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

MY TAKE ON MARVEL'S ETERNALS (SPOILERS)

 direcred by Chloe Zhao

written by Ryan Firpo, Kaz Firpo, Patrick Burleigh, Zhao

As I write this, Marvel's November 2021 release Eternals has just made its debut on Disney+ after a two-month theatrical run that has seen it earn around USD 401 million at the global box-office and garner a franchise-low 47% "rotten" rating, according to review aggregator rottentomatoes.com.  

A lot has been said about this movie during its theatrical run, a lot of it bad, and one common criticism of the film is that the film has too many characters to juggle, which prevents the audience from making a meaningful connection with any one of them.  I don't entirely agree with this; personally I think it still could have worked had the filmmakers effectively focused on the conflict between duty and conscience, which could have played out much more strongly had it been more properly developed. Having ten characters wasn't necessarily an obstacle to this; better writers, like Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame scribes Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely could have pulled it off in my opinion.

One oft-repeated hot take is that Eternals should have been a six-episode Disney+ series instead of a two-and-a-half hour movie, which is something with which I must respectfully but strongly disagree.  

Eternals is basically the story of ten otherworldly beings of extraordinary power, headed by Ajak (Salma Hayek) and her right-hand man Ikaris (Richard Madden) sent to Earth thousands of years ago to protect humanity from monsters known as the Deviants.  They have been instructed by their principal, Arishem the Celestial, not to interfere in human affairs unless Deviants are involved, though they are allowed, in a fashion, to help guide humankind along in the realization of its potential. When the Eternals defeat the last deviant in the 1500s, they also find themselves shocked by the atrocities of the conquistadores.  Druig (Barry Keoghan) whose power is mind-control, breaks the rules and intervenes, and thereafter the group essentially disbands and each of them go their separate ways.

Centuries later, and in the wake of the events of the war with Thanos, a new threat emerges, one strong enough to kill one of the Eternals, that has the group getting back together again.  

Eternals is a movie that, for all its flaws, deserved to be seen on the big screen because it has a distinct visual identity that couldn't really have been captured on the small screen.  While director Chloe Zhao inevitably shot much of the film on Pinewood Studios' sound stages, undoubtedly for the more fantastical elements of the movie, she also shot a significant portion of it on location in the Canary Islands, giving the film a nice, lived-in, earthy feel, which were a nice point of contrast against the ethereal, otherworldly aesthetic that Zhao used to manifest the Eternals' powers.   It had a visual sense of scope that just couldn't be captured on television, and yes, I have seen the Loki series.  

Zhao's eye for stunning beauty is clearest in the scenes in set among ancient civilizations, and later, in scenes in which the characters commune in the desert.  The scene in which the characters dine together is something I particularly liked; with very few exceptions you rarely see these larger-than-life characters do something as mundane as eat, and it was not only refreshing to see but enjoyable to see the food rendered onscreen with such visual flourish. It's nice to know that it isn't just food commercials that can depict appetizing food.  Zhao even managed to put her personal stamp on the obligatory action sequences.  While unfortunately, she couldn't prevent Richard Madden's Ikaris from looking like a poor man's Superman, I quite liked how she envisioned, among others, the balletic fighting style of Angelina Jolie's Thena, complete with her ability to manifest her golden weapons, sort of like an angelic version of Thor: Ragnarok's Hela.  I even liked the look of the Deviants.

SPOILER ALERT: From this point onwards I will discuss plot-related spoilers.  If you still want to go into this movie unspoiled you may end the review here.

6.5/10

Another aspect of the film that really warranted a big-screen presentation was the literal size of the antagonist, i.e. Arishem the Celestial, a mile-high giant that can basically destroy the world, as well as Tiamut, a nascent Celestial buried in the Earth thousands of years ago, who nearly does just that at the climax of the film. Literal titans like this need to be seen on the big screen. 

Also, unlike with so many other Marvel films, at the very outset it's made clear that not every character will make it to the end credits, something we don't always get in a franchise's launching movie. 

Visually, the film more than justified its presence on the big screen, but its muddled script and some rather uninspired performances ultimately let it down. Salma Hayek's Ajak deserved much more screen time than she got, especially considering that she was one of the focal points of the film's conflict of conscience.  Her story deserved more than being the object of the cheap "Marvel twist" that it got when it was revealed that Ikaris betrayed her.

Speaking of Ikaris, it is never established, up until the point of his betrayal, why he believes as deeply as he does in his mission, to the point that he is willing to betray and murder his fellow Eternal, and this is one of the film's major failings, just as the film also fails to establish why the heroic Sersi (Gemma Chan) loves humans so much that she is willing to spare them.  At least Ajak's motivations were clear.

Clearly all of the Eternals have different reactions to living among humans for thousands of years. Phastos (Bryan Tyree Henry) finds love, Makkari (Lauren Ridloff) finds boredom, and literally lives on their mothership with all of her accumulated junk from Earth, waiting to go home, Druig finds peace with his mind-controlled enclave of humans deep in the jungle, Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) finds fame and fortune, Sprite (Lia McHugh) find frustration at spending thousands of years in the body of a child, while Thena (Angelina Jolie) accompanied by Gilgamesh (Don Lee) finds an uneasy rest from her Mahd W'yry, which is basically a condition that befalls some Eternals as a direct result of living for thousands of years.  All of these characters with their individual reactions to these events could have been a storytelling goldmine and could have easily lived up to the "diversity" banner often used to market this film, but instead the filmmakers wasted time on Sersi and Ikaris' love story.  The so-called "diverse" cast of characters feels like little more than decorations. 

