humanist + humorist

Figured I should write a post about this movie before I go see the next one.

Short Preamble About The Box Office

…I’m so surprised this didn’t make more. It got much better reviews than Brave New World, but last I checked, it made about the same amount?

This more than anything has made me think these films are reaching a General MCU Audience. People aren’t thinking “does this individual film/premise/team/audience reaction sound good,” they’re thinking “am I the kind of person who goes to see every Marvel movie in theaters, or am I not?” And the pool of reliable-Marvel-moviegoers has only been shrinking over the past five years.

When The Marvels got a lukewarm response, it could’ve been any combination of racism, sexism, and the strike disrupting their usual promo tours. (The movie itself was excellent. None of the criticisms that people held up as Terrible Flaws ever made sense.) And when BNW got a lukewarm response, it could’ve been because the movie itself was Just Okay.

But Thunderbolts is another genuinely excellent movie! And it has multiple white guys in leading roles! So what gives?

I really wish this had come out years ago. Should’ve been the big team-up finale of Phase 4. Instead, in the meantime, the MCU burned a bunch of its regular viewers by making them sit through hot messes like Quantumania or MoM, and now even the real gems aren’t bringing them back.

Spoiler-Lite Actual Reaction

It’s good!

And specifically, it’s good in ways that cater to transformative media fandom, which you’d think would be a gift. The main characters are a Sad Blorbo Variety Pack. All of them are murderers with tragic backstories, mostly involving kidnapping and/or brainwashing. One has the extra burden of dealing with her overenthusiastic cringe dad, who is also a murderer with a tragic backstory. Everyone is trained in all kinds of cool deadly fighting styles, but completely incompetent at making friends. The premise is about forcing them to work together! The villains are “the embodiment of Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss” and “a floppy-haired man with a stutter and sweater paws who just wants to be a hero.” Everyone has a traumatic childhood and everyone needs a hug. A critical plot point hinges on how desperately they all need a hug!

It’s one of those movies with a big cast, and almost all of them started as secondary characters in somebody else’s movie/TV show — but the writing does a great job of re-introducing them, giving you regular tidibts of exposition and recap, in ways that fit organically with the banter the characters would be doing anyway. Bucky is a bit of an outlier — he’s the most well-established character here, they expect you to basically know what his deal is, they only drop enough tidbits to jog your memory. Based on audience reaction, I think that was the right call.

(This is the movie where he’s in Congress. They don’t even try to explain how or why he ran for Congress. He’s just kinda…there. He’s not good at it, he’s visibly not enjoying it, but he sure is there! You just have to go “I Guess???” and roll with it.)

There was one character who, based on the previews, everyone figured was going to die early on. They do, in fact, die early on. If you were personally invested in that character, and excited to see them get more screen time, that sucks. But in general…I do think it was a good writing choice. It’s not a cheap shock-value death! It fits right in with the plot and the themes! It’s “these characters are career assassins, any one of them could’ve gone out that quickly if they had a bad day, is it any wonder they’re all depressed nihilists right now?”

A lot of the plot is about MCU version of Sentry, whose comics backstory is basically a version of what the MCU did with Spider-Man in No Way Home: “he used to be friends with a bunch of the Avengers and personally involved in a ton of world-changing events, but then, for the safety of the universe, his whole existence had to be erased from everyone’s memories.” I’d love to see the version of the movie where MCU Sentry had that backstory too. It could’ve been so fun to see “a montage of pivotal scenes from Phases 1 through 3, now with this random new guy photoshopped in.” And think of all the novel-length “Sentry’s adventures as a critical part of the last 20 movies” fic epics it would’ve inspired.

On the other hand, I get why they didn’t want to just rehash NWH. And I do really like what they came up with instead. The characterization is well-rounded and compelling, the designs for his different forms/powers are original and striking. A big part of his deal is that he’s Cartoonishly Unbeatably Strong, which makes it all the better that they shake up the Marvel “big CGI-heavy final battle” formula, so the win has nothing to do with “who can hit the hardest.”

Between all the different team members, my favorite dynamic is Yelena and Bucky. They never say out loud “so, how ’bout that life as the childhood friend of an OG Avenger, whose iconic heroism you could never possibly live up to even if you didn’t spend all that time as a brainwashed tool of the supervillains, huh?”, but they bring this low-key sense of mutual understanding to all their conversations. Yelena settles naturally into a team-leader role over the course of the movie, while Bucky has the most experience being on a team of Actual Superheroes, which he translates into “advising Yelena about management stuff” in this quietly-supportive way. It’s great.

