the earlier film, but it's clear this movie is meant to be its own thing.

I liked how this film eschewed the pastel colors of the Toy Story movies (and most other Pixar movies, for that matter, with the obvious exception of WALL-E) in favor of a darker, murkier color palette to reflect the grittier aspect of the narrative. There's a pretty obvious visual nod to Star Wars in at least one scene (and probably many others that I missed) but overall, the goal is to make this universe feel more lived-in, and it works.  And yes, whatever the Tim Allen fanboys may say, I liked Chris Evans' performance as the "real-life" Buzz Lightyear. He was properly engaging as a character. 

A gripe I had with the movie was a bit of a dissonance between the highly atmospheric, action- adventure approach and the goofy, lovable supporting characters that the film inevitably introduces later on, like the idiot played by Taika Waititi or the ex-con. There are space bugs that, in a movie rated PG-13 or higher could definitely have the potential to kill one or more supporting characters, but this movie is only PG, so do the math.  All of the main antagonists are robots, so there's no worry about the gratuitous henchman deaths that earned The Incredibles Pixar's first-ever PG rating.  That said, despite the considerably lower body count of organic lifeforms, this movie still gets a PG rating for "action and peril" despite the fact that, at no point did I ever really feel like the characters were in actual peril. You know in Coco there was this ever-present threat that Miguel might not make it back to the land of the living, which grew greater and greater as the film progressed?  This film, despite its villain, doesn't have that sense of urgency.

It's a handsome film, to be sure, but far from Pixar's best work. It's actually more reminiscent of a family-friendly version of an episode of Love, Death and Robots, the animated anthology series on Netflix. 

A lot has been said about a certain aspect of one of the supporting characters which has caused a furor among conservatives all around the world. I have no opinion on that; I will only say that Disney/Pixar made a judgment call and ultimately paid the price for it in terms of global box-office. 

7/10

A Legacy Sequel that Improves on the Legacy: A Review of Top Gun: Maverick

directed by Joseph Kosinsky

written by Ehren Kruger, Eric Martin Singer, Christopher McQuarrie, Peter Craig and Justin Marks

If I'm perfectly honest, I was not the biggest fan of the 1986 film Top Gun growing up. I watched it in theaters, and I did enjoy it, but the older I got, the less I cared for the film. While other films of my youth like Aliens (which came out in the same year), Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park aged pretty well, Top Gun, which was quite unfortunately dated by its Cold War setting, did not. My feelings for the film are actually best summed up by this hilarious send-up prepared by the folks at Honest Trailers.      

It was to my great surprise, then, that when I saw the first trailer for this film, I felt an odd rush of nostalgia when I heard the first few notes of Harold Faltermeyer's now iconic "Top Gun Anthem." From a film that I would think about seeing when it came out, Top Gun: Maverick suddenly acquired an urgency that had not been there before.  The stellar reviews came in, a good chunk of which were from people who openly professed to hating the original film, and my curiosity reached a fever pitch.

So Top Gun: Maverick takes place over thirty years after the events of the first film, and we find Captain Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Tom Cruise, naturally) testing hypersonic jets for the Navy. Maverick, who could easily have made Admiral by now, has dodged promotions his entire career so that he can stay in the air. Unfortunately, his testing facility is shut down by the big brass, who have decided against spending any more of taxpayers' money on manned aircraft. Fortunately for Mitchell, however, one of his old buddies, Tom "Iceman" Kazansky (Val Kilmer), who happens to be Admiral and the Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet now, has a very special assignment for him over at the Naval Air Station North Island. Maverick finds himself returning to to the training facility where it all began: Top Gun.  This time, though, he's going back as an instructor, to train an elite group of pilots to perform an impossible mission (sorry) to take out a uranium enrichment plant in an unnamed enemy nation's army base deep in the mountains.  Crucially, one of the candidates for the mission happens to be Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw (Miles Teller) the son of Maverick's best friend Nick "Goose" Bradshaw who died back when he and Maverick were students at Top Gun. There is serious bad blood between Maverick and Rooster as the former blocked the papers of the latter back when he was a cadet at the naval aviator's academy, setting him back a couple of years.  Maverick, of course, was only trying to protect Rooster, and acting on the secret request of his late mother. It's a challenging task ahead, with all of the clashing egos, and neither time, nor his commanding officer (Jon Hamm) is on Maverick's side. 

Apparently Tom Cruise was, for a time, not at all keen on revisiting this particular story because of concerns, among other things, that the first film felt a bit too propagandistic. Well, it's a good thing somebody changed his mind because in my humble opinion, Top Gun: Maverick is a rare thing: it's the legacy sequel done correctly.   Unlike recent legacy sequels that essentially kicked its beloved legacy characters to the curb (I'm looking at you, Star Wars), this film brings its main character forward and gives him a bit of growth as a character. The first film was about Maverick stepping out of the shadow of his father, this one is about him doing right by his surrogate son. It's a nice story of redemption, which is quite a step up from the paper-thin plot of the first film.  

What is even more significantly stepped up, however, is the sheer commitment to authenticity that's on display here; the flight sequences are gripping, and in this film much more emphasis is placed on the G-forces the pilots experience in the course of their training and, ultimately their mission, seemingly borrowing a little bit of a tension-generator from another 80s aviation classic, The Right Stuff.  Ed Harris, who played John Glenn in that film, makes an appearance here. These action sequences, at a time when everything in theaters feels like weightless CGI, are just wondrous to not just behold but to experience.

As the title suggests, this is Tom Cruise's movie through and through.  He's basically the only character left from the first film, with Val Kilmer only making the briefest appearance owing to his sickness, which is actually written into the film.  It's gratifying, though, that the filmmakers have cast Jennifer Connelly, who is reasonably close to Cruise's actual age, as Maverick's love interest Penny instead of going with the old trope of having him hook up with someone half his age.  It's a thankless role, but Connelly makes the most out of it, as does the talented young actress who plays Penny's teenaged daughter.  Call me grateful for small favors, but I'm also glad they didn't go for a hot and heavy love/make-out scene, focusing instead on how Maverick connects with Penny by communicating with her and laughing with her. This film doesn't just succeed because of its high-flying action sequences; as unlikely as this sounds it gets a lot of the quieter moments right, too.

