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arc

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Everything posted by arc

  1. That was a one time fluke. AM1’s rules (per Hank, I know, unreliable source) we’re that the QR was inescapable. That’s why Scott’s move at the end was such a heroic sacrifice: he did the right thing at great cost to himself. Then he proved that Hank was wrong and the QR could be escaped but even so, Janet was still stuck there and she’s as smart as Hank and had the same tech. So then the modified rules in AM2 were that the QR is barely escapable under the right circumstances, which our heroes barely manage in order to save Janet. And then in AM3 the rules are further expanded to say that the QR drifts in and out of synch with the main universe, so sometimes it’s more possible than other times. It’s still difficult to escape — I forget what reverse-the-polarity nonsense justified it for Cassie, Hank, and Janet, tbh. Also, the whole thing from the end of AM2 to Endgame was that Scott couldn’t escape at will. That’s why he involuntarily rode out the five year gap in the QR.
  2. Well, the whole thing was that Kang was cut off from his powers in the Quantum Realm too. It may well be that Kang’s not particularly good at martial arts since time powers (as seen with He Who Remains) is a cheat code to life. And the story needed Ant-Man to win. If Kang escaped, then (1) Ant-man doesn’t get a win and (2) story-wise, the MCU would have to go straight into Kang’s endgame, when this was just his introduction. I really think half the reason Marvel execs thought Quantumania was a “banger” is because they were so deep in its development that they remembered all the cut or altered scenes, even when watching later cuts that took out or altered vital pieces. The broad outlines of some really compelling stuff was there, but the execution just blew. Cassie doesn’t have an arc, and Scott’s arc is there but under-executed. And the final heroic sacrifice — Scott wins a sort of Pyhrric victory by trapping Kang and himself in the QR forever — is immediately undone as the movie breaks its own rules to rescue Scott seconds later. To me, these things suggest there was a better movie in there lost in editing, though maybe in the script development stage. I don’t mean to say there’s enough shot footage to cut together a better movie as much as I mean the script had unmet potential.
  3. Yes, we already talked about this article three weeks ago. It's on this very page near the top.
  4. The show was in Netflix’s top ten for English language shows for five weeks, per Deadline. I don’t understand how Netflix made a show that lasted on its top 10 for five weeks (esp considering its binge drop model) and then just cancelled it instead of seeing that as a success to build on.
  5. Harmon and Marder talk about season 7 and the upcoming season 8 in Variety. They plan to do a similar mix of myth arc vs adventures-of-the-week. Evil Morty will probably return at some point.
  6. Variety: How Marvel Is Quietly Retooling Amid Superhero Fatigue Variety didn't get into it, but it was reported elsewhere that Marvel Studios thought Quantumania was really good: So retooling here and there or cutting back on the number of projects isn't the most necessary improvement to their process. The main thing is that they need to get back in tune with their audience. (also, more broadly, a lot of would-be blockbusters fell short in 2023 even if they weren't superhero flicks. Audiences don't have superhero fatigue, they have movie fatigue.)
  7. The Ultimate Marvel line was hit and miss. I guess 616 is too, but with a smaller lineup it was easier to notice with UM. My hot take would be that Ultimate Spider-Man is pretty good, the Ultimates (Avengers with a different team name) usually had great art and often some questionable writing that hasn't aged well, and some of the other projects (Ultimate Iron Man miniseries) were disavowed from Ultimate Comics continuity almost immediately. The early MCU took a few things directly from UM, like Nick Fury being Samuel L Jackson, the early versions of the Iron Man armor being a hell of a production to put on or take off, many superhumans being some ways related to the WW2 super-soldier project. And like UM, the MCU has gradually drifted more towards resembling the 616 continuity as time has gone on*, because so many of the creators are fans of the original stuff. Like, if Marvel Studios does their own take on Galactus, it'll probably be the 616 Galactus in all his Kirby glory and not the UM Gah Lak Tus (more sci-fi, less space god with a crazy helmet) * with exception of Nick Fury, where 616 made the new Nick Fury Black to better match the movies and thus to also match UM.
