Movie Review - The Fantastic Four: First Steps

The Fantastic Four: First Steps [2025]

So, a Fantastic Four reboot! This movie wasn't exactly on my radar. It was going to come, yes, I knew of the casting calls and that it was going to feature Galactus, but otherwise I didn't find myself particularly excited. I will have to admit that the Fantastic Four has never really been that high on classic Marvel superheroes that I was itching and chomping at the bit for adaptations to 'get right'. The first two Fox adaptations were... the first one was all right and honestly quite underrated, but the sequel suffered a lot from sequelitis, and the 2015 reboot was an abomination and easily one of the worst superhero adaptations to have ever graced the silver screen. 

But the Fantastic Four are still a 'big deal', Marvel's First Family that, in theory, should be commanding as much respect and popularity as Spider-Man, Wolverine or Captain America. And yet... they've never been, at least outside of the comic book circles. 

A good chunk of it has been because of how to handle them. Is the reboot going to go full-on Ultimate Universe on them? But would the cheesier tone of the Golden Age comics even work? Would it even be a proper Fantastic Four adaptation without the 'happy family' tones of the original comics? Well, the adaptation for the MCU, The Fantastic Four: First Steps goes full-in with the retro-futuristic themes and the vibes of the older Golden/Silver-Age comics and enjoyed a surprisingly wholesome summer as it released opposite DC's Superman (which I will get to reviewing eventually) which also embraced DC's first son in a back-to-basics approach. 

Fantastic Four: First Steps is extremely divorced from the rest of the MCU other than the post-credits scene, taking place on Earth-828 and having zero multiversal connections to the rest of the MCU universe. Which absolutely plays in their favour, as the Fantastic Four's whole thing in this movie is their relationship with the public, and how the Fantastic Four are the heroes of their time.

After an interesting opening scene where Mr. Fantastic/Reed Richards and Invisible Woman/Sue Storm discover that Sue is pregnant, we get an old-school recap about the Fantastic Four's origin story and their career as superheroes. After a mission to outer space, scientists Reed Richards, Susan Storm, Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm were exposed to cosmic rays and gained superpowers, becoming Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch and the Thing. The family of superheroes fought supervillains, with a quick montage showing them fighting threats like Giganto, Mole Man or the Super-Apes... and the movie is really intent on showing what an impact the Fantastic Four made on their world. There's a constant showcase of Reed moonlighting in a science show for kids, little toys with catchphrases made by the Fantastic Four, Sue creating a Future Foundation organization and interacting with the rest of the worlds... they're a perfectly wholesome group of celebrities, and Earth-828 is a much more peaceful place than the more war-torn real world, or even the 'main' MCU. 

And again, such a huge chunk of the early parts of the movie is devoted to this. Showcasing the Four's dynamic as Reed and Sue skirt around revealing the pregnancy to Johnny and Ben; Ben interacting with local kids and schoolteachers; Johnny trying to egg Reed to continue doing their science experiments; their interactions with each other, and showing off bits of the world around them like the adorable little robot butler HERBIE... it's honestly kind of bold to focus so much on the incoming super-baby, particularly Reed's anxiety around being the smartest person in the world and still being terrified of fatherhood.

And for the most part, I think the only character that's really shafted by this is Johnny, who doesn't really have much to do. Reed and Sue have a lot of material to act and pull from, and the 'brains vs. heart' theme going through the movie works well with both their discussions of parentage as well as how to deal with getting the world to work together. Ben/Thing is always the member of the Four that you can get a lot of mileage out of thanks to his more extreme cosmic transformation and the demeaning moniker of 'the Thing', and we get to see his interactions with his community. Johnny? This is a more mature Johnny, so he's not as much a womanizer or a impulsive hothead as his traditional incarnations, but that does kind of reduce him to just 'the other guy'. He theoretically has a bunch to do, being a secondary scientist, but I did feel Johnny is the member of the Four that didn't get the best spotlight. 

But hey, three our of four isn't bad! As Sue approaches her childbirth date, Reed reveals that his little gift to his son is a somewhat twisted but very cool sequence as he essentially brings down all the supervillains singlehandedly in a single night... and then just as if the world is mocking him, the skies explode as an alien, the Silver Surfer (a female version of the character) shows up and heralds the advent of Galactus. Johnny tries to fight and chase down the Surfer, but gets knocked off. He did hear certain alien languages from the Surfer, and he spends all his free time in this movie trying to decode it while his sister and brother-in-law deal with more pressing matters. 

Reed finds out that charting the course of the Silver Surfer, all the planets in her wake has been destroyed, and that this 'Galactus' is real and very deadly. Thus trying to confront Galactus, the Fantastic Four pile into their spaceship the Excelsior, and through a bunch of very cool retro-tech special effects, we get to see them fly off into space through a faster-than-light engine ring. It's a lot of cool stuff. 

They witness Galactus destroying a planet, and eventually get pulled into Galactus's ship. Again, in 2025 I don't think a lot of these special effects are going to be truly mind-blowing, but I still have to give praise to Galactus in particular... for the simple fact that it's actually not CGI, but a dude in a suit. No wonder it looks so good! Galactus is a giant alien titan who is fed the energies of the planets he destroys into himself, and he gives us his cryptic backstory. He is cursed with eternal hunger thanks to something called the Power Cosmic... but during the confrontation with the Four, Galactus demands Sue's unborn child, sensing the Power Cosmic within Sue. Galactus essentially plans to pass his own hunger and curse to the unborn Franklin. 

This leads to a fight and an escape as the Fantastic Four distract Galactus and fight with the Surfer, leading to another fun and very comic-book-y sci-fi sequence as the Silver Surfer pursues them through a wormhole. We get a pretty cool sequence as the Fantastic Four use a collapsing black hole as a way to slingshot them back to Earth, while trapping the Silver Surfer there. Again, this chase scene takes a while, but I really did like it for what it is. While all of this is going on, Sue gives birth inside the ship, and the scene manages to juggle tension and comedy quite well. 

As this second act ends, the Fantastic Four returns back to Earth to an adoring crowd, and you get the feeling that this is perhaps the first time the Fantastic Four has been so humbled and defeated. Being the honest, nice guys that they are, Reed announces that Galactus demanded Franklin and they refused, and they're planning a different strategy. This bout of honesty, however, causes the Fantastic Four's once-adoring public to turn upon them in the face of existential threat. It is quite depressing considering how upbeat and happy-go-lucky the first parts of the movie were, but it was very well executed. 

Sue and Reed get into some, again, well-acted and well-written arguments -- Reed being who he is, being the problem solver, of course has planned for the worst, and has to consider all the most terrible plans... as much as he is loath to do something like sacrificing baby Franklin. Sue also gets a powerful scene where she walks out and addresses the crowd that demands sacrificing Franklin to Galactus. Sue notes that everyone there is their family, whether their biological son or the people of the world, and the Fantastic Four do not plan on sacrificing anyone. 

While all of this is also going on, Reed and Johnny separately reach a breakthrough. Johnny manages to decode the language of Shalla-Bal the Silver Surfer. Meanwhile, Reed realizes that the teleportation bridge that he's been tinkering in the movie's first act could be used as 'Archimedes's Lever' and move the entire Earth itself. The Fantastic Four make use of the Future Foundation to build these massive bridges all over the world, going through a nice, Neon Genesis Evangelion style of cooperation to build these massive locations with the help of everyone in the world. 

It's all very inspiring and we get to see the Fantastic Four's role of superheroes as peacemakers, even convincing countries to shut off power to conserve power for the activation of the teleporter. However, the Silver Surfer arrives and began to systematically dismantle everything they've worked for weeks. She is confronted by Johnny Storm, however, who has decoded her language and transmissions they've picked up over the past couple of years... and confronts Shalla-Bal with her backstory. She's an astronomer from Zenn-La, who willingly gave herself up to Galactus to save her planet and her daughter. This... this is honestly a bit rushed, and the explanation of Surfer's backstory and guilt feels like it could've had a bit more time. It's not bad, but I did feel like this moment could've been done a bit better.

The Silver Surfer is shocked and traumatized enough by a combination of being confronted with the screams of all the dying planets as well as remembering her homeworld, and flies off. However, Galactus is still coming, and Reed devises a plan to use the last remaining teleporter in Times Square and teleport Galactus away. The problem? They need to use Franklin as bait. Reed and Sue get into a brief argument, but they eventually lock in on the plan. There's a short sequence of them asking Mole Man for help to evacuate New York underground, which... again, I like the mole Man, but he didn't really have a presence outside of the five seconds in the opening montage, and I felt like this could've been done a bit better. 

Galactus arrives, though, and this whole sequence to the last battle is amazing. Galactus is shown as an unstoppable titan, walking through the city like a boy would walk through a garden of flowers. The action scenes are a bit more subdued from the Fantastic Four's side compared to a lot of more recent Marvel movies, which I do appreciate... the powers of the Four are very much well-defined, with only Johnny's fire blasts and Sue's invisible barriers really being anything too visually spectacular. There's a lot of fun beats done with the relatively limited powers.

Halfway through the fight, Galactus realizes the ruse and trap when he sees that the decoy crib near the teleporter did not actually contain Franklin. But as the Fantastic Four all get systematically overpowered by Galactus, including a surprisingly painful moment as Reed gets stretched forcibly by the world-devourer, it's Sue that finally decides to make a last stand, using her forcefield to stop Galactus in place and push him towards the portal. There's also a sequence where Johnny decides to sacrifice himself to knock Galactus back... but Silver Surfer zips in, knocks Johnny away, pushes herself and Galactus to the edge of the universe. 

Sue dies from her efforts, but then a crying Franklin shows off his powers and brings her back. The movie ends as the superheroes prepare to appear on a live show... but then leave because there's another distress call. 

Overall? The movie feels quite by-the-books, if we're being honest. And not all of the moments landed as well as it should, with the act three Mole Man moment being a particular 'hmm, I feel I'm missing the set-up' scene for me. The Silver Surfer stuff was done competently, but I also felt like we could've had more scenes with her. And Galactus... is all right, even if the way he's taken out is quite simple. But there's nothing wrong with simple -- this movie is really just trying to give us the Fantastic Four dynamics, to give us two major moments in a Fantastic Four franchise (a Galactus battle and Franklin's birth) and to sell a new generation on the concept of Marvel's First Family. And whether it's the simple goofy costumes, the simpler stakes and even just how the old-school aesthetics and music of the movie, I feel this was a well-done labour of love. I really respect this movie.

