TV Review: Ironheart

Not the usual superhero origin story

A flawed protagonist making repeatedly questionable choices does not fit the typical trope of a superhero story. Even as a slow-paced origin story, Ironheart avoids the traditional heroic hints or setups. For those seeking a save the world, save a friend, or get justifiable revenge premise, this is not that series. Instead, we have a complex character study in a uniquely paced story that’s hard to turn away from.

Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) is a genius MIT engineering student obsessed with building a perfect Iron Man-style suit. She earns money for her pet project by helping students cheat and she soon gets expelled and is forced to return to her mom Ronnie (Anji White) and their middle-class Chicago neighborhood. While home, she is tormented by memories of her step-father Gary and her best friend Natalie being killed in a drive-by shooting. With even fewer resources available, she accepts an invitation to join a high-tech crime gang to help them physically attack and coerce billionaires into handing over their corporate assets. The gang is led by the charismatic but clearly sinister Parker Robbins (Anthony Ramos), a.k.a. The Hood, who wants to use Riri’s suit in their heists. When Riri has an urgent tech need, she turns to insecure black market tech dealer Joe (Alden Ehrenreich), a.k.a. Zeke, and coerces him into supplying her. Riri notices that Parker’s hood is exuding sinister magic and tries to figure out how to control its power by consulting with a mother/daughter mage duo. Despite her descent of questionable choices, Riri is surrounded by a supportive community of allies, including her surprisingly patient artist mother Ronnie, her talented and supportive friend Xavier (Matthew Elam), quirky mage Zelma (Regan Aliyah), and her insightful and sentient AI NATALIE (Lyric Ross). Riri alternates between pushing them away and embracing them as she tries to stop Parker and the nefarious evil that lurks inside him.

Ironheart is a mix of high points and frustrating inconsistencies. Dominique Thorne is excellent as the tortured, stressed-out genius. Her character’s personality is completely believable and immersive. The ensemble cast is surprisingly appealing. Riri’s mom Ronnie defies the stereotypical hero mom portrayal by being patient, firm, and surprisingly practical when it comes to tracking down the supernatural help her daughter needs. The heist gang consists of colorful characters who steal the scenes they are in. On the other hand, the story suffers from inconsistencies that are hard to ignore. Riri is a genius but can’t get a high-tech job to support her hobby. She’s traumatized by her friend being murdered in a drive-by but chooses to work with a violent crime gang who knows where her family is. And the heist gang’s corporate theft goals seem confusingly unlikely to be sustainable from both a contract enforceability or ongoing criminal liability perspective. This is where you need your willing suspension of disbelief—for the real-life logic leaps, not for the sci-fi tech and the magic.

However, these conflicting plot elements work when filtered through the mind of a flawed protagonist. An unreliable narrator or flawed protagonist is always an interesting storytelling device. In many ways, she seems bent on self-destruction in a way that corresponds to some variation of survivor’s guilt for the loss of her friend. She is introspective, stubborn, and emotionally damaged, with behavior that seems intentionally focused on a series of bad choices. Riri draws her inspiration from Tony Stark, a character with significant personality challenges and anti-hero vibes. Although the two characters are from very different backgrounds and life experiences, they are parallel in terms of their arrogant and sometimes irresponsible worldview.

Surprisingly, my primary comparison for Ironheart is The Bear, another working-class Chicago-based introspective series. Both shows feature uptight genius creators whose internalized trauma leads to toxic behavior and trouble for those who care about them. The ensuing chaos is played out in a uniquely paced, personality-centered story that’s hard to turn away from. Some superhero origin stories involve an immature character making bad or selfish choices that come back to haunt them before they make the pivot to heroism. Peter Parker in Spider-Man had a rough start before finding his way. Rogue in the X-Men started out as a villain before she found her heroic side. Ironheart is a story I watched waiting for the heroic realization to arrive. But when it does finally arrive, Riri remains complicated and continues to make surprising choices in a way that is intriguing but different from the norm. If you are looking for a traditional hero epic, this is not that story, and you will likely feel frustrated. But if you are interested in a complex character study with solid acting and entertaining side characters, Ironheart is a show that will give you plenty to analyze.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

• Appealing, unevenly paced artistic vibe
• Frustrating protagonist making confusing choices
• Excellent lead and supporting cast

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction-writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Film Review: Thunderbolts*

Who will gain the world, and who will lose their soul?

I think it is fair to say that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been flailing around since Endgame. The decade’s worth of intertwined storytelling across several film series culminated in a bang, and everything since then, entertaining as it may have been, has lacked a spine that made it satisfying, like before the big angry purple guy. In that regard, it’s like the Star Wars sequels in that it has been reasonably entertaining but lacking any real direction, any underlying idea that the whole enterprise was aiming towards, anything that it really wanted to say (the Star Wars prequels, for their myriad sins, certainly were saying something). As of May 2025 I am happy to say that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is slowly getting back on its feet with Thunderbolts*, directed by Jake Schreier and written by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo.

The film’s cast is primarily the dregs of previous movies and shows, side characters who had chips on their shoulders and had beef with the heroes in one way or another. In that subtle way, this movie flips the script of the previous movies, where the antiheroes are now, for better or worse, the heroes, and have to save the world because nobody with a purer heart is available at the moment. They are a rowdy, cantankerous bunch, most of whom have been working as contract killers on the behest of those with great ambitions and deep pockets. What holds for a lot of them, most cuttingly Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, is a profound sense of moral injury. As defined by the Moral Injury Project at Syracuse University:

Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.

Pugh does an admirable job of depicting someone who is haunted by her own livelihood. She has killed, stealed, destroyed, in the name of her own survival. In a pivotal early scene, she asks her handler if, after this last job, she will get a more public-facing role where she gets to do things that are more obviously good. Her handler tells her ‘yes,’ but being in the beginning of the movie, this inevitably does not proceed as she would hope. Instead, she is forced to confront the monster she really served as it threatens, quite literally, to destroy her.

Such is the same with the other reluctant heroes. John Walker has much the same dilemma as Yelena, following from his actions in Captain America and the Winter Soldier, as does the Winter Soldier himself, now elected a member of the House of Representatives for a district in Brooklyn. More generally, these are workers in a bloody, violent line of work who have been alienated from their labor and are now reckoning with how that has ruined them psychologically, spiritually, and all too often physically.

All these characters have their foil in the film’s antagonist, CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, played with compelling coldness by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She has been involved with the same world of espionage, subversion, and bloody murder that our heroes have been in, but unlike them, she has no symptoms of moral injury because she never had any morals to begin with. If there was ever a self in those eyes that cared for the world, for other people, it has long since been crushed under the treads of ambition and American policy.

(De Fontaine, as she quite loudly insists upon being called in a Congressional hearing in the film, is a personality I am far too familiar with. When I was in college, I knew a lot of people like her who have since gone into the Foreign Service or other wings of the American terror state. I used to be one of them; being from the DC area and growing up among its striving middle class, government service was the most admirable thing imaginable, the State Department and the Department of Defense and the armed forces most admirable of them all. They were the great bulwarks against the world’s barbarian hordes, the farmers who tilled the shining city on the hill. But in my reading of history, I read of how the Nixon Administration actively supported genocide in Bangladesh so that the Pakistanis would be an intermediary in the lead-up to his visit to China. I decided my morality would not let me work for such people. Gaza has, to my dismay, only proven me right).

De Fontaine is such a compelling character because she is the sort of person who runs the American terror state, the sort of person who can talk in the abstract morality common in American propaganda, and adept at contorting it to make murder sound respectable. In that regard, she resembles more the lackwits that surrounded Joe Biden as he let Gaza be razed to the ground. She is fluent in doublespeak, and in that regard I think she would be considered too sophisticated, too cosmopolitan, too ‘woke’ for the new Trump administration. She, like Debora Lipstadt, would find surprising agreement with Trump in the abduction and disappearing of pro-Palestinian activists; she just wouldn’t like the fact that he was so gauche about it.

