Originally published at: Teaser for Marvel's Phase 5 released | Boing Boing
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Idk what a yellowish-brown checkmark signifies in Twitter’s new hanky code but that trailer seems, you know, fake? And kina content-free anyway.
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Blipverts?!
We will have to see about Kang… Not really feeling the menace yet, good acting? Maybe (?) but menace?
Thanos was really little more than a recurring teaser character for most of his appearances anyway. You could have edited his cameos out of every Marvel movie prior to Infinity War without making much impact on the storytelling.
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It must never be forgotten that when we say “Marvel Universe” we’re saying “Disney.” Disney, Disney, Disney. The corporation built to acquire intellectual properties, then to squeeze every possible drop of blood from them. Fast, formulaic, and over and over and over.
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Personally I think the problem with phase 4 was not that they failed to establish an ominous major villain, it’s that every single movie in it ranged from okay to terrible. There is no center of gravity to the Marvel Universe without Captain America and Iron Man, and with Taika Waititi managing to create not only the worst movie in his corpus with “Love and Thunder,” but one of the worst films in the entire Marvel Universe. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible.
Other than that, we had the extremely “meh” Black Widow, a film about a dead character, half-heartedly trying to set up a replacement. And don’t even get me started with “The Eternals.” What the hell was that? Thinking about that film as a follow-up to the director’s extraordinary “Nomadland” is genuinely depressing. Shang-Chi was completely forgettable and even Multiverse of Madness managed to disappoint with its long, terrible, boring second act, shoe-horned in to try to get us excited about the Multiverse. So far, I’m really not. The one and only thing I care about with the Multiverse is that eventually they’ll finally get the X-Men and Fantastic Four into the world - it’s really kind of weird they’re trying to tease that fact in-story over the course of 3-4 years. “Some day we’ll tell great stories with characters you love! Aren’t you excited?”
Once the foreshadowed films finally appear, I’ll judge them on their merits - until then, they need to do something else that’s interesting, and Moon Knight ain’t it. I would not have thought it possible that MCU could squander the good will they’d built making 25 enjoyable films in a row, but wow, Phase 4 has taken me from enthusiastic fan to basically indifferent about the entire franchise.
Come on Marvel, you’ve been laying the groundwork for the Young Avengers for ages now, dooo iiittt!
Oh wait, I know why,
Fucking Disney and their homophobia
(edit, also, the X-Men are still conspicuously absent, which may be a surprise they’re working up to. All this faffing about with multiverses is an easy way to hand-wave them into the MCU.)
All the IP Disney owns and the best they can do is push more superheroes? Bleech…
I think the “lack of a central protagonist” is kind of connected to your other criticisms here — there’s just no unifying factor to Phase 4. The first decade of the MCU was a slow build, but there was always a hint of connectivity between things, whether it was the Infinity Stones, the Avengers / Sokovia Accords, et cetera. And even across all the movies, as you had, you still had some central “main characters” in the form of Cap and Iron Man.
Phase 4 is just … a bunch of movies and TV shows. The only “it’s all connected” bond they share is an occasional acknowledgement of The Blip, which only really makes things more confusing for new or casual viewers. While I guess it’s good that Marvel has used this phase to diversify things with Black Widow and Shangi-Chi (albeit more than a little too late!), there’s just no sense that any of these stories matter. That certainly isn’t helped by the introduction of a multiverse, either, which essentially says “none of these stories matter because every possible story is simultaneously happening therefore nothing is special!”
Also I have no idea anymore if Gods and Magic are real or just “sufficiently advanced science,” as they were painstakingly depicted in the first 3 phases.
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Well said, and good point about the much-needed diversity boost.
Going all the way back to Iron Man 2, it was so exciting when the post-credits scene showed Thor’s hammer in the desert. It might be an interesting exercise to consider why the teasers for new stories and characters were fun back then and now feel ever more like a cynical franchise exercise.
I suppose part of it is simply that Iron Man 2 was, jeez, 28 or 29 movies ago? I’ve totally lost count, but it’s no longer fresh, to put it mildly.
But more than that - and this relates to Devin’s point about having a unifying theme - I feel like there used to be a sense that a shared story was being told, that the connections between films were in the service of telling the larger story. Now I feel like the motivation is completely reversed - that the stories are increasingly in the service of setting up the next franchise. I feel that in a big, big way with the second act of Multiverse of Madness - like I was supposed to be super-excited to see Reed Richards and Patrick Stewart’s Professor X. Instead, I felt like, why did you totally derail the frenetic momentum of this story to tell a tenuous-related story that just teases additional IP will be coming soon to a theater near you?
And I do think the shared world-building had a kind of magic that felt really new, and that MCU sustained through Endgame - some day people will look back on the two-part Thanos movies and give them more credit for the degree to which they did something really new in film history, and they did it incredibly well. Especially in Infinity War, they brought together dozens of characters from several independent film franchises and it worked, and each character was actually part of the story and contributed in ways that were consistent with their original films.
Anyway, thanks for your comments and your thoughtful reply.
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