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Post-Credits Scene:
• 
  The mid-credits scene show four years later, when Franklin is a bit older and is shown to be a bit smarter than your average four-year old. As Susan goes off to get a book, she comes back to see Franklin interacting with a green hooded figure holding an iron mask... Doctor Doom!
  
• The post-credits scene is an excerpt of the in-universe Fantastic Four cartoon. 
• Past Movies Continuity:
• This taking place in an alternate Earth, we don't actually get many continuity nods other than a sign saying 'Westview Appliance Television', referencing the town of Westview where WandaVision is set. Ironically, Wanda Maximoff the Scarlet Witch was the cause of an alternate universe Mr. Fantastic's famously brutal death. 
• Movie Superhero Codenames: Very interestingly, only 'Mr. Fantastic' is only ever referred to by name, and it's made clear that it's something that's tacked on as part of his public persona. Sue, Johnny and Ben are notably never referred to by their superhero sobriquets of Invisible Woman, Human Torch or the Thing, even by the public. Shalla-Bal is also never referred to as the Silver Surfer, only as 'the Herald'. Mole Man is referred to by that name several times, but it's meant as an insult.
• This also extends to the catchphrases too, where the implication is that Human Torch's "flame on" and Thing's "it's clobberin' time" are marketing tools more for cartoons and cereal tie-in toys than something they actually say, just like the 2005 Fox movie. And just like that movie, Thing embraces his catchphrase in the climax. 
• Franklin's never referred to by his codename, but he's a baby. And to be fair, the editors could never decide on a codename for comics!Franklin either. 
• The mostly-unseen villains like the Red Ghost, the Super-Apes, Wizard, Diablo, Mad Thinker and Puppet Master are all referred to only by their codenames. 
• Favourite Action Scene: Less of an action scene, but the scene when Galactus finally makes planetfall and starts interacting with the world around him. A good runner-up is the subsequent fight as the Four try their best to stop this walking titan.  
• Funniest Line: "There's gonna be a time dilation." "Is it as big as mine?"
• During the montage of the Fantastic Four's superheroics, we get a recreation of their very iconic Fantastic Four #1, mirrored here, where they fought a giant green monster called Giganto. 
  
• While the content is new, the constant showcases of cheesy old cartoons are likely based on the '70's cartoon, The New Fantastic Four. Incidentally, that cartoon also infamously replaced the Human Torch with the robot assistant HERBIE who tended to be made fun of by the fandom, but later proved popular enough to make it into this movie. 
• In addition to the name-dropped Fantastic Four enemies above, the cartoons also show depictions of some other Fantastic Four characters like Dragon Man. 
• Just like Fantastic Four: Rise of the Siler Surfer, this movie features a scene of Human Torch chasing Silver Surfer in flight before running out of oxygen in space, and getting knocked down back to earth. 
• The cast of the unreleased 1994 Fantastic Four movie all make cameos. Alex Hyde-White (Mr. Fantastic) plays the newscaster William Russell, Rebecca Staab (Invisible Girl) portrays newscaster Carolyn Haynes, while two of the power plant workers rescued by Johnny are Jay Underwood (Human Torch) and Michael Bailey Smith (Thing).
• This universe is numbered Earth-828, based on Fantastic Four creator Jack Kirby's birthday (August 28th). 
• Shalla-Bal is traditionally the wife of Silver Surfer's alter-ego, Norin Radd. It is noted that Shalla-Bal has been the Silver Surfer in the Earth-X alternate continuity.
• Johnny's interest in her seems to imply that she also takes nods from Frankie Raye, a.k.a. Nova, an ex-girlfriend of Johnny in the comics that became a herald of Galactus.
• The Fantastic Four's company, the Future Foundation, is a team formed by Reed Richards in the comics that also features several guest stars (famously Spider-Man) that is a philanthropic organization meant to better the world. 
• Their spaceship, the Excelsior, is their creator Stan Lee's catchphrase in all of the letters he writes. 
• The cereal box Johnny holds is a homage to the Human Torch pin-up page from Fantastic Four #3. 
• One of the background signs references Timely Comics, the first name of the company that would later be renamed into Marvel comics. The two citizens in that shop are intentionally dressed up to look like young Stan Lee and young Jack Kirby, the two co-creators of the Fantastic Four. 
• A 'Cult of Galactus' is briefly mentioned in a montage all over the world. Humans that formed a cult worshipping Galactus was the plot of Silver Surfer: Parable, a book that won the Eisner Award.

Movie Review - Thunderbolts*

Thunderbolts* (2025)

I am insanely behind on superhero movie reviews. Which... yeah, I just kept pushing things further and further.

But let's talk about Thunderbolts*! Or as part of its rather delightful media play, "Thunderbolts* New Avengers". Ostensibly an adaptation of Marvel's answer to DC's Suicide Squad of a group of super-villains/anti-heroes who find themselves forced by circumstance and the goodness of their hearts to take a more heroic role, Thunderbolts* ends up actually being a bit of a lower-key Avengers team-up. And taken in that regard, I feel like it does a pretty good job at gathering a bunch of the MCU's more forgotten secondary characters and giving them a huge boost, while also making it an introduction to several new ones.

And I think I'll go through the parts of the movie that I don't like so much... it really isn't a problem unique to Thunderbolts* but it's something that's common to a lot of the ensemble movies. Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Justice League... there's usually a couple of characters that are left just hanging. Whether it's Hawkeye or Groot, it's understandable that the movie focuses on a couple of characters as the 'star'. For Thunderbolts*, however, owing to the fact that almost everyone in this movie are already secondary characters, I felt like the problem is a lot more noticeable. Yelena and Sentry take center stage, while the rest are... they don't really feel particularly necessary for the movie, if we're being honest. The movie does the best with the screentime that it's got with these characters, and we did get some great scenes for Red Guardian and USAgent, but at the end of the day it does really feel like it's a Yelena Belova movie first and foremost, and the rest of the Thunderbolts are just her quirky side-cast. The fact that we didn't even get hints of their 'fear' dimensions even though a couple of them clearly seem to be built up to it felt quite of a missed opportunity in my opinion. 

There is also the very wasted character of Taskmaster, who was killed with maybe five minutes' worth of screentime. I really did feel like Taskmaster's death was really kind of... unnecessary? It felt like 'we needed a death for the supervillains-turned-heroes movie' moment, except instead of a nobody, they actually killed a character with some backstory and history that was abruptly truncated. It's not like I'm a particularly big fan of Taskmaster, but the fact that Yelena -- who was from the same Widow program as her -- barely had any reaction and handwaved it away... it felt very off. 

But other than that? Thunderbolts might be my favourite Marvel movie since... perhaps since Spider-Man: No Way Home. I don't think it's a mistake to say that Marvel's been on a bit of a decline since Endgame, something that's a bit more noticeable in the past couple of years. And while Deadpool & Wolverine was a fun success, it was also a movie that relied on a lot of meta jokes to really understand. This was a great return to a more 'grounded' superhero team... which makes the contrast of them fighting against the immensely powerful metahuman Sentry even more stark. 

The movie starts off focusing with Yelena acting as a hit-woman for Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, leader of the CIA and essentially an evil Nick Fury as far as the MCU is concerned. We get to see a very cool physical stunt as she jumps off the towers in Malaysia, and Yelena is just... going through a superhero-assassin's equivalent of a mid-life crisis. She gets into a discussion with her dad Alexei "Red Guardian" Shostakov about it, but Alexei isn't exactly the best person to go to for a deep talk like this. Always enjoyed the MCU's random but well-delivered reinvention of Red Guardian as a crazy-yolo embarrassing superhero dad. He runs a limousine service now, and there's quite a bit of pathos worked into his scenes where he goes through the motions of acting like this limousine job is a totally natural thing to do for a retired superhero... but the death of Natasha Romanoff clearly still weighs heavily on the two of them. 

Yelena decides to do the spy-movie thing of doing 'one last job'. And that one last job turns out to be Valentina sending four different assassins to the Vault with directions to kill each other. We've got Yelena Belova (former Black Widow from, well, Black Widow), Taskmaster (former villain in Black Widow), Ghost (former villain in Ant-Man and the Wasp) and USAgent John Walker (former villain in Falcon and the Winter Soldier). During the skirmish, Taskmaster is killed and the three remaining assassins argue against each other about why they're sent here and their relation to Valentina.

I'll just go through the other two very quickly here... Ghost/Ava Starr feels like a huge wasted potential. She gets some lines here and there about her past and her desire to find a cure for her condition, but she's probably the character I notice the least in the movie. She just feels like she's there for the spectacle of having someone with slightly-more-powerful-than-the-average-human superpowers. 

USAgent/John Walker gets some nice moments early on as he keeps trying to deny that everything is well and good for him. He's got a prickly exterior and the most assholish of the group, but as we learn through the movie, he never quite survived the whole 'evil Captain America' thing, and his inability to control his temper has destroyed his personal life too, making him estranged with his wife. My problem really is that USAgent's story was built up... and he kind of just slowly fades into the background of the movie as 'the jerk' without much of a real resolution. Again, future movie, sure. But Walker is who I'm thinking of when I thought that the climax of the movie could've featured one or two extra flashbacks from the other Thunderbolts. 

Anyway, Yelena, USAgent and Ghost find a strange amnesiac man called Bob, who is just.... he's just Bob! Lewis Pullman acts as Bob/Sentry, and the direction the MCU goes with the amnesiac, confused Bob is perfectly fun. Bob's adorably out of his depth, and it's clear that there's more than meets the eye about him -- when Yelena and Walker touch Bob, they are transported to some creepy mind-scapes based on their past traumas. But our heroes don't have much time to deal with it, as we jump into another action scene as they try to escape. It's at this point where the Yelena and Walker kinda-sorta learn to... not trust each other yet, but at least to realize that they have a common enemy. Walker is more gung-ho in his approach to battle, Yelena prioritizes saving the civilian Bob, and Ghost... initially just runs away before coming back. 

In-between these action scenes, however, Bob reveals that he has superpowers -- impressive ones at that. Flight, super-strength, invulnerability... typical Superman powers. He gets separated from Yelena's group, and falls down to the ground and causes a shockwave before being detained by Valentina's minions. At this point it's somewhat clear that Bob or 'Project Sentry' actually worked, and that was one of the genetically-modified superhuman assets that Valentina had created. 

While all of this is going on, Valentina has a bit of her sub-plot where she's under investigation for improper usage and disposal of assets. Councilman Bucky Barnes, the former Winter Soldier, is running against her and trying his best to get her unseated legally. There is a bit of a side-plot with some characters like Valentina's put-upon but ultimately well-meaning secretary Melissa Gold (Songbird in the comics), but ultimately it's just some nice setup for what Valentina is trying to do -- eliminate evidence in face of a trial that could destroy her... and eventually pivoting to showing off the new face of the Avengers. 