Most importantly, to my mind this film works because of how it allows Maverick to grow older, just like the target audience. The fact that Cruise doesn't really "pass the torch" in this film to his younger cast mates has grated on some writers, but let's get real here; nobody's going to watch a movie called Top Gun: MAVERICK to see a bunch of millennials make the freaking title character look like an over-the-hill dotard. The Star Wars sequels, this ain't. Is it a bit of a fantasy to see a borderline senior citizen taking G-forces like a champ, flying rings around kids half his age? Maybe, but when it's this well-realized it's a fantasy one is willing to indulge. It's almost as silly as the reviewers poking fun at the fact that the enemy nation in this movie is completely anonymous, as if they WANT Hollywood to go around picking fights with other countries. Well, like one writer said: go ahead and make it Putin's Russia, if you want to. 

It's a little harder, however, to indulge the inherent silliness in the film's premise. The script takes pains to explain why the U.S. Navy has to use older model F-18s as opposed to more modern F-35s for the movie's big mission, but is conspicuously silent on why drones cannot be used for the mission, despite the fact that drones are the reason why Maverick's test flight program was shut down and would entail considerably less risk to human life.  I was paying close attention for the line that would explain this, but the reason never came. I guess the writers were just hoping the viewers would forget about this niggling detail when we would see the awesome actions sequences and, well, to be fair, for the duration of the film, at least I did. 

There's also a touch of silliness towards the climax of the film, which I won't spoil, but suffice it to say  that,  after managing to sell me on its (flawed) premise and draw me in with its remarkable verisimilitude, the film suddenly takes a turn into the borderline fantastical in its final few minutes, in a manner vaguely reminiscent of the ridiculous airport chase scene in the otherwise superlative film Argo.  As with Argo, though, this doesn't really detract from my overall enjoyment of the film.

This was a movie made for people my age, and I have to say, I quite liked it.  

  8.5/10

 

On Marvel's "Disney Plus Requirement" (SPOILER ALERT)

If you're both a box-office geek and a Marvel Cinematic Universe fan like I am, I've got a bit of bad news: in its second week-end of release, the latest MCU entry, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness has dropped a steep 67% from its soaring opening weekend gross of $187 million in North America down to an estimated $61 million dollars  To put this into perspective, the much reviled 2003 film The Hulk (also produced by MCU head honcho Kevin Feige in his pre-MCU days, incidentally) had a similar 1st to 2nd weekend plummet, though of course it did not start out with such a mighty first weekend. All told, the second weekend of DS2 is the kind of opening weekend most studios would kill to have, especially in post-pandemic times. In terms of global box-office, the film experienced  a 60% drop-off from its opening week-end take, which is more important to this discussion, for reasons to be explained below.  

This has to be some cause for concern among the head honchos at Marvel, who have included front-loading into their box-office projections by now and who can usually expect between 50% to 60% percent 2nd weekend drops.   This movie, by rights, should have been in the upper echelons of Marvel's usual box-office hauls, considering the pedigree of those involved in the movie. It is, after all, Sam Raimi's first movie in almost ten years and his first superhero movie since 2007's Spider-Man 3. 

So what happened? Was it a really bad movie?  I certainly didn't think so, and with a 74% "Fresh" critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and with a verified audience score of 86%, I can reasonably say that a fair number of people agree with my assessment.  Also, its higher-than-expected box-office drop notwithstanding, it's still the number #1 movie in most of the world, so there's that. So why the higher-than-usual attrition?

 I'd just like to propound my own theory, and I'm fairly confident that I'm not alone in this.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness marks the first Marvel Cinematic Universe film that makes direct reference to the series of shows that Marvel launched on Disney+ last year. Specifically, DSITMOM serves as a direct sequel to Wandavision, the inaugural Marvel series that featured Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda Maximoff and Paul Bettany's Vision living in a small town called Westview, despite the fact that Vision had died at the hands of Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War.  That series ended with the revelation that, in her grief, Wanda had created a new Vision and even two children and had placed an entire small town in her magical thrall. It also ended with Wanda losing both the Vision and her magically-conjured offspring. To be entirely fair to Marvel head honcho Kevin Fiege, he was quite transparent about these plans quite early on, when he announced Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness months before the COVID-19 pandemic threw a monkey wrench in everyone's plans.  

That said, there are a number of problems with this creative decision, some of which have admittedly been compounded by things beyond Feige's control.  

Among people who have watched Wandavision  there are a vocal number of viewers, including film critics, who feel that Wanda's turn from where she was at the end of that series to the full-on villain she has become by DSITMOM was somewhat abrupt and should not have happened off-camera. Still others are annoyed that Wanda has essentially stolen the show from Stephen Strange, even though the story itself is about how Strange and Wanda learn to deal with their own personal losses very differently.  

And THEN there are the droves of other fans from different countries all over the world, who do not have the benefit of being able to legally watch Disney+, and who therefore have no idea what the heck has happened to Wanda after the events of Avengers: Endgame.  While it would be unfair to blame Kevin Feige for the Walt Disney company's inability to make Disney+ available in every possible territory, I think it would fair to hold him responsible for  his failure to foresee how a hiccup like this could negatively impact the storytelling of the films. A lot of fans feel they have missed out on a major chapter in the character's journey.  This might not have mattered as much to the North American viewers who have ready access to Disney+, but it may have made a significant difference in outside territories that, for going on three years running now, still do not have Disney+. A 60% drop is not exactly insignificant. 

All of that said, DSITMOM is still destined to make a fortune at the global box-office, with a final projected gross of over $850 million and an outside chance at the coveted $1 billion, but with the level of hype behind it, plus Marvel's built-in fan loyalty this was always a given. I can't help but wonder, though, if Marvel will start to think about money they may have left on the table by tying their film so intimately into their Disney+ series. Sam Raimi's return to Marvel, after all, should, with theaters opening up quite a bit nowadays, have been an easy billion and not this emerging question mark as to whether it can actually make ten-figure territory. 

