Category: superheroes

“We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos. We have seen that movie before, and we all know that the sequel is usually worse.”

• Barack Obama, at the 2024 Democratic Convention

I can’t go to a bad movie by myself. What, am I gonna make sarcastic remarks to strangers?

• Jerry Seinfeld

2019’s JOKER, starring Joaquin Phoenix, attracted intense controversy upon its release but also praise for Phoenix’ performance, and the direction of Todd Phillips. As I said at the time, it is not a “good” movie in the sense of being entertaining and uplifting, but it was good in the sense of being a film maker’s vision that was expertly presented. This year’s sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, starring Lady Gaga, hasn’t even gotten that much respect. In fact the level of negative press and word of mouth was so hard that I thought: I just have to see this.

“Folie à deux ” is French for “a shared madness”, like two people having the same hallucination. As Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) is put on trial for the murders he’s committed, he is still in Arkham Asylum among the general population. His lawyer offers an insanity defense saying that Arthur is not culpable because “Joker” is a shadow personality who took control of his actions when he killed five people. Arthur is put in a musical therapy class by one of the guards, where he meets “Lee” (Lady Gaga) who followed his case on TV and says she’s a big fan. They bond when she sets the music room on fire in order to attempt an escape. Despite this, she gets released on her own recognisance and becomes one of the people pleading Arthur’s case to the media. Arthur, previously broken down by prison, starts to become more “normal”, which for him means swaying to imaginary music and hysterically laughing until he cries.

This love affair spurs several moments where Arthur (or Lee) breaks out into song, sometimes leading to fully orchestrated bits where they sing popular songs or musical numbers. This is one the elements that most turned critics off to the film. If anything, I find this the most realistic aspect of the movie, precisely because in the real world, nobody acts like that. In real life, if you see everyone around you singing and dancing like they’re in a Broadway musical production for no good reason, that should indicate that you’re suffering a psychotic break.

In the trial, Lee’s encouragement, and the support of fellow inmates and court crowds, causes Arthur to embrace his Joker personality and turn the trial into that much more of a circus, eventually firing his lawyer and successfully petitioning to represent himself in full Joker makeup. But things turn when the prosecution brings in Gary Puddles (Leigh Gill), who confesses how he saw Arthur kill a fellow co-worker. In cross-examination Arthur berates Gary, and the authorities, and his guards, saying they never really knew the real him. And Gary confesses that Arthur was the only guy in the clown company who didn’t make fun of him for his height, the only one who was nice to him, but now he’s become terrifying. Arthur is hauled back to Arkham and abused by the guards for badmouthing them on TV. And when Arthur’s best friend in the ward tries to speak out, they end up killing him.

This death finally breaks Arthur, and in court he finally takes responsibility for his acts, confessing not only to five murder charges, but to smothering his own mother, which appeared to be a natural death. This causes Lee, and several other fans, to leave the court in disgust. Arthur is shortly found guilty, but then some other fans blow up the room with a car bomb outside the courthouse, and help him flee. Arthur goes back to his old neighborhood, where Lee told him she was staying, and finds her, saying they can run away now. But she refuses, saying “all we had was the fantasy” and he ruined it.

Arthur is then captured and sent back to Arkham. One day he’s in the hallway and a fellow inmate comes up and tells him a joke. A psychopath sees a clown in a bar. He comes up and tells the clown, “I used to be a big fan of yours but now I realize you’re a fucking disappointment.” Then he offers to buy the clown a drink and says “I’m going to give you what you fucking deserve.” And then the inmate shivs Arthur in the gut. And as Arthur bleeds out, the psycho is in the background, slicing his own face with a knife.

Odd, isn’t it, that when you give people license to be irrational and violent, that sometimes they direct that violence at the person who inspired them?

As in the first movie, Folie à Deux is sold by the intense performance of Phoenix as a physical and mental wreck, whose circumstances are that much more grim than before. Meanwhile Lady Gaga’s character is a literal embodiment of the love affair Arthur has with his fan club, people choosing to spread his insanity to the outside world and then turning on him when he no longer wants to be the star of their show.