Back to the crew at the desert, Red Guardian rejoins the movie as he shows up in the middle of the desert with his limousine, picking up Yelena, USAgent and Ghost. Alexei is over the moon excited about being embroiled in some dark-secret-spy superhero mission, and we even get a fun brick joke of Alexei discovering this from his role as a chauffeur, where he was moving around some of the politicians involved in the Valentina subplot. Alexei decides to dub the group the 'Thunderbolts' after Yelena's childhood soccer team. 

We get a bit of a comedy-action moment as a group of military humvees attack the limousine, while Yelena and the others are frustrated that all of Alexei's so-called improvements to his limousine are all junk. Bucky shows up at this point, dressed up in full superhero regalia and shooting sci-fi magnet-disc launchers and taking down the humvees. Our heroes are excited... until Bucky attacks them. 

Bucky notes the relatively poor track record that Yelena, Ava and Walker have been doing -- since they still look like criminals. The whole 'man, look at these losers' side of the movie is probably quite clear at this point... but Yelena and Walker manage to talk Bucky down, explaining the whole Bob situation. The now-complete team of Thunderbolts then take the fight to Avengers tower.

In Avengers tower, however, Bob has been... well, essentially gaslit and manipulated by Valentina. She shows up and acts as the kindly mentor; she gave Sentry blonde hair, a very fancy suit, and honeyed words. It's a lot of well-done manipulation that builds up on Bob's own insecurities and frustrations because everyone else has been treating him as a joke or a deadweight throughout the entire movie. And thusly controlled emotionally, Sentry faces off against the Thunderbolts and just shows off the sheer gap in power between someone with the powers of Superman... and a bunch of people with super-soldier serums. Absolutely nothing the Thunderbolts did works, and they are beaten into a hasty retreat. 

All the talk about Sentry having the 'powers of a god' and all that jazz begin to get to him, however, and Valentina is forced to use a killswitch on him. This, however, awakens Sentry's dark side -- the 'Void'. Perfectly creepy by having two tiny pinpricks for eyes, the Void rises up and begins attacking everyone indiscriminately, delivering a very creepy effect of turning people nearby into shadowy afterimages on the ground. It's a harrowing effect. 

As the Thunderbolts disperse, we get one of my favourite emotional moments in the movie, where Yelena and Alexei get into a bit of an argument. Alexei is far from being the perfect father, but by god he loves his adoptive daughter and the scene between the two is quite well acted. This tender moment of purpose and Alexei's belief in his daughter ends up being interrupted as Void's attack causes helicopters to crash and buildings to collapse. And despite everything, despite the world telling them that they are losers and should give up, the Thunderbolts rush in and start saving people. 

Which is a nice, uplifting moment...  right until a little girl gets turned into shadow right after our heroes rescued her. 

This kickstarts the movie's climax, where after a tense moment of running around, Yelena realizes that the way to stop the Void is to reach Bob from the inside, and just... lets herself be consumed by the shadow dimension. It's a bit of a trippy sequence where Yelena sees Bob trapped within the Void dimension as a poor, scared child in an attic while his parents fought and yelled about what a loser he is. Yelena then gets warped away to one of her more traumatic missions as a child, where she caused another young girl to get killed. This plays on a bit of a loop until the Thunderbolts break in and together they arrive in a facsimile of the Malaysian laboratory where Bob was experimented upon. 

The final battle itself is... it's all right. Void immobilizes the Thunderbolts still, but they manage to talk Bob into resisting and fighting his own dark side... and as all the emotions build up, they realize that they need to make Bob stop attacking. Yelena reaches Bob while struggling against the warping landscape, and manages to talk her down. This causes the Void to disappear and for everything to return to normal as the Void-ed people are released. 

And again, what I just described is something that hinges entirely on execution. It could either be an eye-rollingly stupid, cheesy way to end the movie with the power of friendship... or a genuinely touching moment. And I feel this is where the focus on Yelena pays some dividends, becuase that's really what allows the movie to sell the friendship and bond between Yelena and Bob well. Again, I would also reiterate that this arguably comes at the cost of losing character moments for everyone, but it does make for a neat ending. The fact that mental health and the acknowledgement of it is something that talks the superpowered evil side off is something that not all people would like to see in a superhero movie, but I absolutely love it. 

And the movie ends (post-credits scene notwithstanding) with a bit of a funny twist. As the Thunderbolts converge on Valentina, she lures them into a press conference where she introduces them as the New Avengers... and the credits rip off the 'Thunderbolts' title with 'New Avengers'. 

Ultimately? Watching this movie the first time, I really did feel like it was a bit patchy, especially for a movie that's supposed to introduce the New Avengers. Bucky really didn't have much to do and he doesn't exactly fall into the 'loser hero' category as the rest of the cast. Ghost is, well, a bit of a ghost. But ultimately I still feel like this is a great return to form for the MCU. The plot is well-done and the plot twists are well delivered. After several movies that relied a bit too much on CGI, the more traditional stunts and low-key use of CGI make the movie a delight to watch. And at the very least, the movie does have a very strong focus on Yelena and Bob. It's not what I expected from a Thunderbolts movie, for sure, but it's a surprisingly fun watch. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Post-Credits Scene:

• A scene apparently taken from the upcoming Avengers Doomsday, where the New Avengers argue about Captain America/Sam Wilson making his own group of Avengers. Alexei suggests they market themselves as the AvengerZ; Bob apparently can't transform into Sentry for a while; but signs of a spaceship entering orbit show up on their radar and they see the Fantastic Four's shuttle. 
  
• Past Movies Continuity:
• The events of Captain America: Brave New World is mentioned, with President Ross's transformation into the Red Hulk and Bucky acting as a congressman both happening in that movie. 
• Yelena was approached by Valentina in the post-credits of Black Widow, and was working for her in Hawkeye. John Walker was recruited and given his new darker uniform in the final scenes of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Red Guardian and Taskmaster were last seen in Black Widow; Ghost was last seen in Ant-Man and the Wasp.
• The events of Yelena, Walker and Ghost's failures and roles as antagonists are brought up and recapped to varying degrees by other characters.
• The alien invasion of New York in The Avengers is mentioned by several characters, with Mel being a high schooler during that attack.
• Loki's scepter from The Avengers, last seen being experimented to create Ultron in Age of Ultron, appears on a museum commemorating the Chitauri invasion. 
• Avengers Tower was sold in Spider-Man: Homecoming, with it having moved hands to Valentina by the time of this movie. The fight against Sentry takes place in the penthouse bar where Loki confronted Tony Stark in The Avengers.
• Walker uses Steve's "on your left" catchphrase... which is a bit weird since that's a personal joke between Steve and Sam. 
• Bucky's disc-launcher weapon was used by him during his villainous stint in Captain America: The Winter Soldier during the assassination attempt against Nick Fury. 
• Movie Superhero Codenames: Red Guardian, Sentry and Winter Soldier's codenames are constantly spoken by everyone, with Alexei being particularly happy about dropping code-names. Bob and Yelena also name-drop "Void" several times. Yelena is mostly referred to by name, though some characters describe her as 'a' Black Widow. Ava is never properly referred to as "Ghost" (though the word 'ghost' as an adjective is used), Walker is never referred to as "U.S.Agent" (though comparing him with Captain America is used a couple of times), and Antonia is also never referred to as Taskmaster.
• Favourite Action Scene: Everyone trying to dogpile Sentry and subsequently getting tossed around.
• Funniest Line: "BOB!"
• This isn't the first Marvel project to have a sudden 'title change' at the end, with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier changing titles in its last episode to Captain America and the Winter Soldier. 
• Sentry, a.k.a. Bob Reynolds, a.k.a. the Void, was initially released in a solo series where Sentry is a superhero 'with the power of a million exploding suns'. The civilian Bob wakes up one day with a lot of memories as a 'forgotten' superhero who worked alongside classic superheroes like the Avengers, Fantastic Four and X-Men, but found out that all evidence of his existence seems to have disappeared. Trying to figure out who his arch-nemesis 'the Void' is, Bob discovers that the Void is his evil alter-ego.
• Sentry's "Golden Guardian of Good" and "the power of a thousand exploding suns" that were originally throwbacks to his status as a (fake) Silver Age superhero is used as Valentina's market research.
• Melissa Gold is the civilian alter-ego of the supervillain Screaming Mimi, better known by her post-comics-Thunderbolts superhero alter-ego Songbird.
• The Thunderbolts borrows its name from a superhero team led by 'Citizen V'. The Thunderbolts appeared out of nowhere as relatively unknown superheroes who begin to show up the Avengers. Turns out that the team is a group of supervillains in disguise led by Baron Zemo. Subsequent incarnations of the Thunderbolts would have varying rosters with varying members of supervillains/anti-heroes and varying levels of reformation. 
• The term 'New Avengers' have been used for several different alternate versions of the Avengers, and a version that included the Sentry was one of the first uses of the name, formed by Captain America after the disbandment of the original Avengers. 
• Specifically, the presence of Sentry and a villain who's trying to make use of him is based on the Dark Avengers, a group led by Iron Patriot (Norman Osborn) who had a somewhat similar premise with the original Thunderbolts as a superhero team made of reformed supervillains. 
• Valentina renamed the Avengers Tower 'the Watchtower'. That was the name of the base of Sentry's home base in the comics. 

Movie Review: Captain America: Brave New World

Captain America: Brave New World (2025)

I actually really liked this movie. 

Online audience reactions are a bit less excited as I was, no doubt due to the increasing Marvel fatigue recently, but I do feel like Captain America: Brave New World is nowhere as messy or as bad as its detractors claim to be. 

It is still true that the movie does the rather unexpected decision of focusing on a lot of plot threads that stem from The Incredible Hulk -- a movie that has honestly felt like it was swept under the rug when the Marvel Cinematic Universe consolidated everything under a more comprehensive direction. One of the major players is the return of the newly-elected president Thaddeus Ross, recasted as Harrison Ford of Star Wars fame, who also has to deal with the primary theme of this movie -- legacy. Ross is easily one of the biggest highlights of the movie, with his anger and frustration being very visible, his old grudges against superheroes alternating with his genuine attempt to be a good president, and a huge chunk of the movie's storyline revolves around the question of whether an evil, manipulative old man like Thunderbolt Ross can genuinely change and redeem himself... or if he's internally as ugly as the monstrous Red Hulk that he transforms into at the end of the movie. 