Completing the sturdy triangle of character that holds the movie up is Lewis Pullman, who plays this film’s version of Bob Reynolds, or Sentry. He is a young man with a life lacking much warmth and color, and as such ended up falling in with a government experimental program to produce a super soldier more powerful than even Captain America. He is a character that reminded me very much of Doctor Manhattan in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, particularly one line said by Wally Weaver:

"I never said, 'The superman exists and he’s American.' What I said was 'God exists and he’s American.' If that statement starts to chill you after a couple of moments’ consideration, then don’t be alarmed. A feeling of intense and crushing religious terror at the concept indicates only that you are still sane."

In this regard, Pullman’s Sentry is not in himself breaking new ground. What is new is how he reacts to becoming a godlike being: Doctor Manhattan saw his power, and the strings behind the puppet show of the universe, and saw that all was vanity; in doing so, he still comes off as someone who found a way to reckon with all that. Sentry, on the other hand, could not handle it, and had a psychological break. He is aimless, adrift, and not sure what he should do with his power. This makes him a prime target for radicalization by an unpleasant group, like a terrorist organization or criminal gang.

And, to be provocative, what more is the CIA than a particularly well-funded terrorist organization? Indeed, the entire apparatus of the American security state could be considered a terrorist organization, having been birthed to exterminate the indigenous and terrorize its Black population, and later turned those guns abroad. A good chunk of the movie is De Fontaine grooming Sentry into such a position, offering him compassion and community if he accepts the role of America’s ultimate weapon. As is common in this country, American national interest and common decency are conflated as the same thing, and he is pulled into the vortex where morality is sacrificed because it offers him purpose.

Much has been made of Sentry’s arc as a metaphor for depression or mental health struggles more broadly, and it is right in that regard. However, the criticism I have read has not gone the next logical step down that road, in terms of how those mental health issues can be exploited to advance evil goals. What De Fontaine does to Reynolds is straight out of the radicalization playbook, done by terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda or ISIS and state terrorist organizations like the CIA. She does it because she has the resources to fill a psychological need in Reynolds that broader society cannot; see how common similar messages are in military recruitment ads (such as “be all you can be,” originally from the 80s and recently resurrected) for a display thereof.

Much of the drama of the latter half of the film is on whether Bob Reynolds has enough of his basic human decency to stop what he is doing, placing him in between the namesake team, who have made that realization, and De Fontaine, who has denied it is even a question. There is another character that is interesting in that regard, and that is Mel, De Fontaine’s personal assistant, played with a certain bookish intensity by Geraldine Vinaswathan. She felt like someone who could have been in my very year in college, who grew up in the world I did, and idolized the abstract idea of service that I did, but took far too long to notice the morally compromised nature of the job. As the film goes on, she slowly comes to the realization that she has sold her soul to the devil, and then finds, first with trepidation and later with more intention, a way out of the bargain. She is a relatively minor presence, but the most familiar to me.

This is an aside, but it is interesting that this movie came out so close to another film about the morality of working for the CIA: The Amateur, directed by James Hawes and starring Rami Malek and Laurence Fishburne. Malek plays a CIA operative whose wife is killed by what turns out to be a CIA operation’s collateral damage, and goes against both the killers and foes at the Agency to avenge her. Both films wrangle with how moral it is to work for such an organization; ultimately, The Amateur trusts the process enough to see ‘adults in the room’ set things right (after a lot of violence, of course); in Thunderbolts*, the process is revealed to be untrustworthy, and the adults in the room are the enemy. I am frankly surprised, in a positive way, that the big-budget superhero film is more radical than the smaller spy thriller.

I would go so far as to state that, in the right hands, Thunderbolts* can be as radical as Andor in taking aim at the oppressive structures that envelop us. The film takes time and pains to remind you that there is always a choice to either surrender to tyrants or to fight the evil before us in the name of common human decency. Still being a mainstream film, the ultimate conclusion involves a certain compromise, although a far more justified compromise than many similar films would advocate for. It is a film that is willing to look at what created the whirlwinds of danger that are raging around us, and gives you an honest answer. For that brutal honesty, as much as its thrills, it earns the title of best MCU movie since Endgame.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Film Review: Captain America: Brave New World

Neither brave enough nor new enough

There has always been a tension in how a particular sort of liberal-leaning-leftist viewer has perceived the character of Captain America (and I absolutely include myself in that qualification). As an American, particularly a Filipino-American, there is a part of me that has been seduced by America’s self-flattering myths, and perhaps worse, wants to be seduced. As stirring old Red Army marching songs make you want to believe in the worker’s utopia of the Soviet Union and forget about the Holodomor and the Rape of Berlin (I’m reminded of what Joseph Goebbels said about Battleship Potemkin: “anyone who had no firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing the film”), the best Captain America media makes you want to believe in the old pablum about the land of the free and the home of the brave, and forget about the carnage in Gaza. Chris Evans as Steve Rogers certainly made you want to salute Old Glory, to believe in white America’s view of itself. He (Evans and Rogers both) is what the twentieth century would have called “All-American”—white, blonde, and wholesome. In the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Disney made Sam Wilson, played by Anthony Mackie, the new Captain America, which attracted aplomb and controversy as he is Black. Mackie and Wilson get their first spin at the role on the big screen in 2025’s Captain America: Brave New World.

This is a movie that, for better or worse, has a very defined place within the broader mythos of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I have seen people frustrated that it is in some ways a sequel to 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, the only time Edward Norton ever played that role. It is a film I confess to have enjoyed. The ties to that film are made very clear by virtue of the very important role of Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, now played by Harrison Ford in his gruff twenty-first-century demeanor. The thematic thread that connects this film and the Hulk film is that they are focused more than other MCU entries on the interaction between superheroes and the United States government. The film uses some of these connections in smart ways, but those who wanted a broader political statement will see any such statement hampered by the politics of the plot, and the politics of The Walt Disney Company.

It is Ford’s President Ross around which so much of the film’s themes rotate. He has served in a number of incidents involving superheroes and their adversaries, and he has parlayed that into a successful presidential run. As you would expect, he has skeletons in his closet that come into play over the course of the story, all running through high-level politics. He is a geopolitical hawk and a loud personality, reminiscent of a certain current occupant of the Oval Office, but compared to that one, Ross is so lucid I would pick him in a heartbeat. The film portrays him as a deeply flawed, ambitious man, obviously a climber. But it also gives him a moral core, a certain sense of decency, that he can act on when prompted enough, especially by Sam Wilson. It is there that the film becomes divisive.

Walking out of the theater and later discussing it with a friend as I drove him to a board game night, I concluded that Captain America: Brave New World is an enjoyable enough supervillain film whose politics I disagree with; my friend said that is what he expects of MCU movies, and I can’t really disagree with him. I like Sam Wilson in this role as a patriotic hero, and Ford is good as Ross. The action is well done, with appropriate weight given to punches, and there is a very good scene involving fighter jets. None of those are really the issues I have with this film. The issues come from the fact that I studied international relations in college with plans to join the US Foreign Service, until I read about the Nixon Administration’s support of the Bangladeshi Genocide so that it could keep Pakistan as an intermediary during the leadup to Nixon’s visit to China, was terrified at the prospect of becoming another Archer Blood, and then decided I couldn’t morally accept such employment.

I think this is a good time to note the presence of Ruth Bat-Seraph, played by Shira Haas, who has been the subject of some internet controversy. The character Ruth Bat-Seraph is a form of the comic character Sabra, who in-universe is Israeli, as is her actress. The name ‘Sabra’ refers to a prickly pear native to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, often used as an affectionately jocular autonym referring to how Israelis are said to be prickly on the outside but sweet on the inside. Certain groups on the internet find her name deeply offensive, as Sabra is also the name of one of the refugee camps (along with Shatila, which is commonly mentioned in tandem) in Lebanon, where Israeli-backed Maronite militias slaughtered innocent Palestinians and Lebanese Shias (a fact that directly preceded the founding of Hezbollah) during the Israeli invasion of that country in the ’80s. The character was created two years before the massacre, so I am confident that the name is a coincidence. Its actual portrayal in the film is rather bland, frankly; anything of real interest, including the name ‘Sabra,’ is hacked off in an attempt to dodge controversy in light of the Palestinian Genocide; she is mentioned to have been born in Israel in a way that perhaps vaguely refers to the Mossad’s reputation, but I can’t really detect any commentary beyond that. I don’t view the presence of an Israeli character in itself to be offensive (much as I don’t find the presence of a Russian character, vis-à-vis the invasion of Ukraine, to be offensive in itself), but I have seen her presence brought up in broader (legitimate) critiques of how Disney relates to the Israeli government. All told, the whole thing has amounted to a tempest in a teapot.

