Recently, a rumor popped up in Variety related to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Since it is, whether true or not, pretty spoiler-y, I’ll stick it behind a spoiler break–everything after the break will discuss future Marvel movies, so don’t click on it if you don’t want to discuss.

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In email:

So say Marvel decides to do the unthinkable and make a movie with a female lead. How do they make it?

Pretty straightforward: you do Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel, and you do it as a passing-torch movie, with Mar-Vell falling from the sky and playing a combination of Abin Sur and Anthony Hopkins Old Zorro from Mask of Zorro. Say Mar-Vell has the Quantum Bands, which give him all the Captain Marvel powers – flight, toughness, blasting things, etc. (You probably also want to include a sensory power of some kind because it’ll create a visual hook and be the key to defeating whatever Big Bad eventually shows up – this could be her precognitive “seventh sense” or whatever, but the point is you need that power because without it her powerset is kind of generic. Although being able to fly in space unassisted is sort of a special thing in the Marvel movies right now, so maybe that instead? I dunno.)

Anyway. You can even work Mar-Vell having cancer into it – say the Quantum Bands are the only things keeping him alive and they won’t work much longer so he’s looking for a successor, and it can’t be a Kree because the Kree are planning to invade Earth, as alien empires do, and Mar-Vell is opposed to that so there you go, more comics adaptive referencing. Mar-Vell crash-lands on Earth, promptly gets picked up by the Air Force, and I think it would be pretty great if, rather than being “oh we must be suspicious and scared of the alien” they were immediately co-operative and worked with him. Except, of course, they want to make sure the Bands go to their handpicked alpha dog asshole, even though Carol is of course the superior pilot. Needless to say, Alpha Dog (hell, that should be his callsign) thinks the Bands are basically meant to be his, and everybody agrees with him. Except Mar-Vell, of course, and when a Kree advance strike force attacks that’s when he gives Carol the bands and then dies.

Anyway, the rest of the movie writes itself at that point: Carol has to deal with the military who, even if they can’t bring themselves to admit it, don’t want a woman having the awesome space weapons, and also with the Kree invasion force (probably involving a lot of deep-space fighting because that, in the movies, can be Captain Marvel’s Specific Thing). It’s definitely got a nice meta taste to it but I think that’s what makes it work.

(spoilers abound)

ONE I think a large part of the reason it is being so praised is that visually, the movie is absolutely stunning on any number of levels. This is not only with respect to shot framing – certainly Gareth Edwards’ shot choice in this movie is staggeringly good, and on a visual level this is easily the most cunningly-directed blockbuster since probably Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies (which it surpasses). But everything is masterful: the visual pacing and storytelling is on a whole other level, going beyond the reliable competence one hopes to get out of a blockbuster and heading into the realm of art.

TWO From a storytelling standpoint the choice to not really go full-bore with the Major Godzilla Fight Sequence until the very end of the movie is wise for multiple reasons. Firstly, there is the whole building-up-of-anticipation thing, which is always fun and it’s nice to see a movie that’s willing to deny the audience satisfaction until the movie’s actual climax for once. But secondly, here is the truth: after about ten minutes, giant monster fights are boring because there’s only so many things you can do with giant monster fights; one of the reasons Pacific Rim drags at times (and it does drag) is because there are too many giant monster fights in that movie.

THREE Similarly, the script also makes the gutsy choice of killing off Bryan Cranston’s character in the first third of the movie. Post-Breaking Bad this is particularly ballsy; I mean, between the Cranston-heavy trailer and nerds on the internet being all “it’s WALTER WHITE VERSUS GODZILLA” like that would be something anybody would want to see I was expecting plot awfulness. We did not get that, and this was good.

FOUR Of course, all of this is just asking if the movie is well-crafted, which was evident. But now we must ask the question of whether or not it was artistically coherent. Firstly, it is worth noting that my previous suspicions re: the movie’s shifting allegory are partially correct. Although nuclear energy is in part responsible for giant monsters (they feed on radioactivity? Okay whatever), the movie’s central thesis is indeed “man cannot hope to control nature.” Which: okay, fine, it’s not a terrible analogy to use for Godzilla movie purposes, there’s still some nice notes about the hubris of mankind in that, fine and dandy.

FIVE But the problem is that underlying the plot of “man cannot hope to control nature, so here are giant monsters fighting to the death” is a certain lack of anything making sense. Godzilla shows up to kill the other giant monsters why exactly? I mean, you can have Ken Watanabe mutter profound nothings about “restoring the balance” all you like but in the end, Godzilla becomes a giant deus ex machina whose presence is not really satisfactorily explained, and the absence of a coherent reason for Godzilla to exist in a movie where the craft is so evidently thought out in most other respects is… jarring, to say the least.

SIX And then you have the fact that the movie contradicts itself by the Sergeant Kick-Ass On The Ground plotline, because the movie literally says about a dozen times that Man Cannot Hope To Control Nature but then Sergeant Kick-Ass destroys all of the giant monster eggs and provides the crucial distraction needed to draw away one of the giant monsters so Godzilla can kill them one at a time, and this is frankly as annoying as all get out because either Man Cannot Hope To Control Nature or He Can and you kinda have to pick one of them ahead of time and make your movie on that basis, because Man Cannot Hope To Control Nature Except When Needed To For Plot Purposes is dumb.

SEVEN Still, complaints about coherency aside, it’s a fine movie, easily heads (and tails) above most summer blockbusters. And that counts.