Which, of course, with the optimistic tint that this movie has, the answer is yes. And it's a simple enough hook to make Ross be engaging -- a character that has a long enough of a history to believably go through such a character arc, but also never quite in the spotlight enough for the audience to be super-familiar with. Ford plays the bubbling rage and frustration that Ross faces throughout his handling of the crisis that's going on extremely well... and beneath it all, the heart of a father who has climbed to the highest position his career path would allow him -- who wants to prove to just one single person, his estranged daughter, that he can change. And that quiet scene in President Ross's office as he calls his daughter is such an amazingly well-acted scene. 

But, of course, the main character is Sam Wilson, once-Falcon and the new Captain America. Like Ross, Sam also has to deal with legacy. We've dealt with a lot of the more interesting and drama-oriented impostor syndrome in Sam's excellent Disney+ show, but he doesn't have the trust of everyone yet -- especially President Ross. The movie stats off with a nice little recap of Ross's ascension to presidency and Sam's ascension to Captainhood, before leading us into a fight scene as Captain America and his brand-new Falcon, Joaquin Torres, fight against a terrorist organization called SERPENT. Some fun action scenes, and we get a nice showing from secondary antagonist Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito). 

We also bring back Isaiah Bradley, the forgotten 'black Captain America' from Sam's Disney+ show, who acts as a mentor figure for Sam and Joaquin. The three of them arrive on the White House in an international summit over the discovery of a brand-new metal called adamantium on the petrified Celestial from Eternals. And while all this fancy sci-fi worldbuilding is nice, the movie's focus is on Isaiah Bradley, and how hesitant he was initially to accept the fact that things have changed for him, and his country is trying to do right by him. A lot of focus on how proud he was of his wedding suit that he's wearing to the party, which is all the more heartbreaking when Isaiah, without provocation, pulls out a gun and begins attacking President Ross. 

Now this isn't the first time that MCU has dealt with mind-control -- with Bucky Barnes' whole storyline in Winter Soldier and Civil War dealing with that. So I was admittedly a bit disappointed that none of it is really brought up. But Ross is extremely emotional over the shooting and locks Isaiah up, while the confused and innocent Isaiah delivers a very heartbreaking line on how everything good in his life that he thought he could've enjoyed after a lifetime of suffering is now gone. 

The dynamic between Sam and Ross is pretty well-executed here, with both men being angry at each other due to their past history. Captain America is grounded, but Sam and Joaquin continue on their own investigation. After a brief action scene when Sidewinder ambushes an equipment-less Sam Wilson, he and his allies manage to track down Sidewinder's sponsor to a black ops site called Camp Echo One... finding that the mastermind of everything that's been going on is Samuel Sterns, otherwise known as the supervillain known as the Leader. The Leader has apparently been working alongside Ross during his military career -- having blamed Sterns for the Abomination's rampage in Incredible Hulk but secretly using him to help create anti-metahuman technology and also cure the illness he has.

Ross had promised Sterns freedom from his imprisonment, which he goes back on, and as revenge Sterns has been trying to set up a way to utterly crush Ross at the height of his power. Sterns was responsible for the mind control with the 'Mr Blue' song as the trigger -- and this leads Sam and Joaquin to have to fight a small army of mind-controlled soldiers. 

Meanwhile, Sterns has also manipulated the data to make it look like America has paid Sidewinder to steal the Adamantium to make themselves look good, and then leaked it to other world leaders. In the midst of a desperate attempt to get Japan back on the bargaining table for the all-important treaty, the prime minister of Japan drops the bombshell that Ross couldn't refute -- but is utterly frustrated about. 

Oh, while all of this is going on, Ross's main minion, ex-Black-Widow Ruth Bat-Seraph is off doing her own investigation on the mind-control, finding that all the other shooters in the initial conference having been killed by strangely-behaving guards. Ruth manages to stop the guard before he kills Isaiah, but realizes that there is more than meets the eye, and rendezvouses with Sam and Joaquin. To be perfectly honest, Ruth's character feels like she's mostly there to make Ross's administration less of just him... but I think we can blame the rewrites over some real-world controversies that Marvel faced for adapting this character -- Ruth Bat-Seraph ends up feeling like a character that didn't really need to be here. 

As our heroes exit Camp Echo One, Captain America and Falcon arrive on Celestial Island, where America and Japan's navies are facing off against each other in a bit of a standoff... right as Sterns takes control of the minds of two pilots who fire on the Japanese navy. I actually really like this action scene as the two winged superheroes charge in and try and stop overt hostilities from breaking out, zipping around and disabling missiles while they wait for the world leaders to hopefully talk it out. The tense partial transformation Ross has in his battleship as Sterns mocks him is also very well done. During the subsequent attempt to stop the missiles, Joaquin is heavily wounded and is out for the rest of the movie. 

Sam gets into a bit of a moment of self-doubting again, thinking on whether he should've taken a super-soldier serum or something... but Bucky shows up for a brief pep-talk cameo. Going back into action, Sam manages to arrest a surrendering Sterns, before he realizes what Sterns is planning to do. 

As President Ross is at a press conference, Sterns unleashes the information of his involvement with Ross in the past to the public, and this was the straw that broke the camel's back. Ross has been holding in his rage towards these unjustful acts, towards these attacks on his character, towards the fact that people refuse to look beyond his past as 'the Hulk Hunter'... and finally snaps. He transforms rather majestically into the Red Hulk, which gives us the final showdown. And the final showdown is nice enough, even if as with a lot of Marvel's more recent output the CGI isn't the best. 

The fight is less about Sam Wilson taking down the Red Hulk, but talking him down. Dragging the battle into a location with the cherry blossom trees that meant the world to Ross and his daughter Betty, Captain America manages to wound Red Hulk enough to have him calm down and ultimately revert back to his human form. 

And after that incident, we get some closing scenes. Isaiah is exonerated and gets his suit back. The treaty is finalized but Ross surrenders himself to the superhuman prison, the Raft... but gets a nice surprise because Sam arranges for Betty to visit him there. And while the scene did take a bit of a longer time than it should, Sam visits the wounded Joaquin on his hospital bed, and Joaquin goes on a long speech about how his whole cocky act throughout the movie was because he was inspired by Sam Wilson, Captain America. Sam might always compare himself to Steve Rogers as the gold standard, but other people are looking up to him. And that's a nice bit of legacy for him. 

Ultimately? Yeah, the movie's plot is a bit basic, although I honestly do unironically appreciate the usage of older characters and spinning their stories into a conclusion. I also liked how personal the stakes were for Ross in particular, and how much Sterns isn't trying for a plan of global domination and just one of revenge. This movie did go through a chunk of rewrites thanks to Ruth Bat-Seraph's comic-book counterpart being tied to the Israel military, and I don't doubt that there would be some changes made to a movie that features an assassination attempt at a controversial American presidential figure. But all that aside? It's not the best Marvel movie I've watched, but it's a lean, simple story, and one that I genuinely, unironically enjoyed. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Post-Credits Scene:
• The Leader, in prison, rants about an incoming threat from other worlds that the heroes will be unprepared for, seemingly foreshadowing whatever will come in Avengers: Doomsday.
• Past Movies Continuity: (Characters)
• Sam Wilson took over the mantle of being Captain America in Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Isaiah Bradley ('Black Captain America') and Joaquin Torres (the new Falcon) are both introduced in that show as well. During the first action sequence of this movie, Sam uses the bulkier suit from the TV show. 
• Samuel Sterns and Betty Ross make their return since The Incredible Hulk, an entire 17 years of real-world time between the movies -- the messy licensing issues revolving the Hulk's supporting cast has probably been to blame.
• Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross has shown up in various movies since Incredible Hulk -- notably in Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Black Widow. His original actor, William Hurt, passed away and the character was recasted as Harrison Ford in this movie -- with a lampshade that Ross had to 'change his look' for the presidential election.
• Past Movies Continuity: (Others)
• Finally, after being omstly reduced to news reports, the petrified body of Tiamut the Celestial from Eternals is acknowledged by the MCU, with various nations attempting to claim the precious Adamantium contained within the Celestial's body.
• President Ross brings up Wakanda's attitude towards Vibranium as seen in both Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, where Ross's predecessors had butted heads politically with Wakanda's leaders over the sharing of Vibranium.
• In his gym, Isaiah punches a sandbag off of the chain, a nod to Steve Rogers' very iconic scene in The Avengers where he did the same.
• There is a slight running gag of Joaquin asking Sam about Ant-Man. Whether on purpose or not, Sam's unexpected cameo and defeat at the hands of Scott in Ant-Man has been a bit of a running gag for the character. 
• Ross and Sterns would later find themselves imprisoned in the superhuman prison the Raft, most famously seen in Captain America: Civil War. 
• The sonic cannons that disabled Captain America and Falcon in the bunker seem to be the same sonic cannons seen in The Incredible Hulk that Ross's team used against the Hulk.
• Bucky being busy and unable to help out is presumably an allusion to whatever is going on with him in the next movie, Thunderbolts. 
• Movie Superhero Codenames: Captain America, Falcon and Sidewinder all use their codenames throughout the movie. The Serpent Society is renamed 'SERPENT'. Red Hulk is never referred to as exactly that, but with variations of the term. Neither 'Leader' or 'Sabra' is ever spoken on-screen, and Samuel Sterns and Ruth Bat-Seraph are always referred to by their real name.
• Favourite Action Scene: I like the fighter jet sequence around the Celestial, but I think this one has to go to a no-equipment Sam Wilson fighting against Sidewinder. 
• Funniest Line: "I should have taken that serum. Bucky was full of shit!"
• Dennis Dunphy, Sam's soldier ally, is the civilian alter-ego of minor Avenger member Demolition Man. Considering that Sterns kills him, he's probably not going to adopt that superhero outfit .
• Adamantium, the resource that the various governments are attempting to claim, is, of course, the famous indestructible metal that is used in the experiments that laced Wolverine's bones with it.
• While the MCU's adaptation of the Red Hulk is missing the fiery powers of his comic-book counterpart, during his public, full transformation, Ross's clothes do burn off instead of tear apart, and there were some shots where the Red Hulk is wreathed in flames in reference to this. 
• Camp Echo-1 in the comics was a location meant to hold Amadeus Cho, the second Hulk, in the comics. 

Movie Review - Deadpool & Wolverine

Deadpool & Wolverine [2024]

So yeah, what is there to say about this movie? Hailed as the movie that 'saved the MCU' during its less-than-stellar Phase Five, Deadpool & Wolverine does admittedly put a to of focus back on the characters and the superheroes, and did so in a drought of good superhero content. Admittedly a good chunk of it is due to star power -- Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds, and their respective characters, are extremely popular. But among the comic-book fandom, having the major properties like the X-Men be properly integrated into the 'main' MCU has always been a massive pipe dream.

