Just got back from seeing the Black Widow movie. I actually wasn't going to see it, both because I'm irked generally at Disney and don't want to support them even indirectly in any financial sense, but secondly because a lot of the folks I follow on YouTube about pop culture, like Geeks + Gamers, Nerdrotic, Critical Drinker, Overlord DVD, etc. have panned it. Not all of them, but I know for sure Critical Drinker and Nerdrotic didn't like it. So, when my wife bought tickets for all of us tonight, I kinda zipped my criticisms and went anyway, because I knew it was important for her to get out and see a movie as a family. Even though I wished she'd asked me what to see before buying them.
Turns out, the movie wasn't as bad as everyone I'd read made it out to be. Oh, sure—it wasn't great either. It was pretty mediocre as far as Marvel movies go, and to be honest with you, that's probably as good as they're going to get for quite some time in the future. Now, to be fair, I've already seen this story. It was called the Street Fighter Alpha series of video games, and it involved a character named Cammy. Here's her complete story. If you get the parts from the Alpha subseries in particular, that's an almost note by note blueprint for the plot of Black Widow. Except, of course, that the villain in the movie was nowhere near as cool as M. Bison. (In fact, it almost seems like he's deliberately a Harvey Weinstein stand-in.) And the Street Fighter plots tend to kind of repeat, so very similar beats were still going on with Cammy in SF4 and SF5 in most respects.
If you know the story of Cammy from Street Fighter, then you pretty much know the story of this movie, because it's almost exactly the same. Except with a few Marvel references thrown in here and there, although fewer than you'd think. It's also got a notable resemblance to the story of the Jason Bourne stories. And also, it makes me wonder why Captain America was so special and everyone was after the super soldier serum, when it seems quite obvious that people with super soldier serum knock-offs were kind of a dime a dozen in the current version of the Marvel Universe. Even if this Red Guardian is as much a knock-off of Zangief as he is of the comic book version of his character.
It also occurs to me that some of the guys who complain about pop culture ruination... well, that's kind of their thing, and what brings the audiences to them. So, while I kind of tend to agree with them on general principle, sometimes it's worth taking their trashing of a movie with a grain of salt.
So I don't necessarily recommend this movie, but I don't exactly disrecommend it either. The feminist "oh noez the poor victims, now they're getting their revenge" line that I feared that movie would lean into didn't really materialize too much; it felt more like a personal story of the tragedy of individuals rather than some agitprop to make people feel bad about themselves and that the world owes them something even when they're already the most spoiled, entitled bratty little princesses that the world has ever known. So, that's good, I suppose. David Harbour's Red Guardian didn't end up being very effective, or smart, or anything else like that in the end, but he also wasn't really the butt of every single joke either, like I feared he would be.
The idea that pretty little lightweight women would be these awesome combat machines is kinda silly, and while I'm starting to get tired of that idiotic trope, it is kind of integral to the plot here, and it does predate Marvel really having much hint of wokeness. I mean, the Black Widow character was first published in 1964 fer cryin' out loud. And I am deliberately comparing it repeatedly to Street Fighter, which is probably the franchise most responsible for pushing the idea that tiny little women could be capable in hand to hand combat because of speed and agility.
The only thing I didn't like that really merits a total call-out, and Nerdrotic really went on about this too, was the pointless complete reimagining of the Taskmaster character to make an attempt to get a cheap "a-ha!" moment. Which fell pretty flat because they've done exactly that same a-ha moment several times already. It's, if anything, a very tired attempted reveal, and kind of insulting. Plus, it was handled very ham-handedly. Look at the stuntman who played Taskmaster for the action scenes, with a mask on. Screenshot from Nerdrotic.
But when the mask comes off, it's .... Olga Kurylenko with scar prosthetics on half of her face? C'mon. I know Kurylenko hasn't had a high profile much of anything going on since... what, Quantum of Solace in 2008, but that's kind of insulting even so to misuse her so. She used to be somebody, by golly! Anyway, sex swapping of minor characters that they think that they can get away with without causing too much of an outcry is so overdone, and actually, people are mostly just irritated that it happens at all nowadays. Although race swapping is probably even more insulting (speaking of which, saw the Eternals trailer before the movie too. I've seen it before, of course, on my phone, but this is the first time in theaters. Also saw the new Suicide Squad. They're hyping the involvement of pedophile James Gunn, so Hollywood is obviously anxious to declare him forgiven for tweeting about pedophilia, rape and AIDS. He is half Jewish, after all. I mean, they even brought monkey-spanking Jeff Toobin back to the air only a few weeks after his fall from grace. Then again, he's full Jewish, so the time that they had to pretend to be mad at him was much shorter. And he's not as high profile, so they probably thought that nobody really cared all that much about him personally.
No comments:
Post a Comment