I know Marvel has a really spotty record of having characters stay friends/partners/teammates from one installment to the next…but I really hope the Thunderbolts (or whatever name they manage to hang onto in the future) stick together for another one.

Cool video: Using AO3’s data dump from a few years ago to build unreasonably-detailed maps of tags — characters, relationships, then freeforms — and how they relate to each other:
 

Fandom synning annoyance of the day: Marvel wranglers decided to syn the “Captain America (Movies)” tag to a new “Captain America (Chris Evans Movies)” tag. (They also made a separate “Captain America (Anthony Mackie Movies)” tag.)

A lot of writers use specific movie titles as fandom tags. It makes sense to me if you want to syn things like “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” to a general Evans tag, and “Captain America: Brave New World” to a general Mackie tag.

But they’ve taken away the option for a “general Cap subset of the MCU” tag. If you previously used the general tag because you wanted to include the entire ongoing Captain America series, movies 1-4 and beyond, this goes “nope, that’s not what you meant, you were only writing about the first 3.” If you were following the general tag because you wanted to read about the whole series, you now have a feed that excludes fic about the Sam-centric movies. If you miss that this even happened, and don’t update your feeds, a lot of Sam fic will just never be shown to you.

…and yeah, I’m aware that I don’t, personally, write enough Cap fic of any kind for my opinion on this to matter to anyone! Which is why I’m not out campaigning for them to change it, just grumbling on my own blog about it.

—

Wrangling annoyance of the day that we actually can blame on users: A bunch of wranglers did an audit on the tag “pinning” (currently not canonical, and not synned to anything).

Of the works it’s used on, 27.9% actually involve “pinning.” The other 72.1% are by writers who don’t know how to spell “pining.”

There are a lot of good reasons why we shouldn’t mass-email thousands of random AO3 users and say “hey, fix your spelling.” I get that. But sometimes I daydream about it anyway.

—

Some actual progress with No Fandom freeforms is happening behind the scenes.

You might think we should be publicizing that more. It’s good! It’s progress! People should hear good news about wrangling sometimes!

But: if we make a celebratory post about “good news, we synned Tag X”, it’ll get a thousand responses going “wait, Tag X has existed since 2014, why are you so dysfunctional that nobody managed to syn it until 2024? Also, when are you going to get to the equally-obvious problems with tags Y, and Z, and–“

And, let’s be real, none of these complaints are unfair.

But: We have a process for synning things like Tag X now. This is one of many things where TW leadership has spent a decade holding out for the Perfect Process, and in the meantime we had No Process At All, which has built up a terrifyingly large backlog.

What if there’s an official public post about it…the post gets negative reinforcement…someone gets spooked, they pull the plug on the whole thing…and we go back to having No Process At All? That would be worse on every level. Nobody wants to risk that. We hates it, precious.

So, yeah. Positive things are happening somewhere. Wranglers are mostly not talking about it. For at least some of us, this is why.

I’ve seen a range of movies recently-ish that were not part of the Sci-Fi Marathon. Gonna knock out a whole bunch of mini-reviews in one post.

Conclave

Political thriller about the election of a new Pope, based on a book published in 2016 when that was reasonably topical. (Pope Francis was elected in 2013.)

The book was better!

I read it a while ago (well, listened to the audiobook), so the details are fuzzy, but I remember getting a lot more depth and intrigue out of the main character’s POV in the narration than what we see on-screen. I also remember finding it believable/convincing which character gets voted in as Pope in the end, while in the movie it just felt like “he gave one super-generic inspirational speech and suddenly everyone changed their minds.”

The reason I read it in the first place was, it came up in a recs thread for “media with canon [identity] characters.” Happy to say it held up fine, even if you were pre-spoiled for that reveal.

Spellbound

CGI animated movie about a princess who goes on a quest to de-curse her parents.

The opening is really strong. Our heroine starts into what sounds like a typical, stock, Disney-princess I Want song, only to cut to “my parents are monsters, like, actual monsters, for real.”

There was some point in this movie, I don’t even remember what the specific moment was, just that I had the clear thought of “oh, this is a Story About Divorce.” Anything that didn’t really make sense in the context of this specific plot/characters/setup, it was because it was there to be A Lesson for the real kids in the audience dealing with divorced/divorcing parents.

Biggest example: there’s A Lesson about “kids, it’s okay to acknowledge that you have bad feelings, what matters is how you deal with them.” Halfway through the movie, our heroine sets herself up to learn this lesson, when she announces “oh, I don’t have any bad feelings.”