With the first movie, a lot of critics and pundits complained that Phillips was glorifying his anti-social “incel” subject by making him a protagonist. And yet when Arthur receives his comeuppance, no one wants to see that. At the end of it, he’s basically just a sad clown, who was never good at anything, has never accomplished anything, and for all the chaos and destruction he caused, has to be rated as a total failure.

JOKER, the original movie, was deeply unpleasant, by design. Folie à Deux is even more deeply unpleasant, by design. I guess I read more worth into these movies than a lot of people. But whatever value is in these movies may not be enough for you to watch. If anything, the overwhelmingly negative reaction to JOKER: Folie à Deux tells me that Americans don’t want to bring back a deeply unpleasant, psychotic clown in unnatural face paint four years after he left the stage.

Having nothing else to do on Wednesday and not much capacity to do anything but watch TV, I went on “Max” to check out Ezra Miller in The Flash, just to see if it was AS bad as everybody said. And it’s not that bad… but it sure ain’t that good.

The movie starts with an amusing interlude with Batman (Ben Affleck) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) pursuing criminals while they set The Flash (Miller) to save civilians from the property disaster the crooks set off as a distraction. It’s good, but the part where The Flash has to save eight babies (and a nurse, and a therapy dog) from falling out a skyscraper looks less like an ingenious use of superspeed and more like Adam West running an obstacle course to get rid of a bomb.

But Barry Allen’s other motivation besides being a superhero is to try to get his Dad out of prison. As a boy, Barry’s Mom sent his Dad to the store to get a can of tomatoes for dinner, and when he came home, he was found with a knife in his wife’s chest. Working with the Central City Police and secretly supported by Batman through Wayne Enterprises, Barry gets footage from the grocery store but it fails to give his Dad an alibi. But, Barry has learned from his power stunt in the Justice League movie that he can break the lightspeed barrier and travel spacetime. And of course, he tells Bruce Wayne (Batman) his idea, of course Bruce warns him about “The Butterfly Effect” and of course Barry blows him off. He tries to change the past on only the smallest level: He goes to the grocery store when his Mom first visits and plants a can of tomatoes in the shopping cart so she won’t forget it, so that Dad won’t be gone when a stranger comes by the house. And it works: Barry sees his Mom and his Dad together again, safe and sound. But he doesn’t realize that he hasn’t changed the past, he’s created a parallel timeline where there’s another Barry who’s about to visit his parents too.

For the sake of distinction I will henceforth refer to him as “Stoner Barry.” Stoner Barry has all the goofiness of regular Barry but none of the intellectual depth. See, this version of Barry didn’t see his Dad go to prison for a crime he didn’t commit, so he wasn’t motivated to develop a career in police forensics. That’s another point Bruce made to Barry in their conversation: “Our scars make us who we are.” (Also, our scars remind us that the past is real.) As it turned out not only did Barry go back to the point at which he would have gotten his powers in a lab accident, this is about the same time that the Kryptonian force under General Zod (Michael ‘I’m Only In It For The Money’ Shannon) came to demand the appearance of the last Kryptonian on Earth. So apparently deciding he hasn’t done ENOUGH damage to the timeline, Barry takes Stoner Barry to the police lab to repeat the incident that gave him the Speed Force, except that when he does so, lightning strikes him and then Stoner Barry so that Barry loses his powers but Stoner Barry gets them. So now Barry has to be the rational adult trying to show this goofball how to use his powers and the speedsuit.

In his web searches, Barry realizes that Victor Stone is not a cyborg in this timeline and Aquaman and Wonder Woman don’t even exist. But Stoner Barry’s roommates tell him Batman is real, he’s just been in retirement for years. So the two Barrys take a taxi to the dilapidated Wayne Manor and get in a fight with an old martial-artist hermit who turns out to be – Michael Keaton.

In not too much time, the boys convince this Bruce Wayne to shave his hair and beard and put on the rubber Batsuit again. They trace the location of the Kryptonian refugee to a prison in deep Russia, break in and instead of Superman they see an apparently starving young girl. Barry insists on saving her. She is, of course, Kara Zor-El (Sasha Calle), kept for examination by the Russians under kryptonite lasers and deprived of sunlight. Of course, Batman gets the team to the surface, and she immediately begins to kick ass.

