Chris Pratt
Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase 2
Contains some spoilers, but tries to avoid the really big ones
Longtime readers of this blog may recall my problem with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in that I fell so far behind in the unrelenting run of films that I eventually gave up and just let the MCU ship sail on without me. However I did make an attempt to get back on board by watching all of the seven Phase 1 films (Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger and Avengers Assemble) in the first half of 2019, with the full expectation and intention of moving on to Phase 2 later in the year or early in 2020.
Unfortunately that didn’t happen. You’d think that the advent of coronavirus and the global lockdown would have made this easy to do, but in fact the reverse was true. Thoroughly distracted by real life, I never got around to watching any more MCU films during that period. But finally, with things returning to normal in the world, I once again felt the pull of destiny to get me back on target with the next sequence of Marvel’s superhero juggernaut. Surprisingly this consists of just six films in total, of which I’d actually previously seen and reviewed two. But let’s start at the beginning, which returns to the safe shores of the very first entry of the MCU franchise…
Read the rest of this entry »Passengers (2016)
Without a doubt, Passengers is a beautiful film to look at. Great care has been made by director Morten Tyldum and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto to ensure that every frame is a joy, and the human stars are just as pretty and perfect as the set design and the special effects. But underneath the polished surface veneer there are problems to be found, both in the story by Jon Spaihts and in its on-screen execution. Read the rest of this entry »
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) [Blu-ray]
There’s a couple of things that puzzle me about Marvel’s latest cinematic blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy: why it’s been quite so phenomenally popular, and why I didn’t personally like it more than I did when I finally got around to watching the Blu-ray over Christmas.
Although Marvel’s famous comic book superhero franchises have proved to be a license to print money in recent years thanks to the studio’s canny strategy of weaving the tales of Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Hulk and co. around periodic tent pole Avengers gatherings by using S.H.I.E.L.D. as TV crazy glue to keep all the parts stuck together, this new film is a very different beast indeed. Remaining outside the current established Marvel Cinema Universe continuity for the time being at least, there are no superheroes in the traditional comic book sense; indeed many comic book fans – even avid ones – won’t have been familiar with the Guardians of the Galaxy before this. I confess, I’d never heard of them until the movie came along, while all the other Marvel films to date have been based on comic books that were a big part of my childhood reading when I was growing up (admittedly a very long time ago!)
Instead of superheroes in masks and lycra, what Guardians of the Galaxy gives us is big old classic pulpy space opera on the grandest of scales. That sounds like it should be no problem, given that Hollywood has been pumping out science fiction films for decades now, surely? But such films have been remarkably narrow in scope, tending either towards the aforementioned superhero fantasies, or earthbound dystopias like The Hunger Games, or films in which aliens and monsters make their way to modern day Earth to trash New York City, or else films in which we tag along with explorers from Earth as they boldly go exploring into deep space while retaining some baseline point of human audience identification. Films which do away entirely with that baseline and go full space opera – David Lynch’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic Dune for example, or Andrew Stanton’s earnest but fatally flawed take on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series with John Carter of Mars, or David Twohy’s trilogy of original Riddick films – tend to flop badly at the box office unless they’re basically old school horror films decked out in SF attire such as the Alien franchise. Even there, things can quickly run off the rails as Ridley Scott found when he dared try something a little more fully SF with Prometheus. Of course, the reason why everyone keeps trying to pull off the full space opera gambit all the same is that the one film to successfully buck the trend – Star Wars in 1977 – did so with rather spectacular and industry-changing results. However such films usually fall into a morass of silly-sounding character, place and planet names and various science fiction high concepts that either explode your brain or set your eyes rolling with the inanity of it all. Even Joss Whedon couldn’t pull it off when he tried this sort of thing on TV as the shortlived Firefly space western (it’s surely no coincidence that the show’s star Nathan Fillion has a vocal cameo in Guardians?) Read the rest of this entry »
Taking the Short View 