Except…she’s already expressed and recognized a bunch of bad feelings? In a pretty healthy, open way? She sings about being frustrated with her monster-parents’ behavior, and sad that she’s lost the happy, peaceful life they had before. The inciting incident of the quest is when she reaches out to some trusted adults, explains her situation, and asks for help! (The adults in question: two magic forest oracles, who are basically a couple of gay married Jewish grandpas.)

When the oracles come to visit, they’re even surprised to find the parents are literally monsters, and our heroine wasn’t just “being a dramatic teenager” when she said so. Really seems like this should be the setup for A Lesson about “kids, sometimes adults won’t acknowledge that you have legitimate bad feelings about real problems, here’s how to deal with that.” But no.

The movie’s cute, it just felt like was put together from scenes that were developed at different times for different visions of what the final product was supposed to be, and they didn’t mesh well enough.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Adult Lydia gets reunited with Beetlejuice at just the right time to disrupt her famous ghost-hunting TV show…but also to disrupt her impending marriage to a publicity-seeking creep, help rescue her exasperated teen daughter from an attempted ghost-kidnapping, and generally cause a bunch of fun chaos.

I got into Beetlejuice as a kid watching the early-nineties cartoon version, where Lydia is a cute weird goth kid and the title character is her wacky supernatural bestie…

…so the original movie was pretty off-putting to watch in comparison. Had a good time with this one, though? Not sure if the sequel was really more fun and less sleazy, or if my threshold for being bothered by sleaze is just higher these days.

I’m glad they made it. Some of the proposed BJ sequels over the years have just sounded like dumb gimmicks (apparently “Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian” was on the table at one point), but this story felt worth telling. And they kept the low-tech practical aesthetic of the original, lots of puppets and claymation rather than CGI, which was a good choice.

Inside Out 2

Riley hits puberty, which means she’s unlocked new emotions! Especially Anxiety. One of the emotional morals here is “planning for bad things is useful to a point, but trying to anticipate every possible bad thing will just give you anxiety attacks.”

The other emotional moral is “repressing the experiences you don’t want to think about will stop you from being your authentic self.” One of the new bonus figures we meet in the depths of Riley’s head is her Deep Dark Secret, which ducks back into the shadows rather than revealing itself. She spends most of the movie desperately trying to impress a Cool Older Girl, a high-school hockey star who happens to be extremely attractive.

I’m not surprised that Disney executives kept giving Pixar editorial notes about “this is coming off as too gay, fix it,” but I am disappointed. Cowards.

Belle

Very-loose anime adaptation of Beauty and the Beast. Our heroine hasn’t been able to sing IRL since her mother’s death, but when she realizes she can handle singing through her VR avatar in a virtual online community, she accidentally becomes the biggest pop star in the metaverse. Also, makes friends with a monstrous VR avatar (who turns out to be a sad boy with an abusive parent IRL).

The soundtrack in this is amazing. Including the English-dubbed versions of the vocal tracks. Not long after watching, I went and legally purchased the OST, and have not regretted it.

The art is nice, especially in the lovely VR world. And the plot is…a perfectly serviceable excuse to deliver the soundtrack.

There’s a scene where Belle on her virtual stage encourages her audience to sing in chorus, and they do: characters who are spread out in separate physical places all around the world, coming together online. At least some of the production happened during COVID lockdowns, so it turns out the voice actors in that scene also had to record all their parts alone in separate physical places, and the sound editors brought them together. That must’ve felt so fulfilling.

Venom: The Last Dance

Everyone who said “the parts with Eddie and Venom having wacky road-trip adventures were fun, the rest of it was bad” was correct.

I had heard complaints about “the writers did Knull dirty, he’s such a good cool villain in the comics and they wasted him in this movie.” Didn’t have any attachment to the comics version, so I was prepared for Knull to be fine, just not the perfect-adaptation curb-stomping megaboss his fans were hoping for. And…nope! Judging solely by the contents of the film on its own merits, the writers did Knull dirty, he’s wasted in this movie.

Final note:

Other than Conclave, which involves an all-male religious order being sequestered away from the entire rest of the world, all these movies pass the Bechdel test! Most of them easily, you don’t even have to think about it! Venom was the only one that struggled (all the others have girls/women as main characters), and even there it managed to have multiple women as scientists, who exchanged some lines at work that weren’t about Venom/Eddie.

It was so refreshing to look back over the post and realize that.