In my email inbox today, in regards to this post from 2011:

SUBJECT: Sad, racist and delusional

Also the funniest part, even if Dorne was the Middle East, or North Africa or even just modern day Turkey(and per the author, it isn’t) that guy from the Indian subcontinent who even by Indian standards is incredibly dark, would have no place representing those regions as he does not look like any of those people, whether Arab/Turk/Persian or even Israeli, that last image confirmed to me your racism and your delusion.

A few points, I think, need to be made here.

1.) I am white as all get out, so suggesting that that argument was made on the basis of insecurity about my own race is kinda fun to say the least.

2.) “Why don’t you create your own” – er, I did.

3.) Naveen Andrews is not “incredibly dark” by Indian standards. If anything he’s relatively light-skinned as Indian folks go. And he’s not from “the Indian subcontinent,” he’s from friggin’ London, born and raised.

I could go on – including the fact that GRRM made his qualifications about the Dornish mostly after that blog post, in part to respond to suggestions like mine – but yeeeeeeeeeeah.

32. Man-Thing Brief theatrical run that was so brief it’s a direct-to-DVD in spirit. You have probably never seen it. You missed absolutely nothing. It is a mess in every possible way you can imagine, like Roger Corman came back from the dead (well, he’s not dead, but he hasn’t directed a movie in years so he might as well be, that’s what I say) and decided to make a SyFy Original Marvel Movie, which is basically what this is.

31. Elektra A completely joyless slog that feels five times longer than it is, looking muddy and dull throughout – I mean, we all rightfully criticize today’s action blockbusters for adhering to that teal/orange color dichotomy like it is law, but at least teal and orange doesn’t look awful and bland all the time like Elektra does. Tack on a nearly incoherent plot and the pacing of a dead turtle and you have what is easily the worst “true” theatrical Marvel release of the modern era. Heck, it’s probably worse than the 1990 Captain America and the Corman Fantastic Four. (It’s definitely worse than the Dolph Lundgren Punisher.)

30. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer An incoherent load of below-par SFX, a storyline that made little sense, next to no jokes (and how can you have a good F4 movie without at least some jokes?), but at least it’s over relatively soon. A complete waste of Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans. Not even ironically fun.

29. X-Men Origins: Wolverine Proof that you can spend an immense amount of money on a superhero movie, have competent filmmakers, have a solid cast (seriously: Hugh Jackman, Liev Schrieber, Ryan Reynolds, Danny Huston – that’s damn good) and it can still be a creative failure in every way that matters. The grimness of the later X-franchise flicks permeates this on every level.

28. Punisher: War Zone It has a sort of craziness to it that I admire, Ray Stevenson is an inspired casting choice for the Punisher and Dominic West’s Jigsaw is enjoyably loony. But the problem is that simply taking Garth Ennis comic dialogue and putting it on screen does not work – there is printed page material and there is reading aloud material, and what is poetic on the page falls flat when you say it aloud. And the action is mostly bland.

27. Ghost Rider I think Nicolas Cage’s commitment to the wackiness of the idea of Ghost Rider is underrated even though he was slightly too old for the role when he first played Johnny Blaze – but when you’re saying “hey, 2007 Nicolas Cage is the best thing about this movie,” you know it’s probably not that good a movie – this one overexplains like all get out, which is fatal in a movie that is about a guy who has a flaming skull for a head and rides a motorcycle that is also on fire. (ASIDE: Peter Fonda should have been a lock to be Mephisto and it just doesn’t sing.)

26. Blade: Trinity A mediocre third outing to the franchise which more or less killed it. (FUN FACT: they were hoping to spin a Nightstalkers franchise out of this film. Man, did that not work or what?) At this point the Blade flicks were running out of ideas – when you go to the Dracula well in a vampire-related franchise that’s rarely a good sign unless you invert it cleverly (a la Buffy) and this movie did not do that. It’s not outright terrible by any means: there are some fun performances here (Patton Oswalt!), Wesley Snipes is quite reliable as Blade as he always is, and the action sequences are mostly competent. But it’s not anything other than a third movie in a dying series and it doesn’t elevate beyond that.

25. Fantastic Four It’s more coherent than its sequel, but remains mostly not very good. You see this for Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans’ performances, which are both excellent. Everything else about this movie is bland: Jessica Alba’s Sue is boring, Ioan Gruffud’s Reed doesn’t really work (it’s like he’s got an idea of who Reed is but can’t quite get there to make it work) and the less said about Julian McMahon’s Dr. Doom the better.

24. Hulk There are a lot of contrarians who like to pretend that this is a good movie. It isn’t a good movie; it’s a misfire. A misfire by talented creators: Ang Lee was trying to do something, work outside the superhero box, and it shows: the film is a substantial whole, a work unto itself, trying to say something in a visual language entirely new to comics movies by outright adapting comics visual vocabulary to do it. Which is a really interesting idea, to say the least. The problem is that this language is visually unappealing and in service to a story that is simply dreadful (I defy anyone to explain the ending in a way that makes sense).

23. The Amazing Spider-Man Excellent performances by Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone can’t redeem a clumsily plotted Spider-Man origin story and a mangling of Spidey’s character (if your Spider-Man story has him consumed by revenge, you are doing it wrong).

22. X-Men: The Last Stand This one gets pounded a lot because it’s supposedly the weakest of the X-flicks (it’s not) and because it awkwardly merges multiple classic comics storylines into a weird melange (yeah, okay) and because Brett Ratner’s direction is, to say the least, uninspired (totally fair). But it has some nice bits. It has Ellen Page in it as Shadowcat! And Kelsey Grammer’s Beast is exactly who Beast needed to be. Plus you get Ian McKellen’s last hurrah as Magneto (well, until Days of Future Past comes out this summer, anyway). It could have been much worse.

