BEFORE: Well, I missed this Marvel movie when it was in theaters - I worked at a screening of it for the Visual Effects Society back in February, but that meant that I couldn't sit and watch it. So I had to make my plans based on the anticipated release date for streaming on Disney+, which turned out to be May 28, yesterday. So my plan worked, once I moved "The Electric State" to August that meant I could link here just ONE DAY after the film popped up on Disney. How about that for some accidental planning? (Sure, I was thinking about getting here from "Night on Earth" with Giancarlo Esposito carrying over, but it turned out I was jumping the gun a bit.)
Anthony Mackie carries over from "10 Years". Sure, I could have delayed this by a day or two if I needed to, but I didn't need to.
THE PLOT: Sam Wilson, the new Captain America, finds himself in the middle of an international incident and must discover the motive behind a nefarious global plan.
AFTER: I've been reading the Captain America comics for 40 years now, but of course I don't expect the movies to follow them to the letter, the movies tend to aim for something a bit closer to reality, like in the comics the members of the Serpent Society are kind of more snakelike, like some of them have fangs and I think one of them has no legs, just a snake-like lower half. In the comics Sidewinder is the leader, but there are many more members, with names like Viper, Cottonmouth, Death Adder, Anaconda, Black Mamba, Puff Adder, Cobra and Princess Python. Most often they appeared in Captain America comics, but they were in a few other books too.
There were apparently plans to have more members in this film, like Diamondback, who had pink hair and at some point tried to go straight, and became Cap's (Steve Rogers) partner and girlfriend for a while. But I guess this film was already a bit crowded, because she got edited out of "Brave New World", leaving only Sidewinder and Copperhead in the current MCU, it seems. Whatever - but across the board it really feels like someone here favored a "less is more" concept, reduce the number of villains and characters to a select few. Well, the problem with that is that less is often just less.
There's a shout-out to the "Eternals" movie, which is surprising because that film bombed and I just figured they'd never even refer back to those events any more, but somehow this is all going to tie in to "Doomsday" and/or "Secret Wars", even the post-credits scene here hints at the realization of the MCU multiverse, where heroes will (presumably) be fighting other heroes from other worlds, or other versions of themselves, even, in a giant cosmic shake-up of sorts. Maybe you saw which actor got cast as Dr. Doom from another universe, and honestly, that reveal is causing a lot of questions that don't have answers right now, like is he an alternate-reality Tony Stark or did he change his name to Victor Von Doom, or is he something else entirely? Let me table those questions for the time being, because maybe some answers will come in Marvel's Phase 6, and we're still in Phase 5.
Making this movie about the new metal, adamantium, and the economic trade war that it could cause kind of reminds me of "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace", which for some reason was focused on a trade war and a blockade and a Senate voting for a new chancellor, instead of lightsabers and spaceship battles. That was all pretty boring stuff, who put politics into my sci-fi action movie? Why should a similar trade war inhabit the new "Captain America" movie when we should be dealing mainly with super-villains and alien invasions?
You probably know the big "twist" in this film, if you've seen any of the trailers or the poster, or in my case, if you've read the comics then you know what "Thunderbolt" Ross can turn into - the most ironic of things for a man who spent decades trying to hunt down and kill the Hulk. Sorry, the GREEN Hulk, I have to be specific here. But being the enemy of the GREEN Hulk, the Banner Hulk, is what cost Ross his relationship with his daughter, Betty, who was married to Bruce Banner in the comics, sort of an on-again, off-again thing, but really, Banner is an on-again off-again Hulk, so you know, that kind of works. They'd bring Betty Ross back into the storyline of the Hulk comics on a semi-regular basis, but at some point she died, came back to life, turned into a monster herself (Harpy) and then disappeared again until another writer suddenly remembered that they forgot to bring her back yet again.
So yeah, I knew all along where this film was going, but if you somehow avoided all of the spoilers so far, well, I'd stop reading and turn back now if I were you. Let's just say that in the comic books there were two Hulks for a time, and we all knew Banner was the Green Hulk, but who the hell was the Red Hulk? This was a mystery for a LONG time, I think, until it wasn't. (They're pulling the same trick right now with the new Venom, but the human identity of the new Venom is probably exactly who you think.). But since Marvel Comics have been known to repeat the same storylines over and over again, it turns there have been at least THREE different Red Hulks in the comics, one was Ross, another was another general, Robert Maverick, and one was the secret identity of Joe Fixit, who himself was another alias used by the green Banner Hulk - to say that's complicated is a bit of an understatement.
