Review of Spider-Man: Far From Home

So I’ve got something of a love-hate relationship with Spider-Man. For a long time, I would have considered him my favorite superhero. However, he just didn’t age as well as some of the other superheroes, especially in a post-Dark Knight and Iron Man universe, and the result was that for a while I just stopped following him.

That’s not strictly true; I watched The Amazing Spider-Man and was fairly disappointed (barring the action, which was okay), and I was basically put off enough that I never watched the Tom Holland versions.

Then I eventually caved and watched Into the Spider-Verse, which was absolutely amazing, and I started reconsidering my approach to Spider-Man. Then I got a discount on a movie ticket, and figured I may as well use it to see Spider-Man: Far From Home.

Personally, I had found Tom Holland a little annoying in the MCU. Because of that I hadn’t seen Spider-Man: Homecoming, and I only saw Into the Spider-Verse because I was hounded to by friends and reviewers (they were correct; it was awesome!).

So I went to the theater, not yet having watched Homecoming. I’ve watched it since, because Far From Home is just so awesome, but I was really going in blind.

Which lets me say that Far From Home doesn’t require a whole lot of recent Spider-Man experience. It helps to know the basic concepts and who the main characters are, but it’s a great film and really delivers on a lot of fronts.

All-in-all, I found it to be one of the best action/superhero movies of the year. There were a few spots where it wasn’t perfect, but the merits were strong enough that only a wholehearted critic wouldn’t have enjoyed the film.

I got to watch on a massive screen (not the largest out there, but more than the average movie theater), and it was really a great experience.

The CGI is fantastic, but it doesn’t overshadow the characters. It feels much more like a MCU movie than Homecoming does, and Homecoming is much better than the earlier Sony affairs that I watched. The choreography of the fights is tremendous. It all comes together in a fantastic way, and the post-credits scenes tease things that I’m really looking forward to.

The plot is deep and well-developed, with Peter Parker’s internal conflict being as much a driving force as external events. Set after Avengers: Endgame, Far From Home deals with the threats that almost nobody has the tools to take care of.

There’s a lot of talk about Spider-Man taking over for Iron Man as head of the Avengers/Stark Industries, and I feel like Tom Holland’s performance could be sufficient to help him carry the franchise forward if that’s the role Spider-Man winds up taking in the MCU.

Really, all the acting is great. Every major character gets enough screen time and development to really have a reason to be there, and the minor characters serve their roles without getting in the way.

Far From Home is executed almost flawlessly, and shows that the MCU doesn’t need to end with Endgame. It’s the sort of high-quality fare that one would hope to see more of in the future: elevated superhero stories that focus on people and conflicts with inspirational meaning, but still give a great spectacle.

Review: Dark Phoenix

I’m trying to improve my review styles by being more terse, so I’m going to try to limit myself to 350 words. Feel free to give feedback.

Dark Phoenix feels like a pre-MCU superhero film.

It’s not bad, by any means. I got a discounted ticket, so I figured I’d see it early before looking at reviews.

Dark Phoenix trailer courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Great special effects, tremendous cast and acting, writing that didn’t take me out of the mood, and a decent soundtrack don’t help it rise to the point of being memorable.

The tone feels much darker than Marvel’s superhero films, but it’s not that much darker than X-Men Apocalypse or Logan, other 20th Century Fox entries.

I feel like there’s a lot of stuff that just casually goes unexplained, and the big elephant in the room is how Dark Phoenix compares to Captain Marvel.

The answer is:

Not great, but not poorly.

Throughout Dark Phoenix, there are some really cool special effects moments (and ones that are good enough to make me forget that I’m looking at special effects). The X-Men universe is proving to be a great exploration of some darker social themes, especially with mutant prejudice, though Dark Phoenix is no Logan.

Fight scenes are intense, but there’s a lot of getting to the chase that doesn’t answer any questions. It doesn’t have a whole lot of effective comic relief, but it’s not quite satisfying enough with a purely dramatic approach. It’s serious, but fails to build emotional payoff.