The case of Ruth Bat-Seraph is emblematic of a broader problem with the film, going right down to its foundations. The whole plot is framed as a single bad actor within the US government exploiting the weakness of a flawed politician who nevertheless has some decency. There is never, at any point, an attempt to interrogate the structures of the American government that could make any of this story, any of these deceptions and deaths, possible. The film comes closest through the abandoned super soldier Isaiah Bradley, played by Carl Lumby and imported from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but it never goes as far as it really ought to have. Such a critique would have been extremely relevant given the American-backed razing of Gaza, but there is absolutely no engagement as to why this country, founded on slavery and genocide, feels entitled to bestride the world as a colossus, murdering tens of millions without accountability. There is no attempt to see how this corrodes a nation’s morality. The first sequence of the movie is set in Mexico, and another is set in the Indian Ocean. The film is just close enough to realizing that corrosion, as Aimé Césaire so boldly put it in 1950’s Discourse on Colonialism, but the film is simply not brave enough.

That is really the core issue with the film: it is not brave enough (ironic, given its literal title), and it really doesn’t bother being new enough either. By the end of watching it, you will have spent roughly a hundred minutes with a reasonably entertaining superhero movie, which is about what I expected. The problem, ultimately, is that this movie was exactly what we expected it to be, and nothing more.

--

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

On the woes of 'The Marvels'

Captain Marvel is unsure of what place to occupy in the universe or how to fix past mistakes. That's probably a metaphor for something.

Someone at Marvel Studios should have pointed out that being simultaneously a sequel to WandaVision, Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel and Secret Invasion and providing two sequel teases was too much weight to load onto the shoulders of one movie. But we've played this tune before: Marvel movies are doomed to be mere links in a neverending chain, each forgettable villain is just there to get the pieces in position for the next entry, what you see isn't most of what the director intended, and so on. To keep going to theaters for a Marvel movie is by now a thoughtless habit, like grabbing one more potato chip when you know you're full.

Setting aside whatever big plan Phase 5 is about (am I sure? is this Phase 5 already?), The Marvels tries to bring together the plot threads of Kamala Khan's growth as a superhero and as a fan of a superhero, Monica Rambeau's abandonment issues, Captain Marvel's unfinished business with galactic politics, and Nick Fury's promise to find a home for the Skrulls. This movie's solution? Nah, let's just magically swap our characters' places in the universe and let them sort it out on their own. Add a couple lines of technobabble about damaged teleportation nodes and call it a day.

It's not the most elegant narrative device, and the chances for character interaction it opens are pretty much wasted. It turns out Captain Marvel has a completely nonsensical explanation for never visiting Monica and has zero interest to spare for Kamala's obsession with her. A third potentially meaningful relationship isn't even attempted: there could be much drama to write about between the opposite perspectives of Kamala and Monica, the former as Captain Marvel's enthusiastic fan and the latter as Captain Marvel's formerly enthusiastic, now disillusioned fan.

Even more regrettably, the gimmick of having our lead characters swap places could have been used to explore the theme of occupying one another's shoes. Captain Marvel could get over her self-loathing if she could see herself the way Kamala does, and she needs to understand what it was like for Monica to lose her aunt for so many years. Kamala needs to grow up a little and learn from Monica's hard clash with hero worship, and she could form a more grounded idea of superheroism by facing some of Captain Marvel's challenges. Finally, Monica could begin to heal her loneliness by experiencing first-hand the strong family ties built around Kamala, and she needs to see for herself what complications have kept Captain Marvel busy. There was ample space for character work here, but the gimmick's only purpose was to get the plot from point A to point B.

Still, with all the wasted opportunities, there's solid acting to be seen in Iman Vellani's pure joy as Kamala Khan, even if some of the lines written for her sound too much like the director inserting the DVD commentary track into the movie proper. She's the super-glue that holds the crumbling pieces of this movie together. Monica Rambeau is already known to viewers, but her character is yet to be defined. She spent half of WandaVision not even being herself, and the other half misguidedly trying to save the actual villain of the story. Here, she's just filling the slot of a third superhero. She's not a character with goals and choices of her own; she's a screwdriver clumsily wielded to attach more IP to the MCU. We don't even get a decent explanation of what it is exactly that her powers do. And Captain Marvel is supposedly the main star of the show, but the script implies she missed the obvious solution to her mistake for over thirty years, and in the meantime she lets entire civilizations be destroyed under her watch. But hey, look at the little cats! Aren't they adorable?

The Marvels not only has a serious problem with characterization, but also no idea how to handle its tone. Sure, Kamala Khan is always a delight, especially after more than a decade of watching every single male lead in the MCU adopt the exact same exhausting cocky-quippy style of dialogue. But superhero stories (not only from Marvel) have a long-established obliviousness to the implications of dropping a child soldier in the middle of bloody political disputes with death tolls in the millions. Together with Monica being cursed with nondescriptness, Nick Fury being reduced to ineffective comic relief, and Captain Marvel trying obviously too hard to still sound cool in this century, the background conflict struggles to matter. As Abigail Nussbaum put it recently, this movie is "a hilarious slapstick comedy featuring multiple acts of genocide."

And when you set aside all plot logic and focus on the action scenes, which at the end of the day is what Marvel Studios cares about, The Marvels chooses to go for emphatically meh. The choreography is OK, and it knows how to handle constantly teleporting characters with ease, but the staging is dismal. The problem starts with the design of the main villain, one of the most visually boring and lamentably miscast characters in the MCU.

Exhibit A:

We can see the costume design department chose as its inspiration an "insipid casual" look that pays homage to Marvel's signature "everything is gray slurry" aesthetic and smears it all over the actress's hair, clothes, and weapon. You can almost hear the director giving the instruction, "Make sure there's nothing that catches the eye," while telling the casting department, "Find me an actress with all the menacing vibe of a bowl of oatmeal."

Exhibit B:

You know you failed to make your big bad evil lady command any attention when you frame your shots in such a way that the audience's gaze is first drawn toward the big bad evil lady's nameless assistant standing in the background because he's the only one wearing any color.

Exhibit C:

What's lazier than green screen? No screen! Why invest in set design when you can stage your big, all-important fights inside a poorly lit spaceship where the audience can't tell the featureless walls from the featureless floor and the huge window to featureless space?

For all of Iman Vellani's superheroic efforts to make the viewers excited for the story, The Marvels is very confused about what it wants to be about, structurally haphazard, emotionally inept, morally unaware, and an easy excuse delivered on a silver platter for the usual suspects to keep maliciously badmouthing lady superhero movies.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

The Long Look Back: Star Wars and Superheroes

It has been ten years since Disney acquired the Star Wars galaxy and our writers here weighed in on what we thought this might mean for fans, and ten years since I wrote what remains one of my favorite essays for Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together, From Spurs to Spandex: Why Westerns Died and Superheroes Fly. I’ve been thinking a lot about those two things recently, because literally everywhere I go, I am confronted by a non-stop barrage of Star Wars and superheroes.

Every time I turn on the television, every time I pass a bus stop, or a bus passes me, or I pass a billboard, or I pick my kids up from school. It has become part of the noise of every day.

There was a time – ten years ago, as it happens – when this wasn’t the case. Back then, I and other NoaF writers offered some theories of what might be coming down the pike and speculated about some of the whys and wherefores. I thought it might be interesting to look back at those perspectives and predictions from today’s vantage point.

Let us go then, you and I...

The Rise of Streaming

Right off the bat, two statements I made in the Star Wars and Superheroes posts collide because of the ways in which streaming services have totally redefined the media landscape. The transformation has been seismic, and not one I saw coming or I think any of us really could have predicted.

