So back in 2019, right on the cusp of Avengers Endgame coming out, I needed a project to distract myself and I decided to rewatch and recap every MCU movie, leading up to Endgame itself.
It was fun, and several friends said they enjoyed reading them. I find myself once again in need of a project to distract myself, and I watched all of Hawkeye today as part of a Christmas mood, and so I decided why not try to do the same with phase 4, now that it has officially wrapped with Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special?
I don't know that I'll make it all the way through. I may get to Eternals and stop dead. Or I may continue writing these up.
At any rate, it kicks off with Wandavision, which came out in January 2021. Now that we've seen that Phases 4-6 are about the Multiverse, it makes a little more sense why they would open with a reality warping series, but even now, I look at it and wonder why they decided to launch MCU TV with a story that was almost pure sticom homage for the first three episodes.
Even now, with the benefit of hindsight and binging all nine episodes in one go, I think the first three episodes are wildly self-indulgent. Fun if you're a classic sitcom fan, but my love of sitcoms really begins in the '80s, so the spot-on riffs on '50s, '60s, and '70s sitcoms did basically nothing for me.
Which is not to say they're bad. No, it's actually really impressive how perfectly the creative teams boiled down sitcoms to their decade essence, from the theme songs and opening credits all the way through to the set and costume design. There's even some nods to sitcom tropes, with the "very special episode" about Sparky dying, the pregnancy episode, the boss coming to dinner episode, the shenanigans at a talent show episode, etc. I just remain certain that there was a way to start cutting between the outside world/S.W.O.R.D. stuff in, say, episode two, rather than waiting until episode four to clue us in on what was going on.
The show really gets going when it introduces S.W.O.R.D. and the triple threat of Monica Rambeau, Jimmy Woo, and Dr. Darcy Lewis. One a new supporting character who happens to be one of my all-time favorite comic characters (Monica), the other really fun comic relief from their respective movie series. There's not enough of any of them here, and in fact there was plenty of online begging for a Woo/Darcy spinoff, which I still think would be delightful. But they're used very well.
Also, the development of Wanda and Vision here, both of which have been interesting enough in their own right, shows the actors and characters to be worthy of the spotlight shone on them. Wanda and Vision are one of the best couples in comics, and the show really does justice to them.
The nods to comics here are strong as well, and do the usual MCU trick of pulling in all the things that worked in the comics into a more cohesive narrative. In particular, the nods to West Coast Avengers and Vision & Scarlet Witch miniseries that were early in my comics collecting career, like the "Glamour and Illusion" riff, made me happy in the way that the MCU focus on '70s-'80s Marvel material often has. And both "Probability Hex" and "Chaos Magic," two explanations of Wanda's powers in the comic, make appearances here.
That does mean that they bring in some elements I didn't like from the comics, notably the outright sabotage of Scarlet Witch by first John Byrne and then Brian MIchael Bendis. I know some are very upset about Scarlet Witch's role in Multiverse of Madness, but it feels of a piece with what was done here, and what's been done in the comics. I don't *like* it, but I get it.
The show also delves into theme more strongly in a 9-episode show than even a 3 1/2 hour movie can manage. It's a really effective meditation on grief, with Vision's "what is grief if not love persevering" being the "I can do this all day" or "I love you 3000" of the piece.
There are some pretty notable developments here around the edges showing what the post-Endgame MCU looks like. Seeing the difference between Director Hayward's living through the Blip and Monica's having vanished during it, for example. The appearance of Billy and Tommy, the first nod toward building the Young Avengers that I think we all know is coming.
And the Easter Eggs and speculation started going wild with this one. The return of Evan Peters as Quicksilver spurred all kinds of craziness about how they were going to bring in mutants and the X-Men canon (not to mention several people *sure* that he was secretly Mephisto), only to have it be revealed to be literally a Bohner joke. There is a *lot* more teasing of the fans going on now, or maybe the Internet just got a lot more weird and speculative during the pandemic. It's kind of fun to joke about, but I have to admit I sometimes find myself annoyed at how everyone needs to predict what's going to happen instead of enjoying the ride, especially when the shows get criticism not for what they are, but what they aren't.
Which ironically leads me to my criticism of the show as what it is and what it isn't. This is a mystery box show, ala Lost, which I feel is a weird fit for the MCU formula. It's a sitcom of sorts, although looking at She-Hulk in comparison, it's hard to argue that Wandavision couldn't have been better and funnier while still moving the MCU ball down the field.
I'm a little sad they created a new character in Director Hayward rather than making him perennial thorn-in-the-heroes-side Henry Peter Gyrich, but there is still some speculation that Hayward is a skrull or something else, so maybe they didn't want to use the character that way. Or maybe they're saving him. Or maybe they just didn't think of it.
Certainly the MCU has no problem with "in name only" versions of the character because Kathryn Hahn's Agatha Harkness bears no resemblance at all to the comics version, who is an old woman seen as Franklin Richards' governess, before she was Wanda's mentor. But that's OK, because this reinvention of her as the sinister force who took advantage of Wanda's grief-spawned cosmic oopsie is a delight to watch.
