JonnyLaw

Is “meh” still filtered here, because this show is the definition of that. Olivia Colman is great, and I’d love to see her and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s characters interact in the future.

Accepting that not all heroes are going to show up to help other heroes out in their solo on-going is just standard suspension of disbelief for comic books. Personally, I think it complicates things when they try to explain why other heroes can’t help. Like Fury saying he doesn’t want the Avengers to help because then the Skrulls might try to impersonate them is fucking stupid, because Gravik is obviously smart enough to think of that on his own (see, War Machine). Fury is just lucky his plan calls for impersonating Russians and not Groot. Given the scope of the show, it’d be 100x more believable to just say “I don’t know who I can trust.”

I admittedly haven’t seen much of his actual acting, but I feel like he may have a hard time pulling of a Ralph/Sue dynamic. Plastic Man, he’d knock out of the park.

Mulaney as Plastic Man apparently isn’t confirmed/was a joke spread on Twitter.

Three of four right now, with two of four ending on a surprise Skrull reveal (counting Rhodey last week).

I like the show overall, but I was amused how none of the soldiers/Secret Service really reacted to someone they thought was a Russian suddenly grabbing one of them with thick vines growing from where their arm was.

I’m guessing she gave herself Extremis powers on the sly.

“You know, I thought you looked a little different.”

So… Rhodey’s definitely a Skrull. Not only did that sound like his voice on the phone at the end, but he called Fury “Nick” at the end of their meeting when he fired him. Fury obviously seemed caught off guard by being fired, but in hindsight, it works as a response to realizing Rhodes was a Skrull.

I think the problem with Phase IV is that they treated it too much like Phase I in setting up a bunch of different stuff with only faint teases of connectedness. I think that’s partly due to Phase III being such a concrete ending to the beginning of the MCU, and I don’t think they’ll make that mistake again, only now we have a lot of dangling threads that are likely intended to pay off later.

It was revealed that she was a Skrull as he pulled up, was it not? I do agree about it being that particular Skrull.

That’s kind of my point though. He apparently wasn’t doing much to find a new Skrull homeworld* that was the whole resolution to the Captain Marvel movie, he missed the Hydra infiltration and then took his ball and went home, which causes him to not be around for the Civil War between Cap and Stark and which caused him to be caught off guard by Thanos (which if you’re scouting the Galaxy for a new homeworld, it seems like you’d catch word of), then after the blip he again takes his ball and goes home which causes him to miss the Skrull invasion aka Hydra 2.0. Plus, some of the Skrulls who supposedly went into space to find a new home seemingly have been back on Earth for a while instead. This isn’t a real complaint as much as it’s something I find amusing. They tell us Fury is a badass, but outside of being in the right place/right time with Captain Marvel and forming the Avengers, it doesn’t seem like he’s actually done that much**. *TBF, 30 years really doesn’t seem that long when it comes to finding a new hospitable planet that isn’t already inhabited. **I assume that will change in this show.

This episode does raise the question of what exactly Fury and Captain Marvel have been doing all this time, especially since Fury missed the Hydra takeover and has now missed the Skrull invasion.

I get the thematic use of shitty AI-esque opening credits to create a sort of “everything feels a little off”/unnatural feeling, but instead it just looks really shitty because they used actual shitty looking AI. In general, “Everything feels off” is pretty much my review of the first episode. You have a pretty major supporting character killed off and/or revealed as a Skrull before the opening credits to serve as the motivation for Fury to come back to Earth… but it’s never mentioned again? You have Fury return to Earth from his secret space base because a secret group of shapeshifting aliens with alien technology are trying to take over the planet and the thing you seem most surprised about is they managed to get the supplies to make a dirty bomb? I assume Agent Robin Sparkles isn’t dead, but it seemed weird/off to end the show on the immediate reveal that the Fury that shot her was a Skrull, rather than have the cliffhanger be Fury shooting Hill. That would at least have people talking about something other than the shitty opening credits.

I agree with all this. I was excited to see Chidi at first, then bummed because I would have liked to see him in a bigger role. MODOK should have been played 100% serious or completely absurd. It felt like they didn’t fully embrace the absurdity, so some of the stuff at the end felt just a little off.

I told a friend that hasn’t seen it yet that I liked it more than Wakanda Forever but less than Dr. Strange 2, but it turns out wasn’t helpful because he has those two flipped.

I thought the CGI was fine (not good, not bad) except for Stoll’s face as MODOK looking like it was a face scan from WCW vs NWO: Revenge.

Saw it today, smallish theater was maybe a 1/3rd full. I liked it, but I’ve pretty much liked all of the Marvel movies I’ve seen (which actually excludes most of Phase 4). They’re basically comics to me; unless they’re bad (looking at you, One More Day), I’m going to enjoy them. Kang was great, I was surprised to see the Conquerer presumably killed off, but that makes two straight Kang variants essentially warning about worse variants being out there. I’ve seen some mentions in reviews of this being a little Star Wars-esque, and I definitely felt those vibes in a few places early on, especially the bar scene and Bill Murray’s Lando Calrissian. My only nitpicks, and they’re very minor nitpicks, were how they were approaching a comical level of referring to Kang as “Him” early on, as if he was Voldemort and they were afraid to say his name (also amusing since Adam Warlock is debuting in the next movie), and how they constantly kept taking their helmet masks off. Not really a nitpick as much as it happened so much you could almost hear someone from the studio (or their agents) saying “You gotta show their faces more.” What are the odds that the super intelligent ants left in the Quantum Realm somehow end up leading to Annihilus?

Going to see Quantumania in about an hour and a half. Been pleased to have avoided spoilers thus far.

Yes!

That bums me out, but it probably makes sense.

There are rumors going around that will be in Secret Invasion.

Yeah, there are still four movies coming out this year. The Flash movie apparently wipes out the current DCU and sets the stage for what comes next. I wasn’t clear whether Blue Beetle will be in the new DCU.