First, regarding the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm, I worried about the impact it would have on limiting voices and stories, because for many years the number of films being released to theaters had been (and continues) shrinking. In November of 2012, I wrote:

What we're looking at is a two-year cycle of 12 films where 2 Marvels, 2 Pixars, 1 Disney Animation, 1-2 Tim Burtons, and now a STAR WARS are already taking up over half of the slate and about a billion dollars in budgeted production costs. What this move means overall is that fewer films will be made, there will be fewer surprises, and fewer chances for anyone to ever again blow up the cinematic landscape like Lucas did with the original STAR WARS.

Second, in the Westerns post, I argued that superhero films would move beyond the simple “household name hero origin story+sequel+sequel” pattern, to include different kinds of stories at difference scales. I wrote:

I do not believe it [the theatrical film market] can become saturated [with superhero content] in any real sense, but expectations have to be adjusted. Not every movie with a cape or a costume will make $100 million.

I wrote that in early 2013, surveying a media landscape in which movie studios were consolidating, so there were fewer and fewer buyers for and producers of feature films. Netflix existed, but to put it in context, the first episodes of House of Cards had just premiered. The success or failure of Netflix’s move into original programming was still an open question. Orange is the New Black hadn’t premiered yet, and Breaking Bad had yet to air the second half of its final season. Produced by AMC but licensed to Netflix, the show’s audience swelled through 2013 in anticipation of the final episodes thanks to people being able to binge the previous seasons on Netflix. But this was, crucially, still a broadcast show.

I argued then that Breaking Bad was the show of our time, and I think that holds up because I believe it was the transformative show that paved the way for the rise of streaming services producing original content. Contemporary reporting suggested as much, but even so, the sheer volume of original streaming programming is a whole other thing entirely. From the vantage point of 2012/2013, there was simply no way to anticipate that within the decade Disney+ a) would exist and b) would be cranking out more hours of Star Wars content per month than the total runtime of all the films in the franchise up to that point.

I believe it is fair to say that, thanks to the rise of streaming services and the continuing trends in theatrical distribution, the media landscape has now, in fact, become saturated with superheroes. But this speaks to the central thesis of my Westerns vs. Superheroes piece – in the 1950s, Westerns saturated the (far smaller) media landscape. Myriad TV shows geared toward kids, families, and adult audiences dominated the airwaves, and the list of Western films produced in the 1950s is so extensive that Wikipedia breaks it up into 1950-1954 and 1955-1959 . The Western occupied a massive domain in the American zeitgeist, which now has been replaced by superhero narratives.

An Ever-Expanding Palette, New Kinds of Stories

As I argued in 2013, both genres are concerned, at their core, with the intersection of violence and power. At that time, superhero franchises such as X-Men, Batman, Spider-Man, and the early Marvel films were considered reliable safe bets. I had a little skin in the game in the late-2000s, working as a writer developing a couple of original superhero projects. I and the producers I was working with heard consistently that nothing that wasn’t from existing IP would fly, and even the track-record of films from established characters with name recognition was spotty (Green Hornet, Green Lantern, Ghost Rider, etc). But I believed that the types of stories we were seeing would have to broaden and evolve. I wrote:

We can look at the incredible breadth of stories Westerns provided as a possible indicator of things to come. Tables were turned, where we began to see antiheroes and were asked to invest in the story from the "bad guy's" perspective, we saw stories of smaller lives touched by much larger struggles playing out around them, allegories for cultural and religious struggles, broken people forced into the hero mold and asked to do something beyond themselves, fringe voices telling familiar stories in entirely different ways, comedies, etc.

But I didn’t anticipate that, when we saw that evolution in the superhero realm, we’d be seeing it through the eyes of established characters. I believed that film and TV creators would gain the freedom to invent their own characters to tell stories of different sizes and with different perspectives. But with a few exceptions, particular in kids’ programming, IP remains king of the mountain in this regard. That said, hats off to the creators that have been able to make it work, and tell a huge variety of stories while playing in somebody else’s sandbox.

Marvel’s early Netflix run with Jessica Jones and Luke Cage used superhero characters to weave a neo-noir about the impact of sexual violence and a neo-blaxploitation series about local corruption, respectively – a far cry from the “saving the world” framing of many of the big-screen offerings even from the same universe. More recent series such as WandaVision and Hawkeye continued to get more personal, more emotionally complex, and less spectacle-centric. Meanwhile, the MCU theatrical offerings, especially in the Thor series, have become broader, funnier, and more intergalactic in scope. And films like The New Mutants, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, and Werewolf by Night have branched out into horror territory.

And that’s just Marvel. Amazon brought us The Boys, Netflix The Umbrella Academy, HBO Max continues to roll out content ranging from the blockbuster (Zack Snyder’s Justice League) to adult animation (Harley Quinn), and whatever DC is doing in theaters (a supervillain in a return to the 70s paranoid thriller? Ok, I guess.) continues to not interest me. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies remains DC’s best theatrical film, and you can fight me I don’t even care. So at this point, we have essentially seen the superhero genre iterate into every other genre we’re familiar with. Just like the Westerns did so many decades ago.

It’s important to make the same distinction I made ten years ago, which is that I’m specifically talking about superheroes, not the more nebulous “comic book adaptation.” Heartstoppers is a comic book adaptation. The Walking Dead is a comic book adaptation. That’s not what we’re talking about here. But you don’t need me to tell you that superheroes have become ubiquitous.

The question that lingers is why? Why now? Why with this intensity? Why with this ubiquity? And, I suppose, will it be with us forever?

Magical Thinking

In 2013, I argued that superhero stories supplanted Westerns because of a shift in perception among Americans about what the “American Dream” meant, and how it operated. I stand by this, and I think the titanic events of the last ten years bear this out. I wrote then:

Hard work doesn't pay off like it used to. Many of the hardest working people in this country can barely keep a roof over their heads, and people who have played by the rules and "done everything right" can find themselves out of work for years and unable to repay medical or student loan debts.

Superheroes tend to have a couple of things in common: they exist in a primarily urban landscape, and they believe in magic. Just like their audiences. As a culture, we are far more likely to believe in magic today than in hard work, and not without reason.

The former president of the United States played a successful businessman on TV, and then got elected to run the country. No experience necessary...just the irrational belief that it would all work out. Magical thinking. 1 in 5 Americans believes a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles runs the government. One in five! Even though their guy was in charge of the government! Observation tells me that over the last decade, there has been a marked rise in out-in-the-open magical thinking and a shift by millions of Americans away from evidence-based evaluation of just…facts. Of basic, discernible truths. 

It’s hard to avoid seeing the overlap between, say, Hydra’s role in the MCU and the ways in which an increasing number of Americans think the real world actually operates. It’s also interesting to think about the soul-searching at the heart of the Steve Rogers-Tony Stark dispute over the Sokovia Accords attempting to rein in the impact of superheroes and limit their destructive impacts as an allegory for corporate responsibility in an age of unparalleled corporate consolidation, reach, and impact. And The Boys seems increasingly transparent about its critique of the role of actual law enforcement in this country.

Like many of us, I feel helpless and insufficient to address so much of what is going on in the world. And the more I read, the more I realize that there are vast, interconnected systems undergirding every aspect of our daily life – systems that seem overwhelmingly formidable. There is something resonant in seeing fictionalized versions of those frameworks and something comforting in the idea that there could be superfolks who could just punch it all into oblivion. And there is something in it for the mega-corporations producing all of this content to keep us from looking behind the actual curtain. And it is at least in the realm of possibility that this inundation encourages us to believe in fantastic, impossible scenarios and frameworks, rather than examining the banal, actual, uncomfortable forces that are resulting in widening inequalities, loss of opportunities, and a general decay in the social fabric, writ large. I’m veering into the territory of whether or not violent media desensitizes individuals to actual violence, I know.