The Infinity Stones remain the most powerful force in the MCU. They unlocked Wanda's potential, they created Vision, they gave us Captain Marvel, and by proxy they gave Monica her powers. I'm honestly a little surprised, though not displeased, that the Vibranium meteorite didn't somehow tie into them. At the same time, the successful shift of Dr. Strange from quantum manipulation to "nah it's just magic" that happened in the Avengers sequels means that the MCU is just fine having full-on witches and magic here, rather than having to explain it all as cosmic genetic manipulation, and I'm glad for that.
There's also plenty of setup done here for the future. Obviously Wanda's role in Multiverse of Madness is teased with her sinister Darkhold finale, and Monica's interaction with a Skrull is a nice nod to her Captain Marvel origins and her role in the Marvels sequel. And as previously noted, it seems like Billy and Tommy are the first building blocks toward Young Avengers. Over the course of phase four we'll meet at least two or three more of them.
I really like Wandavision, and it holds up well, but I do think those first three episodes are slow if you don't *love* classic sitcoms, and it was the first indication that Phase Four was going to be very different from what had gone before.
Falcon and Winter Soldier (March 2021)
Musically and cinematography-wise, this felt like a continuation of the Cap series, especially focusing as heavily as it did on super soldiers. Dealing with the Blip makes sense, and clearly this was meant to be the first Marvel show, rather than the more ambitious (and stranger) Wandavision. The GRC (Global Repatriation Council), the notion of refugees kicked out of their new homes when their original owners blipped back into existence, and how the world changed after the Blip is a background element, but it's an important one.
This also has great action scenes. It opens with Sam's air rescue and helicopter fight, battling it out with Batroc, and we get to see Falcon kick ass in a way he didn't really get to in the movies. The truck battle with the Flag Smashers on top of two semis is really inventive and fun, and shows off how cool flight is as a power. The gun fight in Madripoor among the shipping containers is just a really solid run and gun action scene. The fight with the Dora Milaje is really good, and Bucky and Sam fighting Walker in all his 'roided-up Super Soldier serum madness is a fantastic fight as well. And the way Sam combines flight and the shield in the helicopter rescue at the end has me excited for the possibilities of the next Cap movie.
Dealing with Winter Soldier's past and his sins, ala the Brubaker series. Also love Bucky's ties to Wakanda in the MCU, and that they used that here. Given that Zemo killed T'Chaka, it's a natural stress point, and just really good to bring them all together. And having the Wakandans build Sam's Captain America suit (which is a dead-on perfect take on the comic version) makes a lot of sense too. Also love that he has Steve's notebook.
Dr. Raynor, former soldier and now therapist, is an interesting character, and as with Hayward in Wandavision, I like her but also kinda wish they'd used Doc Samson, psychiatrist to the superheroes. But her being ex-military gives her a flavor that Samson wouldn't have, so it makes sense.
The show really hits on race in a way I wasn't expecting, when Sam interacts with the bank, or the cops, and they treat him differently than they would the Falcon. He's a hero, but he's still a black man, and it's clear that people treat him differently. That also comes into Sam's struggles with the shield and Cap's legacy, which is of course a throughline that leads up to him becoming Cap at the end, but a different kind of Cap. Isaiah's "they'll never let a black man become Captain America, and no self-respecting black man would want to be" is a surprisingly subversive thing to be in a Disney+ show.
Sam and Bucky have such a fun relationship/rivalry, Sam's sister and nephews are such a good addition to the character, and I love centering him in New Orleans. One of my favorite moments in this series is just Sam and Bucky hanging around and fixing his family boat, and talking about Steve's legacy. That's the kind of thing that would never make the cut in a limited run-time of a movie (even a 3 1/2 hour Marvel movie), and it's such good stuff, it shows what the MCU can do with the TV format.
The Mark Gruenwald run was one of my earliest comics loves, and this show drew a lot from that. Flag Smasher. Power Broker. Battlestar. John Walker. All reinterpreted for the MCU.
Wyatt Russell as John Walker is fantastic casting. He *looks* like square-jawed blond Cap, and acts like a fascist, just like the comics version. Very notable that he carries a gun. Making him married was a good choice, he's a lot more three-dimensional at first, although he's smug and jerky from the outset too. From the earliest, we can see that his humility is kind of a put-on, that he may believe it but the moment he gets any pushback from a Flag Smasher he's angry, violent, "Do you know who I am?" We can see his fragility when he mutters "they weren't even super soldiers" after he gets his ass kicked by the Wakandans, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the blond, blue-eyed white-haired man got his ass handed to him by strong black women and just couldn't handle it. And it's no surprise that Lemar getting killed leads him to becoming a murderer.
Speaking of, even though I'm sorry he was killed off to motivate John (unlike in the comics, where he just kind of vanished because nobody uses him), I was delighted to have Lemar Hoskins, aka Battlestar, in this show. Making them both military instead of just glory-seeking entertainers like in the comics is a perfect MCU adjustment. Also using a brass band version of "Star-Spangled Man," it all reads like "this is what would have happened with Steve Rogers if he was in the '00s instead of the '40s, and if he was a modern military guy instead of the man Steve Rogers was."
Then there are the Flag Smashers. In the comics, it's one guy with a goofy costume (which I love) who basically just wants to get rid of all nations. Making it more of an organization, with the same dedication to no borders but centered on how the world looked during the five years of the Blip, is a really good update. And gender-flipping Karl Morgenthau and casting the incomparable Erin Kellyman was a good move too.