  8. But Rhodey literally had a spinal cord implant or something that fixed his paralysis. (And Agent Ross also suffered paralysis that was fixed with Wakandan super tech, if memory serves. Also Benjamin Bratt’s character fixed himself with magic, at least until Mordo un-fixed him or whatever it was.) Anyways, ultimately you usually have to suspend disbelief about why super sci fi technology isn’t applied more widely than it is yeah, but NWH really lampshades how disappointingly little Stark and his company did with the arc reactors over the years by bringing Raimi’s Otto Octavius into the MCU to see “the power of the sun, in the palm of my hand.” That Otto, in his original movie, really was trying to change the world for the better by inventing fusion power. Stark basically has, and without any drawbacks like potentially destroying the world with a runaway reactor, and all he does with it is get into super-fights. I guess on the plus side, he also didn’t sell Iron Man tech to various militaries despite his former occupation as an arms dealer. Again, sci fi vs superhero stories. <shrug>
  9. They’ll probably end up getting parked in the Negative Zone till the current day. (They already used deep space for Carol Danvers, the Quantum Realm for Janet van Dyne (and also how Scott Lang rode out most of the Blip era), a temporary retirement for Wenwu, and a big block of ice for Steve Rogers. Also, I figure they’re saving universe merging for the X-men.)
  10. This is the fundamental difference between superhero stories and sci-fi. In the former, Tony Stark invents a revolutionary energy system and uses it to power suit armor. In the latter, cars all run on arc reactors, they're 80% lighter and rely on repulsor "airbags" and they fly so they don't leave tire particulates. Then you add vibranium, Pym particles, multiple humans who literally command a fraction of infinite power (Wanda and Vision and Carol, plus to a lesser extent the Sorcerer Supreme), a revived super soldier serum that at minimum reverts most of the degradations of old age, casual space travel, Spider-Man's chemical wizardry, time travel, actual magic, and pretty soon that world no longer resembles our own. It's a better world, but it's less relatable to the real world.
  11. Even after* HWR set up his Sacred Timeline, the timeline constantly splits. It's only through the actions of the TVA that they prune out timelines that vary too far from the Sacred Timeline. So there could be timelines where Loki turns himself into an alligator, or something. And then the TVA field team shows up and prunes that variant into that end-of-time wasteland. * see below for why 'after' is kind of a difficult concept here I suppose that could be the divergence, but at that point you wonder why that person would even be Loki. I like to think that Loki variants are especially varying in appearance because Loki uses magic, but they were all originally the same baby Loki Laufeyson. Well, this is one of those time things where "when" something happens is different inside and outside of the universe you're talking about. There was a multiverse, and eventually a multiversal war of Kangs, and HWR won out and after winning, trimmed the timelines into one Sacred Timeline that prevents other Kangs from arising, mostly through a TVA he established to delegate the work to. The TVA sits outside of time. The TVA doesn't exist inside the universe/timeline, monitoring divergence points in real time. Time passing in the universe does not correspond one-to-one to time passing in the TVA. When they do field work in the universe, they time travel willy-nilly. So outside the MCU's 616 universe, aka the Sacred Timeline, the TVA was established in year XXXX of HWR's home timeline, say. But once that happened, from the viewpoint within 616, the TVA has always existed. If XXXX was, say, the year 24000 CE, it hardly matters that the Avengers got together in 2012; the TVA could open a portal to that day anyways. Yes, in a sense it's very weird and not exactly plausible that urgent timeline splits that must be attended to happen up and down the timeline but only be considered urgent at some point within the TVA's own linear timeline, but ... <shrug> I think as far as time travel / multiverse stories go, the show gave a pretty good shot at having coherent rules for how things work. OK, here's an analogy I just came up with. Think of the TVA like book copyeditors instead of autocorrect. There are typos randomly throughout the book. When they become aware of a big error, they go in and fix it, but they're not part of the book. They're not constrained by the linear flow of the words in the book; they can jump sentences or pages as any reader could. The copyeditors don't have to only correct the book as the current word is being written in real time; they can go back and forth through the whole thing.