But the point is that the types of narratives we see in contemporary superhero stories, even in their increasing breadth, speak to us in our current complexity. Harley Quinn being an animated show for adults that deals with LGBTQ+ themes and situations is a great example. Can you fathom DC and Warner Media signing off on such a thing in 2013?!? The ubiquity and familiarity of these superhero characters create opportunities for storytellers and for audiences, and I don’t believe we’ll see anything but further proliferation of superhero stories, TV shows, and films for…a long, long while.

What’s Next?

Now is where I get to prognosticate a little more freely. This is just wild speculation, but if you were to ask me what comes next, as the popularity of superheroes inevitably wanes, somewhere far down the road? Again, wild speculation, but…

I’m kidding. I have no idea.

But I will say that I think one thing we are standing on the cusp of in this moment is an explosion of Star Wars content on a scale that is hard to fathom. Is it possible that someday the already-everywhere Star Wars might become even more ubiquitous? I’d say it’s a certainty. I’d like to shout out some of the predictions fellow NoaF writers made in 2012 when Disney acquired Lucasfilm.

The G opined:

Disney might be able to do some good here: they’ve done a decent job with Marvel (so far), and given that the STAR WARS franchise is riding a decade-and-a-half long waterslide to the gutter, it won’t take much at this point to right the ship. Mixed-metaphors aside, all it will take is putting the right people on the project. What’s Lawrence Kasdan up to these days?

As it happens, Lawrence Kasdan was about to be up to writing The Force Awakens. Along those lines, Molly wrote:

[T]his is all about who will lead up the project, both directing (my votes go to J.J. Abrams, Jon Favreau, or Christopher Nolan) – but more importantly, the writing.

Two out of three directors isn’t bad! J.J. was also Disney’s first choice, and Favreau wound up bringing us The Mandalorian. But Brad worried about certain possibilities, including one that definitely came to pass:

I say we all just get down on our knees and pray to God Almighty that they don’t stick Harrison Ford in the role of Han Solo for #7! After Indy 4 you know he’ll do it if asked.

But Mike really took the crown, with this quite prescient take:

My take is that Disney will take the brilliant world that Lucas created and treat it with care. Under the watchful eye of Disney I could see more of a Star Wars presence in its theme parks and could see it expanding the successful Cartoon Network’s Clone Wars. Anyone who has been watching the Clone Wars knows that the Star Wars franchise has a lot of quality stories to be told. I feel that removing Lucas from the picture may really open the creative envelope on a world ripe with opportunity.

Here we are ten years on, and I believe the ball that Mike predicted Disney would start rolling is finally getting up to speed. Many years ago, I remember Craig Mazin saying on the Scriptnotes podcast that when you factor in the Expanded Universe, Star Wars was the closest thing to a religion human beings had created in the last thousand years. The movies were just a sliver of the entire, immense Star Wars canon, but those novels and comics and other media never had the same blanket mass-market exposure the films did. Now Disney has essentially all the money in the world to put behind creating a brand new Star Wars universe, and they’re going to use Disney+ to bring all of it directly into our homes.

What about the metaverse, you may ask? Facebook and Microsoft are dumping billions of dollars into it. Might that revolutionize the entertainment landscape again in the coming years?

Nah. People don’t like to put shit on their faces. You heard it here first, folks!

Check back in 2032 for the latest.

Posted by Vance K – co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012. Emmy Award-winning producer and director, and multi-instrumentalist in different musical thingies

Marvel remains faithful to its TV formula: start promising, end meh

Yet another Marvel character with great potential becomes trapped by the insatiable sequel-teasing machine

Once upon a time, a short scene after the ending of Iron Man 2 sufficed to tease Thor. That's no longer satisfactory for Marvel continuity completists. Now the stories themselves are being increasingly invaded by the promise of later stories, with less and less space for what they have to say about themselves. If there's a unifying theme for the MCU Phase 4, it seems to be about successively sacrificing each character in the service of selling another. Thus a discussion of the problems with She-Hulk needs to be, unfortunately, a boring retread of the current problems with the rest of the MCU. Black Widow exists to set up Hawkeye, which exists to set up Echo. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is a 5-hour ad for Captain America 4. The latter half of WandaVision is derailed by the need to set up Doctor Strange 2 and The Marvels. This trend reached its self-devouring culmination in the miniseries She-Hulk, which was hijacked since its very first episode by the decision to tease whatever movie Bruce Banner will next appear in.

In a rare example of human-sized stakes, She-Hulk's ongoing quest through her series is to land a decent boyfriend. That's a perfectly valid quest; the current state of society has relegated love and happiness to Holy Grail status. To write a superpowered woman in a dating plot lends the story a magnifying lens with which to explore contemporary gender politics, body image issues, unfair double standards, online harassment, work/life balance, and the still unfinished work of 21st-century feminism. However, since one of She-Hulk's superpowers is to cross the metafictional barrier, her quest becomes one of seizing control of her own narrative and defeating the usual entitled manchildren who throw a fit whenever there's a strong woman on the screen.

The metafictional layer placed on top of She-Hulk allows for further development of a fascinating concept that was first hinted at in WandaVision and then explored more overtly in Eternals: Marvel heroes are prisoners of the franchise. They can never have their own lives. They're toys for Kevin (sorry, K.E.V.I.N.) to play with again and again and again. Since Disney can never have enough money, the story can never be allowed to end. At the extradiegetic level, this means that every movie has another one looming in the horizon, with the actors being replaced as they age (so we have rising characters written as successors to Captain America, Hawkeye, and soon Iron Man). At the diegetic level, this means that the original status quo must prevail. One brief line in She-Hulk establishes that the Sokovia Accords have been repealed, which returns things to the way they were before Civil War (not that our heroes paid any attention to the Accords after Civil War either). From watching Moon Knight or Ms. Marvel, you'd never guess that the Blip happened at all. Spider-Man: No Way Home is so averse to having a plot of its own that it unburies five other movies and then removes itself from the continuity. Things must remain just as they've always been, because the road must remain open for the next movie.

The perennial present isn't a big problem in comic books; readers accept that the heroes get rewritten and rebooted and updated all the time. That's how Batman has stayed at the age of vaguely thirty-something since 1939. But maintaining an unchanged state of affairs in the MCU demands resorting to overcomplicated excuses because this franchise burdened itself with the impossible pretense that all its stories happen together, so the setting must be kept as generic as possible to accommodate every bit of the story, because every bit of it is equally inviolable canon. Here we have an interesting case study in how far narrative conventions can be stretched before they break: this is a story that has been stuck in a neverending second act since 2012. Instead of pulling a Days of Future Past and restarting the timeline, the MCU doubles down and insists that even the other Marvel movies not made by Marvel are part of the same big story.

What this means for Phase 4 is an unsolvable dilemma. If the writers of a new show want to focus on their plot and not have to bother with the rest of the MCU, we get an isolated oddity (like Moon Knight). But if the writers want to build links that establish where their show is relative to the rest, we get not so much a show as an extended trailer for what's next (like She-Hulk).

She-Hulk could have been so much better. I've said the same of WandaVision, and Shang Chi, and Doctor Strange 2, and Eternals, and for exactly the same reason: the story cannot move past its To Be Continued status. Forget about this story, because The Show Must Go On. She-Hulk's desperate efforts to make her show her own stood no chance against the popularly awaited return of Daredevil and the news that Bruce Banner has a son. Although the writers of She-Hulk are obviously aware of the problem (just look at the title of the finale), their solution comes off as disingenuous. After an intentionally ridiculous number of Final Boss fights pile up simultaneously, She-Hulk decides that her actual enemy is Marvel Studios, so she breaks into the corporate headquarters and makes a reasoned speech about the clichés of the superhero genre and the intrusion of cameos into what should be her moment of triumph. The irksome thing about this writing choice is that it means Marvel acknowledges the problem with the Marvel formula, but can't be bothered to innovate. The protagonist states what we've been saying about the MCU, only to give us—not even more of the same, but less than the same. Somehow she saved the day. What happened, you ask? We've got no time, and look, Bruce has a son!