If a near-sure billion-dollar hit like this film can suffer what appears to be a bit of backlash for tying it so intimately into a TV series that not everyone around the world can watch, how does this bode for other series that are even MORE intimately tied into Disney+ series? How might this impact Captain America 4, which will directly follow up the events of the Disney+ series Falcon and the Winter Soldier, or The Marvels,  which is set to include a character set to make her debut in a Disney+ series this August? Notably, to celebrate the launch of the world's first Pakistani superhero, namely Ms. Marvel, Disney is making the unique and unprecedented move of reformatting all of the episodes of the TV series for theatrical release in Pakistan alone, for the simple reason that they still don't have Disney+ there. If only we could all get that kind of accommodation.  

Time will tell if Marvel can sustain its Phase 4 momentum with this new, added burden it is essentially putting on its viewers: to keep up with series that many of them cannot even watch.  

So...How About those Cameos (and other Spoilery Things About Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness)? MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING

 Again...

MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING

Okay, with that out of the way, I'm about to do a deep dive into how Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness lived up to a considerable bit of hype in some ways, and how it didn't in others.

Given how wildly successful Spider-Man: No Way Home turned out to be, largely due to the appearance of the two previous onscreen incarnations of the character as played by Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, it made sense for Disney to hop back on that particular hype train as they started marketing the next installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.  That said, the cameos bruited about turned out to be far less significant than a lot of fans might have hoped they would be. 

So, as is clear to anyone who's already seen the film, of the ballyhooed cameo rumors, only the rumors of Patrick Stewart's return as Professor X and John Krasinski's casting as Reed Richards turned out to be true. These were some pretty amusing fan service moments, particularly Stewart's appearance, which was accompanied by the first few notes of the theme from the popular 90s X-Men cartoon as well as his exaggerated hand gestures accompanying the use of his telepathy, also drawn from the cartoon.  In the shadow of the more high-profile cameos, the other members of the so-called "Illuminati" namely Captain Carter (Hayley Atwell), alt-Captain Marvel (Lashana Lynch) and Blackagar Boltagon (a.k.a. Black Bolt, played  by Anson Mount) felt distinctly underwhelming.  I mean, the What If? series which debuted Captain Carter was one of the less warmly-received Disney+ series, the Captain Marvel film was a long way from being universally loved, and the Inhumans series in which Mount actually starred as Black Bolt was cancelled after one season.  

In truth, though, even if every single cameo had been the fulfillment of all fanboy dreams, the euphoria would have been short-lived as these appearances had far more in common with Deadpool 2 than they did with Spider-Man: No Way Home.  The entire Illuminati were basically mowed down by the Scarlet Witch in a short but somewhat gruesome sequence.  The description of Reed Richards as the "smartest man alive" felt a little chuckle-inducing after Wanda quite literally cut him to ribbons and popped his head like a balloon. 

It's actually a shame that so much of the conversation about this movie has swirled around the cameos, because they kind of distracted from the things about the movie that were much more noteworthy, like Elizabeth Olsen's absolutely outstanding performance, and the utterly bonkers direction by Sam Raimi which featured direct callbacks to his Evil Dead days as well as the mid-credits cameo that managed to fly under just about everyone's radar. 

It was refreshing to see Raimi and screenwriter Michael Waldron throw out the tired, old "third act twist" storytelling structure that's been used in too many Marvel movies (including the first Iron Man) and right up front, reveal Wanda to be the big bad.  The marketing materials had pretty much given this away, and pretty much everyone who'd seen the end of Wandavision knew this was coming, but the timing was nonetheless very effective.  Without the baggage of having to conceal a twist, Olsen was able to deliver a truly memorable bad guy, and one very true to Raimi's tradition, started in the Spider-Man movies, of having bad guys who weren't really bad, just terribly misguided souls.  The difference here is that, coming into the film, hardcore viewers already know what Wanda's been through and what has pushed her to this. 

It's also worth mentioning that for all of the focus on Wanda, this is still a Doctor Strange movie, as exemplified by his character arc, and by all of the major action set pieces featuring him, all of which have  Raimi's signature firmly inscribed. Strange's and Wong's battle with Gargantos, the giant tentacled one-eyed being, is arguably the most "traditional" Marvel battle, but given that it ends with Strange ripping out the creature's single eyeball, it's definitely a Raimi concoction.

But the real treat comes later in the film, when Strange meets another, more sinister version of himself, and engages in a magical battle with him which involves...musical notes. It is wildly imaginative, and the kind of thing you'd have to see (and hear) for yourself to really appreciate. It is also one of the reasons why Raimi was clearly born to direct a Doctor Strange movie; you would never see any other superhero doing something like this. 

And then, of course, there's the expertly-realized "dreamwalking" sequence, in which Strange, still trapped in another universe and wanting to save America Chavez, possesses the corpse of his alternate self who died in the beginning of the movie and which he buried in his home universe, "616." Far from just being a visual gimmick, Zombie Strange showcases a really cool, if frightening aspect of Strange's magical abilities, and is arguably THE single most "Sam Raimi" moment in the whole movie, albeit with a $200 million budget to realize it, and a two-time Academy-Award nominated actor shambling along like a zombie. Seeing Cumberbatch embrace the camp was the absolute icing on the cake.  

THESE are the things worth talking about, rather than the dime-store cameos that were good for a whoop and a cheer and then an "aaaauggh" when the characters met their grisly fate. 

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention cameos by two Raimi staples: Evil Dead star Bruce Campbell, who shows up as a hostile pizza ball vendor whom Strange enchants into punching himself, and Raimi's Oldsmobile Delta 88, which has appeared in all but one of his movies (that being the 1995 Western The Quick and the Dead, for obvious reasons).  These were both quite welcome, though I confess I didn't recognize Bruce Campbell right away; like many of us, the dude's gotten old. Special shout-out to my friend Aljay for pointing the cameo out. 

Finally, there's the cameo that apparently nobody knew about going into the movie, that of a very important Doctor Strange-related character, Clea, played by a very prominent actress, Furiosa herself, Charlize Theron. Her casting was not nearly as much of a coup as the fact that Marvel was able to keep her cameo completely under wraps, and it's clear they have plans for her in the near future, so this is cause for some celebration. 