I found it frustrating that the film couldn't be bothered to elaborate on why its main antagonist or its main protagonist think the way they do. There could have been adequate build-up leading up to the twist that Ikaris had murdered Ajak, some dialogue discussing his devotion to the Eternals' mission.   The filmmakers also passed up the chance to pose a real moral quandary given the established fact in the narrative that the Celestials actually create life, which meant that killing one would actually prevent this from happening, and which could have helped deepen the conflict between the two factions. 

So yes, I did have my issues with Eternals, but I still think it deserved its big-screen treatment.

6.5/10

WHY SHANG CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS IS MORE IMPORTANT TO THE MCU THAN SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME (AND A REVIEW, TOO)

 directed by Destin Daniel Cretton

written by Dave Callaham, Cretton and Andrew Lanham

There's something sad about not being able to write about a Marvel movie until after most of the world has already seen it and basically tired of it, but this review's been percolating on my mind for a while so it would be a shame not to at least share my thoughts.  Also, I'd like to discuss how, more than Spider-Man: No Way Home, this film represents the real way forward for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which is now out on Blu-Ray and Disney+ after a very successful theatrical run, is exactly the kind of movie that Marvel fans needed to kick off Phase 4 in earnest, with the disappointing Black Widow basically just serving as an epilogue to Phase 3.  

For those who still don't know, the film tells the story of Shang-Chi, aka Shaun (Simu Liu) a chronic underachiever content to work as a valet in San Francisco and chill with his fellow valet and best bud Katy (Awkwafina). He's happy to live his life this way until the past he's been hiding from catches up to him in the form of the goons of his father, the millennia-old, merciless warlord Wenwu (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), who attack Shaun to get the pendant around his neck, which was a gift from his late mother Ying Li (Fala Chen).  Shaun reveals fighting skills he had long concealed, and then realizing the threat his father poses, he flies to Macau with Katy in tow to warn his estranged sister Xialing (Meng'er Zhang).  When he gets to the underground fighting ring she runs, the two siblings (and friend) encounter their father and all hell breaks loose. 

To show that the title isn't just some clickbait assertion, I'd like to explain just why I believe that Shang-Chi is way more important than Spider-Man insofar as the MCU is concerned. 

Before Chadwick Boseman's tragic death in August of 2020, it seemed very clear from the events of Avengers: Endgame that the Black Panther character was going to be a central character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe moving forward.  When the Marvel head honchos made the sentimental and arguably imprudent decision to essentially write T'Challa out of the MCU following Boseman's death, I personally feel it collapsed one of the established pillars of Phase 4.  It would, of course, be silly to try to create clones of the "tres amigos" of the Infinity Saga, namely Iron Man, Captain America and Thor, or more expansively (if you include Black Widow, Hulk and Hawkeye), the "big six," but it is clear that Phase 4 would need strong, identifiable characters on which to anchor its next mega-narrative, even if it doesn't turn out to be as massive as that first 23-film saga.   Whomever they swap out for T'Challa simply isn't going to cut it; they'll have to develop this new character all over again...and yes, even if that happens to be Shuri. 

Which brings me to Shang Chi, a well-developed, relatable character brought to life in his own solo movie which, barring the mid-credits scene, contains only minimal references to the larger MCU.  One could say that Shang-Chi's solo movie showcases the kind of storytelling Marvel used to do before they descended into formula, but I think it's more accurate to say that Shang Chi is the Marvel formula done RIGHT. Like 2008's Iron Man and 2018's Black Panther, this film has its hero go on a well-defined journey of self-reflection and discovery, features some pretty awesome action sequences, and leaves us with a character ready to take part in something bigger. As of right now, he's basically good to go.

As a character now primed and prepped for integration into the larger MCU, Shang Chi is now pretty much free to fit into whatever grand narrative Kevin Feige and his architects are setting up for the next ten years or so.  There's no danger of any plugs being pulled, or of any character-sharing deals falling through.  Unlike Spider-Man, Shang Chi is not a character whose cinematic fate lies in the hands of a different studio. 

But here's another reason why Shang Chi is so darned important: the MCU is what it is in the cinematic landscape (which right now, includes being the savior of the theatrical moviegoing experience) because once upon a time, all Kevin Feige and his team had to work with were second-stringers, given that the rights to all of the big guns like Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four were all locked up with other studios (who seriously dropped the ball with these properties thanks to some spectacular mismanagement). Having built their foundation on b-listers, Marvel needs to stay closer to its roots, which is particularly apt here considering that Shang Chi was actually one of the very first characters slated to get his own movie alongside Iron Man, though the market clearly wasn't ready for him at the time. 

This brings me to the next point; Feige has stated at least once (and I'm paraphrasing here) that the future of the MCU lies in diversity. The problem, though, is that too often these days, diversity is played up for its own sake, often at the expense of story. For a strong example of meaningless attempts at diversity, take the recent Star Wars trilogy, which had the opportunity to introduce a groundbreaking black lead in Finn, only to relegate him to an eventual token, with the lion's share of storytelling going to white leads Rey and Kylo Ren. 

With Black Panther and Shang Chi, Marvel have shown just how serious they are about telling stories with diverse characters that aren't pandering or tokenistic.  Eternals, which was supposed to be their biggest diversity showcase may have misfired (and more on that in another post), but Shang Chi was definitely a win for the cause of diversity in storytelling, and Marvel needs to lead with that.

It was always a given that Spider-Man: No Way Home was going to dominate the North American box-office for 2021, but the fact that a c-lister from Marvel came in second is testimony not only to the strength of Marvel's brand, but the quality of the movie. 

9/10