Shroom Man 777 wrote: ↑Thu Nov 02, 2017 3:02 pmI'm not even trying to avoid a Big Fight, just adding enough ingredients to make a Big Fight compelling - the personal stakes, the "weight" behind their glares and snarls, hence Bucky versus Cap in Winter Soldier, Stark versus Stane, maybe even Star Loyd and Space Kurt Russel 100% Death Proof God. Winter Soldier's the peak of this, IMO.
Even Dr. Strange's final confrontation and even including the Dormamu bits was better.
Stane worked because he was clearly shown to be a someone Tony had known all his life, giving weight to his sudden but inevitable betrayal.
Kurt Russel honestly did far less for me than Jeff Bridges did, simply because he'd only just shown up in Star Lord's life. Personally I feel that's on the same level as long-lost-sister Hela. In fact I'm pretty sure I like Hela better, because her resolution at least wasn't 'blow up the MacGuffin that we don't need for the next installment'. Losing Asgard had real and personal consequences for our hero - consequences that go well beyond hitting the big ol' 'you're not a god anymore, maybe' reset button for Star Lord.
I suppose there was a more personal connection in
Winter Soldier but that's for me majorly undermined by the comicbook-y randomness of it. Captain America rips off the Winter Soldier's mask to reveal...
A LIZARD his old pal Bucky Barnes! Wait, what? Why? How? Didn't that guy plummet to his death from a fast moving train into a vast abyss? How is he alive? It was HYDRA all along! Oh, okay then... I liked the conundrum it created in that now Captain America couldn't just pummel the Winter Soldier into the ground anymore, but still.
And Strange's fight worked because because it was
clever in its resolution. It wasn't a big wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am brawl, it was different (really the only thing different about that movie in terms of its story too, I would say, but I digress).
At the end of the day they're all still big fairly formulaic fights. Some may have a bit more personal punch than others, but I wonder how often you can repeat that without it getting old and tired. No doubt Marvel are asking themselves the same question.
WW's Big Fight was actually pretty terrible and I think when it came to fight choreo and the obligatory-ness of the big fight, it was out of the awesome director's hands and so it's more of the studio we're seeing?
Plus visually it was pretty shit since the Big Bad being a mass of metalspikes was pretty lame.
Khornate Berserker Ares didn't bother me too much; his dialogue on the other hand did. That old 'join me young Skywalker and we will rule the galaxy together' nugget is just that: old. And
THEN I WILL DESTROOOY YOOUOUOUOU... Really? I suppose we have to end with Wonder Woman vanquishing her nemesis somehow, but I think I would've appreciated it more if he just faded away after she refused to join him. "Okay fine, have fun settling this GIGANTIC WORLD WAR then mwa ha ha." Then she'd have to settle for driving Ares off, the doomsday plot has been foiled, but humans are still humans and the God of War is still out there somewhere. But that's just me. Also the fight was too long, but plenty has been said about that by pretty much everybody already.
I recently saw the recent King Arthur movie by Guy Ritchie, it's not a super awesome movie but I had fun. There was Kung Fu George. And the aesthetics of the Big Fight with Jude Law turning into a Dark Souls Skeletor was nifty, and of course Guy Ritchie goofing around with fantasy and magic... anyway, aside from Jude Law Skeletor's bare pale chest, his TRUE FORM manifestation was actually better looking than Ares' in WW - PLUS it wasn't a big mass of just dark colored stuff, there were different gradients of darkness and greyness and ash and ember-colorations.
I enjoyed King Arthur, but the constant switching between the Dark Souls imagery and East London swaggering medieval gangsters got really grating after a while. It tried to be two totally different things and it honestly didn't work very well. Also the mage could've done with some actual character instead of just being there as a plot device that spawns cool CGI then gets conveniently captured when we need our hamfisted stand-off. Come the fuck on. It was a real clunky movie that could've done with a half dozen more passes by someone capable of unifying its disparate elements.
That being said some of the mythos in that movie is real fucking cool. Too bad we constantly cut away from it to hear some more wisecracking.
Hmmm... I guess the thing is that it wasn't incompetently done but it didn't give us anything new or distinct - heck the skellington armies were pretty damn unimpressive (and for ancient superbadass warrior corpses imbued by supernatural flame, they were pretty meh, at least give them evil ethereal glow or some shit). In the contest of the craziness of Goldblumpopolis... yeah, it just falls short.
Seriously, if Hela's THE shit then give her something distinctively memorable.
It would've been cooler if the skellingtons could at least, say, pull themselves back together again, explaining why they were such a potent threat. I liked how they were one of Asgard's old buried secrets, but yeah, they turned out less than impressive in the end. But to focus exclusively on the skellingtons feels a bit selective - there was also a giant wolf, a de-eye-ing, a space ship shooting at the animated dead, and a big ol' flame monster fighting the Hulk. Does that not count as new and distinct? I feel Godblumgard was played out by the time the movie left it behind; we spent just enough time there that it was still interesting, but it wouldn't've been for much longer.
It's still a huge thing though, that's what made the Russo Brothers the new hot shit. I'm not saying it lacked humor, I just appreciate those small touches and we could've needed that stuff especially here.
It was a huge thing, and justifiably so, because
Winter Soldier mostly holds up. I do think the final act is its weakest point, exactly because the movie feels the need to go into CGI overdrive with an overhyped world-ending threat that can also be conveniently centrally dismantled. For an insidious pseudo-cancer that can eat an organization like SHIELD from the inside HYDRA sure as fuck was easy to beat. After decades in which nobody knew they even existed, at the end of which they ended up controlling everything from US Senators to Siberian super soldier bases to the highest echelons of SHIELD, turns out you can defeat them by dumping a floppy drive on the internet? I don't buy it. Frankly
Winter Soldier suffers from a lot of the problems you've previously described, it's just that the first bit of the movie was so good we end up forgiving it for that. Which is fair enough, it's a cool movie, but that doesn't mean the resolution isn't weak.