But, of course, the Multiverse ended up being a whole load of teases that never paid off (with the sole exception of Spider-Man: No Way Home), and that's even if they do anything with it in the first place.

And this movie... isn't exactly the 'canon-welding' event that people wanted, but it's close enough and, more importantly, fun enough that the movie was a really great experience. There is, admittedly, a rather impressive amount of comic-book-movie you need to understand before watching this movie... but it also kind of works in-universe, which is impressive. They do give an info-dump on a lot of what you need to know just to follow this movie, but basically, the TVA from Loki decide to bring Deadpool over to the 'sacred timeline' of the primary MCU universe. Turns out the TVA agent Mr. Paradox is actually there to prune the rest of Deadpool's universe. And Deadpool ends up escaping, recruiting 'the worst' Wolverine. Hijinks ensue as they lampoon every aspect of the MCU and Fox's movie franchises, and they eventually encounter and fight against Cassandra Nova and even recruited a bunch of superheroes whose movie-series were long-cancelled.

And... written on paper, I really didn't think the movie would work well... but it somehow did. Just like the animated Spider-Verse movies, this movie is chock-full with cameos and references that should, by rights, overload the movie... but we move from one to the next with such ease and so much focus on our main characters -- Deadpool, Wolverine and Cassandra Nova -- that the rest of the cameos just become entertaining background noise, but a huge 'fuck, I remember that guy, that's Azazel!' or 'holy shit, Age of Apocalypse got referenced'! A lot of the jokes are, I think, fun enough that alternative joke interpretation kicks in even if you don't 'get' it. Most of the jokes also don't stick and overstay their welcome, and the actual self-deprecation that Deadpool does towards Disney-Marvel is actually quite refreshing.

After a similar "mid-action you must be wandering how we got here" to his first movie, Deadpool brings the movie to a quick recap of Deadpool 2's ending. We establish that Deadpool has done a lot of time-traveling with Cable's time machine... and a huge chunk of this movie has Deadpool basically feeling like a loser. He actually shows up in the 'Sacred Timeline' and tries to interview into the Avengers and gets rejected by Happy Hogan. And over the next six years, Wade's obsession over this has costed him his relationship with his girlfriend Vanessa. This leads to a rather happy birthday party, still, where all of Deadpool's colourful friends show up... 

...only for agent of the TVA to appear. With a glorious joke where Deadpool mistakes them for strippers, they eventually bring Deadpool to the TVA headquarters, where both Deadpool and the audience get a huge exposition about what the TVA does, the existence of the sacred timeline and the multiverse. It's a bit of a clever bit of exposition, and thematically it even works with where Wade is as a character at the moment. He's offered a place on the 'sacred' MCU timeline, or Earth-616... but the rest of his universe is going to be pruned.

(Which, of course, is a cheeky allegory of how some people expected the Disney/Fox merger was going to go, with a pick-and-choose methodology to the character-actor combos that make it to the MCU). 

Mr. Paradox, who is technically the main antagonist of this movie but quickly gets subsumed by a different, more immediate threat, also explains that the 'Anchor Being' of Deadpool's corner of the universe, Wolverine, has died.. and that his universe is doomed either way. Again, another allegory to the 'death' of the whole Fox-X-Men movie series, but presented in a way that makes sense in-universe. 

Unwilling to accept that his universe is doomed, and in a way that he is, once more, not as important as he thinks he is, Deadpool steals a Tem-Pad from the TVA and goes off to... the grave where Wolverine is buried at the end of Logan. Now Logan is probably one of the best superhero movies ever made, and always noted to be a perfect cap-off to the Wolverine's cinematic history as actor Hugh Jackman retires. And... I both love and hate that this movie actually desecrates that ending by having Deadpool literally dig up Wolverine's corpse and ne utilize said corpse in the subsequent action scene... but I also appreciate that they didn't resurrect this Wolverine specifically and that they acknowledge how well this movie ended. 

Because, yes, this is where the movie opening happens, with the TVA agents charging in at Deadpool, and Deadpool weaponizing Wolverine's adamantium skeleton to deliver a brutal, R-rated beating to the TVA agents to the tune of 'NSYNC's "Bye Bye Bye". 

This then continues to a heavy-on-the-fanservice sequence as Deadpool jumps from one universe to the next trying to recruit a Wolverine to bring home as the Anchor Being of his universe. Going from Age of Apocalypse to Patch to Old Man Logan to a gloriously comic-accurate brown outfit Wolverine, all of these sequences end up with Wolverine beating the shit out of Deadpool. 

Ultimately, Deadpool recruits a Wolverine -- one that's going to be our Wolverine for the rest of the movie. And for the first time in cinema, this Wolverine wears a proper superhero outfit! Admittedly it's a 'MCU-ified' version of the classic yellow and blue, but the colours and the mask are right. Can't complain too much. 

The two return to the TVA, but apparently anchor beings can't be so easily replaced. Additionally, Paradox identifies this Wolverine as "the Worst Wolverine", one that failed to save the rest of the X-Men, pouring more salt to the wound. However, Deadpool realizes the inconsistencies in Paradox's claims, and deduces that he's acting without the knowledge of his supervisors. 

Paradox zaps Deadpool and Wolverine, sending the two tumbling into the desert realm where everything 'pruned' by the TVA go to -- the Void. Here, Deadpool and Wolverine get into a pretty fun fight, which Deadpool defuses by telling Wolverine that the TVA would have the technology to undo the deaths in Wolverine's timeline. They get interrupted by villains, however... and very fun villains, too -- using a mixture of returning actors or lookalikes, the entire villainous faction is made up of former X-Men villains like Pyro, Toad, Juggernaut, Azazel, Lady Deathstrike and Sabretooth. 

A group of such villains arrive in what Deadpool describes rather accurately as a 'Mad Max' parody, leading to a fight between Wolverine and Sabretooth. For as much as Deadpool hypes it up as a fight between rivals, this particular fight ends very quickly and abruptly, although to be perfectly fair it did get an actual spotlight on it. (I really did miss Liev Schreiber version, though).

We also have one of the most glorious cameos ever, as one of the denizens of the Void is a guy in a hood that sounds like Captain America, acts like Captain America... and Deadpool is excited to hear his catchphrase of "Avengers Assemble"... but it's actually Chris Evans' other superhero character! The Human Torch yells "flame on!" and flies into battle but gets trounced by Pyro.

Again, this is the kind of ridiculous but loving references to he superhero genre as a whole that should not have worked... but it does. 

Deadpool, Wolverine and Human Torch get captured and taken to the overlord of the Void, Cassandra Nova. Human Torch gives us some backstory on her, revealing how she's been ruling the denizens of the Void with an iron fist (or, well, creepy psychic fingers) and how there are a lot of universes with their own heroes and villains that were pruned and sent to the Void. Oh, and she is the evil twin sister to Professor X, and the movie showcases her mindfuckery very well with the visual effect of fingers literally wiggling through your face. 

Thanks to some seemingly ill-advised comments on Deadpool's part (which as the post-credits show, turn out to not be actual lies) Cassandra kills Human Torch very graphically, stripping the skin and flesh off his bones and turning him into a pile of graphic goop. Cassandra's psychic powers prove to be extremely powerful even without the aid of her army of superpowered mutants, but the fight is interrupted when the giant cosmic smoke monster that lives in the Void, Alioth, show up. It's a pretty fun nod to the MCU without overloading the show with even more cameos. 

Escaping Alioth with a Sentinel boot, we get a sequence where they meet more Deadpool variants, like "Nicepool" (who is just Ryan Reynolds without the cancerous makeup he wears as Wade) and Dogpool (played by "the world's ugliest dog", and is a good dog), which is mostly just there for gags and to set up the appearance of the Deadpool corps later on. 

At this point, Deadpool accidentally lets it slip that he isn't certain that the TVA is actually able to fix timelines, leading to a very furious Wolverine attacking Deadpool, in a nice subversion of their little bonding moment. It's around this time that we also learn of this "Worst Wolverine's" backstory, where he also views himself as a bit of a loser thanks to being unable to save the X-Men of his timeline. The two of them fight, giving us the biggest Deadpool/Wolverine fight in this movie which, again, is pretty fun choreography that makes full use of the two characters' healing factors. 

They wake up and find themselves in a resistance base, which, in another glorious cameo, is made up of other actors whose superhero movies and franchises are cancelled and have reverted back to Marvel. We've got Blade from the Blade trilogy, Elektra from the Daredevil movies, and Gambit from a movie that didn't even get made. It's just so nice to see Wesley Snipes back as Blade, y'know? Blade and Elektra are played straight, while the movie has a lot of fun with the funky accent that Gambit has. The last member of their group is Laura "X-23" Kinney, all grown up. 

Deadpool glosses over the death of Human Torch, and manages to convince these other heroes to team up with him to fight against Cassandra Nova. We get a nice dramatic scene where Laura walks up to Logan, and while Logan isn't convinced that he can be the hero that Laura wants to see in him, Laura tells Logan that he is the Wolverine whatever things may be. It's a pretty nice, dramatic character-driven moment.

The assembled heroes charge into Cassandra's base, and this is the big badass fight scene which I really don't want to describe beat by beat. But having all of these heroes fight against the X-Men villains, with powers being accurately represented? It really is extremely fun to see. X-23, Blade, Gambit and Elektra fight against the rest of the evil villains, which gives us a lot of fun action sequences. Most notable is Elektra killing Bullseye, which is a small moment but a very nice one for her. Blade also takes down motherfuckers like a mofo. I am a huge Hugh Jackman/Wolverine fanboy, but seeing Blade of all people get so much screentime is a blessing.

While this is going on, Wolverine and Deadpool go against Cassandra... at which point we're treated to some creepy mind-fuckery. Wolverine is forced to contend with the dead X-Men he failed to protect in a creepy misty tombstone-hallucination, while Deadpool gets shoved into a hallucination where his closest friends talk him down... but the imagined Vanessa telling Deadpool that he'll never fucking matter ends up jolting him out of his reverie. With their allies killing Juggernaut and getting his helmet, Deadpool and Wolverine manage to disable Cassandra and they have her dead-to-rights.

