Eternals (2021, Chloé Zhao)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

A group of 10 godlike beings living on Earth face their biggest challenge in centuries when monsters known as Deviants make a reappearance…

Eternals director Chloé Zhao has pointed out that her film was originally intended to be released soon after 2019’s Avengers: Endgame… and not ‘at a time when everyone is having an existential crisis.’ When Eternals finally debuted in November 2021, the world was 18 months into a global pandemic and most people’s lives had been upturned beyond prior belief. The very form of cinema was under attack too, from both falling audience numbers and the lure of streaming services.

However, in a strange way, the enforced delay helped this movie feel more relevant. This is a story about a lot of things – hubris, faith, family, trust – but everything is weaved around a multi-character existential crisis. A long-standing status quo is no longer sacrosanct and, in effect, gods start to question their roles in society. It’s weighty stuff. And the film matches this with some appropriately epic window-dressing – events take place on a galactic canvas, across millennia, with a huge roster of heroes, in locations ranging from 5000BC Mesopotamia to outer space via hipster Camden Lock, and there are some massive special effects that fill the frame with wonder.

Thousands of years ago, a group of 10 Eternals – never-ageing super-beings from the planet Olympus – were sent to Earth to protect the burgeoning human race from savage monsters called Deviants. Once the Deviants had been thwarted, however, the Eternals stayed. As they awaited further instruction from their omniscient overlord, Arishem, they gradually drifted apart and started to build new lives on Earth…

As things pick up in the present day, Sersi (Gemma Chan) and Sprite (Lia McHugh) are living in London… but their normality is ruined when a Deviant appears and attacks them and Sersi’s human boyfriend Dane (Kit Harington) after a night out! Oh no, the Deviants are back! The heroes manage to defeat the beast with the help of another Eternal – and Sersi’s ex – Ikaris (Richard Madden), who arrives on the scene in the nick of time. But knowing they now face a new threat, Sersi (who’s been working at the Natural History Museum), Sprite (who’s cursed to always look like she’s a teenager) and Ikaris (who, we learn, was the inspiration for the myth of Icarus) decide on a plan…

‘We need to find the others,’ says Ikaris 19 minutes into the film, referring to their fellow Eternals. He says the exact same line after 62 minutes too, because getting the gang back together takes a whopping 88 minutes of runtime. As the characters globetrot around, collecting colleagues one or two at a time and explaining the same information more than once, it really makes you wonder why these pricks don’t just WhatsApp each other. In fact, given the episodic quest to assemble a multi-character gang, perhaps this idea would have worked better as a Disney+ miniseries. But then again, Eternals’ widescreen spectacle is very welcome in a time when cinema is fighting against the pull of the streaming services.

At least the quest is dotted with flashbacks to the team’s time hanging out in ancient cultures and gently nudging humanity along by inventing the plough and drinking in taverns. But while we learn more about these characters, all this stuff does highlight a fundamental issue. There are just too many lead heroes for one film. Like the 13 dwarves in The Hobbit films, we simply don’t have a chance to get to know them that well. Several Eternals soon default to stock attributes: the deaf one, the punchy one, the Angelina Jolie one.

An additional crisis strikes early on as Sersi and co travel to South Dakota to visit their motherly leader, Ajak (Salma Hayek), and find that she’s been killed – seemingly by a Deviant. We don’t see the death, however, which will make any Agatha Christie fans in the audience suspicious: her plots often have events happening ‘off-stage’ in order to hide what really happened…

With this tragedy weighing on their shoulders – and Sersi having taken over as leader – Sersi, Sprite and Ikaris track down Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani), who’s been spending the last century or so becoming a star in the Bollywood film industry. (He boasts that his new musical is based on Ikaris.) Kingo also has a valet – ‘Just like Alfred in Batman,’ we’re told in one of several cheeky references to non-Marvel genre stories – who then follows the team around shooting a video diary. As you do when the world’s at stake. The gang next head to an Australian desert to find Thena (Angelina Jolie), a psychologically troubled Eternal who’s being watched over by her friend Gilgamesh (Don Lee); he mixes fighting skills with apron-wearing domesticity. Next on the itinerary is a visit to a forest in South America to find the psychic – and tediously grumpy – Druig (Barry Keoghan); then the ever-growing group recruit Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), a gizmo boffin who’s now enjoying being a middle-class husband and father, and finally Makkari (Lauren Ridloff), a super-speedy deaf girl who has seemingly been spending centuries hanging out in the team’s spaceship on her own.

The mission to reunite the Eternals, which in a film like Ocean’s 11 would be a quickly cut montage before the main action, more or less *is* the story. The Deviant threat never feels that vivid, so the emphasis is on character stories. Phastos’s new family dynamic and Thena’s mental-health challenges are interesting subplots, while the character of Ikaris works very nicely as a kind of satirical Superman (with a dark subtext that only becomes clear in the final act). The Sersi/Icarus/Dan love triangle also has an added level of fun because it features two actors from Game of Thrones and third playing a character whose name is very similar to one used in that show. (Music composer Ramin Djawadi also worked on both Thrones and Eternals; his score here is terrific.)

That sums up Eternals, in fact. The film, all 150 minutes of it, may lack a logical progression or much sense of urgency, but there are plenty of classy moments and details to keep it enjoyable. The pacing is slow but unhurried rather than boring. The design work often has a real beauty, especially the costumes, even if some of that work is blighted by the usual Marvel reliance on cartoony, green-screeny special effects. And this is a noticeably diverse film, with Marvel ticking off many firsts for their superhero series: the first deaf character, the first gay superhero, the first Korean superhero, the first sex scene…

But the existential crisis comes to the fore when the reunited heroes learn a shock truth: planet Earth is soon to be destroyed by ‘the emergence’, an event which will birth a new celestial being. And it’s even worse than that: apparently the Eternals have been through all this before on other planets but have their memories wiped each time by Arishem. They are essentially robots, artificial creations incapable of evolution. As well as throwing the heroes into a chaos of self-doubt and nailing down the movie’s general theme, there’s a nice connection here to a scene from before the crisis kicked in. At the Natural History Museum in London, Sersi had joked, ‘I know I’m late, Charlie,’ as she passed Charles Darwin’s statue in the central hall. An acknowledgment of the Darwinian life cycle, perhaps? Or is it a gag about Covid delaying the film’s release?

Seven cameos from Harry Styles out of 10

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021, Destin Daniel Cretton)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

When his terrorist father tracks him down, a young Asian-American man called Sean – also known as Shang-Chi – must face his past…

We all have to grow up at some point. The Peter Pan at the heart of this Marvel superhero movie, Sean, lives in San Francisco. (Establishing shot of the Golden Gate Bridge? TICK!) He’s working as a parking valet with his best friend Katy (Awkwafina) and they get their kicks joy-riding the expensive motors a la the car-park attendants in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But when the pair go for dinner with some more-mature friends, they’re told to stop acting like kids. ‘We’re not running away from adulthood,’ moans Katy later, as she and Sean head off to party all night. ‘How is it running away to have jobs you like?’

All this arrested development contrasts with the film’s mythological content, which had earlier been introduced in a sombre prologue with lots of backstory told via Mandarin voiceover (get used to subtitles, English-speakers!). A thousand years ago, a warrior called Xu Wenwu became immortal after taking possession of 10 magical rings (arm rings, not the kind you pop on your fingers). Using their power for evil, he founded the Ten Rings – a clan of soldiers and agents that affected the course of human history for a millennium.

