Nebula in Avengers Endgame

Infinity War was the first Superhero movie to actually feel like an Event Comic as a movie.  It wasn't the first named after an Event Comic, but the Civil War movie is much smaller in scale then the Comic was, it felt like less then a normal Avengers movie not more.

Avengers Endgame however managed to feel even more like an Event Comic.  In truth both movies together are the Event, and the post credit scenes of Antman & The Wasp and Captain Marvel are the cinematic equivalent of the tie in Comics.

Endgame is something that does not work as a stand alone film, even Infinity War could kind of work on it's own.  But in Endgame things like most of the cast not being there till the final act yet being treated as of equal importance once they show up could never work as a stand alone film.  But in this case that isn't a bad thing, because the meaning it has is worth it.

Again, my experience with Comics are almost all DC ones, so I'm a weirdo loving these Marvel movies for recreating the experience I get from some of my favorite DC Comics.

No Event Comic actually succeeds in making every one of it's hundreds of characters equally important, you have to accept that sometimes your favorite character might get just a couple cool moments.  What can be interesting is how some Events are quite surprising in who gets to be important.

In the main DC Events the big three are always important, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, for the MCU those are Iron Man, Captain America and Thor, and the Endgame Video Essays on YouTube I've seen so far have mainly been about how their meta arcs came to satisfying conclusions.

But after that things can seem random, like the group of heroes and villains the Monitor originally assembled for Crisis On Infinite Earths, or Power Girl and Superboy's importance to Infinite Crisis.  And in Endgame one example of that is Ant-Man's key role in how the resolution became possible.  But what's most fascinating to me is Nebula.

In the first two Guardians of The Galaxy films Nebula is an important supporting character, but still there mostly as an accessory to Gamora's character development and what their relationship infers to the audience about Thanos, and it's the same in Infinity War but with even less Screen-time.

But in Endgame she is now part of the core avengers team, we open with her having amusing interactions with Tony.  And now 2014-Gamora is basically just here to compliment Nebula's story.

I think that's a pretty interesting pay off if you're a fan of the character or of Karen Gillian.

"We don't trade lives".

I'm going to say something controversial, I hope no one has to die to undo the Snap in Avengers 4.  I hope they truly follow through on Cap's declaration of "We don't trade lives".

I watched a Video Essay Criticizing Antman and The Wasp for how they didn't follow thorough on their "tough choice".  This is like the Bathos issue in how my disagreement with common MCU criticisms are directly related to how much I love Anime.  Both the Magical Girl genre and what Digibro calls the "Otaku Hero's Journey" are predicated on saying "screw that crap, we will save everyone and make sure no one has to die no matter how much you insist that's impossible".  From Steins;Gate to Prisma Illya to No Game No Life.  I'm divided on how much Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha As fits this.

Now Antman and The Wasp still isn't as good as those Anime, it does feel a little like the resolution just sorta happened.  Thing is I also feel this "tough choice" was unearned to begin with, Laurence Fisbourne had no real reason to believe his plan would work anyway, yet this Video Essayist acts like it was such a real tense dilemma ruined because no one actually had to die. In-spite of that nit pick however I did enjoy the movie, it was fun, my Mom watched it 4 times in 3 days.

This Video Essay also talked about how "Sacrifice" is a long standing tradition of the Superhero Genre.  Well I'm like Linkara in that I'm tired of every Event (which there are 5 of every year now) needing to kill a few people off to have real "stakes".  I'm a Christian who Believes in Universal Salvation, Jesus Sacrificed Himself to save all Human Beings, even the ones who killed Him, and He Will Succeed.  And yes His Sacrifice was real because he still has the Wounds, that's the difference between His Resurrection and ours.

My Love of Anime has to do with how often the fiction of these modern Japanese Secular Shintoists comes closer to the True Gospel then what the Western Church has been saying for over a Thousand Years.

Another YouTube video I watched said Tony has to die because his story arc is over.  And that really annoys me, why does having no more story to tell have to equal death?  Why can't he just finally retire and start a family with Pepper?