Batman, Supergirl and Stoner Barry all work together to (eventually) restore Barry’s Speed Force, and the four heroes fly out to where the Kryptonian forces are fighting the US Army in the desert. And this leads to much CGI ass-kicking and stuntwork, but with only one Kryptonian against dozens, the fight is against the heroes. Batman is killed and Zod stabs Supergirl, injecting her with a probe to harvest her DNA as the basis for a program to terraform Earth to Krypton standards, which will kill all existing life.

The two Barrys go back to the time nexus to rewind things to the middle of the fight and change events, but it doesn’t work: Batman is saved (temporarily) but they can’t stop the Kryptonians from taking Supergirl. Eventually Barry realizes this is the fixed event he can’t avoid, and he needs to give up. And Stoner Barry, who has been brought all this way for nothing, refuses to accept this, and won’t let him leave.

This conflict causes the various multiverses to begin crashing in on each other, and at this point the audience sees a whole bunch of crossovers, including George Reeves, Christopher Reeve AND Helen Slater, Adam West, and the Hair Club For Supermen Nicholas Cage, FIGHTING A GIANT SPIDER.

Strange, in the middle of all this fan service, given that DC obviously doesn’t care about paying actors for using their likenesses with cheap CGI, they didn’t bring in Grant Gussin from The Flash series on CW. (After all, Miller did appear there once.) But that probably would have been an unfavorable comparison. Gussin’s Barry may have been an overbearing do-gooder much of the time, but he was a real four-color hero and not a schlemiel.

In any event, Barry overcomes the internal conflict and manages to go back to the day of his mom’s murder, taking the can of tomatoes out of her cart, then going back “home.” At which point, he’s summoned to court in his Dad’s case, because the Wayne Enterprises tape has revealed new evidence. Apparently when Barry put the can of tomatoes back he put it on a different shelf, so when his Dad came to the store, he looked up to get it, so his face was on the security cam, and that proved his alibi. So Barry at least saved one of his parents. After Barry has a brief celebration with his girlfriend, Bruce Wayne comes to give congratulations. Except, now he’s George Clooney.

Oh, sorry. I guess there were spoilers.

I have to agree with some of the critics who point out that for all the comic-relief qualities that made Miller’s performance such a ray of sunshine in the Justice League movie(s), the same approach makes them seem like a nervous klutz when they have to carry their own movie.

The other issue is that just as Barry keeps trying to rewind the past, fans have already seen this before. It was called Flashpoint, a comic book crossover in which Barry’s attempts to save his family had disastrous effects. Flashpoint was one of the major story arcs in the later DC Universe, much as The Infinity Gauntlet is for Marvel, and like it has been re-used for various other media: graphic novels, TV cartoons, and the CW series. And in most of these cases the results were better stories.

The really odd thing is that as this script was hashed and re-hashed over years, in typical Hollywood fashion, two of the listed co-writers (who were previously on track to direct The Flash) were John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, who were also directors and co-writers of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. But the silliness worked in that movie, because it was more consistent with the tone, where the characters were basically gentleman rogues and no one really got hurt. It’s a little more jarring when you have the comedy team of Allen and Allen in scenarios where people are getting shot up with assault rifles or skewered with warblades. You would think that the Dungeons & Dragons movie would not have a code versus killing and the superhero movie would… but this IS the Snyderverse.

Or rather, it WAS the Snyderverse. The problem with building up such a massive movie is that if it doesn’t make an even more massive profit, it becomes one of the biggest bombs in Hollywood history. When you combine that with the even more disappointing Black Adam (‘Finally, The ROCK – HAS COME BACK! – to the video bin’), The Flash is clearly the nail in the coffin to the “DC Extended Universe” and makes it that much more easier for producer-director James Gunn to put his stamp on everything. It’s not impossible, but increasingly unlikely, that Ezra Miller and Gal Gadot will be brought back. They’ve already recast Superman and Lois. And the people who actually liked the Snyderverse (apparently, not enough of them) are all bitching about how James Gunn is going to fuck everything up. I say, if the results are like Peacemaker, then they’re going to be even more fucked up than The Flash but more dramatically coherent.