On top of the Mark Gruenwald stuff, there are plenty of nods to other elements of the Marvel Universe. Lt. Torres is the new Falcon in the comics, and given Sam's new job at the end of this, I have to wonder if we'll see that in Captain America New World Order.
Introducing Carl Lumbly as Isaiah Bradley, and another Young Avenger introduced in his grandson, was great, and I love that Winter Soldier fought Isaiah in the '50s during the Korean War. Then there's Madripoor (including Princess Bar, Wolverine's hangout) and Smiling Tiger (Sam's cover identity), a deep cut from the New Warriors. Dr. Nagel, who was working on the super soldier serum for the Power Broker, comes from The Truth, the same place that Isaiah Bradley comes from. And there's the introduction of Julia Louis Dreyfuss as Contessa Valentina Allegra deFontaine, the hotter, snarkier, more morally compromised Nick Fury for Phase 4. She's only had brief appearances, here and in Black Widow and Wakanda Forever, but I love every minute of it, and can't wait to see her in Thunderbolts. With any luck, we'll get Zemo too.
The development of Sharon Carter and Baron Zemo is great here. Both were memorable but almost cameos in the films, this gives them a both a lot more development. Zemo being a rich baron *and* special op deepens him. Instead of his comics motivation, where he's a Nazi grandson who hates Cap and has a glued-on mask (no seriously, look it up) here he doesn't want there to be super-beings, and honestly, it's a reasonable position to take. His weirdly correct appreciation of black culture is a fun running gag, but also points to him as a smart and educated man. He espouses philosophy about supremacy, he recognizes fine art, he knows how to get information from the kids on the street, it's clear that the writers *loved* Zemo. Also "He's out of line, but he's right" may be the most memorable moment in this series, it's definitely the most memed.
Although making Sharon Power Broker isn't something I loved, making her a disavowed spy in Madripoor is a good move, and fits with what Mark Waid did with her when he brought her back. (I didn't like that either, back in the day, and something I said about it in a review caused Waid to hate me with a white hot passion for like a decade. To be fair, I was a 20-something kid, so whatever I said was probably dickish.)
That said, the Power Broker was a huge part of Gruenwald's run, and was basically a generic white guy businessman until he got stuffed full of his own serum and wound up looking like a grotesque over-built body builder (again, look it up), and this more sinister low-key version of is both more interesting and a better fit for the MCU. In the comics, he was responsible for setting up the Unlimited Class Wrestling, and it's a shame we didn't get that, because that's a fun concept.
I know this show is held in lower esteem by a lot of people, it is almost always lowest on the lists of Disney+ shows. I don't get it, though. I think this all works really well, it has the same quality of all the Captain America movies, which for my money are some of the best movies in the MCU. It's arguably less ambitious than the other shows, a pretty straightforward action thriller, but that's a speed that works for me. I'm looking forward to Captain America New World Order.
Loki Season 1 (June 2021)
Loki was the third of the MCU TV series, and even given my fondness for Falcon/Winter Soldier, I have to admit it's clearly the best of the initial three. At six episodes, most of them weighing in around 30 minutes, it's a tighter show than WandaVision or Falcon/Winter Soldier, and with its introduction of the TVA, the multiverse, and the return of one of the MCU's premier villains, it's arguably the most ambitious of the projects.
The big themes of Loki are Order and Chaos, Determination vs. Free Will, and you couldn't pick a better dichotomy there then the one between the TVA (and the man behind their curtain, more on that later) and Loki(s), gods/goddesses/alligators of chaos. The TVA is a perfect bureaucratic nightmare. They'll casually disintegrate someone or wipe out an entire variant timeline, and Loki catches on fast to how little they value his life. It's interesting that Loki's stated motives in Avengers, restated here are "freeing people from freedom," which kind of sounds like the ideals of the TVA, but Loki isn't really being honest about that with himself or with others. He's an agent of chaos, and even if he really did want to bring order to the people in the name of taking away the burden of freedom, he definitely doesn't want that imposed on himself.
This also plays out in microcosm among the TVA, represented by Judge Ravonna Renslayer, Agent Mobius, and Hunter B-20. To one degree or another, they are all cogs in the TVA machinery, and all true believers. But as the show goes on, all of them face a crisis of one sort of another, and even the most loyal of them realizes that she has been lied to by the organization she's devoted her life to. Ravonna in the comics is Kang's long-suffering love, and she mostly has existed as motivation for him, often literally just frozen in time, so her MCU version, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, is a notable improvement. Agent Mobius was a nod to beloved creator Mark Gruenwald, and I'm glad they kept the mustache look for him. Owen Wilson is fantastic in the role of a dedicated if quirky civil servant of the TVA, he has great chemistry with Loki, although I think we're all a little disappointed that we didn't get to see any of his jet-skiing pre-TVA life. Maybe in season 2. And Miss Minutes is a great addition, I don't know if Tara Strong gave her the southern accent or if that was always the plan, but she's the perfect kind of faux-friendly corporate tool to explain with a cheery smile all the horrible things her organization is responsible for. I love when she's vamping for time alongside Ravonna when Sylvie has them on the ropes late in the season.