So if I were hyping the movie, I'd say "come for the cameos, stay for the Raimi goodness!"

As Awesome as It Needed to Be: A Review of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

 directed by Sam Raimi

written by Michael Waldron

I wrote not too long ago that because Marvel and Sony had basically turned Doctor Strange into a glorified plot device in the global blockbuster Spider-Man: No Way Home, Marvel would have to make it up to the character by making his own movie, Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness, a mind-blowingly awesome film.  I'll have to admit, as confident as I was in director Sam Raimi, stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Elizabeth Olsen and the rest of the talented cast and crew, I could feel doubt begin to creep in as reports of extensive reshoots started dominating the news on the film in the months leading up to its release.  Had Marvel gotten it wrong, somehow?

Having seen it twice now, I would like to assert that, in my humble opinion, they have not. 

The film opens with a frenetic chase scene in which a slightly different-looking, Spanish-speaking Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and young America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) flee a mysterious, rather frightful-looking being through what looks like some kind of interdimensional plane, a nightmarish scenario from which the Doctor Strange we all know (also played by Cumberbatch), wakes up from in a fright. Later that day, though, he learns that this encounter was no dream as he and his fellow sorcerer Wong (Benedict Wong) end up saving America, who has somehow ended up in New York, from a  gigantic, one-eyed, tentacled monster.  America, it seems, has the power to travel between universes, which has made her a target for a mysterious pursuer. Recognizing the markings on the creature he has defeated as runes used in witchcraft, Strange seeks out the other powerful magic user he knows, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) who has been living the life of a recluse since recent events turned her life upside down. This request for help, however, does not turn out as Strange hopes, and before long, Strange finds himself not only fighting to save America Chavez, but the entire multiverse.

From the moment the Marvel fanfare ends, the movie hits the ground running and, quite frankly, never stops, which is very much a good thing.  Sam Raimi's fingerprints are all over everything in the film, from the quiet moments to the big action set pieces, and therefore I must respectfully, strenuously disagree with the critics decrying this film as "studio mandated." Quite the contrary, this feels like the MCU's single most stylized film, with due respect to the excellent work of the other directors whose work I've enjoyed. Raimi really puts his stamp on this film from everything to the transitions, the close-ups, the creepy build-ups to jump scares, and yes, even the performances from his actors, just about all of whom turn in outstanding performances, especially Cumberbatch and Olsen, who gets a far more generous helping of screen time than she ever has in any theatrical Marvel project up until this point. I'm just mildly annoyed that the series that did feature her, Wandavision is basically required viewing for this film considering that a substantial percentage of global audiences, including folks in this specific part of the world, still don't have Disney+.   Still, regardless of whether or not one knows Wanda's backstory through that series, which is quite crucial to understanding her character's journey, there can be no denying that Olsen has turned in an incredible performance.  Cumberbatch, who plays as many as four different versions of Doctor Strange, brings his "A" game here and reminds us all of why he was such a perfect fit for this role in the first place. Benedict Wong's Wong gets a much welcome expansion of his screen time and importance. Newcomer Xochitl Gomez makes the most out of what she's given, but more on that later.

Lovers of the Spider-Man trilogy (only 2/3 of which, really, is fondly remembered) may want to crucify me for what I'm about to say next, but I will go ahead and say it: having seen Darkman and at least two of the Evil Dead movies, I have to say that Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness feels more like a Sam Raimi movie than any installment of Sony's groundbreaking superhero trilogy. Spider-Man 2 had the operating room scene as its signature Raimi sequence, but this film has a whole bunch of those. If I'm perfectly honest, I'm quite surprised that this movie managed to squeak by with a PG-13 rating; somewhere in the third act my eight-year-old shouted "this is a horror movie!" and she wasn't wrong. 

Raimi has clearly been given a pretty big sandbox to play with by Kevin Feige, and as a result the storytelling can get pretty intense, and his visuals definitely get extra trippy.  Sure, there is the requisite massive dose of CGI used to depict the multiverse, but Raimi uses it quite effectively, and arguably more so than Scott Derrickson did in the first film. The "multiverse jump" scene which partially features in the trailer, with Strange's face coming apart, is actually even more entertaining in its full form.  

Also, I'm happy to note that the film does not get bogged down in fan service here; the much vaunted cameos the internet has been buzzing about do not dominate the movie; they're worth a cheer and a whoop or two, but nothing to really distract from the overall story. Make of that what you will, and I guarantee you this will not diminish your enjoyment of this film. Conversely, if you go into the movie expecting cameos on the level of Spider-Man: No Way Home, prepare to be disappointed.  

If the film does have any weak links, the most prominent would have to be its supposed breakthrough character, America Chavez. Xochitl Gomez turns in a decent performance, but the role is so sparsely written that it's painfully clear that she is little more than a plot device, essentially the mechanism to make the multiverse work. To put it even more cynically, she's basically a MacGuffin.  I expected better from the writer of Loki. 

Also, this isn't so much as a criticism as it is me scratching my head: what the heck was the point of Rintrah, the green minotaur guy who basically stood around Kamar-Taj and later got his butt kicked, without contributing anything at all to the story?  Given how relatively obscure the character is it didn't seem like the best form of fan service, and he had to have cost at least some tens of thousands of dollars (if not more) in computer-generated imagery.

To go back to the positives, though, I genuinely enjoyed that apart from the callbacks to Wandavision and Spider-Man: No Way Home, this film does not play out like a set-up for the next big Marvel event. Sure, there are the obligatory mid and post credits scenes, one of which teases for future adventures for Doctor Strange, but there's nothing that screams "everybody has to get together to fight the next big thing" in this film, and I was honestly relieved that this was the case. 

