Phase 5

So, in spite of my desires, my wife bought Antifa-Man and the Wasp: Commiemania tickets for us to see last night. We don't go very often on opening weekends, even to movies that we want to see, because we don't want to contribute to the all-important opening weekend metric, plus we get half price tickets on Tuesday evening. I would have missed it altogether, but my wife loves seeing movies and is desperate to be in denial of how bad Hollywood in general and Disney in particular are as companies. After we watched it, I allowed her to convince me to binge the Loki show too. Now I'm kind of tired.

In spite of all the hate and anger from the angry anti-Disney pundits, the reality is that neither Loki nor Ant-man were really that bad. In fact, although hardly even close to brilliant, they were relatively fun. Although I did notice the things that the anger-pundits pointed out, they were neither as egregious, or blatant as they claimed, and many of them (like heroic black action women who are as physically capable as any man among the extras and minor characters) we'll just have to deal with until the zeitgeist changes. Scott Lang wasn't made to be an idiot constantly upstaged by all the women around him. His daughter was kinda bratty, but not nearly as terrible a character as I'd been led to believe. She can't carry a movie, like Ant-man kinda can.

Don't get me wrong. In both, there were certainly woke elements. But neither were flat out propaganda films, like we have had in the past from Disney. Nothing was as on the nose as "You've got to do better, Senator" Falcon & the Winter Soldier. Nothing was as subtly insidious as The Batman.

If you don't want to see these movies at all, I hardly blame you. If you want to do like my wife and I did and see the movie while still managing to not really contribute to their "success" because of our timing and discount tickets, on the other hand, I hardly blame you for that either. They really aren't that bad. They're forgettable, mostly. They're not going to be classics. But I don't regret seeing them, and I'm actually a little excited about seeing the next season of Loki, believe it or not. Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd and Tom Hiddleston are sufficiently charismatic and have sufficient charisma to carry the current crop of stuff, and hopefully the next wave. That doesn't mean that anything in the pipeline other than the next season of Loki looks promising. Iron Heart? No way in hell. Anything Wakanda related? Absolutely not. For that matter, within Ant-man itself, anything with Janet, Hank, or Hope or Cassie? I'd rather give all of those characters a pass. Sylvie and Loki and Mobius, on the the other hand—they can actually carry something worth watching with their chemistry and charisma.

Jonathan Majors, or whatever his name is, as Kang? He's been getting a lot of praise from the critics as if he's the next big thing who's already the biggest big thing. I'd never heard of him at all. I have a mixed reaction to his casting and performance. For one thing, I don't think casting Kang as a fairly normal looking black guy with gigantic lips and huge spreading nose was the right look at all for the character. I also don't think that the character he portrayed had any resemblance to Kang as a character as I know him. That said, I've never thought Kang was really all that engaging of a character, and other than his blue face (with narrow lips and nose) with the lines on it, his look was neither memorable nor exciting. He's even more boring than Galactus, who's another character who's actually way cooler in many ways than he looks to be. 

Plus, were they trying to set up a joke where the "Council of Kangs" all gathers together and says "We wuz kangz?"

So, didn't look right, the character was all wrong, but the character wasn't all that exciting to begin with? Majors did, I'll admit, do a good job portraying the character that was written for him. That's certainly true. He wasn't as charismatic on screen as people are making him out to be, because he honestly came across as kind of goofy, though. Especially in the Loki show. His face is nearly as overly dramatically expressive as Jackie Chan's. And honestly, there was a slightly uncomfortable undercurrent every time I saw him of his casting being a result of some ESG wanker saying, "We've gotta cast a black guy here". That said, his performance showed some real talent. Just not sure that this was really the role for him or not.

And... well, multiverse alternate realities, parallel timelines, and time travel in general have never been my favorite plot devices, unless the point is to go see dinosaurs. 

All in all, I'd say that my reaction here has been a variety of "Yeah, OK, I can see what you're going for here, and you're actually trying to be entertaining, and you're trying to tamp down the wokeness to a level that it isn't literally pissing off your audience non-stop... but I suspect the damage has been done already." It's a little too late to suggest that, "OK, OK, we're going to tone down the wokeness (but not eliminate it entirely) and try to be fun again" after you've already gone all in on grooming little kids and telling white people how much they hate them. On top of that, I think that people are just a little over Marvel now. Few of the characters that the audience love (Paul Rudd and Tom Hiddleston's characters being a notable exceptions) are still around, and even when they are, they're saddled with often playing second fiddle to new characters that aren't likeable. The "Ant-man family" could all take a hike except for Ant-man himself, and nobody would miss any of them. The vague references to socialism and antifa from Hank and Cassie were designed to make them unlikeable, and poor Hope just has literally nothing to do, no chance to show any charisma or charm, no chance to even really do anything at all. And Janet comes across as an obnoxious, entitled princess who makes no apologies for 1) sleeping with other men while in the quantum realm, 2) not telling anybody anything about the quantum realm, and 3) generally being high-handed and self-important and insufferable. Sadly, I think the writers think it makes her look like a strong girlboss, an insufferable trope in its own right, but it doesn't; if anything, it highlights her weakness.