As I had said in my review of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, while this series of movies may be a lot of silly fun, that movie was also surprisingly deep in its reference to trauma. Director James Gunn’s ability to blend silliness, violence and dark character history became that much more clear in Peacemaker, the HBO series about a neo-fascist jerkwad that became more and more meaningful as the story went on.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 starts from another dark place with ominous musical cues. It seems as though it’s going to look at Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) drinking himself into depression over losing Gamora (Zoe Saldana) who is still alive, but as the alternate-history Gamora who was still loyal to Thanos and joined the Ravagers after he died. But the focus is really on the life and history of Rocket (Bradley Cooper) who gets hunted by Warlock (Will Poulter), a bioengineered superman in service to The High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji from Peacemaker). It turns out the Evolutionary is the one who “uplifted” Rocket from Earth raccoon stock, but did so with torture and implants, along with a bunch of other animals who were turned into misfit toys. Put in a coma by Warlock, Rocket remembers how he made deep friendships in the animal pens and also attracted the attention of his master when he figured out a genetic flaw in his newer creations. Once the Evolutionary integrates Rocket’s idea and improves his creations, he tells Rocket that he doesn’t need him and the other experiments on his new world, and plans to harvest his brain the next day. This of course, leads to tragedy, but Rocket escapes.

In the present, the Guardians realize there’s a code in Rocket’s cyberware that will kill him if they try using medical tech to heal his wounds, and so trace the code to the bio-fortress where the Evolutionary has his main genetic engineering business. This gets the Ravagers involved, which brings Gamora temporarily back into the team, even though she doesn’t care for Peter, and a certain amount of this movie is Peter coming to terms with that fact. In the process of saving Rocket, the Guardians find out just how ruthless and amoral The High Evolutionary is, and what the stakes for defeating him are.

Though there are quite a few scenes where it looks like someone is going to bite it, it is a spoiler to say that this movie is a happy ending for all of the main characters. But there is also a sad finality, as some of them decide to move on. Over the last couple of movies (including the hilarious Disney Plus ‘holiday special‘) the Guardians set up a real community in the “Knowhere” base, and the project has become a lot bigger than just five characters. It continues on. The characters continue on, but James Gunn has made it clear that this is his last Guardians movie and last project for Marvel Studios, after they jacked him around and fired him over politically incorrect social media posts he made back when social media was barely a thing. Now after Peacemaker, Gunn’s been given free rein to handle DC Comics’ movie line, and now social media is trying to cancel him because he decided to kill the Zack Snyder shared universe that wasn’t going anywhere to begin with and was probably going to be killed by DC anyway. While some of these fans don’t like Gunn’s quirks (like casting his wife and his brother a lot) he actually manages to combine the good humor and heart that are in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and were lacking in the DC Extended Universe with the violent action and dark themes that are lacking in the MCU and maybe a little too common in the DCEU.

So while some of the Snyder fans may bitch (and if there were that many of them, DC might not have done what it did), I’m looking forward to seeing what James Gunn will do with those comics characters, like maybe returning Michael Rosenbaum as Lex Luthor or casting Dave Bautista as Solomon Grundy.

To my surprise, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness isn’t about the fallout from Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Peter Parker almost destroying the multiverse in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Rather the focus of this movie is the walking plot device America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), who has the natural but uncontrolled ability to travel between universes. In Marvel Comics, America Chavez is one of the young woke superheroes that the company came up with in recent years. Both she and her parents are lesbians, which means this movie will probably be banned in Communist China (and Florida, same difference).

America is in danger because of none other than Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olson), who was last seen on the streaming show WandaVision, hearing the voices of her imaginary sons while consulting the Darkhold, the ultimate book of black magic that she ripped off of Agatha Harkness. It seems the Darkhold has not only tempted but absolutely corrupted Wanda. It showed her that her sons physically exist in other universes, so she’s decided to sacrifice Chavez in order to steal her power and make her family real again, so when Chavez appears in “universe 616” Strange has to help.

As with No Way Home, I thought this was a good Marvel action movie, but it still left a sour taste in my mouth. Namely because Wanda is rather abruptly turned into a straight-up villain who’s so far gone that there’s only one way for her to go out. Yes, there are lots of examples of how someone can have a superficially good idea and become so obsessed that they take it way too far (for example, Thanos, or the entire Republican Party). But to my mind, this decision completely erased the moral of WandaVision, in which Wanda rejected solipsism and power-madness for the real world and learned to accept grief. This also erased the character growth of that series, in which Elizabeth Olson gave one of the best performances in any Marvel Cinematic Universe project to date.