However, Pyro, having been in contact with Paradox, betrays and leaves a mortal wound on Cassandra. And in a rather stupid -- but in-character -- move, Wolverine has a "what would Professor X do" moment and resolves to save Cassandra, convincing Deadpool to remove the helmet. While Cassandra does hold her word long enough to send Deadpool and Wolverine back to Deadpool's home universe, she quickly kills Pyro, finds out about the Time Ripper, and goes off to enact her multiverse-destroying plan. Which... I think it is important that we do show that for all the gore and cynicism that our heroes in this movie show, they are still heroes at the end of the day. 

The final act takes place in Earth-10005, Deadpool's dimension, as Cassandra Nova kills Pyro and steals the Dr. Strange portal ring to travel there. Having learned of the "Time Ripper" device that the TVA owns, Cassandra reveals her master plan of utilizing the Time Ripper to destroy all timelines and return it to the Void... which... okay, sure. She's not the most right in the head, as established by Wolverine's attempt to spare her and talk things out. 

Cassandra also summons her final army -- the Deadpool Corps, made up of various Deadpool variants. We've got a bunch of comic-book cameos, and again, it's a fun sequence that highlights the absurdity and creativity of comic-book artists. We get some black comedy as Nicepool gets killed by Deadpool's actions, before our two heroes bond over their shared cause and friendship, and charge into battle. We get a cool sequence of Deadpool variants being mangled and mauled as the fight goes through a bus, and the seemingly killed Deadpool variants all getting back up because of the healing factor. The arrival of Deadpool's buddy Peter ends up causing the Deadpool Corps to disperse, however. 

Deadpool and Wolverine charge in to try and stop the Time Ripper, but Paradox tells them that even with their healing powers, trying to stop the device would kill them. We get a pretty fun "who gets to sacrifice himself" as the theme of being the biggest loser plays out, and it almost seems to lead to Wolverine (who's played by an actor who retired once, and comes from a universe without X-Men anyway) going to do it... but of course, friendship prevails and Deadpool charges in, and the two of them together manage to stop the device, overload Cassandra Nova and survive in the process.

And shirts explode. Of course shirts explode. 

The movie ends with Hunter B-15 from the TVA arriving to arrest Paradox, and thank Deadpool because his actions have saved the deterioration of his universe. Wolverine ends up staying in Deadpool's universe and bond with him and his friends... and even Laura gets to stay with them. A nice ending!

And... is the movie messy? It sure is. Cassandra isn't the most well-realized villain. The TVA stuff, ultimately, felt pretty superfluous. I personally think that the last chunk of the movie feels a fair bit like padding, although I also realize the need to have Logan and Wade have a proper moment of them confronting their 'loser'-ness and bonding together, just the two of them. I love most of the cameos, and while I don't think all of the jokes landed, it was still a great experience that does, first and foremost, focus on the struggles of the heroes and who they are as characters before anything else. This movie has way more cameos and easter eggs (this list below isn't anywhere near the full depth of what the movie did) that your average Marvel movie, but unlike something like What If season 3, it doesn't really detract from the actual story they're trying to tell with Wade and Logan as characters. I'm not sure if this is the movie that'll get general audiences to give the new MCU a chance, but it sure is a nice way to get many fans back.

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Post-Credits Scene: A long, protracted scene of Human Torch actually cussing and talking shit about Cassandra Nova while being captured, showing that Deadpool didn't actually lie about him. 
• Continuity Placement:

• The events of this movie take place specifically some time after the post-credits scene of Deadpool 2, in which Deadpool uses Cable's time-slider to revert the death of Vanessa. 
• The timeline of Logan gets revisited briefly way after the end of that movie, where Deadpool visits Logan's grave. 
• The events on the TVA's side of things happen after Loki season 2, where the TVA is purged of Kang's influence and B-16 is in charge. The Void and Alioth are both established in that series -- with Deadpool even correctly noting that Alioth was last seen in "Loki, Season 1, Episode 5". 
  
• The scene with Happy Hogan, lining up the timelines, would've taken place slightly after Spider-Man: Homecoming, explaining his kinder attitude to Wade as well as his appearance.
• Live-Action Cameos:
• Blade, played by Wesley Snipes, was the star of his movie trilogy from 1998-2004. Ryan Reynolds himself starred as a supporting character in Blade: Trinity.
• Elektra, played by Jennifer Garner, was a supporting character in 2003's Daredevil and had a movie in 2005's Elektra.
• Human Torch, played by Chris Evans, is the incarnation from the 2005-2007 Fantastic Four movies. The joke here is, of course, that Chris Evans would go on to play the MCU's incarnation of Captain America. 
• X-23/Laura, of course, makes her debut in Logan.
• Deadpool's supporting cast, namely Vanessa, Blind Al, Colossus, Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Yukio, Shatterstar, Peter, Dopinder and Buck the Mercenary make brief appearances in the beginning and end of the movie. Shatterstar is notable because he was apparently killed in Deadpool 2.
• The various X-Men villains who form Cassandra Nova's minions, played by reprised actors include: Pyro (from the first 3 X-Men movies) and Sabretooth (specifically the incarnation from X-Men).
• Various returning villains based on older X-Men/Fox movies characters not played by reprising actors include: , Juggernaut (X-Men III), Blob (X-Men Origins: Wolverine), Lady Deathstrike (X-Men 2), Azazel (X-Men First Class), Toad (the appearance from X-Men), Psylocke (the incarnation from X-Men III), a gender-flipped Quill (X-Men III), Callisto (X-Men III), Bullseye (Daredevil) and surprisingly, The Russian (Punisher 2004).
• 'Meta' Live-Action Cameos:
• Gambit, played by Channing Tatum, is a reference to the fact that Channing Tatum was tapped to play Gambit for a movie that infamously had a long history of troubled production -- a fact that Gambit lampshades several times in the movie, noting that he "wasn't sure if he was pruned or not", and mentioning "stories that hasn't been told yet". 
  
• One of the Wolverine variants (the one working on a motorbike) is played by Henry "Superman" Cavill, who himself was a very popular casting choice for Wolverine before the announcement of Hugh Jackman's return. Deadpool disses DC comics a bit, noting that they'll treat him much better than "those assholes down the street".
• In addition to the other characters that actually make a physical appearance, Blade and Elektra mention Magneto, Quicksilver (these two are presumably variants from the Fox X-Men movies), Daredevil (from Daredevil 2003) and the Punisher (from any of the 3 movies that Fox produced from him).
• Wade makes a joke about 'which one' when Blade and Elektra mention the Punisher, noting that he's always been played by four different actors across three movies and a Netflix series. 
• While the visuals are consistent with the sling-rings from the MCU, the existence of Dr. Strange sling-rings is likely a reference to the 1978 TV movie made for the character. Yes.
• At one point, Blade notes that "there's only ever gonna be one Blade", while Deadpool looks at the audience, either noting that the MCU has a Blade movie already in the pipeline... or lampshading that that Blade movie is also in production trouble. 
• Comic-Book Cameos:
• Wolverine variants:

• The Wolverine in this movie has a yellow-and-blue suit that's based on his first major appearance in Uncanny X-Men and would become extremely popularized by X-Men: The Animated Series. It was almost a running gag in the original X-Men movies that it was near-impossible to get a superhero suit on Wolverine. As the movie progresses, the suit's sleeves get torn off and Wolverine dons the mask, making it even more comic-accurate. 
  
• "Patch", the Wolverine that wears a white suit and an eyepatch, is the alias that Wolverine uses while in Mardipoor in his first solo comic-book run.
• The blue-and-red one-armed Wolverine is an extremely faithful nod to Age of Apocalypse Wolverine, a comic-book variant who hails from a bad future ruled by Apocalypse. 
• "John Byrne brown" Wolverine is a combination of his second-most iconic superhero outfit from the '90s (yellow and brown), and Wolverine's first appearance as someone sent to fight the Hulk. The Hulk's face reflected on the Wolverine's claws is a homage to The Incredible Hulk #340.
• The crucified Wolverine in a field of skulls is taken from a scene where he was tortured by the Reavers in Uncanny X-Men #251.
• The old Wolverine is a truer-to-text adaptation of Old Man Logan. 
• "Cavillrine", in addition to being an actor gag, also uses one of Logan's more iconic civilian outfit (a 'wifebeater' shirt and jeans), which Hugh Jackman himself wore in some of the earlier movies.
• While obviously exaggerated for comedic purposes, 'comics-accurate Wolverine' is a reference to how Wolverine is meant to be one of the shorter members of the X-Men as opposed to Hugh Jackman's physique.
• Deadpool variants:
• 
  Dogpool, Lady Deadpool, Kidpool and Headpool were the original members of the Deadpool Corps -- which, yes, is a thing. It's an amalgamation of multiple different Deadpools from the multiverse. Lady Deadpool is voiced by Ryan Reynolds' wife Blake Lively, while Kidpool and Babypool are played by their 2 children. 
• The robotic Deadpool is Deadpool 2099, hailing from that series of future comics.
• The ronin Deadpool is The Fool, from the '5 Ronin' alternate universe set in ancient Japan.
• The Deadpool with a gas mask is Golden Age Deadpool, featured in the 2010 story of the same name. 
• The cowboy Deadpool is based on The Deadpool Kid, a variant from a wild west universe and a minor member of the comics' incarnation of the Corps.
• Pyro wears an outfit based on his Ultimate comics incarnation. In the movies that he shows up in, Pyro only wore civilian clothes.
• Among the 'Mad Max' vehicles used by Cassandra's minions is the Fantasticar, albeit one that's based more on the comics than its portrayal in the Fox movies. 
• The backstory of "the Worst" Wolverine is somewhat similar to the one in Old Man Logan, although the source of his angst is a bit lessened -- instead of being brainwashed into killing the other X-Men, Wolverine was instead absent when the other X-Men were killed, and in his rampage of killing their enemies, he kills a bunch of civilians instead.
  