Having She-Hulk name the bad writing we've been complaining about for quite a while, only to railroad the ending of the show with the same old sequel bait we know to expect, feels like an extended version of another irritating Marvel tic: I point out the absurdity of my joke, so that when I go ahead and tell you the joke, you can no longer point out the absurdity. In this case, She-Hulk's monologue is presented as: I write my own harsh review, so that when I give you a mediocre ending anyway, you can no longer give me a harsh review.

I'd say good try, Marvel, but it isn't really a good one.

You see, there's a deeper problem in how She-Hulk pretends to listen to an alternate opinion before giving its protagonist her happy ending: the underlying conflict, which we're suddenly expected to believe is between She-Hulk and Marvel Studios, is pulled out of a hat. When She-Hulk visits the Al G. Rhythm in charge of all Marvel content, it fails to convey the same gravitas as Neo visiting the Architect. By superhero rules, this is supposed to be her ultimate epic battle. Not against the Abomination, not against Titania, not against Intelligencia, but against K.E.V.I.N., a surprise villain we'd been given zero hints about. For a moment there's the faintest hope that Marvel Studios will show some honest introspection, but it turns out to be a big joke. How are we meant to read the power dynamic here? Did She-Hulk defeat K.E.V.I.N.? Does K.E.V.I.N. still control her life behind the scenes? Will She-Hulk win all her future battles by rewriting the script? Depending on the answer, either K.E.V.I.N. or She-Hulk hold omnipotent control over the MCU, but knowing Marvel, this possibility is unlikely to be revisited. The purpose of inserting K.E.V.I.N. here is not to criticize Kevin Feige's stranglehold over the franchise, or address the machine-like uniformity of Marvel plots, but to sneak in the word "Nexus" like WandaVision did earlier. The great reveal bears no relation to the story we're watching. The ending bears no relation to the story we're watching. The story we're watching bears no relation to the story we're watching. It's Easter eggs all the way down.

She-Hulk's style of self-reference and self-parody is the kind of daring experimentation that WandaVision should have ended with. Instead, we're left with a more troubling reminder of WandaVision: perfunctory gestures toward a pending conversation on how society responds to strong women. This is a topic both shows allude to, but don't actually want to discuss. The internet trolls recruited by Intelligencia end up serving as a mere reminder that internet trolls exist. She-Hulk doesn't use them to say anything about online misogyny, only to point at it. The real-life manosphere has spread nonsense about this show in the same terms the script gives to its fictional trolls. OK, we get it: Marvel knew there would be a nasty reaction from an annoying minority. The producers did their homework: the leader of the hate group regurgitates old talking points we're tired of seeing repeated a thousand times in YouTube comments. The bad faith arguments are copied beat by beat and left untouched. Most crucially, the show pretends to engage with the discussion by merely representing it. But don't be fooled: She-Hulk has no time for taking a stance on toxic masculinity. Intelligencia is not there to add meaning to the story; it's only there to let us know that Marvel knows. It's like the studio naïvely believes that its tactic of preemptive self-deprecation will work on meta-ironic edgelords (i.e., "Twitter armor").

Such anxious defensive moves (the return of fan-favorite Wong, the return of fan-favorite Daredevil, the return of fan-favorite Hulk) feel calculated as a way of apology for daring to waste fans' time with a woman-led series. She-Hulk got trapped between her natural impulse to grow as a protagonist and the producers' unconfessed fear that too much growth would provoke another Captain Marvel-type backlash. This aversion to growth was literal: the digital design of She-Hulk was reportedly made smaller, the only conceivable explanation being that the studio was worried that a more muscular shape in a woman would turn off male viewers.

What results from this intricate web of preventative counter-counter-measures is, at the end of the day, the addition of She-Hulk to the pile of toys in Kevin Feige's drawer. He'll take her out to play again some day, and then she'll go back into storage. Like Wanda, like the Falcon, like Loki, like Ant-Man, She-Hulk is a tool, useful for promoting upcoming releases. The story is not about its characters. The story is about the imperative to prolong the story. Perpetually deferred resolution is the curse of being an MCU character. That is, too, the curse of being an MCU viewer.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for effective jokes, +3 for opening the MCU to the mundane side of superpowered life.

Penalties: −2 for the frustratingly bumpy pacing of the first episode, −3 for demonstrating the exploitation of digital artists.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

'Doctor Strange 2' is visually delightful and narratively bland

The MCU is looking less and less like a continuous story, and more and more like a subscription plan you can never opt out of

Despite the refreshing shift in visual style brought into the MCU by director Sam Raimi, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is far from the milestone it was expected to be. The ongoing saga of the Avengers was supposed to expand into a wealth of possibilities with the addition of alternate realities, character variants, and reclaimed franchises just acquired by Disney from Fox. But what this movie delivers is smaller than the sum of its parts.

Early announcements for Multiverse of Madness appeared to promise that the story would center on the character of Stephen Strange and the consequences of his reality-breaking spell in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Indeed, this seemed like the right moment to bring back the lingering threat of Mordo, the wizard-turned-wizard-hunter we met in the first Doctor Strange movie. This was turned into an even more enticing prospect by the limited series What If, which gave us a taste of what damage an unhinged Doctor Strange might do to the world if he succumbed to thirst for power. Instead, Multiverse of Madness can barely be called a Doctor Strange movie. The script and the camera treat him as if he were the protagonist, but he is never properly given an arc. With América Chávez as the only hero with a pivotal moment of choice to define her character, and Wanda Maximoff as the self-offing villain who learns the lesson of the day, Stephen may as well not have been in this movie. This is actually an origin story for the character of América Chávez, clumsily inserted in an overly long epilogue for WandaVision.

It's not really worth it to analyze this movie from the character of Stephen, who is only here to stand with a worried face while other characters recite exposition. Even the repeated question about his happiness is left unresolved, because it really doesn't matter. Even a half-hour of What If had more to say on the topic, and it pretty much exhausted its possibilities. So let's look at Wanda.

Since WandaVision aired, opinions on Wanda's character have been extremely divided: one side is ready to empathize and forgive, and the other side points out that her grief, while valid, does not give her a pass for hurting others. I'm in the second camp, as I detailed in my review last year: Wanda's traumatic past gives an explanation, but never a justification, for her actions. She is undeniably the villain of Westview, and now she's become the enemy to defeat. Contrary to the protestations of many on the internet, this is a natural evolution from where we left Wanda last time we saw her, and it is to the credit of Multiverse of Madness that it doesn't buy WandaVision's attempt to pretend that Wanda has learned and grown from her experience. So it might be argued that this movie is about the cost of pursuing an unreachable fantasy, but that was already done in WandaVision, or maybe it is about the cost of meddling with forces beyond human grasp, but that was already done in No Way Home. Both in theme and in actual things happening in the plot, this movie is a redundant and fully skippable entry in the MCU.

Spider-Man: No Way Home proposed the question of what is a responsible use of world-altering magic, but Multiverse of Madness is quick to throw that question at the feet of Wanda, not Stephen. Even when she offers to send him to a universe where he's reunited with his old lover, there's never a sense that he's susceptible to that temptation. This should have been the movie where Stephen has to reflect on his hubris, but what we get is vignettes from other versions of Stephen who have already gone down the path of dark magic and are only there to scare Stephen into staying on the good side. There's no real growth for him. There's no hard choice. He fulfills a role less important than that of a secondary character, and we're meant to believe this story is about him.

This hollowness at the core of the story makes the rest of the flaws more noticeable. There's no thematic statement in this movie that wasn't already clear from WandaVision, and whatever little gesture of maturity Wanda shows here shouldn't have needed an entire movie to develop. The actual function of this movie is to establish América Chávez as a key figure for some upcoming project where she will turn out to save the multiverse. This movie is not its own story. It's a two-hour-long teaser for Phase 4.

This habit of producing movies whose sole function is to promise future movies is becoming a vice in the MCU. The middle portion of Multiverse of Madness is bloated with alternate characters who only show up to earn five seconds of cheers and then die with no consequence to the story. To bring Patrick Stewart back as Charles Xavier, only to kill him in the most unceremonious manner, is already disappointing enough after Logan gave that character the perfect farewell, but on top of that misstep, the casting of John Krasinski as Mr. Fantastic is a transparent play to mass appeal. This movie is not conceived as a story with a statement to make about its characters or its themes. It is simply calculated to please.