If nothing else, the Multiverse concept allowed this movie to provide a whole bunch of fan-pleasing cameo appearances, as well as an expanded role for Rachel McAdams as Strange’s ex(?) girlfriend. And it allowed for several minutes of Doctor Strange walking around as a zombie, which is when you know you’re watching a Sam Raimi movie.

I believe it was in the early ’70s when DC Comics, mainly under writer Denny O’Neil, decided to make a clean break from the four-color, Adam West-style Batman to something closer to the character’s 1930’s vigilante roots. One step in this was to have Dick Grayson graduate high school and go to college so Batman would be operating alone again. But another quiet step was that they started calling him “The Batman” again.

And yet other media still presented Batman as a standard superhero until the Tim Burton Batman movie, way back in 1989. I had problems with the movie, but at the time I thought they were at least trying to present the character realistically, for instance by giving him armor. But the Batman movies since that one have been getting steadily more grim and dark, especially with the Zack Snyder movies that took their cues from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.

My sister wanted to go see the new Robert Pattinson Batman movie (directed by Matt Reeves) and we went to see it last Wednesday, and I think she was a lot more impressed by it than I was. I think it IS very good, but at the end of the day The Batman is just another movie about a heavy-breathing, obsessed vigilante in a leather mask.

No, not The Batman, The Riddler.

Some general impressions:

I don’t like how most of these movies since Michael Keaton have basically made Batman a bulletproof tank who gets into fights with gunfire and survives mainly because he is a bulletproof tank. Because given the other similarities between the characters, going too far in that direction makes Batman basically Goth Iron Man.

But given that this Batman does have military-grade armor and uses contact lenses with digital feeds to record events around him, you’d think that they’d make him more like the comic character and have the eyes be white slits in a helmet, which you could also explain as nightvision lenses. I mention this because the movies insist on making the actor’s eyes visible and having the masked vigilante wearing black eye makeup around the eye holes of the black mask, so when Pattinson takes it off, he looks that much more emo than he usually does. Although this is probably the only modern Batman movie I’ve seen that acknowledges that he is wearing makeup.

On the other hand, I did like how this is one Batman movie where Batman avoids guns and killing. It is also a movie that actually focuses on Batman as a detective, having to follow The Riddler’s clues and piece together the big picture, although at least one person pointed out that it’s Selina Kyle (Zoe Kravitz) who actually grabs the crucial suspect while trying to get revenge for her slain roommate.

Paul Dano, exerting some serious “Voted Most Likely To Shoot Up The High School” energy as The Riddler, allows himself to be captured fairly late in the movie, and it seems like the whole thing is over, but The Batman realizes that there’s at least one more step in his scheme, and it’s especially disturbing given how it uses “stochastic terrorism” to organize people over social media to commit mass violence against a city. In the process of that discovery, Batman learns that fear and vengeance are not enough. This is part of why the movie is almost three hours (and 20 minutes of that is end credits), but it’s that final act that distinguishes this movie from something where Batman just uses the Batmobile machine guns to blast bunches of criminals.

Robert Pattinson is actually very good as Bruce Wayne and credible as The Batman, and I don’t know why that would surprise anybody given that Pattinson made his reputation playing a grim, brooding obsessive who stays out of the sunlight. But then both he and Kristen Stewart have gotten a bad rap for being the popular stars of the teen-fantasy romance of the Twilight Saga, which I didn’t love as much as its fanbase seems to but did not hate nearly as much as some people seem to.

The Batman is a very well-done movie, but it is too long, too dark (in both the literal and figurative senses) and doesn’t really give us anything new or beyond what came before. The Riddler, as perverse and insane as he is, is not more insane than Heath Ledger’s Joker. Pattinson, good as he is, doesn’t have the total Batman package of Christian Bale, much less the edge of Keaton, the suaveness of Val Kilmer, or the metal nipples of George Clooney.

