SPOILERS BELOW
A lot of fun ideas and cool design, but there's basically no structure here. It feels more like looking at some story beats on a writer's room whiteboard than watching a story. It's just "and then this happened" over and over for two hours.
Kang's backstory is a mix of 'tell don't show' and muddled tv show tie-in, it's all so clumsy and unsatisfying. If they had a nice clean throughline of 'messing with time in Endgame led to Loki, which led to this guy getting power which led to this guy getting exiled and then it was now', that might be satisfying, but instead it's all shortcuts and shorthand and we're left wondering if gaps are going to get filled or if this is it. Either way, in the meantime it doesn't make for an individually fulfilling movie.
By the way, Hank made supergenius ants. By the way, they fell into a time-warp, and they're an advanced civilisation now. By the way, for one reason or another they will always help Hank and they're ready to pop up and save any situation. Hey, Darren is MODOK now but wait now he's redeemed but now he's dead and it's sad but no actually it's deflated with humour. Hi Bill Murray, bye Bill Murray.
And I don't mind stepping away from the crime comedy of the first two movies, but there aren't really any characters in this movie. None of the leads gets anything to do - no comedy, no emoting, no character arcs - and all the new characters get wheeled in for a couple of mild comedy lines and then wheeled off again.
(Also, I know I'm making assumptions here, and I like Kathryn Newton fine, but replacing Emma Fuhrmann with her, seemingly just to get a slightly more princess-pretty face in the movie, and without even telling Fuhrmann before it was announced no less, is a shitty move.)
In short, the same old MCU problem: interconnectivity over storytelling. As this whole thing goes on, it becomes more and more apparent what an amazing feat Ragnarok pulled off and what a shame it is that the MCU didn't learn from it.
Rating: Not bad, not good, just kind of there.
No comments:
Post a Comment