But, as is often the way with tyrants, Xu Wenwu wanted even more power so also sought out the mystical village of Ta Lo, where magical beasts are purported to live. This quest brought him into contact with a young woman called Ying Li and, after a balletic, Crouching Tiger-style fight sequence, they fell in love, married and had two children. But after Ying Li’s murder, their son Shang-Chi fled into hiding… in San Francisco, adopting the pseudonym Sean…

The first that Sean and Katy know anything is amiss in their easygoing life is when Sean is attacked on a bendy bus. Some thugs want a pendant that hangs around his neck, and the scene develops into a really terrific action run as Sean brawls with the bad guys while the bus careers down endless San Fran hills. It’s all here: slick fight moves, audacious stunts, inventive choreography, crazy camerawork, slo-mo, a driver who doesn’t notice the commotion because of his earphones (surely a sackable offence!) and plenty of comic relief – such as a cheeky moment when the gas-guzzling vehicle flattens a whole rack of eco-scooters.

Realising he’s in trouble, Sean decides to seek out his estranged sister – and Katy insists on coming along too. She’s that kind of sidekick– I mean, best friend. At the top of a skyscraper in Macau, Sean and Katy find an illegal fight club being live-streamed on the dark web. One of the fighters cheered on by the hipster crowd is Doctor Strange‘s friend Wong; another is Abomination, a character who hasn’t appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since 2008. We soon clock that the fights are staged, like pro wrestling, but Sean is still bamboozled when… for some flimsy reason… he’s compelled to take part in a bout. And guess who his opponent is? His sister, Xu Xialing (a po-faced Meng’er Zhang), who actually runs the fight den.

After the siblings’ frosty reunion, there then follows the movie’s second tremendous action sequence. Agents sent by Sean’s father attack the club and our heroes are chased onto vertiginous scaffolding on the outside of the skyscraper. Gravity-flaunting stunts are filmed with craning cameras, adding a dizzying, disorientating feel, while the 3D environment means characters move up and down levels as the action plays out – it’s a human marble-run of a fight. (There’s also a winsome gag as nervous Katy attempts to confuse an assailant by singing Hotel California right into his face. Awkwinfina really is this film’s star player.)

So far, so watchable.

However, at the conclusion of the scaffolding scrap, Xu Wenwu himself appears on the scene and takes Sean, Katy and Xu Xialing back to his movie-villain compound in the hills. And at this point the film almost entirely falls apart.

Tony Leung, who plays Xu Wenwu, is a Hong Kong actor with a weighty CV and an impressive reputation; he wowed in the 2000 romantic film In the Mood for Love. But here he’s given endless, introspective speeches and info-dumps, which he fails to make sing; all the energy and zip that’s been building through the first act fizzles away as Xu Wenwu blandly explains that he wants Sean to join him in leading the Ten Rings. He’s also still looking for the village of Ta Lo, which he believes is now home to the ghost of his long-dead wife. We then get lots – I mean, really LOTS – of very tedious flashbacks to Sean’s youth that tell us nothing we didn’t already know. But the biggest storytelling sin is that Sean now becomes a completely passive character, who stands or sits around while his father pontificates. He’s become a hero with no goals, no desires, no direction.

In amongst all this, there’s also the return of Ben Kingsley’s Trevor Slattery from Iron Man 3 (‘Oh hello, loves. What year is it?’). In that 2013 movie, Trevor had been a comical decoy leading a fake version of the Ten Rings, so his use here is a tacit admission from Marvel that Iron Man 3 had been a bit insensitive when using one of the comics’ few Asian concepts. Kingsley is good value as the hazy, discombobulated hippy, and the humour is welcome, but he adds precious little else. Well, he does link us to a spectacularly lazy bit of plotting: Slattery has a pet called Morris, who is a mystical creature the size of an average dog but with no head (‘Where’s his face?!’ says an appalled Katy)… and Morris just happens to know the secret way to Ta Lo! In another unlikely stroke of luck for Sean and co, his dad has no one guarding Slattery or keeping an eye on a garage full of fuelled-up cars. So our heroes affect a very easy escape.

Ta Lo turns out to be a magical land of CGI creatures and green-screen countryside. Sean and Xu Xialing meet their aunt, Nan (Michelle Yeoh, serenely smiling her way through the part), and it now becomes her turn to intone *yet more* redundant, repetitive backstory to a bewildered Sean. All the characters then prepare for the imminent arrival of the invading Ten Rings army, so we move into a sequence of A-Team-style tooling up and weapon building and the risible idea that Katy becomes a master archer in a couple of lessons. Sean and Xu Xialing are also given tailored superhero costumes that their mother somehow knew they’d both need one day when they were grown up. And, yes, we even have time for some more soppy and wholly unnecessary flashbacks.

During the action finale – a chaotic collage of stunt men fighting, CGI dragons flying, and everything becoming dark and swirly – the stakes just don’t matter. The preceding 90 minutes have been so slapdash in telling a story that nothing feels of any consequence. Because he’s been pushed around by circumstance rather than driving his own movie, we never really understand what Sean wants. We don’t know him at all, in fact – an issue not helped by a performance from actor Simu Liu that sticks relentlessly to the middle of the road, never being too emotional, never being too funny, never being too distinctive.

Like a lot of drama, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is essentially about parents and how they shape us. The dead-angelic-mother cliche is wheeled out, while Sean’s father is a murderous tyrant, but Sean can’t just move on with his life. As much as he tries by living in America and speaking English and wearing a high-school letterman jacket, we’re told that Sean can’t escape his heritage or his father. As Nan explains, ‘You are a product of all who came before you. A legacy of your family – all the good and the bad. It is all a part of who you are.’ Perhaps; it’s an age-old narrative cliche. But these things need to be *earned*, not just stated. We never understand why – or even if – Sean is that concerned about his father.

Compare with Star Wars hero Luke Skywalker, whose love/hate relationship with *his* corrupt father moves through several phases of knowledge and emotional resonance. At the start of the first film, Anakin Skywalker is a long-dead, idealised figure. As the layers are peeled back across the trilogy, Luke’s opinions about his dad develop and change – and the storytelling demonstrates how conflicted he is in various ways. We experience what he experiences, learn what he learns, feel what he feels – it’s a journey and it hits home. Sean, however, is a blank space where this kind of drama should be.

Elsewhere, the film contains almost no intrigue or subtext. Practically everything about Sean and his role in the plot is on the surface and spelt out. Xu Wenwu is a tediously open book. Supporting character Nan knows everything before we ever meet her. No one discovers anything for themselves or works anything out. They already know or are told, usually in very boring ways.

This is childish storytelling, like a fairy tale aimed at toddlers. Great characters investigate and make decisions and affect the world around them and are affected by their emotional reactions. It’s why stories work; it’s why we sympathise with characters. It’s definitely time for Shang-Chi – the weakest film so far in the entire MCU series – to grow up.

Five Asian Jeff Gordons out of 10

Black Widow (2021, Cate Shortland)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

After her foster sister sends her a batch of antidote vials, Avenger Natasha Romanoff decides to bring down the terrorist group that once brainwashed her…

The 24th entry in a linked series of films might be an odd time to look back – and in fact, Black Widow’s release in 2021 came just as the Marvel powers-that-be were turning their attentions to new characters, new worlds and new stories on both the big screen and the small. But this is a retrospective movie, essentially an origin story in disguise, which digs deep into its lead character’s history. There’s also a sense that both Natasha and the filmmakers want to mend the errors of the past.

One of those errors was the lack of a real introduction for the MCU’s biggest female character. Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) first landed on planet Marvel in 2010’s underwhelming sequel Iron Man 2. She was a supporting character, most notable for her tightly fitting costumes, kick-ass fight scenes and smart casting. Without much examination of her personality or backstory, she was then placed at the Avengers top table. By her second appearance, she was sharing screen time and billing with the likes of Thor and Captain America – characters who had had entire movies devoted to their introductions. We learnt bits and pieces as Natasha kept cropping up in other people’s stories – her time as a shady assassin, her deep friendship with fellow Avenger Clint Barton – but there was always a nagging doubt that we were being shortchanged.