But as I keep saying, not like it matters. Superheroes are literally corporate property, as in, not only can DC (no longer calling itself a comics company) do whatever it wants with these characters, all that aggregate product means that any given character is the product of more than one creator. Batman isn’t just the Bob Kane-Bill Finger character, and hasn’t been for decades. DC has actually been running multiple media versions of its characters concurrently (as with Grant Gussin and Ezra Miller both being The Flash), and in that regard, this movie is just Matt Reeves’ interpretation of Batman, no more or less official than the Ben Affleck one, although given the success of this movie it’s probably going to be the setting they’re going to run with.

Overall, I thought that The Batman wasn’t as good as I was hoping, but a damn sight better than some haters want people to believe.

Spider-Man, nobody knows who you are…

Even before seeing the movie, I thought the title Spider-Man: No Way Home was a bit ominous and negative compared to Homecoming and Far From Home. Now I know why.

No Way Home has all the great elements I’ve come to expect from Marvel Studios movies, but it’s also kind of a bummer. And to explain my opinion, I basically have to go over the entire movie. There’s not much point in giving a spoiler warning, because not only has everyone seen this before me, half of the major plot elements have already been given away in previews.

At the the very end of Far From Home Mysterio, in a last act of spite, blames Spider-Man (Tom Holland) for his death and announces his Secret ID as Peter Parker. This taped statement is broadcast to the world by none other than J. Jonah Jameson (once again played by J.K. Simmons). Peter, his friends, Aunt May and Happy Hogan all get investigated by the government, but the charges are dropped thanks to “a very good lawyer.” But this doesn’t repair Peter’s reputation, and he’s caught in a very Spider-Man like situation: “I am the most famous person in the world, yet I’m still broke.” This all comes to a head when Peter, MJ and Ned all apply to MIT in their senior year and are turned down due to “the recent controversy.” So in his awkward adolescent fashion, Peter decides to look up his old friend Doctor Strange to solve all his problems with magic. And Strange, in his own adolescent fashion, actually agrees.

Strange no longer has the Time Stone, so he can’t just go back and prevent the original event, but Wong (who is now the Sorcerer Supreme cause Strange was ‘blipped’ for five years) recalls that there is a spell of mass forgetfulness. So Peter asks Strange to cast the spell, but when he’s reminded that this would mean that everyone forgets who he is, Peter attaches so many exceptions to the spell, Strange loses his concentration and the spell turns into this giant dimensional anomaly that will eventually destroy reality. As happens in these situations.

This ends up summoning the various super-villains who fought Spidey in the other Sony movies, and these are fairly easily defeated, but when they compare notes, Strange, Spider-Man and the bad guys all deduce that the villains had been plucked from their time lines just before Spider-Man ended up killing them. So Peter doesn’t want to send them back before curing the psychotic disorders that made these guys villains (which in most cases also would remove their powers). Strange doesn’t care. So Spidey actually defeats Strange and resolves to fix the problem without killing anybody. This involves science instead of magic, which is probably why Strange didn’t think of it. Peter makes real progress, but Norman Osborn’s evil side re-asserts itself and screws the whole thing, with catastrophic results. At which point MJ and Ned discover that the other two Spider-Men (Mans?), Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire, are also in New York, so they get them together to help Peter. And this part of the film is a real blast, with the three Spider-Men trading stories and working together in the lab. And eventually they lure the villains out and manage to subdue them again in a big brawl, but during this, Osborn/Green Goblin shows up again and sabotages the containment spell Dr. Strange was using to stop Earth’s dimension from imploding. When Strange tells Peter that he can no longer stop all the various parallel dimensions from merging with Earth, Peter tells him to redo the original spell, under its original parameters, which means that everyone, including MJ, Ned and Doctor Strange himself forget who Peter is. And even though there’s no real reason Peter can’t just come back to MJ, explain what happened, and try to rebuild the relationship, he sees that she and Ned have actually gotten into MIT… so he basically figures they’re better off without him.

Like I said, a real bummer. And I haven’t even spoiled the real bummer.

One of my Facebook friends posted (before I’d seen the movie): “I did really enjoy Spiderman: No Way Home. I highly recommend it. However, there is a takeaway to the story that needs consideration. ‘The most heroic thing you can do is cut yourself off from friends, family, and all social contacts. Give up love. You will only hurt those you love. Give up rage. Rage will only make you a monster. Give up pursuing personal joy, comfort, or basic needs. Give up anything outside of a single minded focus on your mission. The mission is everything.’ That is a classic view of masculinity. And it is toxic as hell.”