21. Spider-Man 3 Some nerds love to hate on the Dancin’ Evil Peter sequence, and I am not one of them – it’s fun. That having been said: like the other Spider-Man movies, this has a lot of craftsmanship in it. But it again goes to the “Spider-Man needs to have someone to seek revenge against for Uncle Ben’s death” well, which is awful and terrible and completely misses the point of the character. (It really drives home how ambitious Christopher Nolan was to remove revenge as a motive for Batman in his trilogy.) Combine that with the needless inclusion of Venom as demanded by the studio’s marketing department and you have a movie which is cluttered, confused and flawed.

20. Daredevil Another victim of the “what makes a superhero more relatable is making the superhero grittier and more morally compromised” school of superhero moviemaking, but at least ends with Daredevil rejecting that philosophy. Ben Affleck’s performance as Matt Murdock is underrated, Michael Clarke Duncan’s Kingpin is good and Colin Farrell’s Bullseye is greatly entertaining. Jennifer Garner’s Elektra is kinda meh, but the movie is perfectly acceptable, forgettable popcorn fare in the bare-minimum sort of way.

19. The Wolverine This is the “okay” Wolverine solo movie. It is defiantly average as superhero movies go. There are ninjas. And Wolverine. And that is basically it. I mean, it’s nice to see a superhero movie with a majority-person-of-color-cast, that’s certainly true, but you can’t shake the feeling that this entire $100 million movie was sort of improvised on a page-by-page basis based on when the ninjas were available. But at least they’re fun ninjas.

18. Iron Man 2 I know some people are going to complain about a Robert Downey Jr. As Iron Man movie being ranked this low, but here is my counterpoint: tell me what this movie was about off the top of your head. Because you can’t. I had to actively think for a while to remember who the villain was (it’s Mickey Rourke! Remember that? Mickey Rourke was the villain in the second Iron Man movie) or any detail of the plot other than “RDJ quips, and War Machine stuff, and um Black Widow makes her debut in the Marvel movies.” That was all I had. This is not to say that Iron Man 2 isn’t entertaining. It is. But it’s also mostly insubstantial.

17. Blade II Guillermo del Toro’s only Marvel movie is visually striking and has that gritty-B-movie fun factor that the original Blade had as well. And it’s got tons of great genre actors in it: Donnie Yen, Ron Pearlman, a very young Norman Reedus, the guy who played Cat in Red Dwarf, that sort of thing. But it’s got a boring plot (basically: vampires versus zombie vampires) that’s just there to string together the fight sequences. Which are great, so… yeah.

16. The Punisher This one is one of the really underrated Marvel flicks, mostly because people had enormously overinflated hopes for a Punisher movie “done right.” Because the Punisher, outside of comics, is just your bog-standard vigilante/murder fantasy, and that doesn’t translate remarkably well to film because it just becomes, well, a vigilante movie. The Thomas Jane Punisher movie, however, is probably the best of them; if you forgot Marvel Comics existed, this would be a decent crime/revenge movie. It has good action, decent performances from Jane and John Travolta, and a solid plot. Certainly it can be described as unambitious, but then again this is a movie that aims for “solid” and hits it, and there are worse things.

15. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance This is basically the opposite of Punisher in that it is ridiculously ambitious and shoots for the moon and misses quite a bit, but it has great action sequences, and Ghost Rider turning a giant digger machine into a Hell-cycle, and Nic Cage and Ciaran Hinds and Idris Elba and Johnny Whitworth having a contest to see who can chew the most scenery. It is insane. And it’s fun. High peaks and high valleys, though, to be sure. But it’s never boring.

14. The Incredible Hulk Probably the poster child for ensuring a lack of downside risk in a Marvel movie, which likely makes it the blueprint off which future Marvel films were based. There is nothing wrong with Incredible Hulk, other than that it is fairly predictable and fairly safe as entertainment goes, avoiding risk in vast chunks and doing its level best to avoid offending any viewer regardless of preference. But, again: this is a movie that knows what it wants to do and does it competently and professionally. Artistry is sort of an optional extra.

13. Thor: The Dark World It is relentlessly entertaining. This is the one that was hardest for me to rank, probably because on the one hand it is the Marvel film I enjoyed terrifically while watching and then later, on sober second thought when the adrenalin of the experience was gone, thought “hmmm” – because enjoyment of the film helps one forget that the villain is bland and the magical McGuffin is meaningless and the plot just a series of excuses to have Loki do neato things and the film’s gender politics are just plain bad (especially after the first Thor was so good in this regard). And then I watched it again and it was still super-entertaining. But it still bugs me.

12. X-Men Deserves credit for inspiring the new wave of superhero movies in the first place, and beyond that it holds up surprisingly well. A nice balance between nerd callouts and easy access for newbs, well-directed by Bryan Singer with tight editing and gorgeous cinematography, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine is still a revelation (he was never better in the role than he was his first time out) and the script balances pathos, action and moments of comedy quite well. It still has its weak spots (Halle Berry, and also Halle Berry), and the pacing is definitely off at times, but it’s amazing how much this film got right on what was more or less the first try when so many others failed when they had examples of what worked and what didn’t.

11. Thor Kenneth Branagh’s direction is perhaps a touch overly staid at times (which is amazing to say considering that this is a frigging Thor movie – but it’s true, as he doesn’t really mesh well with the “house Marvel style” of moviemaking), but the movie’s narrative arcs all satisfy and Chris Hemsworth delivers the goods and Tom Hiddleston earned his stardom as Loki. I still think Anthony Hopkins’ Odin is, well, dull, but other than that I have no complaints about this.