Why hadn’t she been given her own solo film? This was one of the top-rank Avengers, a character who’s part of that iconic six-way team-up shot in the first Avengers mash-up. Was it purely an economic choice on the part of Marvel Studios? Notoriously, there’s long been a feeling that boys and young men – these films’ primary target audience – won’t turn up for a female-led superhero flick. Perhaps. It took until film 20 (Ant-Man and the Wasp) before a female character was named in the title of an MCU movie, and it wasn’t until 2019 that one was the lead character (Captain Marvel).

Sadly, due to both on-screen events elsewhere in the MCU and some behind-the-scenes ructions, Black Widow – which finally puts Natasha front and centre – will probably be the character’s swan song as well as her ersatz-origin story. So, with no future, the movie has no choice but to look back.

We start in Ohio, 1995, for a prologue showing us Natasha’s unconventional childhood. At first, all seems content. The young Natasha (played here by Ever Anderson) is living with her parents (David Harbour and Rachel Weisz, both subtly de-aged by CGI) and her younger sister, Yelena (Violet McGraw). But then we learn that this domestic cosiness is a lie. Just like in the TV drama The Americans, mom and pop are actually deep-cover Russian spies – sent to live in the US and await instructions. They’re not even the girls’ real parents. When their identities are rumbled, all four must flee in a sequence that builds from sweet, suburban happiness into a crazy action-movie chase sequence very nimbly, with Lorne Balfe’s score adding lots of adrenaline.

Cut to ’21 years later’ (never look too closely at the Marvel timeline; it doesn’t always tally) and we realise we’ve been dropped into some established continuity. References in the dialogue and a cameo from William Hurt’s politician Thaddeus Ross tell us that this is soon after the events of the 2016 film Captain America: Civil War. Natasha (now Scarlett Johansson) is on the run and goes into hiding in Norway, but she’s soon sent some mysterious vials and is then attacked by a ruthless agent called Taskmaster (great costume, no dialogue). It’s all connected to Natasha’s estranged foster sister, Yelena, who since 1995 has become a brainwashed assassin for the same evil agency that once controlled Natasha. On a mission in Morocco, Yelena (now grown up and played by Florence Pugh) is hit by a burst of gas, which breaks her conditioning and allows her to think for herself for the first time in years…

Given the focus of a whole film, Scarlett Johansson is terrific. This is a confident performance, full of Bourne-like physicality and plenty of dry humour. But Pugh is absolutely her equal, whether it be in the stunt work and fighting, or the comedy and pathos. She has a real X-factor – charismatic, adorable, lots of moxie – almost like a star from the Golden Age of Hollywood. And when the two sisters encounter each other in Hungary, the pairing works wonders straight away. Here are two actors who can spark off each other, play the drama at the same time as the action, and never feel like they’re competing for the camera. This easy connection allows for plenty of fun – especially when Yelena teases Natasha over her superhero poses – as well as an emotionally satisfying storyline. Like a lot of sisters, their relationship is an unpredictable mix of rivalry, cattiness and genuine if unspoken love.

Reluctantly joining forces, the two characters set off to track down the Red Room, the organisation that coerces young girls into becoming cold-blooded killers. Their quest leads to some revelations, such as what really went down in Budapest when Natasha was recruited by Clint Barton (this calls back to a throwaway reference made several films ago). And there’s also a family reunion… Needing information from their former foster father, Alexei Shostakov, the women break him out of a snowbound Russian gulag. Although now a podgy middle-aged bear with prison tats, Alexei was once the svelte Soviet superhero Red Guardian – and he has a comical obsession with his presumed rival, Captain America. (The two men have never actually met.) With Alexei’s help, Natasha and Yelena also track down their foster mother, Melina Vostokoff, who’s now experimenting on pigs at a remote, isolated farm. With the ‘family’ back together for the first time in two decades, grievances are aired at the dinner table as all four bicker and spill some home truths – a great example of how Marvel films hide emotion and drama beneath comedy.

Alexei’s Captain America fixation is apt, because this movie does share an awful lot in common with 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Both are superhero adventures that lean towards real-world politics and spy-shit subterfuge. Both see Natasha on the run from the law with a platonic friend with whom she shares some sassy banter. In each film, our heroes go up against a well-funded, long-established system that’s rotten at its core and has a history of subjugating people into being super-soldiers trained in Russia. There’s a villain played by a big-name actor (here, Ray Winstone on autopilot). And the heroes’ primary adversary is a warrior in a face mask who, we later learn, has been scarred and embittered after a past tragedy and is not entirely cogent of their actions.

But thankfully Black Widow never feels like a copy. Due to good writing and impressive direction, the movie fizzes along enjoyably. The action is pleasingly free of distracting CGI (at least until a typically over-egged finale). And there’s an amazing balance to all the elements you need for a superhero blockbuster – action, comedy, drama, plot. None feels underused or neglected. This is reliable, popcorn entertainment which doesn’t take itself too seriously but still has room for rigorous storytelling and effective emotion. The touchstone for this kind of action-adventure film is, of course, James Bond. That debt is repaid here via a fun moment when we learn that Natasha can quote the 1979 Bond film Moonraker word for word.

And the 007 links don’t stop there. Two major cast members – Olga Kurylenko, who is eventually revealed behind Taskmaster’s mask, and David Harbour – appeared in the 2008 film Quantum of Solace, while another – Rachel Weisz – is married to James Bond star Daniel Craig. There must have been something in the water, in fact. As well as Black Widow’s ode to the shallow pleasures of Moonraker, 2021 saw other films paying tribute too. Edgar Wright’s thriller Last Night in Soho features a character magically transported back to the 1960s and seeing a huge cinema marquee for Thunderball, while a scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 70s-set drama Liquorice Pizza plays out in front of an advertising hoarding for Live and Let Die.

But as much as Black Widow looks back, it ends by also looking forward. The main storyline concludes with a scene to lead us into the events of the whopping two-parter Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, while a post-credit scene hints at further adventures for Yelena. Perhaps there is a future after all.

Eight pockets out of 10

Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019, Jon Watts)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

While on a school trip to Europe, Peter Parker teams up with a new superhero to battle rampaging Elemental creatures…

The world is in mourning and the students at New York City’s Midtown High School have put together an in-memoriam video. After the events of Avengers: Endgame, several of the planet’s biggest superheroes are now out of the picture – including the late Tony Stark, aka Iron Man. As well as marking the start of a new phase in the Marvel Cinematic Universe series, the video also neatly reminds us of its recent ‘blipping’ storyline, which saw half of all life cease to exist for a period of time. Viewers who have only been following Spider-Man’s solo films would otherwise be justified in asking why the main characters in this sequel are still in school despite it being five years later.

Aside from not having existing for half a decade, not much has changed for schoolboy Peter Parker (Tom Holland). He still lives with his MILFy Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), is still attracted to his iconoclastic classmate MJ (Zendaya), is still best pals with the nerdy Ned (Jacob Batalon)… and is still splitting his time between studying and secretly suiting up as the superhero Spider-Man. But Pete can sense that a big change is on its way. With so many other Avengers now out of the game, Peter fears that he’ll be asked to step up and become a full-time protector of humanity. He’s even started to ignore phone calls from Avengers supremo Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson, in roughly his 700th MCU appearance).