Speaking of the TVA, it looks fantastic, with it's late '60s art deco technology, colors, and design. When we see glimpses of the scale of it, and looking at Quantumania trailers, it seems clear that it's similar to the scope and design of Kang's realm. Mobius also notes that time moves differently in the TVA. Is the TVA located inside the Quantum Realm?
Then there's Loki, or more correctly Lokis. The way Tom Hiddleston plays Loki is a lot of fun. The way he "turns on" that smile so you can see that it's entirely fake, and his disdain for the Avengers and Tony Stark. And he immediately tries to join the TVA and help them take out the Avengers. And when he realizes he can't use his powers, he realizes how much trouble he's in. The theme of the first episode and indeed much of the show is that his "glorious purpose" isn't what he thought it was. The judge tells him "it's not your story" and he finds out that he was supposed to die. He's an enemy of the very concept of the sacred timeline, but he won't find that out until he meets Sylphie. Which... Sophia Di Martino has to match Sylphie up with Hiddleston's Loki, who has had four movies to develop at this point, and she does an admirable job. Her darker backstory, kidnapped from Asgard as a child and then growing up hunted the TVA, seeing apocalypse after apocalypse, shapes her into a very different kind of Loki. The two of them bantering and bickering their way through the doomed Lamentis-1, and the extremely odd love story of two variants falling in love with themselves, really works with these two actors. My favorite Loki, though, might be Richard Grant, playing a full-on classic Loki in full-on classic Loki costume, and he gets one of the most memorable moments of the series facing off with Alioth at the end of time.
There are a ton of fun moments in this one. The drawer full of useless Infinity Stones. Loki as D.B. Cooper, aided by Heimdall, because he lost a bet with Thor. During the Lamentis-1 sequence, Loki smashes a cup and yells "Another!" so I guess that's just an Asgardian thing, not just Thor. That Sif time loop cameo. Plenty of Easter Eggs too, including but definitely not limited to Throg, the Thanos Copter, the U.S.S. Eldridge (from the Philadelphia Experiment), and President Loki and Kid Loki from the comics. All the Lokis betraying one another because *of course* they do.
Then there's the reason I wanted to rewatch this before Quantumania hits, and that's the Kang of it all. Or at least, Jonathan Majors giving us our first glimpse of Kang, even if he's not technically Kang in this one. In the comics, He Who Remains is head of the TVA, but unrelated to Kang. Loki wisely changes this so that He Who Remains is sort of like Immortus, the more patient, less conquer-y version of Kang who nevertheless has always seemed a little sinister, ruling over his version of Limbo. Jonathan Majors plays him as a bit quirky and odd, which you would be if you were the last being in the universe, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it contrasts with his Kang. We also get the origin of Kang, the MCU version, and learn that the TVA was created to end the Multiversal War of Kangs.
Hearing about the Multiversal War and the sacred timeline, you can hear some of the developments that will resonate throughout phases 4-6. In particular, "madness" is mentioned as the condition of a multiverse, and the promise of "another multiversal war" seems like a presaging of Secret Wars. How that plays out, we'll see, but just as WandaVision laid the groundwork for Doctor Strange 2 (and the upcoming Vision and Agatha series, and Monica in the Marvels), and Falcon/Winter Soldier laid some groundwork for Captain America 4 and Thunderbolts, I suspect there's a lot of foundational work being done here in Loki that we haven't quite seen yet, but which will be crucial in Phase 5 and 6.
Black Widow (July 2021)
This is the only MCU movie I didn't see in the theater, due to pandemic stuff. So let's get this out of the way first... this movie should have come out before Infinity War and Endgame. It takes place between Civil War and Infinity War. It gets a little extra weight from knowing Natasha's fate, but it would have been so much better if she had this much more development before she met it. In rewatching it now, though, I realize that I actually like it a lot more than I remembered liking it. This is a pretty great flick that had the misfortune to be the next movie after Endgame, which was the culmination of like 20+ movies, and it doesn't compare as well to that. But compare it to the first Cap, Iron Man, or Thor and I think it's as good or arguably better.
In the comics, Red Guardian was Natasha's husband, part of the Red Room project. Making him the surrogate father, Americans-style, to their undercover family is a *much* better replacement. David Harbour's cartoonish and boastful Red Guardian is a delight. And she's basically an original character, but Rachel Weisz as Melina Vostokoff, Natasha and Yelena's foster mom, is also great. In the comics, Melina is a third tier Black Widow villain, an armored agent of the Russian federation known as Iron Maiden.
There are a ton of great action sequences, most of it kept at the tight, espionage level of the Bourne movies, or if you want to get a little further afield, Atomic Blonde. That airstrip escape is a pretty solid opening sequence. Natasha and Taskmaster on the bridge is a good fight. Natasha vs. Yelena in the safehouse in Budapest is brutal and fast and shows off their well-matched skill sets. The motorcycle/car/tank chase in Budapest is up there with Winter Soldier for best vehicle chase in the MCU. The prison break is pretty spectacular.