10. Spider-Man The general lack of Spider-jokes (other than the inspired “go web!” sequence) is a shame, but other than that Spider-Man is an exceptionally well-crafted film in just about every respect. If, tonally, it is not quite accurate to its source material, that is forgivable given the impressiveness of its visual skill (Sam Raimi spent a decade making these films and it was time well spent), its strong story, fine performances from Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and Willem Dafoe, and excellent special effects (which he would improve upon in the sequel, but even so). Of course, now that we’re in the top ten all of that is basically to be expected.

9. X2 Everybody understands that this sequel is simply superior throughout to the original; bigger stakes, mostly superior performances (Alan Cumming’s Nightcrawler and Brian Cox’ Stryker are standouts, but this is also Famke Janssen’s best work in the franchise and Ian McKellen is at the height of his powers as Magneto), and by this point Bryan Singer was developing his previous visual flair into a sense of craft that results in a film that is just endlessly watchable. Everything about this is good and nothing is bad.

8. Iron Man 3 Of all the Marvel Studios movies, this is the one that is perhaps the most idiosyncratic, the result of a singular vision. Which is to say that Iron Man 3 feels like a Shane Black movie that happens to be a Marvel movie, rather than a Marvel movie that happens to be directed by Shane Black. (For the sake of comparison, Thor is certainly a Marvel movie that happens to be directed by Kenneth Branagh.) It is smart and clever (recognizing that Movie Tony can’t really work as an alcoholic and substituting PTSD for it was particularly brilliant) and at times barely feels like a superhero movie at all. Of course, that is a bit of a problem because it is a superhero movie, or at least intended to be. But only a bit of a problem.

7. X-Men: First Class There’s a lot of silly bits in here and a lot of things you can quibble over or complain about (how it instantly becomes Team Whitebread as the good guys, how the guy whose power is “don’t get killed” IS LITERALLY THE FIRST ONE WHO DIES, January Jones being completely awful at everything she does, etc.) but mostly smart writing, the gorgeous art direction and overall sense of design, the skilled direction by Matthew Vaughn, and the stupidly good performances of James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender are what push this one into the top ten.

6. Iron Man Let’s be honest: the third act of this film is at best a hot mess and at worst confused sludge, and we all forgive it that, because RDJ kickstarted the Modern Marvel Movie Movement ™ and because you get to see Jeff Bridges’ performance as The Dude Except Now He’s Evil (IN A CAVE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!) and because the first two-thirds of the film are just about perfect, so we let it limp to the finish and nobody says boo to that goose. But that limp to the finish is what keeps it out of the top five.

5. Blade If X-Men is responsible for the modern superhero movie, we have to give Blade credit for making Hollywood think that Marvel Comics was something that could be exploited in the first place. But Blade is more than that; it is in its own right an amazing action/horror picture, just about flawless in every respect – the sort of B-movie that filmmakers imitate endlessly (and have done). There is simply nothing Blade does wrong.

4. The Avengers Now, if you want to point to things The Avengers does wrong – the lighting for many of the interior shots is insipid at best and cheap-looking at worst (Joss Whedon may not have been the cinematographer but it seems he wanted it to look like boring TV), the primary arc of the movie really is just a Cap/Iron Man buddy story, Thor doesn’t get enough dialogue, the Hulk reveal doesn’t make sense really, and the Thanos end-reveal is nerdwank of the highest order. But, on the other hand, they successfully made a superhero team movie of epic scale, the Battle of New York is probably the best long-form action sequence on film since the end of Hard Boiled, it doesn’t sag and it’s never boring. When we talk about movies being ambitious, it is worth remembering that Avengers was attempting to do something that had never been done and almost entirely pulled it off.

3. Spider-Man 2 Ebert’s favorite superhero movie and justifiably so: this is the height of Sam Raimi’s creative vision. Just watch any of the Spidey/Ock fights; they are simply perfect filmmaking. The balance between action and drama is expertly maintained. Alfred Molina’s performance is staggeringly good. I could say so many more things but they would all be superlatives.

2. Captain America: The First Avenger As Iron Man 3 is recognizably a Shane Black movie, so is Captain America recognizably a Joe Johnston movie (if somewhat less so); the lush colour palette Johnston utilized in The Rocketeer is present, as is Johnston’s well-documented love of homaging old Republic serials. But what makes Captain America so good is the emotional notes of regret and loss that are omnipresent throughout the film: despite being a superhero movie, this is a film whose core emotion is sadness, and that feeling hits at every beat of the movie, most notably in Chris Evans’ magnificent performance as Cap – he’s not as showy as RDJ’s Iron Man is, but I think it’s a more fully realized performance on the whole. The overall effect is to make the film slightly downbeat (which I think hurt it) but it also feels more mature and adult. Until recently I thought this was the most fully realized Marvel film…

1. Captain America: The Winter Soldier …until last week, anyway, because Winter Soldier is even better, taking numerous visual cues from 1970s conspiracy thrillers in service of a story more ambitious than any Marvel has yet told (government overreach as tyranny is a bold statement in a superhero movie at present to say the least), with a cast of heroes who, it must be noted, are mostly women or black – seriously: Cap is the token white guy, and how great is that? This is a film that has the narrative confidence to simply skip a difficult and exciting heist because it needs to put the time elsewhere, a film that doesn’t bother explaining its tropes because it trusts the audience not to be stupid, a film that doesn’t feel the need to justify Arnim Zola as a living bank of computers or how Falcon’s jetpack works, but just shoves it out there immediately. This is the Marvel movie in maturity, and it feels so good to see it.

I started a bit of a minor nerd kerfuffle yesterday on Twitter when I said this, but I’m standing by it.