A convenient distraction then arrives in the form of an overseas school trip. We’re launched into what could be described as Marvel’s European Vacation, which sees Peter, Ned, MJ and their friends travel to ‘Venice, Italy’. There’s wide-eyed sightseeing, musical montages, romantic hijinks, language confusions, and a trip to the world’s least-well-attended opera. As with Tom Holland’s first Spider-Man film, it’s all very light on its feet and likeable – the only blemish being the overly goofy teacher characters who fail to raise a smile. Holland himself is breathlessly energetic and endearing. But just as everything is going nicely touristy, disaster strikes. A huge water monster rises out of Venice’s canals and begins to cause carnage. Peter knows he should leap into action to help people – and helpfully, Aunt May has remembered to pack his Spider-Man outfit – but he can’t risk revealing his identity. Then another hero arrives on the scene and deals with the threat…

The newcomer, who soon acquires the suitably cool name of Mysterio, is the film’s main guest star and is played by Jake Gyllenhaal. At first he appears to be a derivative mish-mash of previous MCU characters – the look of Thor, the abilities of Doctor Strange, the nobility of Captain America – and the way he bests the ‘Water Elemental’ is via a typically busy, noisy, slightly cartoony and over-scored flurry of action, stunts and CGI. We’ve seen all this before, haven’t we? Well, yes we have. Many, many times. But there’s a postmodern sting in this tale…

After the chaos has subsided, Nick Fury arrives in Venice and introduces Peter to Mysterio, who says his real name is Quentin Beck and he’s from a now-destroyed version of Earth in an alternate reality. ‘This is Earth 616,’ he tells Peter. ‘I’m from Earth 833.’ The notion of there being several parallel Earths has long been a staple in superhero comic books, which have used the idea of a multiverse to present fresh takes on the same characters as well as team-up crossover events. The MCU film series has actually sourced some of its stories and ideas from more than one of these ‘realities’, while the concept has been a big feature of both the animated Marvel film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and the various TV shows in DC’s Arrowverse franchise.

The thing is, though? It’s all a lie. The multiverse idea in Far From Home is just sleight-of-hand intended to disguise Beck’s true identity and motivations. After Peter and Mysterio become close and even fight side by side when a Fire Elemental monster roars through Prague, the movie pulls one of those bold plot twists that occur every now and again in the MCU series. The reveal comes at the end of a downbeat, confessional scene around the hour mark. Peter has been struggling with his destiny as the new Tony Stark, and Mysterio – still in his superhero get-up – offers kindly, avuncular advice while the two chat in a quiet Prague pub. However, once a pepped-up Peter has left, the furnishings slowly fade away, as do some of the patrons. The scene was a piece of theatre, refitting an abandoned building as a busy bar via hologrammatic projectors. Beck then breaks character and we realise that Peter has been had. He’s the mark in the kind of long con used in The Sting or Ocean’s 11.

But there’s more going on here than just a flip-flop story point. ‘Someone get this stupid costume off me,’ Beck cries to his team, now he can stop acting like a hero. That disparaging remark about the ‘Mysterio’ outfit is the start of a smart and self-aware deconstruction of the Marvel house style. It soon becomes clear that Spider-man: Far From Home is having some fun at its own expense. In fact, it’s spoofing the whole superhero-movie genre.

We’re quickly told the backstory and the team’s motivations. Beck *is* from Peter’s version of Earth, and was actually a colleague of Tony Stark’s. Furious that Tony stole some of his breakthrough work without adequate credit – and jealous that Iron Man’s mantle is now being passed on to a teenager – he wants revenge. He’s rounded up some similarly aggrieved people and devised a plan. The destroyed version of Earth in an alternate dimension is just a cover story, an invention designed to fool Peter and Nick Fury. In con-artist terminology, it’s the convincer. It also fools us viewers, because it’s precisely the kind of plotline that today’s superhero films dabble with. ‘A soldier from another Earth named Quentin fighting space monsters in Europe is totally ridiculous,’ sneers Beck to his minions. ‘And apparently the kind of thing people will believe right now.’ He’s talking as much about modern cinema-goers as he is about Peter and Nick.

We also learn that Beck’s team are using holo technology and covert weapons to stage the Elemental attacks. The monsters themselves are just part of the illusion. This means an extra level of self-aware tomfoolery, because we then see Beck reviewing the ‘special effects’ beforehand. He watches a rehearsal of the faux carnage behind closed doors, and asks for tweaks and changes like a movie director approving the work of his VFX team. The sequence is fun and unexpected, but it’s also ridiculing the artifice of modern blockbusters. That’s an admirable joke for a billion-dollar franchise to pull.

If there’s a downside, then perhaps it’s that the metatextuality draws attention to this version of Spider-Man sometimes not feeling very Spider-Man-y. The MCU approach to the character has been to mould him into a replacement Iron Man. The character’s original USP – a friendly neighbourhood crime-fighter – is being ignored in favour of him acquiring a can-do-anything cybersuit, a pair of hi-tech smart glasses and help from an AI voiced by a sexy female. There’s fun in the way Peter – sometimes inadvertently – uses his new tech to get the upper hand in his bid to date MJ, but the youthful, playful distinction of the original character is being blurred. Perhaps the MCU creative team have sympathy with Quentin Beck. After all, Beck and his associates want the power that comes from being the planet’s biggest superhero – and, as Beck says, if you have a cape and some lasers then everyone will listen to you.

Eight Night Monkeys out of 10

Avengers: Endgame (2019, Anthony and Joe Russo)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

Reeling from the devastation caused by Thanos, the remaining Avengers and their allies attempt a risky strategy to put things right…

In early October 2019, a few months after the release of the Marvel superhero film Avengers: Endgame, the revered film director Martin Scorsese caused a minor kerfuffle. Asked if he’d seen any Marvel movies, he said, ‘I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.’

An array of fans cried foul on Twitter, ridiculing Marty as an out-of-touch old man or a snob or a fool or all three. (Samuel L Jackson, who’d had a small role in Scorsese’s Goodfellas before appearing in many Marvel films, gave a more measured response: ‘That’s like saying Bugs Bunny ain’t funny. Films are films. Everybody doesn’t like his stuff either.’) Scorsese is entitled his opinion. He’s earned that much after a career that has included genuine all-time-great works of the art form such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas, even if there’s a certain irony in him evoking the purity of cinema while preparing to release a film, 2019’s The Irishman, that has been funded by Netflix and will be available for people to watch on their phones astonishingly soon after its theatrical run.

Also, as clumsily articulated as his point was, modern, flashy, big-budget, effects-heavy superhero films are undeniably different beasts from, say, Lawrence of Arabia or Casablanca or American Beauty. Films such as Avengers: Endgame and its stablemates have a different focus, a different intent. Scorsese’s theme-park analogy actually holds up when you consider that every Marvel Cinematic Universe movie is awash with boldly designed visuals intended to excite and thrill, as well as camera movements and rapid editing designed to pull you along and sweep you around.

The problem comes when you assume that that’s *all* they are. To use Martin Scorsese’s logic against him, should we conclude that Mean Streets is not cinema but closer to a videogame because it contains lots of violence? Of course not. The film uses violence to tell its story, and its story is about human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.

It’s true that the Marvel series is open to any number of criticisms on a filmmaking level. The movies can be cinematographically bland, flatly staged, horrendously over-edited and lit like a game show; the scripts can feel hammered out by a committee and have a sense of explain-everything-for-the-people-in-the-cheap-seats; occasionally the stories can be undermined by boring action sequences and badly thought-out villains. However, saying they’re ‘not cinema’ is patently ridiculous. And while no one is going to claim that modern superhero films are as sophisticated as Shakespeare, so is implying that there’s no drama involved amongst the razzmatazz. Soon after that Scorsese quote went viral, the writer C Robert Cargill tweeted to say that when he was working on Doctor Strange, the 14th MCU film, ‘the vast majority of Marvel’s notes were about deepening character, strengthening the story, and asking us if we could “make it weirder”. Anyone who thinks Marvel is only trying to make theme park rides is being unjust and cynical.’

That approach is easy to believe when you watch Avengers: Endgame, which is nevertheless the most bombastically epic movie in a serious not short of bombast or epic qualities. The film, all three hours of it, is packed pull of *stuff* and characters and spectacle and action and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of talent and effort, but its story is still founded on character choices and character reactions. It starts, in fact, feeling less like an event movie and more like an indie drama: an understated cold open shot with a handheld camera shows us Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton in idyllic domesticity with his family. But then the mood darkens, as his wife and children fade out of existence thanks to the villainous actions of Josh Brolin’s Thanos as seen in previous MCU mega-hit Avengers: Infinity War.