  12. I kind of get it. Without the evil dragon -- I forget what its name was and it literally had no lines once it manifested in its true shape -- Wenwu's fight has little to no stakes for the world. It matters to Shang Chi and Xialing, and in a better movie maybe the filmmakers would have had faith in that. (Though given Cretton's previous films, I am strongly inclined to blame studio meddling rather than the director.) Between Shang-Chi and Quantumania and Eternals, I think the biggest problem with phase 4 has been needing to hit their release dates, so the scripts end up underbaked. I've said elsewhere that Quantummania actually has a lot of good stuff in theory, but the execution is badly lacking. They should try sending the scripts through the Dan Harmon story circle; I think analyzing them through that lens might help show where the character beats the audience wants to see are being missed. The second biggest problem is that for all that this is the studio that introduced "cinematic universes" and revolutionized crossover cameos, they've been falling dreadfully short at keeping things interconnected. By phase 2, Marvel had their characters cameoing regularly. Shang Chi hasn't shown up once after his own movie. In one sense it's only been two years so far, but in another sense it's been about fifteen canonical stories between the shows and movies. They couldn't fit in one cameo? Similar complaints for America Chavez or Moon Knight/Scarab, or the Eternals. Instead, Marvel spent all of phase 4 introducing new characters and giving them no followups. Kate Bishop's second appearance in the MCU came about fourteen to sixteen stories* after her first! * it depends whether you want to count I Am Groot, Werewolf by Night, and the GOTG Holiday Special or not.
  13. Loki is really good! S1 less so with the Jonathan Majors stuff tainting his appearance. S2 is a drag in the middle but ends really strong. I strongly suspect you won't need to watch Loki to understand Deadpool 3. He breaks the fourth wall and also Marvel has been pretty good about slipping in enough exposition in the movies to cover the basics of what went on in the previouslies, without doing actual previouslies. Or rather, lately Marvel has outsourced the previouslies to the "Marvel Legends" clips they put on Disney Plus and Youtube. Five minute clips that run down all the things that will probably be touched on in the upcoming show or movie. So worst case, watch the Marvel Legends they put out just before this movie premieres. That said, I'm kind of in the same boat as I haven't watched Deadpool 1 or 2, so maybe I'll need to watch some Marvel Legends to catch up.
  14. I guess in this show parental issues are mostly dealt with via Morty and Beth and Summer, and much less so Rick's own parents and upbringing? Which Rick set up the Central Finite Curve? Our Rick? Excluding anyone smarter than him either means he cut his parents out of the CFC, or they're not smarter (or even as smart?) as him.
  15. These days, I like Avengers 1 except for all the distinctly Whedon-ish touches esp in the dialogue, and there's more than a few of those. But it's at least pretty good. I found Avengers 2 very disappointing. I get the sense most fans thought the Russo brothers did a better job overall with Civil War aka Avengers 2.5, then 3 (Infinity War) and 4 (Endgame) than Whedon's 1 & 2 taken together.
  16. arc

    The Marvels (2023)

    It's not when their powers are used, but when they're used at the same time that a switch would occur. (Which again, brings me back to the quibble I raised months ago in this thread: when people are light years apart, it's really hard to even say when two things occurring are "simultaneous".)
  17. With show forums like Community that got vaulted and converted into a single thread, could those vaulted forums please be un-vaulted and merged with the new forums for the show?
  18. The first is a classic. The second one is actually the story the filmmakers wanted to tell, but with budget constraints they decided to scale back and do the first Raid movie in a smaller setting. It's brutal but a martial arts masterpiece. The second one is still good but suffers a bit from losing a bit of focus. Well, this is a world where nearly everyone is a very skilled martial artist, besides Bruce and maybe Mama Sun. The Boxers overall have been some vicious killers, from the giant in ep 1 to the squad that attacked at Ka Spa. June is indeed apparently a major league assassin in her own right for someone who probably doesn't have expensive training -- given how poor she was growing up -- cause she murked that LA drug runner who was Sleepy Chan's LA guy. Maybe Grace made up for any combat deficiencies with sheer righteousness?