First, a few caveats. It’s an excellent trailer on numerous levels. I’m gonna go see it when it comes out, and not out of a sense of nerd-obligation either; this looks genuinely amazing and it’s filled with actors I really like and plus, come on, it’s frigging Godzilla.

But.

The trailer does one thing, and I hope the movie reverses on this at least a little: it removes the central allegory that was at the heart of Godzilla movies – namely, that Godzilla represents man’s hubris in using nuclear weapons. Even the horrible 1998 American Godzilla didn’t get rid of that. But in this one – or at least as per this trailer – man’s use of nukes aren’t what create Godzilla; instead they’re something that mankind uses to try to kill Godzilla. We go from man’s nuclear sins to nukes-are-useful-weapons just like that.

I got responses about how “people aren’t as scared of nuclear weapons as they used to be” but that’s really only a valid point from a marketing perspective, because nuclear weapons are still a huge problem; just because the Cold War sort of ended (and depending on which historians you ask, it’s only mutated somewhat). The Doomsday Clock is still a thing and it’s still set at five minutes to midnight; there’s nothing stopping another Stanislav Petrov scenario from happening except, one hopes, future Stanislav Petrovs. Just because our fear of nukes has grown less immediate or we’ve grown more used to them doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to acknowledge that. (I think there’s a reasonable argument to be made that nukes stopped being scary in part because we all stopped talking about them and just pretended they weren’t an issue any more.)

A few people also suggested to me that this represents a shift in the Godzilla metaphor to being about climate change or asteroid armageddon or the like because of when, in the trailer, Ken Watanabe says “the arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control… and not the other way around.” And there’s nothing wrong with a horror concept being adapted for use as a different analogy. It happened with zombies multiple times, for example: zombies started out as atomic panic, then shifted to being a metaphor for commercialism and consumption, and nowadays appear to be the fear of the mob and/or poor people depending on how cynical you are. (Yeah, yeah, “infectious diseases,” my ass.)

But Watanabe’s line doesn’t work for climate change at all (and I think it’s fair to say that for whatever Godzilla might be a metaphor, it’s going to be massive in scale because come on, Godzilla) because that Watanabe line, while still addressing human hubris, rejects human responsibility. The power of the original Godzilla metaphor was that nobody made humans use nuclear weapons, and whoops you weren’t expecting Godzilla now were you – Godzilla becomes about not opening Pandora’s box lest there be a giant murder lizard in it. But climate change is A) primarily human-driven and human-created, and B) has been a known consequence of carbon emissions for decades. A climate change murder monster metaphor has to be about selfishness, not helplessness, so Godzilla doesn’t really work for that.

Anyway: none of this is going to stop me from seeing the movie. But it’s definitely something to think about while waiting.

What can I say, it wouldn’t have been much of a marathon if it was short. That’s right, I’m still talking about the movies I caught on Nextflix a couple of months ago, in one long epic movie-watching binge while my family was out of town and I had undisputed control of the remote. And this time, it’s indie sci-fi movie ‘Primer’.

What everyone usually talks about when they talk about ‘Primer’ is the epic head-fuck twist in the third act that suddenly makes you re-evaluate everything you thought was going on in the entire movie, and that makes you realize that everything you imagined you understood is in fact something completely different. I won’t spoil that twist, because it’s something that everyone should decide for themselves whether they want to know beforehand, but I did have it spoiled for me. And I don’t mind, because it means I was able to concentrate on what the movie was about instead of what was happening in it.

Because ‘Primer’ isn’t a movie about time travel in the way that most time travel movies are about time travel. ‘Primer’ is a movie about the way that big technological advances aren’t made by people who are necessarily well-equipped to consider the ethical and moral consequences of the discoveries, and the way that the people who wind up in a position to control those discoveries are the ones who exploit them most ruthlessly and not the people who created them or the people who could make the best use of them. It’s about the way that people who think that their friendship will survive business endeavours generally get exploited by the people who don’t much care one way or the other, and it’s also about the way that the pioneers in any new science are taking risks that they aren’t even aware of. (The scene where the main characters realize that they’re developing hand tremors and they don’t even know why…or how much worse they’ll get…is tremendously affecting.)

And it’s also a movie about time travel. But it’s a peculiarly practical one. The main characters spend a lot of time theorizing about how the time travel they’ve invented might work, but a lot of their knowledge comes from painful trial and error. At one point, a character shows up that they assume must be from the future, then collapses into a coma. Do they show him the time machine in the future, and send him back? Does he collapse because they never show him the time machine, creating a fatal paradox? The main characters don’t know, and they never find out. Unlike most time travel movies, and very much like in the real world, ignorance of the laws of physics is no defence against them.

There’s a lot that’s challenging about ‘Primer’–it’s a movie that makes very few concessions to watchability, and it can be very dry and perversely technical. This isn’t a popcorn movie by any stretch. But if you’re patient and willing to let the film unfold, it’s probably the most interesting documentary about imaginary technology you’ll ever see.

David Uzimeri on Twitter complained thusly:

And I had heard nothing of this, mostly because I tend to ignore nerd news about casting unless people make a fuss about it somewhere I might read it (e.g. not Ain’t It Cool News or one of the myriad websites that wish, for some reason, that they were Ain’t It Cool News). So I Googled “Shailene Woodley not attractive enough to play MJ” and confirmed for myself that, yes, this was a nerd thing. And there are two points I have to make here, and then I’m going to ramble for a bit.