Endgame is very much a follow-on from that earlier film. In fact, when originally announced in 2014 its title was Avengers: Infinity War – Part 2. However, the script moves events on by five years into a grim, sombre, post-Thanos world where the remaining members of society are trying to deal with their grief and their survivor guilt. Even the mighty Avengers and their associates have been hit hard by Thanos’s finger-clicking carnage. Well, ish… Fifty per cent of all life in the universe may be now gone, but for storytelling reasons the big headline characters who started this series of films – Tony Stark aka Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr), Bruce Banner aka Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Steve Rogers aka Captain America (Chris Evans), Natasha Romanoff aka Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Clint Barton aka Hawkeye – have all survived the cull.

Character stories dominate. Thor has descended into a overweight drunkard. The traumatised Clint has become a cyberpunk vigilante. Tony Stark has retreated into rural obscurity. Natasha is trying to coordinate the remaining Avengers but is emotionally raw. Bruce Banner has actually flourished, finally finding peace with the two halves of his personality. It’s a bravely downbeat way to start such a film, but a smart one. Martin Scorsese may disagree, but the MCU has always put emotion at the heart of their stories. For all the razzle-dazzle, each film has been about characters wanting things and overcoming hurdles. It’s fundamentally why the series has been so enjoyable. (And why it stands up so well when compared to the rival DC franchise.)

However, the dark mood doesn’t last. Slowly, bit by bit, the film raises its levels of humour and momentum as the characters realise they have a way of righting the wrongs caused by the now-dead Thanos. The surprise reappearance of Scott Lang aka Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), who avoided the cull because he was infinitesimally small in the quantum realm at the time, gives the gang the impetus to attempt a plan based on time-travel. The plan dominates the middle third of the movie, and is generally a hoot.

The goal is to obtain a full set of the Infinity Stones – singularly bland plot devices that have recurred throughout this series since 2011’s Thor movie – by removing them from the timeline before Thanos did his damage. We get the usual meta gags about how time-travel doesn’t really make sense (Back to the Future is cited), then we’re thrown into a gleefully self-indulgent tour around the MCU’s own heritage. Tony Stark, Steve Rogers and Scott Lang travel to the New York City of Avengers Assemble; Bruce Banner drops in on Tilda Swinton’s character from Doctor Strange; Thor and Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) head to the planet Asgard at the time of Thor: The Dark World; Nebula (Karen Gillen) and Rhodes (Don Cheadle) visit the planet Morag at the time of Guardians of the Galaxy; and later Tony and Steve must also travel to a secret research base in the 1970s where they encounter a succession of younger versions of important MCU characters (Michael Douglas’s Hank Pym, Hayley Atwell’s Peggy Carter and John Slattery’s Howard Stark). The sequences are riotously enjoyable, blending action-driven plotting and emotion with humour and postmodern winking-to-the-audience. Several times, new footage is stitched into old scenes, a la Back to the Future Part II, allowing both fresh perspectives and a hell of a lot of fun.

The final third of the movie is then more conventional, essentially boiling down into yet another MCU battle scene where thousands of characters are filmed (or created digitally) in isolation and then matted together in post-production. But you forgive it with Avengers: Endgame because the stakes have been laid out so cleverly. And for all its CGI noise and bluster, this climactic action sequence still contains plenty of character moments, comedy and stirring emotions. (Having said that, how you respond to an archly designed moment that features all the major female characters – Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), Wanda Maximoff aka Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), Okoye (Danai Gurira), Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Shuri (Letitia Wright), Hope van Dyne aka Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Nebula – teaming up for *one shot* will depend on your levels of cynicism. Is it a daring, pointed, woke breakthrough? Or a rather silly bit of tokenism? You decide!)

Endgame is well named. The MCU series has continued, with movies and TV spin-offs announced for several years to come. But this film has the real feel of a season finale, an end point, a conclusion. The two biggest, most well-known and most popular characters are written out, while it features the final cameo from Marvel godfather the late Stan Lee. It’s the end of an era. Given how effective the emotional series of wrap-up scenes are, it’s also undeniably the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.

Nine men shouting, ‘Make love, not war!’ out of 10

Captain Marvel (2019, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

A female soldier from a far-off world crash-lands on Earth in the 1990s and soon begins to piece together her mysterious past…

‘So Captain Marvel zaps him right between the eyes,’ John Lennon once sang. That was in 1968, more than half a century ago. But the Beatle could have been psychically predicting the impact of this 2019 superhero film, because the character of Captain Marvel is slick, fun and focused. She aims, shoots and hits her target. (Yeah, yeah, when Lennon made that throwaway reference in the lyrics to his song The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill, he actually meant a different comic-book character altogether. *That* Captain Marvel now goes by the name Shazam and, coincidentally, also had a solo superhero movie in 2019.)

But the fact that, for some of us, the film’s title brings to mind a track from the Beatles’ White Album is more than just vague thought association. Captain Marvel is dominated by a theme of nostalgia, of longing for a bygone time, of revelling in reminiscing. It even begins with a unique production-company logo that pays tribute to the Marvel universe’s founding father, the late Stan Lee. Whether you were alive to experience the Beatles first hand or have come to them after the fact, they cast an enormous shadow over pop culture. For most of us, they are one of the pillars of what we think of as ‘the 1960s’; for many, they’ve played a huge role in our lives. But they spilt up 50 years ago. We all have to *remember* them in order to enjoy their music.

Captain Marvel’s lead character, however, can’t indulge this kind of nostalgia because she can’t remember her past. In Hala, the capital of the Kree civilisation – which is another of those skyscraper-heavy alien cities realised via CGI that we always get in these types of films – a young woman called Vers (Brie Larson) is being trained by a mentor-type called Yon-Rogg (Jude ‘Does anyone not guess that he’ll turn out to be a bad guy?’ Law). She’s spunky, sassy and headstrong, has superpowers, and works as part of a gang of military commandos. She’s also sexy, but not in the usual superhero-film way. This character’s allure comes from self-assuredness and arch lines of dialogue delivered in heroic close-ups. She may wear a figure-hugging uniform, but she feels quite different – more confident, more independent, less fanboy-baiting – from Wonder Woman’s cosplay costume or Harley Quinn’s Lolita act. This film doesn’t succumb to ‘male gaze’ objectifying.

Early on, Vers has a one-on-one chat with a mystical deity, the Supreme Intelligence, which seems to run the Kree civilisation. Everyone sees this spirit as someone unique, and Vers’s vision is of a middle-aged American woman played by Annette Bening. Sadly, it’s a fairly clunky opening act, inelegantly full of setup rather than storytelling. In fact, it’s not so much storytelling as ‘storytold’: we have to take in a lot of information, which isn’t always elucidated very clearly.

The upshot is that Vers is struggling to remember her past. When some bad guys later rifle through the deep folds of her consciousness (it’s that type of film), she sees glimpsed flashbacks to what we recognise as a Top Gun-style life on Earth (‘Higher, faster, further, baby!’ being the Marvel equivalent of ‘I feel the need: the need for speed!’). The villains are looking inside her mind because they’re hunting for a faster-than-light engine, which Vers was somehow involved with. But inconveniently for both her and them, she has amnesia.

Thankfully, after 22 minutes, Vers is flung across space and crash lands onto Earth – specifically into a LA branch of Blockbusters in 1995. Our theme of nostalgia really kicks into gear now, whether you’re old enough to remember the 1990s or not. If you are, there’s a whole level of pleasure-through-recognition to be had: we see a poster for True Lies, a VHS copy of The Right Stuff, a GameBoy, cyber-cafes. We hear tracks by Smashing Pumpkins and Elastica. We smirk at the now-dated technology and cars and fashions. It’s all joyful nostalgia, well deployed to get both laughs and to set the scene. (The later use of the No Doubt track I’m Just a Girl in a fight scene, however, may be a contender for the most literal-minded use of a song in any movie ever.)