  19. So catching up on this, just curious, given that Gosselaar is mixed, was Gosselaar's character white or mixed himself?
  20. Yeah, it never made sense to me that Grace was head of the Boxers or even high enough to be able to promise not to hunt Charles or Eileen. But I never thought the Jade Dragons consigliere was behind them either, and we never even saw her reporting to anyone. Who was the guy on screen left in the mid credits scene?
  21. My understanding was that the guild asked members not to write for struck productions during the strike, even if it wasn't going to be shared with the studios until after the strike resolved. Obviously this is next to impossible to police, but this mostly went on the honor system. But in any case, if production had already started on s3 before the strikes, then writing would have been almost entirely done before filming began. (Yes, with network shows they'll start filming one episode while episodes due a few weeks later aren't even written yet, but for cable and streaming shows, esp with shorter orders, the tendency is for the entire season to have full teleplays written before filming begins.)
  22. That may stem from the producers wanting to keep things light. I've been reading a bunch of pieces since finishing the show, so I can't find it now, but I remember reading that they wanted some kind of balance leaning towards lightness*. So that may be why Bruce is conflicted about it all. Plus, this is a pretty short amount of time for a newbie to just dive in and fully commit to the gangster life. (edit: found it: ) But yeah, one thing they definitely could have done more with was earlier in the season when Charles said Bruce wasn't being a rebel, but just a coward because he was pursuing improv secretly, not in open defiance of his mom. That hit hard because it was valid. Even so, he did change a little over the course of the season. He started off like a typical Asian American son, outwardly obedient but secretly slightly rebellious, but he ends up with no hesitation in aiming Xing at the Boxer who killed Blood Boots, he fully lies to the cops, and he doesn't oppose his mother when she firmly states her intention to take over the gang. I love Charles and Eileen, but they're pretty bad people who are definitely not committing only victimless crimes. The Boxers may not have been good people themselves, but they had legitimate reasons to want to destroy the triads. I do agree that Bruce was too naive, even at the end, but I'm just not sure anyone had much of a moral high ground to talk to him about it.
  23. One last thing: I really liked how the Sun family showed off the skills they acquired in America. Bruce used his acting (improv) to get one over on Alexis, and his pre-med knowledge to shoot his dad to wound, not kill. Eileen used her nurse training, albeit to cause harm, in the end.
  24. The team on the show, esp the ending. Spoilers. https://www.salon.com/2024/01/15/brothers-sun-ending-season-2/
  25. Nah, Eileen is right. Bruce bringing the Boxers to the meeting was a colossal betrayal. For a gangster action-comedy, I'm pleasantly surprised at the show making Boxers have very legitimate, justifiable grievances with the triads. (Rather than just triads vs triads or triads vs cops.) The Boxers' indiscriminate murder sprees did suggest an early corruption, though. Haaaaaa, I knew it! I knew that assassination attempt on Big Sun seemed too neatly wrapped up by a fourteen year old Charles killing the assassin in single combat. In that little outdoor breakdown Bruce had talking to Alexis, it struck me as just a hair too dramatic -- and then it was! Bruce was playing her! Nice. This is very nitpicky, but I've love to hear the thought process of the writers on when the family members say "Sun" like the English "sun" vs the Chinese, kinda more like "Suen". Certainly earlier in the series, even in English conversation, Charles would say "Suen". If I was gonna kill my evil dad, maybe a waterlogged gun wouldn't be my first choice for a murder weapon. It was probably for the framing of the shot that Big Sun sat facing away from the door, but come on, a career gang leader should know better than to sit with his back to a door. Oh wow, I didn't think Bruce would shoot to wound. I thought 50% chance he takes Big Sun up on the offer to replace him and 30% chance he kills Big Sun like he said, and 20% chance he runs away or something. This was pretty diabolical, honestly. ... but not nearly as much as Eileen using her medical training to incapacitate Big Sun with insulin. Holy shit. If there's a second season, I'd love to see Bruce continue being a fish out of water, by bringing him to Taiwan. Aw snap, a mid-credits scene! And that Jade Dragons senior member who I thought was shady the whole season is shady! I really hope they do a second season.
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