Firstly: by any reasonable standard, Shailene Woodley is really very pretty. Quite lovely. Definitely good-looking. And so forth. The idea that she is not attractive enough to play Mary Jane in a Spider-Man movie is just kind of weird.1

Secondly, though, is the thing that caused this: the ongoing idea that Mary Jane has to be otherworldly levels of hot, which is the root cause of people being stupid and saying that a beautiful young actor is somehow not beautiful enough to play Mary Jane; Mary Jane must be played by someone who is the ne plus ultra of beauty, beauty dialed up to eleven, beauty of the gods. And typically I find this is because people have no idea who Mary Jane is, as a character, besides “she’s super hot” – which explains why, then, that people have to have Mary Jane played by a goddess in human form. If the only quality you assign to Mary Jane is hotness, then a Spider-Man movie where Mary Jane is only very pretty would be like a Batman movie where Batman doesn’t fight crime.2

Of course, this is stupid. Granted, I say that as someone who is a big Mary Jane fan – Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane is one of my favorite comic books ever – but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Mary Jane is best when she’s defined by her toughness, not her hotness. Just after Civil War and just prior to the Mephisto marriage reboot, Matt Fraction wrote a great Amazing Spider-Man annual that was basically the pro-MJ argument summed up: she’s tough and she’s smart and once she picks her side (which is Peter, obviously) she is there. (“He’s my husband. You’re just some guy.” That line is a fucking hammerblow, Thor should be envious of that line.)

Emphasizing MJ’s hotness as being somehow a superpower is also, I think, one of the key reasoning flaws behind why the “Peter/MJ marriage doesn’t work” argument is such bunk; one of the key elements of that argument is that Peter is meant to have a hard life (undeniably true, he’s a fortitude-based character, his hallmark is that he endures hardship on all levels, that’s what it is to be Spider-Man) and that being married to MJ somehow undoes this because she is beautiful. I am not being reductionist in any way when I say that’s the argument: numerous people have said precisely this very thing,, that Spider-Man having a hot wife undoes the character, as if somehow “hot wife” means “everything right in the world” or for that matter that being hot somehow requires a character to have no burdens in life.

Just because MJ has been an actress/supermodel in the past does not mean she has to continue being these things. J. Michael Straczynski gets a lot of crap for his comics work, and some of it deserved, but one thing his era of Spider-Man brought to the table was that MJ could have a failing career and this would not in any way harm the integrity of the character because, surprise surprise, being pretty doesn’t guarantee anything. JMS’ MJ was trapped in a failing Hollywood career and towards the end of his run was considering becoming a drama teacher, which isn’t a bad job but is hardly the ideal of glamorous-as-hell. (As an aside: JMS’ idea that Peter should be a high school science teacher was brilliant, the single best thing he contributed to Spider-Man, and Marvel shouldn’t have walked away from it because having underappreciated overworked Spider-Man be, in civilian life, in the most underappreciated overworked job there is? That’s just perfect.)

True story: the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and I don’t mean “to me personally in a loving kind of way” but rather “objectively, we are talking Botticelli’s Venus times a kajillion,” worked in a video store. I mean, this woman was stunning, literally jaw-droppingly beautiful, and I remember this not just because she was amazing looking but because one time, when I was renting a movie3 this schlub in front of me asked her why she wasn’t a model and she shrugged and said “I tried, but it’s all who you know.” Which isn’t surprising because that is how everything works.4

And there’s no reason it shouldn’t work for MJ as well. Plenty of physically beautiful people fail because that is how life happens; only a small subset of people get to be glamorous and everybody else gets shut out, even if they are a perfect 10. Hell, if the whole Shailene Woodley flap teaches us anything it is that people will discount astounding prettiness for whatever reason they choose.

1. Still not sure what all of this says about Kirsten Dunst. [↩]
2. This sentence was originally going to be “a Superman movie where Superman doesn’t fly” but then I realized that any discussion of Superman movies, by law, now requires people who hated Man of Steel to come out and say that they hated Man of Steel. [↩]
3. FOR THE KIDS: there used to be stores where you would rent movies for money, like, you would go walk to the store and physically borrow a movie from them. [↩]
4. Or maybe she was bullshitting this guy to get him off her back, that’s possible too, because being beautiful doesn’t mean you have to live a life specifically designed for beautiful people. [↩]

A lot of kafuffle was raised yesterday about Michael Douglas being cast as Hank Pym in the Ant-Man movie. First off, we’re not sure why there is kafuffle anyway because come on, it’s Ant-Man for crissake, it’s not like we’re recasting Wolverine or anybody important, it’s just Ant-Man, whose superhero name is a punchline and who in comics is so famous for being unable to find a consistently successful identity which fans like that it has, in fact, become the character’s thing to switch names every so often.

But basically the nature of the kafuffle was to say that Michael Douglas in real life is much older than Hank Pym is in the comics. Which: again, it’s Hank Pym. I know there are people out there who care greatly about Hank Pym, but the movies make concessions about character biographies all the time – that’s part and parcel of adaptation. But the question then becomes: what do you really lose by having Hank Pym be older? Because I’m not sure what the answer to that is, exactly.

Can Older Hank Pym still go on superhero adventures? I would suggest that in a world where Christopher Lee can have lightsaber battles then its reasonable for Hank Pym to put on his labcoat and have a bunch of shrink-down weapons in his pockets and be Doctor Pym, or if you want to go for laughs he can even put on a costume. Can Older Hank Pym still have a relationship with Janet Van Dyne? It’d be weird, but sure. (Remember that originally in the comics Hank was twice as old as Janet was until they retconned that away.) Do we particularly lose anything if Scott Lang dates Janet Van Dyne instead of Hank?

Is this about the casting of Douglas specifically, as opposed to a generic older respected actor? Because, as William Goldman pointed out a long time ago, Douglas specializes in playing the modern, flawed American man – and depending on your view of Hank Pym this either makes Douglas perfect for the job or is conceding that Hank Pym is a terrible wifebeater.

