(SPOILERS) Infinity War and Beyond (Marvel Thread)

[Thad]

There is a scene in Secret Invasion where a Skrull, disguised as a human, taunts Fury that he can't reveal they're a Skrull without killing them.

In the very next scene Liv Colman causes a Skrull to reveal himself by nonfatally shooting him in the leg, and in the scene after that a Skrull reverts to his true form while receiving a beating.

This is never addressed or reconciled. There's no reveal that the Skrulls have been lying and are actually easier to force to return to their true forms than they claim. There's just a flagrant, obvious contradiction from one scene to the next. This is a show where the writers do not respect the audience's intelligence or show pride in their own work. I won't say it's the worst writing I've ever seen in the MCU, but that's only because I've seen Eternals.

(Eternals should have been a series and Secret Invasion should have been a movie. Eternals needed time to breathe and develop its huge cast of characters and hundreds of years of backstory, and Secret Invasion needed the budget to have some fucking superheroes in it.)

It's not a total loss. The cast is good-to-great and does a better job of selling this nonsense than anyone could reasonably expect.

And I like the ending where the president declares a racist pogrom against the Skrulls, paranoia reigns, and vigilantes start indiscriminately murdering both Skrulls and humans suspected to be Skrulls alike. That's the kind of pointed social commentary that Marvel proper is built on but the MCU tends to avoid, and I think it does a nice job of laying some groundwork for the X-Men whenever we end up finally getting to that particular fireworks factory.

But mostly, I'm afraid it isn't very good.

[Thad]

Loki is one of the good ones.

Ant-Man 3's fundamental problem is that it doesn't make a lick of sense as an Ant-Man movie. Its premise is fine, its villains are solid, but it's an absolutely terrible fit for the Ant-family. It could have worked with a more cosmic cast of characters -- the Guardians of the Galaxy, the Asgardians, oh man it could have been great as a Beta Ray Bill movie -- but it's just mystifying that they decided the third Ant-Man movie should be a space western. (On the plus side, it gave Corey Stoll another bite at the apple and a chance to prove that it wasn't his fault the first movie had a shitty villain.)

Haven't seen The Marvels yet. I hear good things.

[Niku]

The Marvels is the most pure fun I've had with a Marvel movie with a while. I think I liked Guardians 3 overall more, but it was a really fucking solid emotional capstone to a trilogy whereas the Marvels is just Absolute Breezy Chemistry: The Film.

[Thad]

Oh man, they are really teasing me with the whole retro-futurism thing.

I so badly want to see a Fantastic Four movie set in 1961, but I don't think they're really going to do it.

[Mongrel]

Wait... Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards?

I mean, he's great, but would you really call out to a guy with his build and his wide-yet-cherubic face "hey Slim"?

Then again, maybe that's actually a positive sign, being willing to mess around with this. Pascal is fun.

It's also cute how they managed to get a Kirby in there (no relation, AFAIK).

[Büge]

no no, Cyclops was "slim"

Mister Fantastic is "stretcho"

[Niku]

I so badly want to see a Fantastic Four movie set in 1961, but I don't think they're really going to do it.

Absolutely same: and early leak/rumors (which are never to be fully believed) suggest that if it's not currently the plan, it at least WAS the plan at some point to skip the origin and set it in the 60s and then just multi-time-blast them into the "main" MCU at the end. But I dare to dream.

[Thad]

Apparently the director is the WandaVision guy, so maybe?

WandaVision was pretty good until it quit being weird and turned into Generic CG Fight Last Act. Which probably wasn't his fault.