I don’t know if this story was a specific example of toxic masculinity, but I see the point. The thing is, this film kind of flies in the face of what came before, where half the fun of these movies was in Tom Holland’s interactions with the supporting cast, and the generally light-hearted tone. Not unlike CW’s The Flash TV series, the central character in No Way Home works better as a member of a team with a network of friends, and the conclusion took all that away from him. Theoretically, they could address all this in the next movie, but Marvel doesn’t usually do more than three movies focusing on one character (and Sony’s track record with Spidey hasn’t been the greatest).

But in regard to that last point, No Way Home is good at least in that it creates a sort of redemption for the last two Spider-Man actors, who in the movies might have been obliged to kill their enemies but still did kill them. Not only is the fan-service premise perfectly executed, but the acting is at the least very good, especially from Willem Dafoe, who at this point is so creepy and reptilian that he can play the Green Goblin without a mask.

The other aspect of this movie is how it ties into the whole chain of MCU movies – as I’ve mentioned, some of these movies tend to fit into the sequence better than others. In this case, the fact that Doctor Strange was actually willing to go along with Peter’s crazy idea just illustrates that the personality problems that caused him to lose his medical career didn’t go away just because he achieved ridiculous levels of magical power. In fact, this leads directly into the next movie, because the second after-credits scene of No Way Home isn’t even a “scene” but a straight-up preview of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, simply without the title logos. Which raises the question: How does Strange deal with the consequences of breaking into the multiverse when he doesn’t even remember WHY he did it?

In some respects, the return of Tom Hiddleston to the Marvel Cinematic Universe character of Loki was more anticipated than the last two Disney+ Marvel series, WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Except this is and isn’t Loki from the movies. As a recurring foil in the Thor movies, Loki actually experienced a certain amount of character growth, if only because he realized Thor was starting to see through his schemes, so by the end of Thor:Ragnarok he was there to support him in finding a new home for the Asgardians. But then their ship got attacked by Thanos and Loki ended up dying trying to protect Thor. Then in Endgame the heroes had their “time heist” which required the Avengers to go back to just after they’d defeated the Chitauri invasion and captured Loki, but in a moment of confusion, that Loki escaped. So Loki has effectively been “reset” to just after where he was character-wise at the end of Avengers.

Specifically, Loki stole a Tesseract, which I guess is not THE Tesseract the Avengers needed to build their own Infinity Gauntlet, and wound up in Mongolia, where he was immediately arrested by the “Time Variance Authority” and drafted to help hunt other rogue variables under the supervision of Agent Mobius, played by Owen Wilson, which brings to mind the question of what a Marvel movie would look like if it was directed by Wes Anderson.

Loki does have something like that droll sense of humor, but to judge from only the first episode, it’s just setting up the basic premise. Apparently some triad of cosmic beings set up “the sacred timeline” in order to prevent the sort of chaos that happens with a multiverse (for examples of such, try to map the continuity of Star Trek and Doctor Who. Or lack thereof). However Loki‘s main writer, Michael Waldron, is also writing Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, so that title already tells you where things are going. In fact based on the rumors about the crossovers in the next Spider-Man movie, it seems as though this narrative and the end-credits scene of the last WandaVision are moving towards a storyline that will string together the various Marvel projects in Phase 4 the way the Infinity Gauntlet arc did with the prior movies, not to mention using the “multiverse” to justify Marvel finally getting to use all those intellectual properties that they sold to other movie studios and that Disney bought back.

Loki the “variant” plays into this once Agent Mobius puts him face to face with his own evil and causes him to realize that his own desire for control over others stems from a lack of control over life. In his attempts to escape, he ends up playing the reel of his life in the “sacred timeline”, and, realizing he can’t go back and that the TVA basically collects Infinity Stones in their desks, sees that there is no point in continuing as he was. This works mainly because Mr. Shakespearean Actor Hiddleston sells it so well, but also because Owen Wilson is a serious grounding influence, or as serious as Owen Wilson ever gets.

This relationship is clearly going to be the core of the series, and that alone is worth the price of admission, although with Loki, even more than the first two Marvel Disney Plus series, it’s hard to tell how it will play out from just the first episode.