And let’s be honest: the domestic abuse aspect of Hank Pym is a third rail, probably the reason that Paul Rudd is playing Scott Lang instead of Pym. Hank Pym fans can talk about mind control and mental illness all they like but the truth about Hank Pym is that the character will always carry that baggage, and even if a Hank Pym movie never had him engaging in domestic abuse people would still wonder when it was coming, just as people wonder if and when the “Tony Stark is an alcoholic” coin will drop in the RDJ movies (answer: who knows if it even will).

I don’t have definitive answers for any of these questions, honestly. But they’re all there, lurking, and the internet kafuffle yesterday serves to remind us of that.

Gravity. People complain that it loses a little oomph the second time through because the second time through all of Alfonso Cuaron’s brilliant direction isn’t a novelty any more, but whatever, it’s still brilliant. And I take issue with people who complain about Sandra Bullock in this movie; she’s the anchor of the film because her fear and panic are normal, human reactions to the insanity that is going on, and Sandra Bullock does “normal person overcoming fear” better than just about anybody else. She grounds the film and gives it the weight it needs; the most amazing shot in the movie is not any of the staggering Things Happening In Space shots, but the triumphant final shot of Bullock that closes it. So to sum up, Sandra Bullock is pretty good in this. So is George Clooney. (The dialogue is average at best, but so what.)

12 Years A Slave. It’s not an entertaining movie by any means – this is really a movie you have to endure rather than enjoy – but it’s simply a masterwork on so many levels (the acting, the direction, the dialogue, the cinematography – there is not one aspect of this movie that is not auteur-level work) that the endurance is worth undertaking. When the biggest complaint people have is that Brad Pitt’s character seems like a deus ex machina when those events are actually what exactly happened in Northrup’s actual life, then you know you have a fine movie on your hands – it deserves to win Best Picture in a walk, and even if it doesn’t we all know what the actual best picture of 2013 is.

Frozen. Tangled was the first sign that modern audiences actually still did want to see Disney Fairytale Musicals ™, the relative failure of The Princess and the Frog notwithstanding. (Did Frog make only a middling amount of money because of a black cast or because it was hand-drawn rather than CGI? Either way, it was a good movie, so this is further proof of my never-wrong theory that Audiences Are Often Stupid And Wrong.) But where Tangled is an solid B+ entry into the Disney musical canon, Frozen is an A; better songs (the weakest song in the movie, “Love Is An Open Door,” is silly and light until you realize, later on, it’s the villain song, not the love song), better characters, excellent and very active subversion of standard Disney “princess movie” tropes, numerous animation sequences that are absolutely breathtaking and all of the gags hit. Just staggeringly good and entirely deserving of the immense mountain of money it’s making.

American Hustle. There is so much about this movie that shouldn’t work: Christian Bale’s horrible combover and Noo Yawk accent would in any lesser movie scream out “I’M ACTING!” but in Hustle it fits because it’s a movie about liars. Multiple voiceover narrators should never work ever but in Hustle it makes sense because it’s a movie about liars. Gaudy filters to make the movie look “70s” should be mockworthy but in Hustle it works because it’s a movie about liars. Hustle‘s commitment to its own con mirrors its protagonists’ commitment to their cons and their desperate belief that their cons are morally acceptable; the entire movie is a justification. And it’s brilliant. Also it’s a really funny movie (“you don’t put metal in the science oven!”).

The World’s End. A lot of digital ink has been spilled recounting how meticulously Edgar Wright put this together; much more has been spilled trying to tie together the “Cornetto trilogy” as if that were a thing for real instead of Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost just bullshitting their audience endlessly that three basically unrelated films made by the same guys are in fact a thematic sequence of some kind. (SPOILER: they aren’t really.) But The World’s End is smart, and affecting, and definitely a movie made by guys in their early forties because as you approach that age the whole “what happened? Wasn’t I young?” thing gets more and more prominent and you start to understand why assholes buy sports cars even if you’d never buy one yourself. In this movie, the promise of being an immortal robot is the sports car, and so is the idea of a drinking marathon, and although those two things are in conflict they’re also not, and that’s the genius of it. And they behead a lot of robots and that’s good too.

Next five: Kon-Tiki, The Wolf of Wall Street, Before Midnight, The Croods, +1

Hi, everybody! Sorry it’s been a while since I posted, but I was traveling through a number of parallel universes and checking out all sorts of movies that never got made in our reality, and Internet access was spotty. I can’t say the trip was worth every penny (the universe where every single movie since 1966 was a sequel to ‘Manos: The Hands of Fate’ was a particular lowlight) but I did really enjoy seeing all of the James Bond movies in the universe where Batman and James Bond had each other’s Rogue’s Galleries. Still, as always with these things, some were better than others…and since this is the Internet, naturally I am compelled to rank them all for you!

continue reading "Ranking the James Bond/Batman Mash-Ups"

For those of you who didn’t read the previous entries, this series of posts is related to a bit of pop-culture archaeology I did a few months past, trawling Netflix for a bunch of movies that I’d been meaning to watch but never quite got around to seeing. On the logic that if I was still thinking about them years later, they must have something going for them, I finally watched them all in one long binge, and am sharing the results with you!

