Run Marvel Run!
This year and movies: what a sh*t show.
Well Marvel have just announced that they are pushing their planned movies further out. The new slate looks like this now:
Black Widow is now May 2021
Shang Chi is in July 2021
Eternals in November 2021
This means 2020 will not have one Marvel film at all, for the first time in like forever! The Year of Corona and now the year of the MCU draught.
This also means that there will have been almost a 2 year gap between the last MCU film Spider-Man: Far from Home and Black Widow.
To further illustrate how bad this year is, I actually managed to go to the cinema only four times this year BUT every single time I left disappointed, what a record! Another terrible thing to associate with this year.
Let’s look at the sad pickings this year managed to served up for me as far as movies in the cinema is concerned.
BEFORE LOCKDOWN:
Birds of Prey
Absolute tosh, This film is like eating junk food but not even tasty junk food. Not tasty at all, empty calories and bright packaging.
DC are going back to the bad days of Suicide Squad with this film.
Quinn herself was not the issue with this film but I found her story arc almost meaningless and I had no real reason to root for her. The Birds of Prey from the title were barely in it and that is not even looking at the fact that some of these characters were so lame and not worthy of bearing the names from the comic – Cassandra I’m looking at you – such a wasted opportunity.
I daresay no one was emancipated at the end of this film.
Bloodsport
This was also such a lackluster affair and, in what was to be a trend all year long, I had such high hopes for this film. I mean Bloodsport was going to be the start of a new superhero shared universe but it turned out to be meh at best.
The film did not do much with originality of ideas at all and seemed a throwback to the 90’s. At one point I could have thought I was in a Fast and Furious film in one scene that had Vin in his signature white shirt and driving a fast car! In 2020 there is no excuse for such lack of imagination.
I have heard that this was not likely going to be part of the Valiant shared universe anyway as the Bloodsport property is now in a similar ownership situation to Spider-Man and Sony.
So maybe Valiant can still pull off a great shared universe and we can pretend this never happened.
AFTER LOCKDOWN:
New Mutants
I should not have been disappointed by this, but the last trailer got my hopes up.
The film moved away from being a typical superhero movie and tried to embrace the horror vibes of the original ‘Demon Bear’ storyline from the comic-books . Unfortunately it ended up being neither a good horror film nor a good superhero one.
Having watched this I am now not surprised we heard so much about delays and reshoots plaguing it.
The actors’ performances were all fine -I would love to see Anya Taylor-Joy play Magik again. For me this is purely a script/direction issue as there were a few plot-holes and script contrivances that irked me. The story was just not very compelling or even that scary to be honest.
Now I am going to complain about something that I normally avoid but for me this was very unforgivable. Sunspot in the comics is a black Brazilian but was white-washed in this film. Why you may ask is this worse than other white/black washing situations I have ignored in the past? Because there was no other black character in the film at all!
So they took the one black New Mutant and what would have been the only black character in the whole film and made him white! Why?!!
Thank god we at least had Dani Moonstar and she was not washed one way or the other.
Tenet
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you all: Chris Nolan and his Emperor’s clothes! What a sad load of hogwash this film was. My biggest disappointment of them all this year.
As a fan of John David Washington from Ballers I was looking forward to this film. I am also quite the Chris Nolan fan and I count Memento as my best movie ever so you can understand why my expectations were so high!
Why was it bad? I am not even going to talk abut the bad audio and loud music making it hard to hear the cast spewing loads of exposition – and there was a lot of that!
The film is similar to Memento in many ways except in one key area and this is the major issue I had with it : The film is NOT clever it simply makes no sense at all!
The core concept of the film – unlike with Memento – was poorly executed and barely had any internal logic throughout its long runtime. The film at one point tries to tell you not to think about it but yet keeps trying to explain and fails badly.
I have watched this film twice now and it was worse for me on the second viewing as more flaws in the logic presented itself to me much earlier.
With this announcement by Marvel to move Black Widow into 2021, I think Warner Bros should take a leaf out of their book and also move Wonder Woman 84 out of the way as well.
Tenets box office take was not encouraging to any studios and is a clear sign that people are not ready to return to the cinemas en masse and with most of Europe bracing for a second wave of the Corona virus it will not improve anytime soon.
Will Christmas make people go out in full force? I doubt it.
The year is well and truly jinxed and it is for the best that the MCU just gets out of the way of this annus horribilis.