This movie goes pretty hard on the horrors of the Red Room. Opening with basically child slavery and showing the training they underwent in the credits with that haunting cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit is probably creepier and more effective than any other origin sequences would have been. We've had plenty of snapshots of the program, from implied honey pot work by a teenager, forced sterilization, murder from a young age, and so these still images and snippets of video let us see exactly what Natasha and the other Widows went through.
The Widows as an organization of deadly female assassins is a natural extrapolation of having two Black Widows in the comics, and it's a really good expansion of the concept. To be honest, I feel like this would have worked really well as a TV miniseries that expanded on all the characters, but Yelena gets to reappear and develop in Hawkeye, so that kind of works anyway.
Natasha's tech/ID connect is Rick Mason a.k.a. The Agent. In the comics, a pretty deep cut, the son of Spider-Man foe The Tinkerer, who has also appeared in the Spidey movies in the MCU in a very different take. As with most of the characters in this movie, he's so modified as to be a new character, but he serves his purpose well. He's not as memorable or fun as the best MCU supporting cast like Spidey's Ned or Ant-Man's Luis, but... he's fine.
Taskmaster is a favorite villain of mine. His power is cool and really easy to do in comics, where you can make explicit that he's duplicating moves of existing heroes and villains. He's a smartass and also someone who decided to use his powers to train henchmen for other villains. And he's a mutant whose power is photographic reflexes. This version is... fine. But it feels like they stole a lot of his personality and the really cool origin of his powers in order to give us an only OK surprise. I hope that MCU Taskmaster gets to be a lot cooler and more fun in Thunderbolts. That said, if you watch some of the online videos and see how much work the fight choreographers put in to Taskmaster's moves to echo other characters, it's clear that they did the work. I just wish they'd called it out a bit more in the movie. It's like they wanted Taskmaster to be like the Terminator, silent and implacable, but it doesn't quite work.
And then there's grown-up Yelena. In the comics, Yelena Belova was introduced by Greg Rucka & Devin Grayson as the replacement for Natasha, and she was trying to kill her. Making her instead a foster sister is a much better replacement. And Florence Pugh absolutely kills it here, her deadpan sarcasm and casual confidence are winning, and she is believable as someone who just incorporated all her trauma and kept rolling forward. Love her teasing Widow about her fight poses and her larger-than-life superhero life, but it also tells an important bit of story, that Yelena resents Natasha for basically forgetting about her, and that she wants to be the heroic role model, not the killer she is. There's another nod to her very Russian, very deadpan suicidal nature during the prison escape, with her bemused "this would be a cool way to die."
Would it have *killed* them to pay off that Winter Soldier and Natasha met each other in the Red Room? For that matter, I would have loved to have seen the Natasha/Hawkeye flashback, rather than just being told about it. The film does a good job picking up on the Dreykov's daughter bit that was mentioned in Avengers, and fleshing it out, but a little de-aged Jeremy Renner/Scarlet Johannson flashback would have been great.
Fun to see Ursa Major in the prison sequence, although I would have loved to have seen him turn into a bear during that prison riot. Also, Red Guardian's tale of meeting Captain America... just boasts? If so, I don't think he would have asked Natasha about him. Hints at Jack Monroe, a.k.a. Nomad? Hints at Isaiah Bradley? Seems more likely. Either way, I want to see that resolved.
Love the Red Room being basically a Russian helicarrier. Complete with Russian versions of the Quinjets. The MCU has a reputation, not entirely unearned, for having weaker third acts, but this whole movie, from the moment they land on the Red Room all the way to that amazing falling fight sequence at the end, is spectacular. The battle through the falling debris of the Red Room is the big superhero set piece, an imaginative and evocative fight for people whose super powers are basically super martial arts.
Ray Winstone is pretty English to be Russian, but in his relatively few minutes of screen time, he makes a great General Dreykov. Slimy, utterly convinced of his own power and position, and brutal to those under his command. The way he uses these women, including his own daughter, as if they were nothing more than killer robots, makes it deeply satisfying when Yelena finally does get him. Also Natasha getting him to break her nose so the pheremonal lock doesn't work is some pretty badass shit. And getting him talking, giving away his secrets, is exactly the trick that she used on Loki.
The chemistry between the made-up Russian family of Red Guardian, Malina, Natasha, and Yelena is so good that I'm actually pretty sad we'll never see more of it. When things turns serious at the dinner table and really shows how screwed up Natasha and Yelena are, and how much Yelena wanted her family to be real, everyone involved makes it very real even in this heightened superhero genre film. Natasha's sacrifice in Endgame is important, but I'd rather have had her and this cast continue on in the MCU, exploring the espionage side of the universe. But at least we'll get Red Guardian and Yelena (and Taskmaster, I think?) together in Thunderbolts.
What If? (August 2021)
I love the concept of What If? and Elseworlds and alternate world takes. It's probably part of the reason I love Spider-Verse so much. Gimme a multiverse and in general, you've got to work hard to make me not like it. Which is why I'm a little disappointed that I only love about half of this series, and I think there are two legitimate clunkers (What If? Doctor Strange and What If? Thor) in the bunch.
One of the touches I love about this is when we see The Watcher in the background, invisible to the people he's watching. Jeffrey Wright definitely understood the assignment too, and gives us the perfect Uatu.