This one, ‘Pontypool’, was part of the glut of zombie movies that have taken over the horror genre in the last decade or so. I don’t think I’m providing any deep psychological insights by suggesting that there’s a link between the events of 9/11/2001 and the wave of zombie movies; 9/11 traumatized American culture, and stories about societal collapse and the return of fears long thought buried are a pretty sensible response to that horror. (That’s also why we got our first “fast zombie” movies after 9/11; slow zombies are an implacable march of horror, while fast zombies represent that sense of chaos and rapidly-escalating threat that became very familiar to people who turned on their TVs one morning to see a national landmark suddenly disappear. The 2004 ‘Dawn of the Dead’ remake absolutely captures its zeitgeist perfectly. But I digress.)

‘Pontypool’ isn’t a “fast zombie” movie, but it does use one of the most popular tropes of the zombie story; it evokes societal collapse through modern media. When society crumbles and the zombie horde overruns humanity, we’re not going to learn about it first-hand…at least, not if we’re lucky…we’re going to learn about it from the news. In this case, it’s a radio station out in the middle of nowhere, in a small town called Pontypool, whose reports slowly and eerily turn from the mundane day-to-day routine of traffic and weather to reports of riots, martial law, and finally the town’s own little apocalypse.

All of which would be a bit over-familiar even if executed well, except that ‘Pontypool’s zombie hordes aren’t exactly the kind you’re used to. Sure, they’re mindless. Sure, they rampage. Sure, they even lumber around and attack people. But this movie has a whole different way of conceptualizing zombies; this zombie plague isn’t spread by bite or scratch, but through an entirely different and unsettling manner. I’m trying hard not to spoil it, because one of the most interesting things about this movie is the way that it presents its information in a way that disorients not just the characters, but the audience as well. You never quite feel like you know what’s going on in ‘Pontypool’ on first viewing, and that’s one of its best elements. I’d like to preserve that for you. So I’ll just say that it’s not quite your typical zombie movie and leave it at that.

The “Run! It’s the zombies! Barricade the doors!” part of the film, which is pretty much de rigeur for the sub-genre, does bring it back to predictability just a tad. There are only so many ways that you can have people fend off a zombie horde, after all. But I forgave the movie that little bit of bog-standard zombie-ness, because there’s still a ton of excellent characterization and creepy atmosphere leading into that end of things…not to mention a weird, lingering epilogue that takes a strange detour into arthouse surrealism. On the whole, I’d say it’s worth your time to look it up on Netflix.

Thoroughly fun Lord of the Rings-meets-sky-lasers flick, partially (but not entirely) spoiled by some pretty regressive gender politics.

So, um, right. Where was I? Oh, yes. ‘John Dies At the End’.

Simply put, this is great. It’s great in that weird, quirky, cult way that ‘Army of Darkness’ or ‘The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai’ is great…well, in that way that ‘The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai’ should be great but isn’t in any kind of practical sense, because the screenwriter is so in love with the concept that they never actually bother doing anything with it and the only real difference between it and ‘Leonard Part Six’ is Bill Cosby’s incessant mugging and everyone says it’s full of quotable lines but they all only ever quote the same two damn jokes…

…sorry. That sort of went to a weird place. The point is, ‘John Dies At the End’ is an intensely personal movie. It is someone writing a story that they know is probably only going to appeal to them, but they don’t care because it’s an idea that is flowing so deeply from their soul that they can’t not write it. And if they ever find a second person who enjoys it, then so much the better, but they don’t have a whole a whole lot of interest in changing it for mass appeal.

Which isn’t to say that they didn’t change the movie to making it a little more audience-friendly. There are changes from the book, primarily because a) the book is really long and needs to be condensed a bit to fit it into movie length, and b) the ending is a bit of a downer, and even though the tone is all over the place between Lovecraftian horror and splatstick comedy, it still works a bit better with a happier ending. Oh, and c) when you get Clancy Freaking Brown in your movie, you beef up his role a bit. But it’s amazing how much of the weird, discursive, digressive, occasionally perverse if not outright perverted spirit of the story survives the transition to film entirely intact.

For those of you unfamiliar with the novel or film, it follows the adventures of David Wong and his best friend John, who stumble onto a consciousness-expanding drug called “soy sauce” that makes you aware of the greater, stranger, scarier hidden world beyond normal human perception. It also makes that hidden world aware of you, which is why David is now having to deal with demons made out of frozen meat and ghosts and parallel universes and the kind of weird shit that makes people go find a little rubber room somewhere to be voluntarily committed to, just on the grounds that it makes it harder for THEM to get to you. On that score, it’s a cool and creepy horror movie with some wonderful scare moments.

On the other level, though, it’s a hilarious comedy, because the response of real people to crazy shit isn’t necessarily to go crazy in that classic Lovecraftian “rant and rave and wind up in a rubber room” way. We have coping mechanisms, and sometimes those take the form of laughing at the strangeness of it all and sometimes they take the form of blowing off saving the universe in order to play pick-up basketball with your best friend and sometimes they take the form of combining a nuclear bomb with industrial-grade hallucinogens because it may not kill the Lovecraftian horror-god, but “it will sure fuck his shit up”. And on that level, it’s absolutely hilarious.

So I can’t guarantee that you will love ‘John Dies At the End’ the way I did, because it’s a deeply personal movie and deeply personal movies always have a love-it-or-hate-it aspect to them. But that’s what makes them worth watching even if you wind up hating them, because it’s worth encouraging people who pour their souls out like that and make the world a more wonderful and strange place by giving us their artistic visions instead of mass-produced soulless tripe. Movies like this cannot leave you unaffected, even if that effect is to hate them.

In other words, you may not love it…but it will sure fuck your shit up.

daaaaaaaaaaamn that is what I call some motherfucking moviemaking right there, man

(aside: this is the only live-action film I have ever seen in 3D where I felt the 3D enhanced the film as opposed to being at best value-neutral or at worst actively detracting from the movie experience)