In my review of the Zack Snyder Cut of Justice League, in the wake of near-universal hatred for the Joss Whedon-directed theatrical release, I’d said that at least the Snyder Cut would give a chance to determine whether Joss’ version was making the best of bad material or butchering something that otherwise would have worked. (My verdict was ambiguous: the first movie was a dull grey slog, and the Snyder version is twice as much dull grey slog with somewhat more character development.)

But even before demand built up for the Snyder Cut, Whedon was working on a new project for HBO, The Nevers, and ended up leaving that for reasons unexplained but probably related to the avalanche of hits to his backstage reputation in Hollywood. So with the series premiering on April 11, we have a similar question as to whether the remaining production team (including Buffy veterans Jane Espenson and Douglas Petrie) have a good idea that they screwed up or a bad idea that they can only do so much to redeem. However the pilot episode was both written and directed by Whedon himself, so it should convey the intended approach.

One valid critique of Whedon is that he tends to go for the same themes a lot. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, there was only one Slayer per generation, who was always a young girl, but each Slayer was monitored and trained by a mostly male, entirely British order of Watchers. Well, in The Nevers, almost the entire cast is British cause it’s set in London, 1899, where a few thousand people, mostly women, were “touched” by what appears to be fairy dust sprinkled by a passing alien lifeform and/or spaceship. As a result they were altered, some more obviously than others, with what are called “turns.” The main character seems to be the widowed Amalia True (Laura Donnelly), whose main power seems to be psychic visions (or as she calls them, ‘rippling’), but this being a Whedon hero, she also kicks serious ass, and this being the Victorian period, she kicks even more ass when she’s wielding an umbrella. Her much less prim best friend Patience Adair (Ann Skelly) has some command over electricity but uses it to create anachronistic inventions, so yes, there is steamtech.

Actually there are several Touched who are not women, including a black doctor and a white male aristocrat, but for the most part the cases seem to be concentrated outside the ruling class, something that didn’t escape the attention of Lord Massen (Pip Torrens) who wants his mysterious council to protect the British Empire and counter the ambitions “for those whom ambition was never meant.”

This approach is already giving me a sour vibe. One of the reasons people could gravitate to Buffy as a feminist story is actually that it wasn’t such an obvious one. The characters were good characters before they were symbols, and that drew you into the message. You don’t even need to lean too much on the patriarchy vs. women theme in this setting, given that “Victorian” is a modern adjective for “puritanical and repressed.” And yet, Whedon still sees the need. In the words of Willow Rosenberg, The Nevers isn’t dropping hints, it’s dropping anvils.

Otherwise this show has a young decadent who’s a friend of Amalia’s wealthy patron, a truly nasty surgeon (with an American accent), a street detective who’s already doing a better job playing Mister Vimes than the guy on AMC’s The Watch, and an insane (or at least extremely irritating) serial killer who has assembled her own little team of supervillains. Indeed, this show seems to allude to superhero comics a lot more than Buffy or Firefly did, with Amalia being more civic-minded than the early Buffy, with her and her patron creating a little urban “orphanage” where people like her can have sanctuary and support.

This show has some potential (so to speak) and a lot of stuff that could work very well, and it certainly appeals to the premise of “What if you had Buffy, but Steampunk and with cool British accents?” Plus which, it’s HBO, so you get at least one shot of tits and people say “Fuck” more than once. The problem is that while all the critics seem to think The Nevers borrows too much from Whedon’s previous tropes, to me it doesn’t feel enough like a Whedon show. The dialogue and action don’t have the snap, crackle and pop I’ve come to expect from his best work. With the notable exception of Amalia and Patience, the warm character relationships aren’t there and it’s a lot harder to care.

In fact The Nevers is almost as much of a dull grey slog as either Justice League, which means either the Victorian Era is too depressing for some people, or Whedon learned the wrong things from Snyder. Even when Buffy, Angel and Firefly were handling very serious subjects, they didn’t usually take themselves too seriously (and with Buffy, they started to suck once they did). If one is going to take a fantastical approach to the 19^th Century, one might be better off starting with the tongue-in-cheek approach of The Wild, Wild West. (the 60’s TV show, not the Will Smith movie, for Gad’s sakes)