What If? opens strong, if a little predictably, with the back-to-back tale of Captain Carter and Star-Lord T'Challa. Both feel like they're working a little too hard to elevate their leads when neither character nor actor needs that kind of thumb on the scale. Is it funny that T'Challa is so much better at being Star-Lord that he actually talks Thanos out of his lifelong genocide plan? Yes. Does it make sense? Not really. But the What If? formula in comics usually involved a mix of "everything would stay sort of the same, the timeline corrects" and "everything would be so terrible that everyone dies" and these first two sort of lean into that first one.
In particular, how much you'll enjoy Captain Carter relies on how much you liked Captain America the First Avenger and how much you like the Peggy/Steve relationship. Tony building the HYDRA Stomper for Steve using a captured cube is something I like very much, Sharon just wailing on some Nazis with a sword and shield is also something I like very much. There's not a lot of twists and turns here, but it's an enjoyable story to me.
Star-Lord T'Challa is also very enjoyable, but it's... odd. It kinda feels like they want to get that James Gunn weirdness and heart in but don't quite know how to manage it. I love the way all the relationships get tweaked with T'Challa in the role, I didn't *quite* buy Tivan as a big bad because he's such a quirky goofball, but it mostly works.
A murder mystery conspiracy thriller about how the Avengers didn't form in this universe was not what I expected from the third episode, but given how much I like the SHIELD/spy stuff, this became one of my favorite episodes. And I love the way Fury and Widow work together.
The voice cast on the show in general is impressive, but episode three is a particular high point, with Fury, Hawkeye, Hulk, Loki, Crossbones, and Agent Coulson, and Lake Bell picking up the slack to do a pretty perfect Black Widow.
I love that episode three opens with an unseen scene from Iron Man 2, before it all goes wrong. There are also visual and story references to a lot of early Marvel, including scenes from Incredible Hulk and Thor.
In retrospect, the reveal of how the murders took place was very clever, but there was really no way to figure it out on first watch. Usually I'd say that's not playing fair with the audience when it comes to a mystery, but I think it works here.
Also that last fight between a disguised Loki and a bitter Yellowjacket version of Hank is a ton of fun. As is Loki predictably deciding to take over the Earth with no Avengers to stop him.
In the MCU, I've always liked Doctor Strange more as part of an ensemble, and his What If? episode is no exception. It's cool to see chaos magic and time manipulation and magic played with on this level, but I've never quite bought into the romance between Christine and Strange, and so all the stories trying to convince me that it's so important fall a little flat.
Also, Christine's death can't be an Absolute Point, because the entirety of Strange's real origin has Christine alive and him in the accident, so it's a weird premise. And introduces a bunch of new stuff, like the Library of Cagliostro, which is completely original to this episode but doesn't exist in the MCU anywhere else. A few Easter eggs when he's absorbing beings would have been nice. Given that What If? is about alternate paths of characters and events we've known, this one feels more like an original Dr. Strange story, and not a super-interesting one.
While I like Marvel Zombies, the sort of dark humor take that Kirkman gave it was not my favorite, and so I wasn't expecting a lot, and I think it wound up as my favorite episode. The choice to have mostly the more low-powered characters left to fight the super zombie apocalypse really works, and I loved seeing Sharon Carter, Winter Soldier, Wasp, Okoye, Happy, Kurt (from Ant-Man), an unpowered Bruce Banner, and of course Spidey all together. Even if, true to zombie form, not all of them make it past the first encounter with zombies.
The origin of a zombie plague, which I know Kirkman doesn't have much interest in exploring (and I don't know that he did), makes a lot of sense as something from the Quantum Realm.
Having Spidey the pop culture aficionado make a Zombieland style how to survive the zombie apocalypse is a fun touch too. Using Peter Parker was a particularly smart move in general, because he gets to be the light of hope in the darkness when they need it.
There's also a really nice balance between goofy and serious here. Ant-Man as a severed head floating around on the cape works and is kinda sweet too. Wasp's last ride is tragic and heroic, but then we get the hilarious bit of her throwing a zombie at their escaping quinjet and it bouncing off harmlessly. Using Vision as another bad guy, the "man gone mad" in the zombie apocalypse scenario, mostly works if you buy into the depth of his relationship with Scarlet Witch, which I do.
I still kind of hate the episode with Bro-Thor. I know that everyone became convinced that wacky was the way to go with Thor thanks to Taika Waititi, but as we learned in Love & Thunder, not even Taika could pull the trick off twice. There's stuff I like, including Captain Marvel coming down to lay a smackdown on Thor, and the science/magic couple tattoos of Thor and Jane, but it's few and far between.
Hawkeye (November 2021)
I was pretty much always going to love a Hawkeye show. In fact, the only way I wouldn't have loved it is if I had *hated* it. Because while Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye bears little resemblance to my favorite version (that would be '80s newlywed Hawkeye running the West Coast Avengers), he has made him a likable, sardonic everyman hero in the MCU in the little bits he's been allowed to do.
So when given a wider canvas to work with, and a perfect partner in Hailee Steinfeld's Kate Bishop, it's no surprise that Renner came through. That it is also the Shane Black style Christmas MCU movie we didn't get (Iron Man 3 is the one we did get, and the less said about that, the better) is the little light-up angel on top of the tree.