Almost forgot: I'd be remiss if I failed to mention one of the major pluses of the movie for me, and that is a surprisingly robust music score by veteran composer and longtime Raimi collaborator Danny Elfman. I was initially upset that they had replaced the original Doctor Strange composer Michael Giacchino with Elfman, as I was a big fan of the score Giacchino had composed for the first film, and was worried that Elfman would just trot out a remix of his previous work with Raimi and Tim Burton.  Also, Elfman's last work for the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a last-minute substitute for Brian Tyler on Avengers: Age of Ultron had been nothing to write home about.  It was much to my surprise, therefore, that Elfman turned out a rich, moving score for this film, and I say that as someone who has followed his work since 1988's Beetlejuice.  Does it sound Burtonesque? Sure, at times, but it really highlights the film's emotional beats and marks the characters' emotional journey without being cloying. Wanda's theme is downright haunting at times, and I hope Kevin Feige and his brain trust consider this theme as canon, moving forward, given how Marvel has come more and more to embrace the importance of music in their films.

Critics may not be as solidly behind this movie as they were the first one, but I'm a fan of how Marvel let Sam Raimi do his thing with one of their prized properties and heartily recommend this film to anyone interested.

7.5/10

A Fun Little Throwback: A Review of The Lost City

directed by Adam and Aaron Nee

written by Oren Uziel, Dana Fox, Adam and Aaron Nee, and Seth Gordon

I had contemplated reviewing this on my YouTube channel, which has a bit of a broader audience than this blog (ever since I started filtering out the bots), but writing movie reviews, in my opinion anyway, is a bit of a dying art so I decided to keep this here so that, even as I keep putting up content on my vlog, I keep this fresh and updated with new reviews.

Anyway, the movie in question is The Lost City, directed by relative newcomers Adam and Aaron Nee and starring Hollywood A-listers Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum.  The film actually marks Bullock's triumphant post-pandemic return to theaters after her 2018 film Bird Box spent little time in theaters before heading to Netflix.

In the film, Bullock plays highly-successful romance novelist Loretta Sage, a PhD holder and failed archaeologist/historian who, frustrated with her lack of success in her preferred profession and disheartened by the death of her husband and archaeological partner, has decided instead to take her volumes of historical knowledge and repackage them as trashy romance novels, which have proven to be a huge hit among women.  Catapulting to success along with Loretta is her cover model Alan (Channing Tatum) whose likeness adorns her books as the long-haired he-man Dash. The thing is, though, Loretta hates her job and has to be dragged virtually kicking and screaming to her latest book tour by her agent Beth (Da'Vine Joy Randolph).  Upon leaving her latest, disastrous book tour, however, Loretta finds herself abducted by the wealthy Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe) a collector of the obscure who recognizes the historicity behind Loretta's writing and wants to use her knowledge to find the lost city described in one of her books, specifically the priceless crown found in that city.  Having witnessed her kidnapping, Alan, who secretly has a crush on Loretta, hires exfiltration expert Jack Trainer (Brad Pitt) and follows her to the the remote island in the Atlantic to which Fairfax has whisked her. Hijinks ensue, and before long both author and cover model find themselves completely out of their element and on the run from Fairfax and his army of goons, but not not before Loretta realizes that she may be on the verge of finally finding the lost city she and her husband spent years looking for. 

The movie is good (if a bit dumb) fun, and the kind of film we've seen less and less of since IP-powered movies started  dominating the landscape several years ago. It's oddly fitting that the former Harry Potter Radcliffe himself helps bring a star-driven movie like this back to cineplexes.  Sandra Bullock plays an older, wearier version of the harried career woman with which she built her career in movies like Miss Congeniality and The Proposal, among others, while Channing Tatum trots out the dimwitted beefcake he played in both 21 Jump Street movie adaptations, and Brad Pitt plays a role that borders on self-parody, but you know what? It totally works.    

The movie's plot has the proverbial holes big enough to drive trucks through, as well as such a frayed connection to reality that it's a small wonder it makes it to the end without completely collapsing, but the redeeming aspect here is Bullock's and Tatum's comedic (if not necessarily romantic) chemistry together. Sure, it borders on the exploitative at times (mentally gender flip the scene involving leeches and you'll know what I mean) but the dynamic still works on the whole, and truth be told, it's actually quite refreshing to see the whole "older-leading-man-with-younger-leading-woman" trope totally turned on its head.

The movie's main virtue is that it is genuinely funny thanks to some good comedic timing and chemistry from its lead actors, and to its directors' willingness to lean hard into some romance movie tropes and mine them for their inherent humor.  The film also benefits from some really gorgeous scenery, which is a must for movies like this, and from a surprisingly engaging musical score from relatively unknown composer Pinar Toprak (Captain Marvel) who does an awesome remix of a fantastically cheesy 80s song. 

I'm glad they no longer spend huge amounts of money on movies like this (the movie was a relatively frugal $70-plus million); it's a good thing that we've moved on from the time when star-driven vehicles were basically the only show in town.  Because movies like this have to survive in a marketplace where IP-based franchise fare rules, filmmakers can no longer just throw unconscionable amounts of money at movie stars and hope their faces are enough to put fannies in the seats; they have  to try to engage the audiences with something entertaining. 

Fortunately, this time, they managed to do just that.   

7/10

Making the Old New Again (Sort of): My Review of "The Batman"

 directed by Matt Reeves

written by Reeves and Peter Craig

Batman is arguably one of the best-known comic book characters in the world, and as such has been adapted into multiple media, including film, so many times that it's hard to imagine any iteration of him feeling particularly fresh, but director Matt Reeves, who not too long ago revitalized the Planet of the Apes franchise and his excellent team of collaborators like actor Andy Serkis and composer Michael Giacchino (to name a few) gives it the old college try.

This iteration of the Caped Crusader is played by British actor Robert Pattinson whose Bruce Wayne is just as brooding as his Batman, and he's bringing with him a whole new cast including Jeffrey Wright as Police Lieutenant (and future Commissioner) Jim Gordon, Serkis as faithful Wayne butler Alfred Pennyworth, Zoe Kravitz as Selina Kyle a.k.a. Catwoman, Colin Farell as Oswald Cobblepot, a.k.a. the Penguin, John Turturro as Carmine Falcone, and Paul Dano as Edward Nashton, a.k.a. the Riddler. 