The film is also wallowing in its own history. The character of Nick Fury – who arrives on the scene after Vers’s crash-landing into the video store – has been an MCU stalwart since the first entry in the series in 2008. Now we have the joy of seeing him at an earlier stage of his life – before the Avengers, before his ‘death’, before he was the leader of SHIELD. The role is still played by Samuel L Jackson, but he’s been de-aged digitally. The special-effects work is utterly magnificent. Seriously, it is a seamless piece of artifice. Fury looks to be about 40 and you very quickly forget that he’s being played by a 69-year-old. All this wizardry also means that we get an additional level of Proustian recollection: Sam Jackson was already a huge Hollywood star in the mid-90s, and another chance to see the actor who played Jules from Pulp Fiction or Zeus from Die Hard with a Vengeance running around on the cinema screen is a real thrill.

Soon, Fury and Vers are thrown together by the plot and they make such an entertaining buddy-cop team-up that you’re left wondering whether we needed all that boring setup on Halo. The actors’ chemistry and comic timing are wonderful and the film comes alive any time they’re in the same scene. How much more elegant and more instantly fun would it have been to *start* with Vers’s arrival on Earth, and for us to learn about her as she and Fury discover things together?

But, a bit regrettably, there’s a plot to service. At least we have Ben Mendelsohn as Talos, a leader of the antagonistic Skrull race who’s seemingly the bad guy of the story but who actually turns out to have a more noble intent. The actor is developing a nice career of playing entertaining foes in genre films (cf Rogue One, Ready Player One), and is great value here. But as the film develops, there are two strands going on at the same time: a story in the present with Talos and his plans, and a story in the past. It’s the story in the past that’s the more resonant.

Via an impressive variety of means – snatched memories, secret military files, exposition from other characters, photos, audio recordings – Vers pieces together her backstory. She was, as we suspected, originally from Earth and was a hotshot test pilot called Carol Danvers. (When taken away from Earth by the selfish Ron-Yogg, his only clue to her identity was a damaged military identity badge showing just the final four letters of her name.) This mixture of tools to tell the story keeps things fresh and interesting, and we feel like we’re discovering information along with our central character. The quest to find out what’s going on – who exactly Vers is, who Annette Bening’s Supreme Intelligence was based on – leads Vers and Fury to a old fighter-pilot colleague of Carol’s called Maria (Lashana Lynch) and her young daughter, Monica (Akira Akbar). The latter can remember Carol from six years previously, despite only being about eight years old – another instance of this film playing with how memories work.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has now reached 21. Captain Marvel is the 21st film in the megalithic series that shows no signs of slowing down now it can buy alcohol in America and adopt children in the UK. Whether this entry becomes as memorable as some of the big-hitters that have come before is debatable. But it’s enjoyable, entertaining and well made. It’s also very funny. A scene where characters need to wait several, silent seconds for an audio file to load on Maria’s 1990s PC is a mini-masterpiece of humour and deserves to be remembered for a long time.

Eight Stan Lees on a bus reading the script for Mallrats in preparation for his real-life cameo in that 1996 comedy movie out of 10

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018, Peyton Reed)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

Scott Lang is under house arrest, but must leap into action when old pals Hank and Hope need help finding a long-lost loved one…

By the mid 1980s, Christopher Reeve had played Superman in three successful movies. For the fourth instalment, he was given an opportunity to develop the story himself and he hit upon the idea of Superman tackling the world’s growing proliferation of nuclear weapons. He then went to Tom Mankiewicz, the writer of the first two films, for some advice… and Mankiewicz told him to avoid the issue like it were Kryptonite. If Superman can solve the Cold War, he argued, then surely he can do anything. As a story idea, it just opened up too many cans of worms. Why doesn’t the Man of Steel cure cancer, then? Why doesn’t he solve world hunger? Why doesn’t he stop every rapist?

In the event, the advice was ignored – and we ended up with the rotten Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. But Mankiewicz had a point. Superheroes are not real. They don’t fit well into the real world. Superhero films need to construct a context for their stories – one where, for example, it’s plausible that an all-powerful character such as Superman could have obstacles to overcome. But in Ant-Man and the Wasp, the desire to have some fun results in a film where you constantly ask, ‘If they can do *that*, why don’t they just…?’

It’s been a couple of years since we last checked in with Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), the ex-con who became the miniaturising superhero Ant-Man in his debut film. He’s under house arrest after an unauthorised sojourn to Germany in Captain America: Civil War, but is having fun visits from his young daughter and is also setting up a security business with his pals. Meanwhile, his old cohorts Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) are attempting to develop technology that will allow them to locate Hope’s mother, Janet. She was lost in the quantum realm when she shrank down dangerously small 30 years earlier. Oh, and Hope has become a superhero herself: she has her own miniaturising suit – complete with wings and blasters – and is known as the Wasp. (She’s therefore the first woman mentioned specifically in the title of an MCU movie. It’s taken 20 films.)

Hank and Hope’s quest means doing a shady deal with a rent-a-complication bad guy called Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins). They need to acquire some vital equipment for their Death Star-like quantum tunnel – a device that will shrink them small enough to find the infinitesimally small Janet. And here’s just one instance of ‘Why don’t they just…?’ Hope can reduce herself to the size of a wasp. She has a gizmo that means she can change the size of other things too – cars, salt cellars, entire buildings and all their contents – so where is the suspense meant to be when Burch reneges on the deal? Can’t she just buzz in, shrink the equipment and buzz off without anyone knowing?

Anyway, when the deal goes south, a fight breaks out – and Hope and Burch’s goons are not the only ones involved. A mysterious character referred to as Ghost shows up and is determined to claim the equipment for herself. (Ghost is patently a woman, though at first Hope and Hank assume she’s a man for some reason.) Covered in a mushroom-grey bodysuit that brings to mind tardigrades, bizarre micro-animals that grow to just half a millimetre in size, she steals the MacGuffin and legs it. We then learn that she’s Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), a young woman who – due to an scientific accident when she was a child – is constantly phasing in and out of reality. She’s being helped by an old pal of her father’s, Bill Foster (Laurence Fishburne, previously Perry White in the rival DC series of movies).

With the pieces now in place, the ‘plot’ becomes a succession of chase sequences as various characters attempt to gain control of Hank’s lab, which has been shrunk down to the size of suitcase. Some of them are fun, such as a comedic sequence at a school that sees Scott inconveniently stuck at either half or twice his normal size. (After her time in the Hobbit films, Evangeline Lilly has form for playing opposite actors being artificially sized up or down by CGI. The film also wisely ignores any fetish subtext of her appearing half the size of Paul Rudd.) But there are a large number of plot holes, which become more and more difficult to ignore.

The biggest comes when Hank, Hope and Scott manage to send Hank down into the quantum realm and he finally locates his long-lost wife. Janet is played by silver vixen Michelle Pfeiffer, but no attempt is made to explain how she’s survived in a desolate micro-world for 30 years. What has she been eating? Drinking? Using for moisturiser? Why hasn’t she gone insane after three decades with no human contact or external stimuli? Perhaps, having been Catwoman in a different superhero series, she’s got more than one life to play with.

Another disappointment is the drearily orthodox filmmaking. Maybe this is like criticising a four-door family salon for not being a sportscar, but Ant-Man and the Wasp is very bland cinema. Scene after scene plays out in boring medium shots and over-the-shoulder cutting. There’s no distinction or panache to anything, no visual storytelling (which is even more of a shame when you notice that the cinematographer is Dante Spinotti, who shot Heat and LA Confidential). All the movement, drama and emphasis comes from the never-ending editing. It’s by no means unique to this film, it must be said: it’s the MCU house style.