Ultimately, it feels like it lives in the shadow of Captain Marvel. Pretty much every gripe I had with Captain Marvel is absent. However, while Captain Marvel was a 9/10 movie buried in a 7/10 movie, Dark Phoenix is just a 7/10 movie.

Basically, Dark Phoenix takes itself too seriously, and doesn’t go off into deep exploration of its subject and themes. However, it’s a good movie, and I certainly enjoyed it. If I get another discount, or if it comes to streaming services, I might watch it again because there’s some seriously cool special effects and moments throughout.

Review of John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum

Went and saw the third John Wick film yesterday.

I was happy with it, but it wasn’t quite as good as I was expecting. Solid, still, and I’m actually more confident about the next film (because of course they set up another film in the series).

If you just want spectacle, Parabellum delivers. The storytelling is decent, and matched by tremendous visuals and acting, but there’s too little focus.

I’m going to be avoiding any spoilers in the review.

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Review of Avengers: Endgame

I went and saw Avengers: Endgame today, and I was not disappointed. I will keep this review as spoiler-free as possible, so feel free to enjoy.

I was somewhat on the fence about Endgame. I enjoyed Captain Marvel, but I was worried about some of the choreography (I felt Captain Marvel suffered from over-long fights) and the impact of a new character introduced so recently in the MCU on a story which is predominantly about the characters we’ve been following for years now.

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Review and Reflection: Captain Marvel

I put off seeing Captain Marvel for a while because it seems to be my norm over the past week to procrastinate, but I’ve also been a little less excited to see it because I saw a good mix of positive and negative reviews from critics I liked: I wanted to see it, but I wasn’t willing to put up with a crowded theater to see it.

So I finally went today (actually a couple days before the publication, but at the time of writing it’s only been a couple hours since I actually saw the movie), and I was actually really pleasantly surprised.

Review

I’d say that Captain Marvel is a 9/10 movie buried in a 7/10 movie. I normally don’t use numbers, but I think it’s a good illustrative point here.

I actually thought all the acting was really good; I’d heard complaints about stiffness, and there were a couple points in dialogue where things wore thin, but also a lot of moments that were really poignant, humorous, or exciting, so I can’t critique the writing too much overall.

Pacing is definitely an issue. I feel like there’s some sort of Marvel convention that says “Thou shalt have movies be more than two hours long” that drove some of the writing decisions. Upon looking it up, this is not true, but for some reason perfectly correlates with the MCU movies I’ve seen in theaters, as opposed to the ones I’ve seen at home (e.g. Thor).

With that said, there’s a lot of somewhat drawn out exposition and even fight scenes, which is odd because for most of the film the pacing feels really solid. Some early scenes feel over-long, namely the first fight between Captain Marvel (or, as she is known at that point, Vers) and the Skrull.

The movie starts with an amnesia plot; Vers doesn’t remember her prior life as Carol Danvers, and eventually figures out who she is over the course of the film (by about the two-thirds mark she remembers who she really is, courtesy of help from old friends; I’m guesstimating because I wasn’t timing the movie).

The big problem here is that we figure out who she is before she is, and the trailers make it clear too. For some reason, either we’re given a larger glimpse into the character’s mind than they themselves have (which, admittedly, is not impossible), or she’s remarkably stubborn about figuring out who she is despite knowing that she can’t remember anything and then suddenly getting memories or flashbacks.

There is a very small attempt to squelch this when another character mentions that she could have had memories implanted (when she has flashbacks that override the amnesia), but the counterpart to this is that the people who would have implanted the memories seem very keen to find out what they are and also act on information they acquired from those memories.

Or, to put it more simply: It’s the one “idiot ball” moment in the film where a character doesn’t realize everything the audience knows and doesn’t have a good reason to do so, and it’s the main character doing it right in the middle of the main plot. Just a tad frustrating, and one of the reasons why I describe Captain Marvel as a 9/10 movie buried in a 7/10 movie: if the audience were kept in the dark, or Carol Danvers had been quicker to re-emerge, it would’ve been great (or at least good). As it stood, it was just a little bit underwhelming in execution, and amnesia plots are overused as a secondary device, much less a primary one.