In this version (not to be confused with the DC Extended Universe in which Ben Affleck played Batman), Batman is a relatively new crimefighter in Gotham City, dealing violently with the criminal element and aiming to strike fear into the hearts of criminals, calling himself "vengeance."  He already has an informal alliance with Police Lieutenant James Gordon, but both of them are caught completely off-guard when the mysterious killer the Riddler starts killing high-profile city officials of Gotham City, leaving riddles for the Batman to solve and releasing videos declaring his victims to be symptoms of corruption that must be purged from Gotham.  Batman needs to find the Riddler before he claims his next victim. To get to the truth, he must investigate the victims' connection to the criminal underworld, including the shady Carmine Falcone, owner of Gotham's sleaziest gentlemen's club, and his henchman, the Penguin.  In the course of his investigation, he crosses paths with the mysterious Selina Kyle, who has her own agenda, but it's not clear if she'll be able or even inclined to help him as he races against time to stop the Riddler.

The first thing I'd like to say about this movie is that I really appreciated a lot of the little touches.  For example, I hugely appreciated that this was the first Batman reboot that did not feature the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne, which has literally been done on screen four previous times, including in a movie that didn't even feature the Batman (it was the 2019 film Joker, for anyone wondering). The film talks about it, to be sure, but doesn't beat that particular dead horse anymore.

Pattinson and the rest of the cast acquit themselves quite well; Reeves made the conscious decision not to have Bruce put on the suave bachelor facade as a contrast to his brooding Batman; early in his career, Bruce, still wallowing in his Kurt-Cobain-esque angst, wouldn't have yet appreciated the value of putting up a veneer to keep people from asking too many questions. One assumes that iteration of Bruce will come later in the series. Kravitz makes a compelling Catwoman, and Wright does a creditable Jim Gordon as well. Paul Dano, who spends majority of his screentime behind a mask and with a muffled voice, plays a pretty effective psychopath, it must be said.

Unfortunately, a significant downside of the casting is Colin Farrell buried in latex doing what feels like a Vegas-style impersonation of Robert DeNiro. It's understandable that Matt Reeves wanted the Penguin to veer away from his cartoony, comic-book origins, but unfortunately in veering away from one form of camp he has steered too hard into another. Well, at least the Penguin featured in pretty memorable car chase.  

Speaking of which, I quite appreciated Reeves highly kinetic camerawork, and his visible efforts to create a more immersive experience for the viewer, like the moment in which Batman glides from a building top, with what looks like a Go Pro riding him on the way down. It also helped spruce up the car chase sequences, which featured a cool take on the Batmobile that felt part muscle car, part supercar.  The sound mixing of these  sequences was pretty keen, as well.

This brings me to composer Michael Giacchino, who is now the third composer, after Danny Elfman and Hans Zimmer, to compose music for both Batman and Spider-Man movies, though he's the first one to have composed for Spider-Man first. His music is memorable and intriguing, given that Batman's current theme sounds distinctly like notes from John Williams' iconic Imperial March. I'm not sure what impelled that but in the context of the story it works, though for me the definitive Batman theme is still Danny Elfman's. 

It's not a perfect film, but it has to be said that this iteration of the Batman is off to a pretty strong start. 

8.5/10

Not Exactly Unexplored Territory: A Review of Uncharted

 directed by Ruben Fleischer

written by Rafe Lee Judkins, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway

When it comes to film adaptations from other media, video games as a source material are pretty much at the very bottom of the proverbial totem pole.  As marginalized as comic book-based movies are among critics and the "experts" they are royalty compared to video game movies. Heck, Johnny Depp got nominated for an Oscar for a character he played in a movie based on a theme park ride. Long story short, video game movies don't get any respect.

Making a passable video game movie, therefore, is an embarrassingly low bar to clear, and yet so many major film studios have failed at it over the years.  If nothing else, the film adaptation of Naughty Dog's wildly successful Uncharted game at least manages to clear this bar. 

Following over a decade and a half in development hell, Sony Pictures have finally managed to churn out the long-gestating adaptation of Uncharted, with Zombieland's Ruben Fleischer pulling directing duties from a script by Rafe Lee Judkins, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway. White-hot Tom Holland, whose other movie, Spider-Man: No Way Home is still in theaters, making considerable amounts of money for a three-month old film, stars as bartender-turned-treasure-hunter Nathan Drake, while Mark Wahlberg, once in the running for the role of Drake, plays his older mentor Victor Sullivan.  Tati Gabrielle plays chief henchwoman Braddock, Sophia Ali plays fellow treasure-seeker Chloe Frazier, while Antonio Banderas plays the big bad, Santiago Moncada.

The film starts with a flashback in which young Nathan Drake (Tiernan Jones) and his older brother Sam (Rudy Pankow) sneak out of the orphanage in which they live and break into a museum, with Sam attempting to steal a map. They get caught, and Sam, rather than go to jail, escapes, leaving Nathan to grow up alone in the orphanage with the promise to find him again.

Years later, Nate is grown up and working as a bartender in New York, who also happens to know how to slip valuables off of the wealthier patrons, when he is approached by Sully, who tries to recruit him on a hunt for a treasure that was supposedly found by Ferdinand Magellan in the Philippines and brought back to Spain, but which no one can find. They are in a race against time against Santiago Moncada, whose family bankrolled Magellan's trip 500 years ago and who is ready to use deadly force to claim what is his, especially the services of Braddock and her crew of mercenaries. For their part, Nate and Sully have Chloe on their side, but it's unclear if she can be trusted. The hunt is on.

As much as I've enjoyed all four Uncharted games, bearing in mind the "curse" of the video game movie I came into this film with expectations firmly in check.  To be fair, the producers did go to some length to recreate the globe-trotting feel of the games, with some decently-staged action sequences in Spain as well as two major action set pieces, one involving a fight in a plane's open cargo bay and the other involving a fight aboard a Spanish galleon being airlifted by a helicopter. So those boxes are  firmly ticked. Tom Holland's Jackie-Chan-inspired fight sequences are genuinely fun to watch, especially given how he really lends his physicality to them.  Arguably, even more than Spider-Man, this is a role in which his experience in dance and acrobatics will really benefit him. 