But despite these problems, this is still a zippy, enjoyable – if disposable – couple of hours. Paul Rudd is charming, funny and likeable. Evangeline Lilly is excellent, providing both sass and heart. There are some good jokes, including a few meta-gags that poke fun at the film’s clichés. Michael Peña is good value as Scott’s mate Luis, even getting a reprise of his fast-talking montage from the first Ant-Man film. And of course there’s the general Marvel sheen to everything. But it’s doubtful it’ll linger long in the memory.

Six men who miss the 1960s out of 10

Avengers: Infinity War (2018, Anthony and Joe Russo)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

The Avengers must spring into action when the powerful Thanos begins to acquire the Infinity Stones…

Avengers: Infinity War is the fourth massive, multi-character, multi-plot, multi-focus mash-up movie in the Marvel series – and it’s easily the most successful. A big reason for this is the structure of the plot. Avengers Assemble (2012), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) and Captain America: Civil War (2016) all feature many, many heroes and sidekicks wanting our attention and yet are built around a single, unifying idea. In the first film, the team must come together to face Loki. In the second, the team must stay together to defeat Ultron. In the latter, the team are split into two camps and face off against each other.

But the script of Infinity Wars is a different kettle of superheroes. There’s still an overarching plot, of course. After several cameo appearances and references in previous films, the all-powerful god Thanos (Josh Brolin) wants to be even more all-powerfuller so is collecting the magical Infinity Stones, ancient totems that will allow him to wipe out half of all life in the universe. The extended Avengers family must work towards stopping him.

But writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely – key players at MCU HQ since 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger – break this storyline down into discrete segments. As the various characters we’ve got know over the last 18 movies react to the Thanos threat, they’re divvied up into separate groups, each one getting its own chance to shine. For example, in one thread, there’s the joy of Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Tony Stark aka Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) butting heads and trying to out-Sherlock each other. Peter Parker aka Spider-Man (Tom Holland) also tags along like a fanboy. Elsewhere, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) crash-lands into the sarcasm-and-sassiness world of the Guardians of the Galaxy, while Steve Rogers aka Captain America (Chris Evans) and Natasha Romanoff aka Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) are living a mean, tough, espionage-y life. With such a big cast – the DVD cover manages to squeeze *24* of them into one collage – it’s admirable that they all feel like they have a role to play in the story. (The only notable absentees from the MCU roster are Ant-Man, being held back for the next movie in the series, and the forgettable Clint ‘Hawkeye’ Barton who’s said to have retired.)

All this makes for a dynamic film that keeps zipping around a huge canvas – from enormous starship battles in deep space to a kebab shop in Edinburgh’s Old Town – and always to characters you’re interested in. Each scene moves the larger plot forward and no section outstays its welcome. There’s the usual helping of action sequences, of course, including an arch moment when Tony walks out of a quiet building, down a street full of fleeing people and turns the corner to see a gigantic space ship hovering above Manhattan – all seemingly done in one uninterrupted take. Meanwhile, the script never loses sight of humour, with Thor and Peters Quill and Parker probably getting the most amount of funny lines. Black Panther sidekick Okoye (Danai Gurira) also wins a big laugh during the obligatory third-act battle. Secondary Avenger Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) had earlier been in the palace looking after an injured Vision, but now joins the fighting and blasts some bad guys with her psychic force powers. ‘Why was she up there all this time?!’ deadpans Okoye, impressed.

This is a big, brash popcorn movie that entertains so successfully that you’re distracted from the flaws. There’s the inherent silliness of the premise, which is a rather unimaginative story about a bad guy wanting to do bad things to innocent people just because he can. There’s the lazy repeat of a third-act battle taking place in Wakada (which also happened in the immediately previous film, Black Panther). And there’s the fact that the Infinity Stones are thunderingly boring and drab plot devices. But little of this matters when a movie is this much *fun*, and when it keeps throwing up telling character moments, enjoyable combinations of characters, and even an apocalyptic, how-will-they-get-out-of-that?! cliffhanger, designed to lead into 2019’s as-yet-unnamed sequel…

Eight bus drivers out of 10

Black Panther (2018, Ryan Coogler)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

Having taken over as ruler of Wakanda, King T’Challa – aka the Black Panther – faces a challenger from his family’s past…

Black Panther is a marvellous showcase for Afrofuturism, an aesthetic that combines African-influenced art with technological motifs. Many scenes dazzle with costumes, sets, make-up and CG-created backdrops that show off this bold, beautiful, colourful look, and it gives the film a tone and mood different from any other movie of its type. As a new-to-Hollywood explosion of design it’s comparable to Blade Runner’s use of futuristic film noirism in 1982. You can feel the fresh air blowing through the genre, and this is indicative of the whole movie.

After 17 consecutive films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe built around white, male lead characters, here – pointedly, unashamedly, gloriously – is a story about black characters, featuring a mostly black cast and made by a black director. It certainly paid off financially: at the time of writing, Black Panther is the highest-grossing solo superhero film ever, the highest-grossing film made by a black director, and the ninth highest-grossing film of all time. Thankfully, it’s an enjoyable watch too.

The story begins a week after events seen in Captain America: Civil War (2016). After the death of his father in that movie, the new king of secluded African country Wakanda is T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), a dignified, unflappable man who clearly cares for his nation and takes his responsibilities seriously. He’s officially crowned after an elaborate and ritualistic ceremony, which is a scene that risks dragging the movie into po-faced territory. Thankfully, there’s some comic relief from T’Challa’s cheeky sister, Shuri (a sparkling Letitia Wright), who as the story progresses acts as Q to his James Bond. The king also has an entertainingly grumpy bodyguard called Okoye (played by Danai Gurira, who has badass form after her stint in The Walking Dead), while Hollywood old hands Forest Whitaker and Angela Bassett crop up in small roles.

But all is not copacetic is the world of Wakanda. Just like the Amazonian paradise seen in Wonder Woman – that other recent superhero film that broke free of the white-male paradigm – Wakanda is a highly developed society that has chosen isolationism. It hides away from the rest of the world, actively putting forth the myth that it’s a backwards country of farmers when it’s actually wealthier and more technologically advanced than anywhere else on the planet. It’s an odd situation in which to place your hero. Superman, Batman, the X-Men, Iron Man and the rest all risk their lives to help innocent strangers. T’Challa, however, is the ruler of a pull-the-ladder-up society. We don’t see him help a single person other than himself and his allies until the film’s closing moments. (It’s best not to ponder how many atrocities Wakanda has stood by and ignored over the years – just in Africa alone.)

But there’s a dissenting voice to this conservatism. T’Challa’s ex-girlfriend, Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), spends her time helping women in other countries and advocates sharing Wakanda’s wealth and resources with the world. This gets the king thinking, but his aide W’Kabi (Get Out’s Daniel Kaluuya) is concerned. ‘You let the refugees in, they bring their problems with them and then Wakanda is like everywhere else,’ he says. Charming.

Meanwhile, the plot kicks off… At the Museum of Great Britain, two men overpower security and steal an ancient weapon from a display case. Surely the UK was chosen by the writers deliberately because of its colonial past, while the use of a museum is a neat comment on the West’s appropriation of African heritage and culture; we even learn that the weapon has been naively mislabelled. It’s a fun, slick sequence and it introduces the movie’s villain in style. Erik Stevens (Michael B Jordan) is an American with Special Forces experience. Within moments of showing up, he’s joined Loki, Guardians of the Galaxy’s Yondu and Spider-Man: Homecoming’s Adrian Toomes as one of the most effective bad guys in the Marvel series. There’s danger and attitude in Jordan’s performance. There’s fun too: as well as nabbing the axe, Stevens also steals a flamboyant mask from the museum just because he ‘feels’ it. Working alongside him is Ulysses Klaue (an entertaining Andy Serkis, returning from 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron). In another loaded reference to white oppression, Klaue has an Afrikaans accent.