• Past-Movie Continuity Nods [MCU]:
  
• Happy's office contains the 'Proof that Tony Stark Has A Heart' plaque from Iron Man; the martial arts stick that he and Tony played around with in Iron Man 2, the partially-unfinished Captain America shield from Iron Man 2, the Mark V suitcase suit from Iron Man 2, and a photograph of Tony Stark and Peter Parker that Tony looks at in Avengers: Endgame.
• Peter's face is, however, obscured by a toy Iron Man mask due to licensing reasons for Spider-Man. That toy Iron Man mask was worn by a kid in Iron Man 2 -- who was later retconned by some directors to be a young Peter Parker. 
• Cassandra Nova's forces are based on the skull of Ant-Man in his Giant-Man form.
• Among the random stuff seen in the Void, many of them have appeared previously in Loki. New additions include a more truer-to-the-comics winged Thor helmet, the ice-cream truck from Moon Knight, Red Skull's pimped-out car from Captain America: The First Avenger, the mural of Scarlet Witch from Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and Thanos's throne from the first two Guardians of the Galaxy movie.
• In addition to various archival footage from the movies, the scene of Deadpool and Thor uses edited footage from Thor: The Dark World, in the scene where Thor mourns over the apparent death of Loki.
• When Deadpool is confronted by the Hulk, he (mis)-quotes Loki's line "I'm a god/Marvel Jesus, you dull creature" from The Avengers, and gets punched right after saying the line just like Loki. 
• As Deadpool and Wolverine jump into the TVA portal, he says "on your left", a nod to Captain America's line from Captain America: The Winter Soldier and paraphrased by Falcon in Avengers: Endgame. 
• The end of the movie where Deadpool discuss Shwarma is a nod to the famous post-credits scene to The Avengers, and the surge of popularity that the movie caused to Shwarma... with Deadpool mockingly noting that 'The Avengers discovered Shwarma!'
• Past-Movie Continuity Nods [X-Men and Other Movies]:

• While they do not appear, various characters name-drop other X-Men: Professor X, Magneto, Quicksilver, Jean Grey, Cyclops, Storm and Beast all get mentioned at some point in the movie.
• Deadpool recruits Wolverine in a bar fight, a reference to how Wolverine's very first scene is in a bar in the first X-Men movie.
  
• Deadpool's intense performance of 'NSYNC's "Bye Bye Bye" actually is a very obscure reference to a line from Wolverine where he was irritated by the song in X-Men 2.
• The song that plays in Deadpool's birthday, "Angel of the Morning", was the song in the opening credits of his first movie. 
• Deadpool mockingly tells the TVA agents that 'pegging isn't new' for him. It happened to him during the sex montage in Deadpool. 
• Deadpool notes that Human Torch does a "superhero landing", having lampshaded the three-point landing in Deadpool with his antagonist Angel Dust. 
• Laura and Logan's quiet conversation has a callback to some of the more dramatic lines from Logan, with Laura noting that Logan is "always the wrong guy... until [he] wasn't."
• Right before the final battle, Laura pulls out the convenience store sunglasses that she famously wore in Logan as a younger child. 
• The samurai Deadpool's arms grows into a 'baby arm' similar to what happened to our Deadpool in Deadpool. 
• In addition to all the X-Men, parts from the Sentinel robots as they appear in X-Men: Days of Future's Past can be seen strewn around the Void, and one is used to escape Alioth. 
• Blade and Deadpool briefly note that they don't like each other much -- a cheeky nod to how Wesley Snipes and Ryan Reynolds had an infamously hostile relationship during the filming of Blade: Trinity. 
• Blade gives an epic rephrasing of one of his most iconic lines from the 1998 Blade movie: "some motherfuckers are trying to ice-skate uphill."
• Cassandra Nova in the comics is the evil twin sister of Professor X, who, depending on the writer, was the 'evil from birth' twin of Charles Xavier or a psychic entity called a mummudrai that infiltrated the womb of Charles' mother. Regardless of the origin, a young Charles Xavier was able to sense the evil in her since she was a baby, and used his psychic powers to force a miscarriage. Cassandra survived, however, and menaced the X-Men afterwards.
• Mr. Paradox in the comics is a minor, evil future version of TVA agent Mobius M. Mobius. 
• The Ant-Man skull's mouth-roof has '24601' engraved on it, a nod to Hugh Jackman's leading role in the Les Misérables movie adaptation.
• As usual, the 'sacred timeline' is identified as Earth-616, the traditional moniker for the primary Marvel comics universe. 
• Comic-book artist Rob Liefeld is referenced in the foot massage parlor that is very prominently shown in the final battle. Hilariously, Rob Liefeld is apparently known for not being the best at drawing feet.
• A picture of Stan Lee is used in an advertisement poster for 'You Friendly Neighborhood Cleaner: Stanlee Steamer', a double-reference to Spider-Man's moniker.
• The pizza place that Logan and Wade eat at is called "Feige's Famous Pizza", a reference to Kevin Feige.
• Deadpool notes that the "power in the Marvel universe is about to change forever", which is an echo to Dwayne Johnson's much-mocked attempt to hype up the Black Adam movie for the DC cinematic universe. 
• Deadpool also mocks the 'whole multiverse thing' multiple times -- when the Deadpool Corps show up, and immediately after when Deadpool reacts negatively to Nicepool noting that he loves the 'post-Endgame' content. Marvel's performance and meandering during the Multiverse saga has been a huge source of frustration by the fans because the MCU has mishandled the multiverse in their many different projects.
• Nicepool also seems to be a bit of a lampoon on some of the MCU's "forced comedy" moments that it has (not unfairly) been accused of in its later years, like name-dropping random pop culture references without actually tying it into a joke.

Movie Review: The Marvels

The Marvels (2023)

Okay, and we thought Thor: The Dark World or Avengers: Age of Ultron were the black sheep of the MCU. And in retrospect, after a slew of middling movies like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Thor: Love and Thunder, and outright bad Disney+ content like Secret Invasion, the already controversial Captain Marvel isn't going to be fighting an easy fight, and that's without the unfavourable impression that the character (and the not-entirely-undeserved criticism that Disney/Marvel has been shilling the crap out of Carol) in some aspects of the fandom... and 'The Marvels' is already going to be fighting a huge, huge battle without taking into account that it's also a crossover movie featuring two characters that are introduced in Disney+ TV shows... not all of which everyone watched.

And that's already a huge, huge ask, and even for someone like me, who did his MCU homework and watched -deep breath- the entirety of the Infinity Saga, Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, WandaVision, Secret Invasion and a couple other projects that tied into this behemoth... all throughout this movie I felt like there were so many random aspects that seemed to contradict the Disney+ shows I'm watching, most egregiously Nick Fury and the Skrulls' portrayals in this movie as opposed to Secret Invasion. 

Throw in a lot of questionable choices for the movies, many of which simply didn't land, and many of which are dragged on longer than they should be... and The Marvels simply isn't a particularly enjoyable movie to watch even to someone who's trying not to dislike this movie.

And keep in mind that I have a very low tolerance towards comic-book adaptations. Heck, I spent several years reviewing CW shows. And... I still find it hard to find anything nice to talk about this movie. 

The plot of the movie itself is simple. Thanks to some cosmic-plot mumbo-jumbo, Captain Marvel gets her powers entangled with Ms. Marvel/Kamala Khan, a young superhero from Jersey who's a gigantic fangirl who is a huge Captain Marvel fangirl, as well as her 'adoptive' niece Captain Monica-no-codenames-Rambeau (who in the comics goes by Captain Marvel, Spectrum, Pulsar, Photon, and many others) who is the exact opposite of Kamala's personality, and is disenchanted with an aunt that she views as having 'abandoned' her. Some plot-device thingamabob causes them to swap locations every time two of them use their powers at the same time, which... the movie and trailers make such a great deal of, but in practice it just makes action scenes jarringly confusing and bamboozling instead of 'damn, they did something cool'. 

And in concept, the discussion and deconstruction of Carol Danvers as some kind of messianic saviour figure is an interesting one even if arguably we've never really seen that in-universe other than Kamala's fangirling over her. But... but even this bit of dramatic event really isn't executed well. The scenes are there, of course. There is Monica being clearly peeved at Carol, them confronting the memories through the aid of a magic memory device, and later on making up after... one conversation? It really doesn't help that Monica is the easily the most boring of the three, and her big emotional moment feeling so unearned and neutered makes it really hard to invest in her. Carol's explanation kind of being shit (she feels ashamed and guilty for destroying the Krees, which... Monica doesn't care about?) doesn't help either, and if anything makes Carol feel even more unsympathetic because she isn't really fixing some giant cosmic threat and even goes to Earth long enough to meet Maria in her dying days, but... never met her niece? What? 

Kamala's story seems to be built up quite well, before it peters off without payoff. Just like her Disney+ show, Kamala's status as a new hero and a giant dork is built up charmingly well (even though that 'fanfic' moment ran on for a bit too long) and I do like the scene when she sees Carol basically forced to sacrifice a bunch of Skrulls during the destruction of Tarnax. Seeing Monica and the Skrull Emperor's attitudes towards Carol also seems to be building up into a whole deal where she realizes that the super-perfect hero... actually isn't as perfect and is as fallible as they come. 

...except Carol apologizes once, and somehow we're back to Kamala adoring Carol as this perfect role model, and that honestly feels even worse than if we didn't have this buildup at all. 

Carol herself also gets built up as someone a bit more exhausted, someone who, off-screen, has been dealing with a lot of the fallout of Captain Marvel (which took place in the 90's) such as going to Hala and waging a one-woman war against the Kree Empire, blowing up the Kree Supreme Intelligence as she promised... and making things worse. On one hand, I do like it because it does explain the confusing state of the fragmented Kree Empire as we saw in Guardians of the Galaxy and other projects... but it all gets breezed over so fast that it doesn't really get a chance to sink in. 

The fact that it's implied that there has been a long time since Carol fucked things up and she hasn't really done much to fix things for the Kree (who lives in a world where the climate became toxic to them) or the Skrulls (who are refugees and with many of them stuck on Earth in Secret Invasion) or come back to talk to Monica... yeah, it ends up making Carol feel unintentionally unsympathetic. 

And all of this could've been handwaved as just window-dressing, if the rest of the movie was a bit more engaging. Sure, we've got our typical fare of superhero punchy-punch and beamy-beam, but the movie itself really isn't anywhere as fun as it thinks it is. And even at the surprisingly short runtime for a MCU movie, at 100 minutes, the movie feels long. There is a whole long subplot that really doesn't add much and is a drawn-out joke with Nick Fury being shocked and surprised and dropping one-liners at everything on the SABER base -- culminating with an also overly-long sequence of Goose's Flerken kittens swallowing panicking SABER personnel so they can be evacuated from an exploding space station. It really just isn't funny to me, and ran on for way too long to be funny, and the fact that the named protagonists (Nick and the Khans) get to not be swallowed by the cats for some arbitrary reason just feels confusing. 

There's also a sequence in the middle of the movie where our heroes spend a chunk of time in Aladna, the planet where people have to communicate with song. I love musicals. I love singing. I like songs in my movies. And while Brie Larson's singing voice is wonderful, this whole scene just feels like an indulgent chunk that is drawn out, doesn't add anything into the movie other than a huge dose of WTF-ness, and to top it off... Prince Yan and the rest of the Aladnans' fates aren't even addressed by the end of the movie, making me even more frustrated that we spend time here. 