Unfortunately, though, apart from the brisk action sequences, the movie doesn't really have that much else going for it. Tom Holland still manages to make Nate Drake a likeable guy, but he's a far cry from the rogue we see in the video games, though the producers have repeatedly emphasized that he's still on the journey to get there. Mark Wahlberg's take on the iconic Sully is even wider off the mark (pardon the pun) thanks to a clunky script and Mark Wahlberg basically just playing Mark Wahlberg.  Banderas' menacing bad guy Moncada, who does nasty things to his father (Manuel de Blas) for wanting to give away his family's blood-soaked fortune, essentially comes across as a goof ball, and the less said about Sophia Ali's take on Chloe Frazier, basically a South-Asian Lara Croft in the games, the better.  Tati Gabrielle's Braddock is vaguely convincing as a bad guy, but that's about it. I also have a problem with a script that basically has its characters act like morons to advance the plot. I know this is true for a vast majority of Hollywood films to one degree or another, but it felt especially prominent here.

The good news, though, is that the bones for a decent franchise are there. Holland can grow (if not necessarily physically) into the Nathan Drake role, which will make more and more sense as he gets older and could potentially be something he could settle into after hanging up Spider-Man's tights, and Wahlberg, who sports Sully's trademark mustache in the film's post-credits scene, could also grow into the character. Between the two of them they could develop the chemistry that makes their interactions in the game so much fun.   Also, the filmmakers have shown they can pull of the show-stopping actions sequences, and given how many of those are featured in the games, there is plenty of material left for them to mine. 

Speaking as a fan of the games, I think it would be nice if they incorporated some of the game's more interesting puzzle sequences into the movie rather than the fairly pedestrian bits they featured. Also, Nate needs to do way more wall climbing in the next film; this is a staple of the game, for crying out loud. I can understand why they toned down the shoot-em-up nature of the game, but the climbing has to be stepped up for the next movie.  I mean, Tom Holland getting ridiculously jacked feels somewhat pointless considering that Nathan Drake was never about shirtless scenes but he was all about scaling virtually any surface.

This certainly could have been better, but it could also so easily have been so much worse.

With my first blockbuster of 2022 now in the rearview mirror, I look forward to checking out Matt Reeves' The Batman. 

6.5/10

Why Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness Needs to be Mind-blowingly Awesome...And Why It Probably Is (Spoilers for...Oh You Know What? Read at Your Own Risk)

 Having seen Spider-Man: No Way Home in theaters a total of three times now, I no longer see it through rose-colored lenses and am less willing to ignore at least one glaring aspect of the storytelling that I basically set aside the first few times that I watched it because, well, I had a really great time. But it's a lot easier now to be honest with myself about one of the single biggest flaws of SMNWH.

I'll just say this directly: Marvel (and Sony) did Doctor Strange dirty by basically turning him into a plot device.

It's not the first time that Spider-Man's Marvel Cinematic Universe iteration has had a "babysitter" from the "MCU proper."  The first film in the trilogy had Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark, the second had Samuel L. Jackson as an ersatz Nick Fury, so on the one hand Doctor Strange's presence in SMNWH was just the continuation of a tradition (and most likely a contractual obligation).  More than that, however, he served as an indispensable plot element as his powers were the needed catalyst for the MCU's version of the multiverse to work. That's not a problem in and of itself,  but the way it was carried out was.

Basically, the way SMNWH was written, for Doctor Strange's spell to get screwed up and rip open the multiverse, Doctor Strange had to be dumbed down and turned reckless. I could see some token efforts by writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers to explain him casting the ill-fated spell by basically having him take pity on Peter, but the manner in which the spell is botched just defies logic when the person casting it is supposed to be a sorceror supreme.  There was also the fact that Strange was somewhat callous regarding the fate of the multiverse villains, especially considering he's an actual doctor sworn to preserve life, and finally, the fight between Strange and Peter which literally had the writers inventing new superpowers for Peter, like his unexplained, out-of-body ability to keep the spell box from Doctor Strange, just so he could defeat Strange and move the plot forward.  We could argue the livelong day about how Peter could legitimately take Doctor Strange in a fight, even though we're talking about someone who held his own against an Infinity-Gauntlet-powered Thanos versus someone whom the latter swatted aside like a fly--er--spider, but to my mind, the way the film handled the fight felt off.

The point is that Strange was depicted so blatantly out-of-character just to make the plot work that a whole theory has been written on at least one fansite (and quite probably more) as to why, and even a casual viewer like Ben Shapiro, who has openly professed his preference for DC over Marvel, has taken notice, even in a largely positive review. It doesn't surprise me; McKenna and Sommers, while not actually bad at writing heartfelt character moments, have had trouble creating devices to move the plot forward and are guilty of some pretty lazy writing in the past. They're the guys, just for reference who gave Janet Van Dyne miraculous healing powers at the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp (spoiler alert, I guess) because the plot needed to be resolved. Speaking of which, Strange, following his battle with Peter, was essentially written out of the story until the writers needed him to conviently show up and fix everything.  

Benedict Cumberbatch may have just turned in the single most compelling dramatic performance of the year in The Power of the Dog, but in Spider-Man: No Way Home his character's sole purpose is to open up the multiverse and close it back down again. 

When you've got fans racking their brains to explain why one of your marquee characters is so OUT of character, you've definitely done something wrong, and as much as I know that Spider-Man is basically Marvel's crown jewel, a character who will NEVER suffer Tony Stark's fate in Avengers: Endgame, Doctor Strange should not have been so thoroughly degraded just to make Spidey look better. That was unconscionably lazy writing. There were better ways to do it. For example, the fracturing multiverse could have helped Strange lose the spell box to Peter, not some hamhanded explanation of math being the key to manipulating the Mirror Dimension, which the writers quite clearly pulled out of their asses, same as Spidey's out-of-body powers.  

Anyway, Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness looks like it may actually fix these mistakes, or at least be cool enough to get us to forget about them. From the look of the trailer, Marvel have basically written Sam Raimi a blank check, and having paired him up with Michael Waldron, the head-writer of the fantastic Loki series, it looks like their investment is going to pay off handsomely.  

Just...please, Marvel, don't disrespect Doctor Strange like that again. 