Hawkeye and Green Arrow are two of my favorite characters. I dunno, I just have a thing for archer superheroes, I guess. But I love the goofy elements that a lot of writers are embarrassed by. Give me trick arrows and impossible shots and normal people taking beatings that only superheroes should be able to take.
And Hawkeye does that, but it also shows that Hawkeye and Kate are both vulnerable. Giving Clint his trademark hearing loss but instead of getting it from biting down on a sonic arrow to stop sound-based mind control (no, really, look it up) he can't pin down which explosion or concussion caused it? *chef's kiss*
Likewise, Hawkeye having a secret family and kids is an Ultimates thing, something Mark Millar used for cheap drama by having them all murdered, and I'm glad that instead the creators in the MCU made it a centerpiece of why Hawkeye does what he does. Seeing him try to enjoy a New York Christmas with his family is delightful, and the scene with him talking to his little boy with the help of Kate is legitimately heart-warming and heart-breaking at the same time.
But it also makes the relationship between Clint and Kate work better than it does in the comics. And it works great in the comics, but the whole reluctant mentor/surrogate dad thing that he's got going gets much more reinforced by having Kate's dad killed instead of being a supervillain, and by having Clint be a dad in his regular life already. And Kate's hero worship of Clint, her sincerity, works better than the patented snark that is Matt Fraction's stock in trade. I want to be clear, the Fraction/Aja run is a *huge* influence on this show, and it's a good thing, but I think again that the MCU has improved on the source material.
Like the Tracksuit Mafia. And Echo. And the goofy, lovable version of Swordsman. All just great here. And of course, Lucky the Pizza Dog is great, but you can't improve on that, because he is always the best boy who did nothing wrong.
I remember when this was coming out, everyone kept speculating that Kingpin was involved, and I was like "Nah, they're not gonna bring in any of the Netflix stuff." (I did the same thing with Daredevil. My track record for that is, uh, not great. I'm so glad they did, though. Vincent D'Onofrio makes a great, menacing Kingpin, and they really gave him the MCU upgrade here, with note-perfect costuming (that flower pattern shirt!) and a physicality and power that pushes him into near-superhuman. Look at him throwing Kate around, taking a hit from an arrow and a car and then getting up and walking around again. He's not in this a lot, but he *owns* the screen when he is.
Speaking of memorable guest stars, bringing in Yelena from Black Widow honestly elevates the Black Widow movie about half a star for me in hindsight. The most fun is when she and Kate are talking things over in her apartment, the second most fun is when they're fighting it out in the building, but the really crucial bit is when she and Clint have emotional catharsis, bonding over the death of Natasha.
The action in this show is top notch. That car chase, complete with Pym arrow and bridge-jumping, cable line swinging escape. Clint taking on the Tracksuit mafia. The LARPer battle for the Ronin suit. And everything about the finale, especially all the trick arrows, Kate bringing down the Rockefeller tree, and those perfect new costumes.
Then there's the cherry on top for me, the reveal that the watch they've been looking for the whole time belongs to Laura, and she was SHIELD, and she was Agent 19, and that pretty much seals that she's Mockingbird, that she just retired to a new identity. And *that* means we could maybe see the adventures of young Hawkeye and Mockingbird in the future. Even if we don't, knowing that Clint and Bobbi made it work in the MCU, that they have kids and a stable relationship, unlike the continuity shitshow that it devolved into in the comics, makes me very happy.
I could write more about this... it's six episodes but I loved every minute of it. I didn't even really touch on Vera Farmiga's perfect performance as Kate's mom, and I only lightly touched on Tony Dalton as Jack. Hell, I almost forgot to talk about Rogers! The Musical, which just killed me the first time I saw it. Just a perfect version of an MCU show I always wanted.
Wakanda Forever (November 2022)
The joy of Wakanda contrasted with the death of T'Challa (and Chadwick Boseman) feels like a respectful way to pay tribute to the actor who just embodied the character. It's like we were all invited to the public funeral of this version of the man, not the real person that we didn't all know, but everything he represented as the hero. I understand the calls to recast T'Challa, but I think that the creators did an excellent job with the decision that they made. And T'Challa's coffin being taken up into a ship, representing his ascension to an afterlife, was a nice touch. Also not since Up has any movie had the whole audience crying before the credits rolled.
Speaking of contrast, the verbal smackdown Ramonda lays down on the arrogant members of the UN works nicely with the physical smackdown the Dora Milaje lay down on their mercenaries in the Wakandan Outreach Center. The "oh shit" moment of the Dora revealing themselves had me just grinning when I watched this. Also, it's a funny moment, but Okoye's distaste for the energy daggers of Shuri carries forward the tradition vs. change arguments that were a big part of the first movie. The same argument plays out in the introduction of the Midnight Angels, a fairly new set of characters from Ta-Nehishi Coates' run, who are recreated note perfectly here, and in Shuri's disinterest in recreating the heart-shaped herb and the mantle of Black Panther.
I love that even in a world with Thor and Bast, Shuri is still basically an atheist, and is pushing back against her mother's more spiritual grieving. I know that her arc is basically learning to accept tradition and spirituality, but it's as rare to see atheism portrayed this way as it is to see nakedly anti-colonialism and I love that Coogler puts it in these movies.