Ironically, I think it’s probably the final fight scenes that go on too long despite the clear intent to make them epic and flashy. The triumphant battles go beyond what they need to do to show us the power levels of the characters and make a good narrative point, and as much as the eye-candy is up to Marvel’s traditional quality (albeit, a little flashy even by their standards, something I’ll permit because Captain Marvel typically uses powers that manifest as pure light and energy).

A lot of people have argued that it doesn’t feel like Carol Danvers has a personal stake, but I didn’t get that at all. Except in the fight scenes. They drag on and nobody ever seems to really be impacted unless they’re a faceless extra, and even the lesser henchmen take a giant beating and just keep going. It feels like they had a giant CGI budget to use and insisted on using it all, but it just comes across as spectacle. I think if I watch Captain Marvel again, I might actually skip parts of these scenes; they’re well choreographed, but do nothing to actually move the story forward.

I’m not a huge MCU superfan (though I would describe myself as a lesser fan; I’ve liked them all), but I’d rate Captain Marvel in with the others. I don’t think it’s up to the same level as Infinity Wars was, but it’s definitely at the same level of quality as most of the other character origin films.

One thing that did surprise me a little was the fact that the movie was definitely a little crasser than it had to be. I get that they wanted to play up Carol Danvers (both pre-Kree and post-Kree) as someone who would overcome any obstacle, but there were some unnecessary, somewhat crude remarks by male characters that felt forced (particularly a line about “You know why they call it a cockpit?”) and weren’t even as effective at conveying the sexism she faced as some other events that cropped up (scenes where she is told that she’ll never fly as a pilot and where her father is giving her guff do the same without resorting to crudity). I know that Marvel’s moving toward embracing a PG-13 rating, but combining this with some of the other cussing in the film would have put me off of seeing it with young children in tow. I think it could have been as poignant with a little less explicit language and a little more illustration (and, given some of the things that we see fragments of later in the film, I think they may have actually cut out some of those scenes in favor of the more crude ones, which seems a tragedy).

Generally, despite this, I liked it. Other than feeling that it was a little over-long, I thought it was definitely worth watching. If I were the director, I would’ve trimmed it down a little (or added more context to justify the length of certain scenes), but there were a lot of really good moments and I was into it. Samuel L. Jackson was fantastic, Brie Larson did a tremendous job (there were a couple rough spots, but I put them down to the writers), and it was certainly worthy of the Marvel brand.

Reflection

Heads-up: I’ve avoided spoiling as much as possible in my review, but my reflections don’t do that so much.

The strongest points in the film come when we see a heroic struggle; this isn’t surprising, since it’s a point that I seize on all the time, but it’s still one that is quite interesting.

Carol Danvers has a two-fold struggle: the internal struggle of mastering herself and coming to grips with her identity, and the external struggle of figuring out what to do with her life and taking the fight to the Kree, who turn out to be the villains.

That’s quite an interesting side to the story, even if it’s not fully executed.

There’s a moment in the ending of the film where Danvers is being interrogated (for lack of a better term) by the Supreme Intelligence, the Kree AI overlord, and she is thrown into her own stream of memories, watching herself fail over and over again.

Her victory comes when she returns to those memories, watching the next bit: the part when she gets back up after failing.

It’s quite a powerful moment, and perhaps the best in the film, because it sums up what makes Danvers different from the Kree: being willing to get up and keep going, always improving herself, rather than sticking with the situation she’s in. By contrast, the Kree are more involved in their own lives, not wanting to change or grow and suppressing anything that might challenge their assumptions of superiority.


Wrapping Up

Captain Marvel was a good movie, and I’m glad I went to see it. It’s not the best movie I’ve ever seen, nor the best in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it certainly is worth seeing if you’re at all interested.

Why Star Wars is Still Good

Yeah, so I’m going to try to write more stuff up here this year. Show that I’m alive. Since I got loreshapers.net up and going, this is back to being well and truly just my personal blog, and I’m also working past my “write something formal” stage and (hopefully) coming out of my shell as a better, more flexible writer.

Today’s topic: Star Wars, and particularly the Last Jedi. Spoilers ahead.

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