In the people-pleasing department, it's at least commendable that Sam Raimi was allowed to dial up the colors of the otherwise boring look of the MCU. His use of fade transitions and close-ups between character beats adds a much-needed touch of uniqueness to the narrative. This feels like a movie that has a director behind it instead of an impersonal corporate machinery.

However, the visual inventiveness of Multiverse of Madness is not used to its full potential. We quickly jump through a dozen universes made of paint, made of comic book ink, made of flesh cubes, but for the most part we stick to only a couple universes that have a walkable New York and a recognizable set of characters. Again, these decisions follow the preestablished needs of Phase 4. Each of these movies has only so much space where they can expand before they risk deviating from whatever big narrative is being prepared behind the scenes. There's only a tiny chance to experiment, to ask hard questions, to challenge the audience. Multiverse of Madness had infinite places to go, but it's too afraid to wander off on its own way.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +3 for giving Raimi the creative freedom to leave his personal mark on the film.

Penalties: −1 for inconsequential cameos motivated purely by fan service, −1 for choosing the wrong protagonist to focus on, −1 for not taking the risk of sending the heroes to more visually bizarre universes, −1 for refusing to have an interesting point to make.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

'Spider-Man: No Way Home' is a well-oiled nostalgia machine, and little else

The conclusion of the MCU Spider-Man trilogy delivers five retroactive happy endings at the cost of losing its own thread

As self-congratulatory sequels go, Spider-Man: No Way Home is adequately acceptable. Hell knows this year has seen much, much worse instances; at least this one has some respect for its audience and follows believable emotional arcs, even if it blatantly feeds on the goodwill earned by other productions and ends with a massive reset button. It's not terrible, and it's not terrific. It's OK.

This movie makes a curious choice of conflict. After illusionist villain Mysterio divulged Spider-Man's identity at the end of Far from Home, Peter Parker's life has become a mess of unwanted celebrity, constant public scrutiny, loss of privacy, and unpleasant consequences for everyone in his sphere. So Peter asks his friend Doctor Strange to remove that bit of information from everyone's head. What he needs to defeat this time is not an enemy, but a vulnerability that invites enemies. He doesn't have the infinite money that helped Tony Stark maintain a comfortably protected life after revealing his identity.

Oddly, even without infinite money, the rest of the Avengers have had no issue with being publicly known. The MCU, as a rule, has avoided superhero secret identities, a choice that has been both praised and criticized. So it's a detour for the MCU to devote an entire movie to have a hero struggle with being known to everyone. It would have been very interesting to see Peter deal with the legal aftermath of his exposure (since they were going to have a certain lawyer drop in anyway), or to see him try to adapt to life under the public eye (a fun meta story to watch for a character who's literally dating Zendaya). However, an entire movie devoted to Peter's mundane problems would have had fewer explosions. After the rather perfunctory procession through the plot beats we already knew from the trailers, including Peter going through the motions of legal trouble and then breaking Doctor Strange's concentration during a mindwiping ritual, No Way Home only really starts when Doctor Strange invents a shiny MacGuffin to banish Spider-Man's enemies that have magically appeared from other movies. The justification for the transdimensional shenanigans is that the spell was targeted at everyone who knew Peter's secret.

This is a way to bring your cake from another universe and eat it too. The MCU version of Spider-Man has run into a peculiar villain problem in that our hero was left to clean the messes left by Iron Man instead of fighting his own villains. Spider-Man has an iconic gallery of enemies; however, the two previous franchises had already used the best of them, and done so in ways that are hard to compete with. How can you bring Doctor Octopus and the Lizard and the Sandman into the MCU without inviting comparison with the performances that defined an era of superhero cinema?

Easy: rinse and repeat.

So, after they're made their respective entrances, and Doctor Strange has resolved to kick them back to their own movies, Peter's crucial choice is to steal the MacGuffin and try to save his enemies instead of sending them back to the deaths that await them. Essentially, Peter's mission is to rewrite the endings of five other movies. From this point on, No Way Home slows down its second act to milk every available joke and memeable moment out of its multiversal baddiepalooza, because it knows we won't have another chance to spend time with this Green Goblin or this Electro. This "now or never" spirit, mixed with the dangerous "go back and fix it" attitude in the third act, makes No Way Home share many of the problems with nostalgic sequels. This is not only a team-up movie; it's a team-up between separate iterations of the character going back to 2002, which explains why actor Tom Holland describes it as a bigger crossover than Avengers: Endgame. It's an understandable sentiment, but also a bold one to make when Into the Spider-Verse already exists.

No Way Home not only pays tribute to two decades of Spider-Man movies, but to the entire slate of productions associated with Marvel Comics: its choice of final battlefield is the Statue of Liberty, memorably used in the original X-Men, the movie that paved the way for the entire superhero craze we're still living through. However, there's fan service, and then there's fan servitude. No Way Home is full of small moments that feel like ticking off boxes in fan wishlists, although it at least knows how to use its cheap nostalgia effectively. You'll recall that the shot of MJ falling in the trailer brought up comparisons to Gwen's fall in the Andrew Garfield movies. The way MJ's fall is resolved here is transparently manipulative (even if it punches you right in the feels).

Tom Holland is 25 years old, but he's still playing a high school senior about to enter college. Accordingly, the MCU has continued to treat Peter as a kid, even going to the length of freezing his age for five years in-universe. Keeping Peter from growing up diminishes the emotional depth his movies are equipped to handle. Asking a wizard friend to fix everything by inchanting "Returnus to Normalus!" is a facepalmably childish choice, one that No Way Home at first condemns, but ends up vindicating.

This is less its own movie than a step in the integration of multiverse characters into the MCU. This is a pattern that has plagued Phase 4. WandaVision forgot about its own themes because it needed to set up The Marvels; Black Widow only existed to explain a minor character's presence in Hawkeye; Falcon and the Winter Soldier is a skippable prologue to Captain America 4. By not letting each movie be its own thing, Marvel has forgotten how to create complete stories. No Way Home is not here to explore how Peter Parker deals with crisis, or to follow him in a journey toward maturity, or to give us a full emotional experience, but to provide backstory for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (coming soon! only in theaters!). It's a very mechanical method of storytelling that robs stories of their meaning.

A possible reading of this movie is that Sony is afraid of losing the cash cow it's found in Tom Holland, and it deals with that anxiety by leaning on its two previous attempts. Spider-Man has been reset two times already; it's like Sony wants to preempt that risk by doing its own reset of Peter's story (and, in an incongruous move that negates the emotional growth of the previous movies, a perfect reset of every villain to their pre-villain status). This is a failure to understand the nature of storytelling, which is also noticeable in how No Way Home is obsessed with erasing ambiguity. The already canceled Spider-Man franchises are momentarily brought back from cancelation, and No Way Home refuses to let go of them until it's done reassuring us that their respective universes have happy endings now. Don't wonder any longer what happened afterwards: here, let us tell you exactly how it ended.

This is the problem at the core of Spider-Man: No Way Home: it sacrifices its own story because its actual function is to prepare the upcoming ones and forbid any ill talk of the earlier ones. We should have taken a lesson from MJ: expect to be disappointed, and you won't have to be.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for organically integrating the nostalgic string-pulling into the plot, +1 for visually dazzling fight scenes (except for the last one, which is a confusing mess).

Penalties: −1 for jokes that go on for too long, −1 for wasting five major villains in a movie that is not really about any of them, −1 for not having any solid theme to explore regarding Peter's character growth (and no, the "great power" line is a catchphrase, not a theme).

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

'Eternals' wants to save the superhero genre from itself

It's doubtful that Marvel Studios will appreciate, or even understand, what Eternals has to say about the horror of living in a superhero franchise

It's a revelation to see how much Eternals is unlike the rest of the MCU. It feels strangely like a normal movie, which shouldn't be noteworthy, because we really shouldn't be this accustomed to expecting characters to smash each other in the head in every scene, but to follow the discussion around Eternals is to realize how severely the MCU has warped our way of watching. It is the first MCU movie to get a rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes (48% at the time of writing this review), which makes it, completely undeservedly, the worst-rated entry of the MCU (not counting television). Upon closer look, the criticisms thrown at Eternals reveal a particular type of anger, which stems from a particularly twisted set of expectations. Supposedly, Eternals believes too seriously in its themes, has too much talking, is too abstract, leans too far into substance, is not violent enough, has too many feelings.

