2. The emotional core of these Marvel superhero movies always works pretty well. Here it's all about that nagging wonder about "what could have been." Would you be happier in another timeline where things turned out a little different? You married the one that got away, you avoided some terrible tragedy. It would be different, yes, but would it better?
3. There's also fascinating elements of nature versus nurture - how much of your personality traits are innate and shared with your counterparts across endless universes and how much is uniquely yours and yours alone?
4. That said, it's still a superhero movie which means there are endless, exhausting CGI-driven scenes with characters firing colored laser beams at each other and giant buildings and rooms crashing and crumbling to the ground.
5. These movies have come a long, long way from the relatively small-scale, tech-driven movie that was Iron Man. Now audiences are completely okay with witches and magic and monsters and inter-dimensional travel and aliens. Imagine showing this wacked-out movie to someone in 2008.
6. The much-discussed Illuminati scene is pretty awesome, as is the way the sequence is used to demonstrate the power of the villain. At that point, it genuinely seems impossible for our heroes to prevail, which is exactly what you want in a movie.
7. We didn't know Rachel McAdams played this big a part in the movie. Pleasant surprise.
8. Is it a coincidence that two mystical books play a big role in a movie directed by Sam Raimi whose Evil Dead movies centered on a supernatural book?
9. We think people would buy Pizza Poppa T-shirts.
10. Almost all of the combat sorcerer sequences go on too long.
11. You may have heard this is the darkest Marvel movie. And that's 100% correct. Things get really weird and really creepy at the end - there's one third act turn that we had to laugh at it's just so insane and audacious. But it's very much in Raimi's wheelhouse.
12. We don't know much about these Marvel characters, but Benedict Cumberbatch certainly seems perfectly cast.
13. Bonus points for resolving the central conflict through emotion rather than brute force.
14. Not sure how to feel about that third eye business.
15. It's the kind of movie where the villain works so very hard to try and catch and kill someone, but then the minute they have the victim in their grasp... the villain chooses to then drag their feet, inexplicably savoring the moment rather than just going in for the kill, thus allowing the heroes time to regroup and fight back.
16. We suspect that you're going to be way ahead of the characters more than once, seeing where this is all going but still having to sit impatiently waiting for the narrative to catch up.
17. It's definitely... decent.
No comments:
Post a Comment