Thaddeus Ross is a stand-in for Trump here, that's pretty plain to see. A U.S. President with a shady past (he's ex-military, that's really the only difference between him and The Donald) who's corrupt as all hell, and also he's got an illness which he's hiding from the public. Remember how Trump's annual physical claims every year that he's 7 foot 2 and weighs 135 pounds and how he's more physically fit than most 25 year olds? When we can all see his fat gut when he wears golfing outfits, so we know that his doctor's either insane or getting a pay-off. Maybe both. Anyway, Ross keeps taking phone calls from the mystery villain, which feels a lot like Trump taking phone calls from the Kremlin, and you know that he does, right?
Let's take things a bit further here, because President Red Hulk is also a take on Trump - only Trump is mostly orange, not red, but those colors are pretty close. Hulk is big, Trump is, well, fat. Hulk is loud, and Trump is certainly loud. Filled with rage? Check. Has trouble communicating? Sure, check. Ready to screw Japan or any other country over by enacting tariffs and trade wars? Double-check, and when that fails, willing to use the military strength of our armed forces to blow another country off the map? You'd better believe it. So this really is the kind of Captain America movie that we should have expected when we re-elected the big, loud orange guy. Sure, it looks like Sam Wilson is fighting the Red Hulk, but he's really fighting Trump, I'd bet my bottom dollar on it.
On a positive note, Isaiah Bradley gets some more screen time here, he was a character from the Marvel TV series "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" who filled in for Capt. America during the Korean War, when Steve Rogers was frozen in ice. The first black Cap, and Sam Wilson is the second, only things didn't go so well for Bradley, they experimented on him against his will, Tuskegee-style, and then he was imprisoned for the crime of freeing other black soldiers from the torture/experimentation. In the comic books, his grandson becomes a Cap-style super-hero called Patriot, but there's really no time for that character here, either, because less is less.
This film is set in Washington, DC, but much of it was filmed in Atlanta, like the White House scenes, shot at Tyler Perry's studios in Atlanta. The weird thing to me is that my wife and I visited Atlanta in October 2022 - and we went to a bookstore and I picked up a guide book of weird things to do in Atlanta, and I spotted a listing for a replica White House in nearby Decatur, so we looked it up and drove by it, took photos from across the street. It was a private home, built at 3/4 scale to resemble the White House, from the outside at least - the interior is just that of a normal house, like there's no Oval Office. But if there's ANOTHER replica White House at the Tyler Perry Studios, that means that Atlanta actually has TWO White Houses, which is twice as many as Washington DC does. That's a bit odd. Perhaps the Tyler Perry studio has a set for an Oval Office interior, but not a White House exterior set?
At the end of the film, Sam Wilson sets out to re-establish the Avengers, but other than the Falcon, which heroes are going to be on that team? What? We're out of time? How can that possibly be, whoever's in charge of this movie, for God's sake, MAKE the time! Just make the film a couple minutes longer and show Sam deciding over headshots of certain heroes, who makes the damn team?
Directed by Julius Onah (director of "The Cloverfield Paradox")
Also starring Harrison Ford (last seen in "If These Walls Could Sing"), Danny Ramirez (last seen in "Assassination Nation"), Shira Hass (last seen in "Mary Magdalene"), Carl Lumbly (last seen in "How Stella Got Her Groove Back"), Tim Blake Nelson (last seen in "The Homesman"), Giancarlo Esposito (last seen in "Night on Earth"), Liv Tyler (last seen in "Robot & Frank"), Xosha Roquemore (last seen in "Space Jam: A New Legacy"), Johannes Haukur Johannesson (last seen in "Bloodshot"), William Mark McCullough (last seen in "Arsenal"), Takehiro Hira (last seen in "Gran Turismo"), Harsh Nayyar (last seen in "Freejack"), Rick Espaillat (last seen in "Jerry and Marge Go Large"), Todd Allen Durkin (last seen in "Trial by Fire"), Pete Burris (ditto), Dustin Lewis (last seen in "Pain Hustlers"), Alan Boell (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Ava Hill, Marissa Chanel Hampton, Katerina Eichenberger, Mark Pettit (last seen in "Reptile"), John Mark Bowman, Katina Rankin, John Cihangir, Eric Mbanda, Josh Robin (last seen in "Get Me Roger Stone"), Sharon Tazewell, Sandra Aparicio, Ricky Robles Cruz (last seen in "Plane"), Bill Stinchcomb (last seen in "Fire with Fire"), Sebastian Stan (last seen in "The Bronze").
RATING: 6 out of 10 heavy punching bags
No comments:
Post a Comment