With regard to The Marvels, I really hope it's good. Captain Marvel was a HUGE disappointment, and there seems to be a lot of recent trepidation about this installment as well. I keep telling myself to just trust that the trailer footage looks AMAZING. ...but then a little voice creeps in and says, "Yeah, but so was the trailer footage for Love and Thunder." So I don't know. I have very high hopes, but low expectations. Anywhere toward the former end of that spectrum would be fine.
And it looks like this film and Loki are targeted at starting to tie a good chunk of the phase 4-6 storyline together finally, which is much needed. To tie that into and expand the discussion in my previous post, the lack of focus has been such an issue, and to me, the argument that "this is just the same as phase 1 where we were just being introduced to all kinds of new characters, so just think of this as a reset to do that again and lay the groundwork for the NEXT big thing" doesn't fly. For one thing, phase 1
had to have a lot of world/universe building because the world/universe was new. It isn't now. This just feels gratuitous, meandering, and poorly thought out. Second, there was still a focus to phase 1 that hasn't been present in phase 4, and feels like it is just slightly starting to happen now in phase 5. So let's take a quick look back and compare:
Phase 1: Introducing the original 6 Avengers, doing lots of character building for the main ones, and building toward the team-up in Avengers. This worked because we were told about the team up from the end credits in the very first film. We were building toward something concrete, even if we didn't know who the characters would be and we had to take the time to introduce and get to know them.
Phase 2: Phase 2
did meander a bit. But it still had two unifying themes. First, we were dealing with the aftermath of the battle of New York. Second, we were introduced to the threat of Thanos, if ever so briefly, and in the very second film of this phase, we knew we were dealing with infinity stones. Marvel built this storyline by taking the time to further develop our original characters and being careful to be sparing and deliberate about introducing new ones (major ones anyway; of course we are going to get a bunch of minor characters in film). Ultron may have seemed like a bit of a detour and an underwhelming climax to phase 2 (I didn't feel it was underwhelming, but I get that some did), but it was clearly a big building block of the overall narrative.
Phase 3: Lots of characters, new and old, and was clearly building, step by step, to Infinity War and Endgame, the culmination of all three phases.
Phase 4: Okay...we're dealing with the aftermath of the infinity saga. That's fine and logical. We
should be dealing with that. No problem so far. We get introduced to the multiverse and to Kang. Maybe these are two separate threads; maybe they aren't. But okay, they will probably at least intersect. And that's the road map for us moving forward for the next three phases. Cool. So far, so good. BUT we have 17 different properties. LOTS of them have new characters. There is often little to no overlap in these characters' story arcs. And there appear to be lots of different arcs that have nothing to do with one another OR to the multiverse or Kang. So where are we going? At least we're building toward
something, right? Well, the end of this phase came and went
without any climactic point that felt like the phase was moving toward something. We don't necessarily
have to have an "Avengers" team up to wrap up a phase. But each phase thus far worked because we were building toward something that at least had a unifying climax to most or all of what we saw earlier in that phase. Not so here. It was all just disjointed. Most of these characters had no interaction with one another. And we would go a LONG time without revisiting some (some have not been revisited at all yet). And, again, all of that spread out over 17 properties with a longer total run time than phases 1-3 combined, which contributed even more to the disjointedness of it all.
Phase 5: Okay, yeah, more disjointedness so far. I don't buy the narrative out there that Secret Wars was such a disjointed mess that it will have to just be retconned to not have happened. But that said, I have a hard time seeing how it will fit in, or how they are going to deal with G'iah now being one of the most powerful beings in the universe and, being a shapeshifter, being able to hide in plain sight, while somehow still just being a minor character with no apparent future plans factoring into anything in the MCU.
And Guardians 3, while being really good, doesn't necessarily appear to have anything major to do with the major thread of the MCU, and is just about giving closure to some o.g. characters. That's fine. 2 of the 4 phase 5 properties thus far (Ant Man and Loki) are clearly moving the ball downfield. I finally feel like I know where
some of this is all headed. This feels more like phase 2 so far. But we're not that far in.
So my assessment so far: Phase 4 was an inexcusable mess, despite having
some really good things (e.g., Wandavision, Moon Knight). And while phase 5 is feeling more focused, it is building on the very flawed, messy foundation of phase 4, with no apparent plans or ability to resolve the problems above. I hope it can somehow start to feel more cohesive and just cut ties with some of the phase 4 trash, but maybe not. Even with building toward something cohesive, if the multiverse saga is just a means of saying that everything that ever had the Marvel logo attached to it is all "canon," then that just further dilutes the good and compounds the bad. And I fear that is exactly where we are going.
Topic: Marvel Studios' - The Marvels - SPOILERS (Read 5006 times)