When T’Challa learns that old nemesis Klaue has some Vibranium – an exclusively Wakandian mineral – and plans to sell it in South Korea, the king wants him caught and brought to justice for past crimes. We then get a sequence in Seoul that’s often reminiscent of a similar scene in the Bond film Skyfall – our heroes stalk a golden-lit casino, quipping to each other over earpieces, before the fighting begins. At this point we’re also reintroduced to CIA agent Everett K Ross (Martin Freeman), who T’Challa encountered earlier in the series and is now after Klaue for his own reasons. (When Ross and Klaue meet, it means a reunion of Hobbit actors. As someone far cleverer than me once joked on Twitter, Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis are this film’s Tolkien white guys.)

After a fun car chase, with Shuri remotely operating a vehicle from back in her lab and T’Challa suiting up as his Black Panther alter ego, Stevens nabs Klaue from under the noses of new allies T’Challa and Ross. Stevens then kills his former ally and delivers his corpse to Wakanda. We learn that – although raised in America – Erik is actually N’Jadaka, the king’s cousin, so he has a claim to the throne. And he’s a far more radical personality than T’Challa. He’s seen the hardship suffered throughout the world by people ‘who look like us’ and wants to use Wakanda’s resources to help them fight back. Swaggering into a meeting of the king’s retinue, he demands a challenge of combat. T’Challa feels he has no option but to fight; Stevens wins, seemingly kills our hero, and takes over running the country.

There’s then, sadly, a rather leaden period of the film as it tries to pretend that T’Challa is dead. (Does that cliché *ever* work in a film?) Meanwhile, Stevens starts to enact his aggressive policies, much to the chagrin of the other Wakandians. It’s a bit like those episodes of The West Wing where CJ, Josh and the others react badly as John Goodman takes over as President. No one’s happy, but they don’t feel as if they have a choice. (Perhaps a fistfight in a lagoon is not the best way of choosing a nation’s executive officer, guys.)

Eventually, after it’s revealed that T’Challa is alive (yay!), he and his friends mount a huge assault on the capital and we head into one of those loooong superhero-movie climaxes of fighting, jumping, crashing, fighting, flying, quipping, fighting and lots of CGI-ing. But you forgive the film the indulgence. Firstly because Black Panther has been – for the most part – an engaging and enjoyable action flick. But secondly because it’s patently an important movie. Hollywood has been maddeningly slow to recognise the need for diversity, and superhero films have not been immune to that. Black Panther is a proud, confident step in the right direction.

And as it nears its end, it becomes apparent that the stylish design work is not the only echo of Blade Runner. There aren’t many films where the bad guy steals the scene as he realises he’s about to die, but it happens in Black Panther. After T’Challa and Erik have fought for the future of Wakanda, the latter is mortally wounded. The king says he can get help. ‘Why?’ says Stevens, tears in his eyes. ‘So you can just lock me up? Nah. Just bury me in the ocean, with my ancestors that jumped from the ships. Because they knew death was better than bondage.’

Eight gamblers in the casino out of 10

 

Thor: Ragnarok (2017, Taika Waititi)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

Captured and imprisoned on an alien word, Thor is forced to fight an old friend in gladiatorial combat. But back home on Asgard, his evil sister has taken control…

Despite cynics claiming that all superhero films take themselves too seriously, there’s been comedy in the Marvel Cinematic Universe series since day one. The Iron Man strand has given the world lots of droll sarcasm from Robert Downey Jr. Ant-Man and its star Paul Rudd often have tongues placed firmly in cheeks. Even the muscular thriller Captain America: The Winter Soldier uses gallows humour alongside its high-octane plotting. But even so, there was still something very significant about 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy.

As much an out-and-out comedy as a sci-fi adventure film, Guardians was very funny indeed. There were actual gags as well as playfulness, satire and self-deprecation. It was a risk, but it earned a huge amount of money and reviews were great. Coupled with the similar success of the likewise light-hearted superhero film Deadpool, and Marvel Studios knew they were onto a winner. Guardians soon got a sequel, but its influence also extended to another floor of the MCU skyscraper.

There had been two previous Thor films. Neither was without merit, but both suffered from a lack of distinction. The character’s debut movie, 2011’s Thor, hardly rewrote the rule book. Its sequel, 2013’s Thor: The Dark World, was the closest the MCU’s got to being actively boring. But for the third movie, there were big changes. It’d be underselling it to say Thor: Ragnarok is influenced by Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s more a shameless copy. Jokes are never far away from any scene. The film constantly pokes fun at itself and the genre as a whole. The colour scheme has switched from The Dark World’s grim, earthy dirge to an explosion of bright, bold, pop-art colours. And old music is used as score.

Inside five minutes, for example, there’s a confrontation between Thor (Chris Hemsworth, who knows how to handle comedy) and a mystical, all-powerful entity. It’s a moment seen often in genre films, yet here it’s played entirely for laughs. Then, as the action kicks in, so does the heavy-metal chugging of Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song (1970). As the film develops, we get pop-culture references, slapstick, insults, a cameo from Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange, another confident turn from Tom Hiddleston as Loki, and even guest appearances from Matt Damon, Chris Hemsworth’s brother Liam and Sam Neill as actors playing Loki, Thor and their father in a play loaded with in-jokes for attentive viewers.

It’s fun. Bags of fun. Enormous fun. A lot of the credit must go to director Taika Waititi, who also voices a very funny secondary character (‘I tried to start a revolution but didn’t print enough pamphlets so hardly anyone turned up.’). It would be very easy for a film like this – where the cast are clearly having a ball and where the writers are running free of the usual shackles – to descend into self-indulgent nonsense. Thor: Ragnarok teeters on the edge a few times, but Waititi always keeps it upright.

Having said that, long-term MCU fans do have to let a few things go. This film bears such little tonal relationship to Thor’s previous outings that it may as well be a spoof. Humour is no bad thing in a multi-million-dollar franchise blockbuster, but here it can sometimes feel flippant (a problem that the Iron Man and Guardians of the Galaxy movies have always sidestepped). When Jeff Goldblum shows up and gives the most Jeff Goldblummy performance in the history of Jeff Goldblummary, it’s certainly entertaining. But it doesn’t exactly help with the suspension of disbelief.

Because, buried under all the silliness, there is actually a plot going on. On a far-off planet, Thor is captured by a sometimes drunk bounty hunter with a secret heritage called Scrapper 142 (Tessa Thompson, very good). He’s sold into slavery, forced to have his Nordic locks cut off, and must fight as a gladiator in an intergalactic amphitheatre. His opponent? As revealed in the film’s gleeful trailers, it’s Hulk! Thor’s trepidation instantly dissolves as he sees his old pal (‘We know each other! He’s a friend from work!’) but the two superheroes are forced to brawl for the paying audience. Eventually Hulk calms down and, for the first time in two years, reverts into Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo, always good value). Then Thor gets word that home planet Asgard is under threat, so he and Bruce – the latter wearing a Duran Duran T-shirt – escape with the help of Scrapper 142 and Loki. The quartet form a team, jokingly self-named the Revengers.

Meanwhile, Hela – the goddess of death and Thor’s never-before-mentioned sister – is taking over Asgard, killing millions and waging war on the universe. She’s played by Cate Blanchet, who gamely wears a skin-tight costume and black eyeliner as she rants and raves and pontificates. The actress also has a Lord of the Rings reunion with Karl Urban, who here plays a cockney wide-boy Asgardian who unwillingly becomes her sidekick. But, as talented and entertaining as the pair are, their section of the story never really takes flight. The relentless comedy works against the story here: with the script constantly undercutting her pomposity, it’s too difficult to take Hela seriously.

In fact, the whole Asgardian section of the story feels unnecessary. Thor, Bruce Banner and co having breezy, riotous adventures in a colourful, sci-fi setting – all scored by 1980s-ish electronica and 1970s rock music – would be even more enjoyable without it.

Eight hairdressers out of 10