Let it sink in that this is the rare superhero movie directed by a woman, and reread those complaints.

In fact, those are exactly the qualities that make Eternals one of the most important entries, and I'm not exaggerating, in the history of the superhero genre. It wasn't until I watched Eternals that I noticed how tired I was of Marvel's trademark ironic detachment. It's refreshing to have characters who don't hide behind a barrier of quippy banter, who aren't afraid to own their emotions, who care about what their battles say about who they are.

Solid characterization was always going to be difficult. Eternals had to fulfill the mammoth task of being simultaneously the origin story, the teamup blockbuster, the team breakup tragedy, and the world-ending epic for an entire new crop of ten almost unknown superheroes, in a cinematic universe that pretends every obscure character needs A-lister treatment. But there was no alternative; it wasn't viable to introduce these characters in their respective solo movies, because their place in the fictional world makes no sense outside of this team. Perhaps Eternals would have achieved better pacing as a Disney Plus series, but as one single movie, it's remarkable that it manages to make almost all of its heroes feel like full persons. And it does so via relevant moral disagreements.

As a rule, the MCU has very badly dropped the ball when trying to grapple with the ethics of superheroism, opting for a juvenile power fantasy every time it has played with hard dilemmas that called for a more thoughtful approach. Eternals sees the oversimplistic moral calculation of Avengers: Infinity War and raises a more pointed set of questions: if heroes have a responsibility toward living beings, does that extend to future lives? And should their concern for those potential future lives outweigh the importance of present ones? And does it matter in the decision if the future lives are thousands of times more numerous than the present ones that may have to be sacrificed? These are not the speculations of fantasy. The problem of the potential value of future lives is an extremely delicate point of contention that has been debated by philosophers for decades, and that has had, still has today, and will continue to have real consequences for real people.

It will be argued that these are unnecessarily heavy interests for a movie where a character is called Sprite and another has pew pew fingers. But Eternals doesn't fool itself. It knows that the MCU is a ridiculous place to ask the big questions. In fact, the conscious mismatch between its themes and its setting is a central part of how Eternals is made, and it shows precisely in the characters of Sprite and Mr. Pew Pew Fingers.

On one hand, Sprite is an illusionist. Over the centuries of the Eternals' mission on Earth, she has been feeding the human hunger for inspiration via stories. If the Eternals are behind all our ancient myths, Sprite has been behind the telling of the myths. On the other hand, Kingo is a movie actor and director. He used to live in hiding with Sprite, but became tired of hanging in the limbo between truth and deception. So he opted for full-time deception: he's been pretending to be a dynasty of Bollywood stars for roughly a century. Indeed, both are beings of legend: Sprite cannot have the normal human experience, while Kingo doesn't even try. They exist in the world of stories.

This matters because, in Eternals, what threatens to invade the physical world is the world of stories. Our heroes yearn for normality, but beasts that belong to primal nightmare keep interrupting their dates, their family meetings, their careers. This occurs more explicitly with Kingo's sudden interest in filming his friends. The Eternals' lives become a threatened home, not unlike the fortress Phastos has built in his house: a shelter of domesticity besieged by conventions of cinematic spectacle that are emphatically unwelcome. These characters are trying to go through their lives, but their boss Arishem needs them to stick to their predefined roles, while Kingo keeps annoyingly insisting that their lives be made into a movie. When the obligatory faceless monsters show up during a family discussion in the Amazon jungle, they don't feel like an adventure, but like an inconvenience. Eternals is a movie, and it has superheroes, but it resents having to be a superhero movie.

Now why would a Marvel production want to do that?

Because Eternals, you see, is actually about the horror of being a Marvel character.

Most hero stories are about the search for purpose, but few dare address this openly the despair of having your purpose written in a script. The surprise reveal of this movie is that the titular Eternals don't exist to be full persons, but to be action figures in a war with a preordained result. They're not meant to have lives; they're just meant to make it to the end of the world and then be refurbished and repainted for the next end of the world, with nothing left of their previous personalities. Much like the tragic heroines of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, they're created to be pieces of cosmic machinery in a plan guided by the most ruthless of utilitarian calculations. The awkward excuse for their absence from every other Avengers-level crisis refers back to the same metanarrative directive: those other conflicts were not about them. They were not their story.

If you've ever wondered why Tony Stark went back to superheroing after burning all his suits in Iron Man 3, as if he had forgotten his entire personal growth in that movie, here's the explanation: as a Marvel character, he's not allowed to have an inner life. He just has to make it to the end of the movie and go back to the makeup department to get ready for the next movie. It's only in Eternals that this curse is shown in its full monstrosity: Marvel characters are doomed to repeat the end of the world again and again, and all the lives they're supposedly saving only have value as food for the cosmic machine that controls their fates.

Marvel fans complain that not enough stuff blows up in Eternals. Yes, that's the whole point. Stuff blowing up would just be another repetition of the endless cycle that makes the MCU a Gnostic hell, its characters trapped by a heartless creator who only cares that the rules of the game be obeyed. Ajak and Ikaris constantly refer to Arishem's Grand Design. Well, the Grand Design is the MCU and its voracious need to keep growing by recycling its heroes, throwing them at one cataclysm after another, because that's the only way it can feed itself. This movie is so informed by the obligations of franchise that its new slate of heroes drop onto the world from a literal floating slate. The Eternals' rebellion against the Grand Design (as well as their repeated destruction of Kingo's cameras) symbolizes Eternals' resistance to being a Marvel movie. These characters don't want to be action figures. Fans who complain that the Eternals always want to discuss their feelings miss the point: that's what characters in a story are supposed to do. It's not that the movie lacks a villain; the established rules of MCU storytelling are the villain that gets in the way of these heroes' happiness. It's nice that Ajak decides that Earth is worth saving, but it's depressing that the reason why she decides it's worth saving is that it produced superheroes.

This symbolic framing of Eternals as a war waged by Marvel characters against Marvel Studios helps decipher what otherwise are incomprehensible character choices. Kingo's puzzling exit from the final fight is actually in consonance with the rules of his assigned role: as the character who is most aware of the conventions of superhero fiction (it's no coincidence that his superpower is making literal pew pew fingers), he chooses the right moment to leave the movie and repackage himself for the next one. He survives by following the game. Sprite goes the opposite way: her victory is that she's no longer a Marvel character. She was stuck as an unchanging piece in a game she didn't ask to play. So she wins by refusing to play any longer.

Give some thought to the fact that what saves Sprite, and the world, is the power of transformation. The message couldn't be clearer: the MCU needs to change, because the alternative is the existential abomination (and the narrative laziness) of treating people as instruments. It's a horrifying twist that Arishem, the ultimate producer of the show, gets to literally take these characters out of the movie and dress them up again for their assigned roles in the next one.

Coming to terms with that absurdity is the breaking point that drives Ikaris to kill himself after his defeat: the people of Earth were never people to him, just instruments. Accordingly, he saw his own life as a mere instrument of the Grand Design. Once the mission was frustrated, he couldn't accept that he was responsible for choosing his own purpose; he needed to have it scripted for him. So he followed the plot of his own myth, and flied toward the sun. (Director Chloé Zhao knew exactly what she was doing when she took inspiration from Zack Snyder's Man of Steel when designing her nihilistic and ultimately self-negating version of Ikaris, because that is the logical consequence of a Snyder-style Superman.)

This is the kind of shaking up that the MCU desperately needs. This is the kind of outsider perspective that can save superhero movies from endless self-cannibalization. But in all likelihood, Marvel executives (and fans) will bemoan the lack of explosions, fail to get the intended warning, and go back to the regularly scheduled show. They don't want to miss the end of the world—again.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.