MARVEL'S MISUNDERSTOOD TAKE ON "STAKES:" A REVIEW OF SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME (MAJOR SPOILER ALERT FOR BOTH SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME AND ETERNALS)

 directed by Jon Watts

written by Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna

Much as I'd like to say that Spider-Man: No Way Home was the first movie I saw in theaters  after a year and a half of lockdown, the truth is that it was another movie I went to see, namely Chloe Zhao's much maligned, somewhat misunderstood film Eternals, a movie I didn't hate but didn't love either.  It's worth comparing the two because there's something important they have in common apart from the Marvel Studios brand name.

Spider-Man: No Way Home immediately follows the revelation that Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is Spider-Man that took place in the mid-credits scene of Spider-Man: Far From Home.  Thanks to the doctored broadcast leaked by the late Mysterio's team to conspiracy theorist/online show host J. Jonah Jameson (JK Simmons), Peter's life has basically turned upside-down. Although none of the allegations hold up in court, Peter's life is still in shambles, and to make things worse, even his friends Ned (Jacob Batalon) and MJ (Zendaya) are suffering from the backlash as none of them can get into any of the colleges of their choice due to the controversy surrounding them. Desperate, Peter thinks of a radical solution; he approaches Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and asks him to use magic to help him. Strange is able to think of a spell to make people forget his identity, but it ends up getting botched, however, after Peter constantly interrupts Strange with concerns about the people he cares about forgetting him like his Aunt May (Marissa Tomei), MJ and Ned. Suddenly, Peter finds himself running into strange, powerful people he doesn't know...but who know that Spider-Man is Peter Parker, and who want to kill him. These mysterious strangers include Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina), the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Electro (Jamie Foxx), the Sandman (Thomas Haden Church) and the Lizard (Rhys Ifans), and Peter learns that they've been pulled from other universes into his own because of Doctor Strange's failed spell, which means he is now in a race against time to send them back where they belong, until he learns something shocking that changes everything. 

(SPOILER ALERT)

Sony and Marvel basically pulled out all the stops for this movie, with all of its villains and surprise heroes, but the real coup of this movie was what it took away.  What this film has done in somewhat shocking fashion is to take away from the Marvel Cinematic Universe version of Spider-Man everything in his life, such as his friends, and even his Aunt May, and strip him to basically the barest essentials of the character. When he swings out into the winter night at the end of the movie, the MCU Spider-Man, for the first time, is completely on his own. 

People have often criticized Marvel movies--quite unfairly--in my opinion, of being low-stakes affairs in general, largely because of the relatively light tone that many, if not most of them adopt. Such a criticism actually fails, in my opinion, to understand the way Marvel tells stories. 

Kevin Feige and his cohorts understand, probably better than anyone else in the business, that even though making each individual MCU film is important, they are all still part of a bigger narrative and as such are a true adaptation of the comic book series' long-form storytelling.  They know that it is important for their characters to connect with audiences over time.   In short, rather than get a cheap rise out of the audience with contrived "stakes" through gratuitous violence and death every movie, Marvel takes the cannier route of getting audiences invested in its characters, whether these are heroes like Iron Man and Black Widow or key supporting characters like Aunt May. While, several of their individual films may sometimes seem "weightless," more often than not all but the harshest critics note that they usually do a good job of connecting us viewers with the characters.

As a result, when Black Widow sacrifices herself to obtain the Soul Stone and restore half of the universe's population, and when Iron Man basically barbecues himself to defeat Thanos and his forces, audiences all around the world are genuinely gobsmacked.  I still remember watching Avengers: Endgame two years ago in a packed IMAX theater in which the guy beside me was so sure that Iron Man would rise from the dead with a clever quip...until he didn't. 

Similarly, Marisa Tomei's young and hip Aunt May has been known mainly for her humor and loving support of Peter over the course of several films starting with Captain America: Civil War,  so when the filmmakers finally yanked the rug out from under the viewers and killed her character in No Way Home, it hit harder than any "edgy" but ultimately meaningless violence in movies with supposedly more "stakes" ever could. 

Perhaps the most effective point of comparison and contrast is Eternals, which significantly departs from the Marvel practice of letting all of the major characters survive their first movie. Salma Hayek's Ajak doesn't even make it halfway through the movie before she's killed, and Don Lee's Gilgamesh meets a similarly grisly fate about two thirds into the movie.  This is supposedly good for the narrative because it creates a sense of urgency and menace for our eight remaining heroes, but because this film does such a poor job developing its massive cast of characters, we the audience cannot really be bothered to care that something bad has happened to them.  We're not invested in the characters and so their deaths become meaningless. There are dire consequences to their actions, sure, and there are therefore "stakes" in that hackneyed sense, but because these characters are so undercooked, these "stakes" basically don't mean anything beyond what the script tells us they're supposed to mean, and it's probably only when Thanos' brother (played by Harry Styles) shows up that the audience has some vague idea of how serious the threat is...because the movie has to spell it out at this point, rather than it being a visceral reaction. So having failed in its basic assignment of getting the audience to connect to the characters, the film now struggles to establish its sense of urgency, even after killing principal characters to make its point.  So for once, Kevin Feige and his team screwed up. 

Spider-Man: No Way Home, in contrast, takes what has come before and basically pays it off in spectacular fashion. Throughout all of his adventures in his solo films and in the Avengers movies, MCU Spider-Man has made lots of friends and allies, and even though he's had close calls, he's always benefited from having someone, whether it was Happy Hogan with Stark tech, or  Ned as his "guy in the chair," or even two other Spider-Men, around to help him out.  In Spider-Man: No Way Home, the film truly ups the ante; after finally asking Doctor Strange to cast the spell to really make everyone forget who he is, Peter lets go of everyone left in his life who matters, leaving himself completely alone in the world, and it is a deeply affecting moment, especially when the viewer realizes that he's still just a kid, albeit one who's just grown up a whole lot faster.  

Yes, producer Kevin Feige, working here with Spidey vet Amy Pascal, director Jon Watts and his writers Erik Sommer and Chris McKenna know all about stakes, and how to really hurt their character when it really and truly matters. And THIS film was a time that it really mattered.

  

9/10