I think there should be a Sacrifice but not one that's a truly permanent death.  I suspect our heroes will have to regather the Infinity Stones, and thus someone will have to be Sacrificed for the Soul Stone.  I think that should be Cap leaving the mantle of Captain America to Bucky for awhile.  But like Gamora he'll still be alive in the Soul Stone, maybe his going in will also let Gamora out.  Either way the potential to get him out in the future will be in place.

I'm not super optimistic about this however.  You see I reject the notion that Killing a popular character is the brave route, maybe it was in Comics in the 70s.  But Western media criticism is so obsessed with the notion of "consequences" and "equivalent exchange" that I know the Critics would never forgive Avengers 4 for actually having the Guts to do what I'm suggesting.

Infinity War's dark route was a bold move in the context of the general MCU tone leading up to it, but responding to it with a complete reversal would in fact be ten times bolder.

Meanwhile there is nothing brave about killing off Tony Stark when no more solo films staring him are likely to be made anyway.

The Future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe

 This entire post is kind of a Spoiler for Infinity War so....

The Avengers did NOT actually need those prior films in order to work

You may be thinking I'm contradicting an earlier post of mine here.  There I was talking about how Marvel needed to make the public consider Iron Man, Thor and Captain America to be big deals so that their being in a film together could be a huge deal.  DC doesn't need to do that, just as the new Spiderman doesn't need a solo film for him being in Civil War to be a big deal.  Audiences will care about Spiderman being in a film with the MCU heroes regardless of it not being the same Spiderman they already know.

Here I'm talking about story, if the story and/or plot of Avengers had needed you to have seen those prior films to get what's going on it would have been a bad film, if that's how you write connected stories you should be writing a TV show, not blockbuster motion pictures.  Whedon had already directed both and understood the difference.

Rarely you can make 2 or 3 films that feel like one big film, like LOTR or The Hobbit though I feel they overdid it with The Hobbit,  But those are very special cases, and LOTR was already like that in The Books, it was 1 giant book published as 3, I disagree with those who feel it should have been 6 movies based on the 6 books the books are divided into, none of those would have felt like a satisfying movie to me.

The trend of splitting the last films of these YA Novel based franchises in two I feel hurts those films.

The Avengers drew on events that came before, but it also tells us in that film everything we need to know.  We don't have a movie depicting the events with the "Mad King" referenced back to constantly on Game of Thrones, if the prior MCU films hadn't existed, those references would be the same as that.

Having seen the other films adds to Avengers enjoyment like reading The Hobbit and The Silmarilion adds to Lord of The Rings, but you do not actually need to know those stories to follow LOTR, you don't even actually need the information from the Appendices, they're just a fun bonus.

Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope actually was a sequel made without the prior films, and we followed it just fine, the Prequels existence now adds depth to the OT films allowing me to enjoy them more as a Prequel fan then I ever did before.  But they worked on their own.  If The Force Awakens is written in a way where you won't understand it if you hadn't seen the prior films, even just the OT, it will fail.

So when people act like Batman V Superman or Justice League can't work without establishing the characters first, my thought is, no you're an idiot.  Whether or not the characters were established first, if you need to have seen other films to follow those films or get who the characters in them are, or why they're doing what they're doing, they would be poorly made films.

You do not need to have seen Batman Begins to understand The Dark Knight, in fact TDK doesn't even really draw on the events of Begins at all.  Rises does draw on the events of both prior films, but it still tells us on it's own everything we need to know.

A number of animated Justice League and Superman/Batman films have worked without any shared continuity to solo adventures.  And they have less screen-time to work with.  Some but not all recycle voice actors already affiliated with those characters.  That however is a superficial connection that could have gone either way.  That is also how I refute the "too many characters" nonsense.

BvS and JLA better be the same way, or else I will dislike them regardless of whether or not the films explaining what I don't understand exist.  Same goes for future MCU films, they better not get carried away with what a shared universe means.

Even in the Comics themselves, many hate on Infinite Crisis for how it feels like you need to read 20 other story-lines to know what's going on.  I love Infinite Crisis but I feel it's dependence on the other story-lines is overstated (I've only read not even half of it's tie ins and understand it just fine), plus comics are by nature a more blatantly serialized medium then film, like TV shows are.  But still that complaint exists, and I wouldn't want a film version of Infinite Crisis to be done the same way.  Civil War was in many ways Marvel's Infinite Crisis, as is Infinity War, so they better be careful.