Speaking of which, let's discuss another wasted sequence... the secondary characters. The Khans are just a couple more jokes away from being reduced to 'funny foreign extras', which is the entire antithesis of everything that their source show, Ms. Marvel, wanted to show. I do like that Kamala's mother Muneeba at least gets to show off some of her great worried-mom concern and browbeating, but they ultimately could've been better served cut off after the end of the fight in their destroyed house. There was absolutely no reason why Fury brought them to the SABER space station other than maybe to justify the actors' paycheques, since they were all honestly utterly wasted. 

Nick himself is also kind of wasted, and it's kind of bizarre why he's in this movie, again, other than 'oh, he's in the first Captain Marvel'. More egregiously, for a franchise that prides itself on continuity, Nick feels so much more jovial than his world-weary characterization in Secret Invasion... so much that many people question whether the two series are meant to be canon. The two fit together, if you squint and pay attention to what's being said by the boring background Skrulls in Secret Invasion, but absolutely nothing of that Disney+ show is brought forwards to Fury or the Skrulls' portrayal in this movie. Emperor Drogge and the random small Skrull colony that got fucked up by Dar-Benn is utterly flat, barely explored, and honestly feels so different from the disenfranchised, frustrated refugees in Secret Invasion. I honestly could fill a full article about how inconsistent the Skrulls were portrayed across the different MCU projects, but I really just don't have the energy. 

And speaking of which, let's discuss the main villain, Dar-Benn. She's so... so flat. There's absolutely nothing of particular interest about her, and it's a shame because she starts to build up a backstory. She was a random member of the Kree Starforce, similar to Yon-Rogg, Minn-Erva and Korath and the rest... and saw Carol as 'the Annihilator' like the rest of the Kree. She has what is, on paper, a sympathetic goal of wanting to restore the Kree homeworld of Hala. But whether it's playing up her sympathy points, or playing up her sadistic, vengeful points, Dar-Benn just feels like an even more generic doomsday villain compared to, oh, Malekith or Steppenwolf or some of the worst superhero movie villains out there. The movie barely even acknowledges that Dar-Benn is sadistically targetting all the planets that Carol might consider 'home' for her insane plan...

...which, by the way, is something straight out of the Golden Age comics because Dar-Benn steals the atmosphere, water and sun from various different Tarnax, Aladna and Earth. And it's not that the MCU hasn't done stupid old-school comic book plots -- Thanos's plan is to use magic cosmic stones to kill half the population in the universe, and the way the movies frame it makes it look 'oh, they made this stupid comic-book concept cool'! Whereas Dar-Benn's portrayal and her utterly lackluster and underbaked backstory made it just feel stupid. It doesn't help that her lines are so generic, and she's given a pretty generic 'raaaah I am untrustworthy and evil' fight at the end. 

And let's not get into the fact that despite technically being of the same 'Accuser' caliber as someone like Ronan, and even with the same Quantum Bangle that Kamala has... somehow Dar-Benn isn't only able to give Carol a good fight, but Carol with two extra metahumans supporting her? I get that Dar-Benn is shown draining Carol's powers, but it really does stretch some credibility that she lasted that long. What's really stopping Carol from lifting a chunk of mountain or a random Kree spaceship and bashing Dar-Benn with it? They even get her super-hammer away from her a couple of times in the movie, and it's not like the bangle's doing anything when Carol's not directly in contact with her or shooting a light beam to her face. 

I've never been a huge 'power-scaler', but it really is bizarre to see Carol and Monica having trouble fighting against Dar-Benn and her hammer, and then two minutes later Carol's just flying and blowing up Kree battleships like it's the climax of Captain Marvel. It really is a major case of plot nonsensicality, and I really wonder if they couldn't have just, like, picked a far more suitable supervillain, power-wise, to fight Carol. 

And to top it off, the climax of the movie seems to want to shoehorn some 'multiverse' bullshittery for... no real reason. I still think characters like America Chavez are already shoehorned into the Dr. Strange movie, but at least within the context of the movie itself it works okay. Dar-Benn overloading the plot device ends up causing a portal destruction that looks identical to all the other times the space portals break apart previously in the movie, and only Monica explicitly saying that "another universe's bleeding through" that we even get what's going on. Monica sacrifices herself and locks herself on the other side of the portal in a sequence that's honestly rather bland in a genre that already does a lot of fake-out deaths. 

And then Carol just casually flies into Hala's dying sun and restarts it no problem, which adds even more to 'Carol, why didn't you do anything before this movie' questions. 

It really is hard to sympathize with a character that can literally do anything thanks to the power of plot... but it's not like Carol is regaining her powers or her independence in this movie (which was the excuse in Captain Marvel!) or that she's busy dealing with other crises, but the fact that the movie really does a rather piss-poor job at establishing Captain Marvel herself as a person... it really brings to mind the portrayal of Iron Fist in his first Netflix season, where they had an idea about the character but the execution and the story elements are just so terrible. 

The movie ends with the promises of a team-up, with Kamala recruiting Kate Bishop; and Monica apparently finding herself in a version of the X-Men movies' universe (with Kelsey Grammer's Beast!) but by the point the movie reaches this point I was already itching to get out of the cinema and going 'man, I wished I just looked up these two scenes online'. And I'm trying hard to note that it's not because I hate the people involved in creating this movie or think that it's 'woke' or whatever the words people like to use to bash these works of fiction... but it's just a bad superhero movie, and a huge waste of so many of the characters involved. A bland antagonist, three back-to-back unengaging climaxes, terrible continuity with previous project, character build-ups that don't get paid off, extended scenes on 'jokes' like the Flerken and the musical planet... yeah, sorry. I think I can easily call this my least favourite MCU project. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Post-Credits Scene:
  

• A mid-credits scene shows Monica Rambeau showing up in what appears to be the Fox X-Men universe, specifically the pre-soft-reboot version with Kelsey Grammer acting as Beast. That universe's Maria Rambeau is also a superhero, explicitly called Binary, and at the very least a Professor X is around. 
  
• Past Movies Continuity:
• Captain Marvel was last seen in Avengers: Endgame (and a brief cameo in the stinger for Shang-Chi), and many references to the events of Captain Marvel is mentioned... particularly Carol promising a confrontation with the Kree Supreme Intelligence. 
• The Skrull memory-torture devices make a return from that movie, which is used by the three Marvels. Scenes lifted straight from WandaVision and Ms. Marvel are shown. 
• Kamala Khan, obviously, was last seen in her Disney+ TV series, Ms. Marvel. 
• Monica Rambeau as an adult, as well as her mother's fate in the primary MCU universe, was established in WandaVision, where she cheekily comments about getting her powers after walking through a 'witch hex'. 
• Nick Fury was first seen associated with S.A.B.E.R. in Spider-Man: Far From Home, and he was involved in a Skrull saga on Earth in Secret Invasion. 
• While there are many major tonal inconsistencies with the way the Skrulls are depicted in Secret Invasion, that show did mention a Kree/Skrull summit, as well as Emperor Drogge's colony.
• S.A.B.E.R.'s space base was first seen in the post-credits scene of Spider-Man: Far From Home. 
• Valkyrie was last seen in Thor: Love and Thunder, and she briefly mentions being in an unexpected 'team', presumably referring to the events of that movie and/or Ragnarok. 
• The hexagonal jump points are prominently featured throughout all three Guardians of the Galaxy movies, though none of them offer an explanation to the origin. 
• A different alternate-universe Maria Rambeau was the Captain Marvel of Earth-838 (the Illuminati universe), as seen in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. 
• Movie Superhero Codenames: Due to Kamala being a gigantic superhero geek, she latches on to 'Captain Marvel' and 'Ms. Marvel' quite a bit, and even lampshades trademarks. Monica's codename is a bit of a gag -- her comic-book counterpart actually switches through many names, and in the movie Kamala goes through a slew of names, some of which are ridiculous and some of which are her actual comic-book counterpart names. Maria Rambeau of the X-Men universe, meanwhile, uses 'Binary', which is Carol's superhero name in some of the titles where she is an X-Men supporting character. 
• Worth noting that the merchandise associated to the movie alternate between 'Captain Rambeau' and 'Photon'.
• Among the many names that Kamala workshops for Monica, 'Pulsar' and 'Spectrum' are some of her comic-book counterparts, while 'Nova' and obviously 'Vision' belong to other major Marvel superheroes. 
• Favourite Action Scene: ...eh? I guess the very first action scene that flips between Carol, Kamala and Monica across three different battlefields is pretty cool. I do really like that Nick and the Khan family all join in the action, too. 
• Funniest Line: I am really partial to Nick Fury's deadpan delivery of "It's cool, it's just Carol."
• The idea of bangles that swap the places of Captain Marvel and her ally is used in a run of the comics where Mar-Vell (the first Captain Marvel) was trapped in the Negative Zone, and his non-powered ally Rick Jones would use the Nega-Bands to swap places with Mar-Vell. 
• The movie also establishes Kamala and Dar-Benn's bangles as the Quantum Bands, a set of artifacts normally associated with the superhero Quasar. 
• Aladna, Prince Yan and its bizarre matriarchal rule is first featured with minor X-Men character Lila Cheney, and recently in a 2014 comic run became associated with Carol Danvers. 
• While on Carol's suit, Monica puts on Carol's Nine Inch Nails shirt from Captain Marvel. 
• Monica's Aladna outfit comes with the draping sleeves that her comic-book counterpart is known for during her tenure as Captain Marvel. She rips it off almost immediately, however. 
• Kamala and Carol discuss Dar-Benn's weapon, calling it an 'Universal Weapon', but also its lesser-known alternate name in the comics of 'Cosmi-Rod'.
• The Kree Supreme Intelligence being shown as a giant, green vaguely heart-shaped head is accurate to how he looks in the comics, though in his brief appearance in this movie it looks far more robotic. 
• The SABER escape pod briefly passes through the Statue of Liberty, and it's still unoxidized just like how it was in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
• The way Kamala talks and tries to recruit Kate Bishop for her team is an in-universe attempt to mimic the original post-credits scene in Iron Man, down to her quoting some of the lines that Nick Fury said. 
• Kamala name-drops the fact that Ant-Man has a daughter (Cassie Lang, a.k.a. Stinger). 
• Beast name-drops 'Charles', which of course refers to Professor X. 
• As noted above, alternate-universe Maria's codename of 'Binary' was that Carol Danvers had. She obtained this moniker during a cosmic run of Uncanny X-Men, shortly after waking up from her infamous coma. 
• The sound of Goose vomiting can be heard in the absolute end of the credits, a reference to the original post-credits scene of Captain Marvel, which showed Goose vomiting out the Tesseract.