Talokan is such a reinvention of Atlantis and Namor its almost a wholly original idea. Making Talokan another site of vibranium, tying it into Namor's powers, and portraying Talokan and Wakanda as mirror images of those affected by colonialism is just all really smart, and a good engine for conflict.
The Talokani having sirens is a neat idea, and makes sense as an aquatic threat. I'm kind of surprised they've never done with Atlanteans. I really like the reinvention of Atlantis as Talokan, although I think in trying to make them scary Coogler made everything a bit too dark, and often hard to really see or appreciate all the work that went into those visual designs.
Talokan technology is as inventive and different as Wakandan technology was in the first movie. The "water bombs" to give them an advantage in fights is pretty clever. And the flooding of Wakanda, seeing them under attack, is suitably horrific that even if you sympathize with Namor up to that point, it's clear he's sort of crossed the line. I'm not 100% sure I needed him to kill Ramonda, but I understand why the filmmakers felt he had to.
In the comics, Namora was Namor's cousin and eventually a member of Agents of Atlas (and mother of Namorita, a New Warrior). She feels like a character open to reinterpretation, and making her the more hawkish daughter of Namor, who is more overtly immortal in this interpretation, is a good reinvention.
Another great reinvention is Nakia, who in the comics was sort of a villainous ex-Milaje with a crush on T'Challa. Reinventing her as Wakanda's premier spy and T'Challa's true love gives her a lot more to do, and of course sets up that great post-credits sequence.
As cool as the reveal about Hydra/SHIELD was in Winter Soldier, I think in retrospect that getting rid of SHIELD was a huge mistake. The facility the Talokani attack, who exactly Julia Louis-Dreyfus's Val works for, it's all a bit nebulous, sort of CIA/NSA, and it really feels like it should have been SHIELD. That said, everything with Everett Ross and Val, including the revelation that they were married, is delightful.
There are a lot of callbacks to the original Black Panther in this. Ramonda returning to Wakanda after the UN is a visual callback to the return of T'Challa after the death of his father. She then goes right to Shuri and her lab, just as T'Challa did. Coogler is establishing the characters, in the same way he did in the first movie.
I thought they were going to tie in Riri Williams by way of the Wakandan Outreach center, and make her a protege of Shuri, but making her the only one smart enough to develop a Vibranium detector and thus a conflict point between Wakanda, Talokan, and the U.S. works really well. Riri's reaction to Shuri, recognizing her immediately and asking if she was being recruited, made me fall in love with her right away. And Shuri recognizes right away their kinship, noting that "brilliance at a young age is not always respected by the elders."
Shuri seeing Killmonger in the spirit realm was a shock, and it makes perfect sense. Shuri is struggling with her anger and her resistance to the traditions of Wakanda, in different ways from Erik Killmonger, but similar enough that it makes sense. The conflict between Shuri's revenge (for T'Challa, for her mother, for everything) and her becoming Black Panther and a leader is, if not as effective as T'Challa's realization of the tainted legacy of his father, still pretty damn effective.
This movie could have used more M'Baku, but his relationship with Shuri, as reluctant advisor, is interesting. By necessity, it changes his character, making him less of the fun outsider that he was in the first movie and in Infinity War, but Shuri had to shift roles as well, as did everyone, with the loss of Chadwick Boseman. Leaving M'Baku in charge, though, is fun, and I can't wait to see the follow-up. Especially with Ross now in exile in Wakanda as well.
That last fight between Shuri and Namor is brutal. Glad they worked in the Imperius Rex, and I like that there's a callback to "show him who you are" from Ramonda. And the callback to the "vengeance has consumed us" from Civil War. There's an argument to be made that both Black Panther movies pull back from their more militant messages at the end to give us the more traditionally noble superhero ending, but... I'm a sucker for that kind of thing, so it works for me.
Then there's that epilogue. I know there was some controversy (to say the least) about not recasting T'Challa, but the revelation in Haiti lets them have their cake and eat it too. Shuri can be Black Panther for a while, and then, eventually, T'Challa will be the Black Panther again. Chadwick Boseman gets a fitting tribute, we get a strong female black character in the MCU, and everyone gets their strong black male role model back too.
Last quick thoughts:
I love a lot of the designs in this movie. Both Ironhearts (in particular the post-Wakandan design), everything to do with Namor and Talokan, the Midnight Angels, Nakia's spy suit... but that big Wakandan platform at the end is kind of a clunky design. Would have loved to have seen a Wakandan Helicarrier or something.
"The American equivalent of a Wakandan village school" being how Okoye describes Harvard is hilarious.
The Boston car chase is good, but it doesn't hold a candle to the chase in Korea in the first movie.
Attuma in the comics is one of Namor's most notable foes, I wish he'd been given enough development to be Namor's M'Baku, but he's kind of just a brute without much character. But there are a *lot* of characters to service in this movie, so that's fair.
It wasn't until my second viewing of this that I realized Ramonda was about to tell Shuri about T'Challa Jr. right before Namor showed up. I'm glad they revealed that she knew about her grandchild before she died. Still question the decision to kill Ramonda, though, especially given how much Angela Bassett just shined in this role.
