Avengers: Endgame (2019)

yeah, they really aren’t spoiling anything with these- the first (long) one was what looked like all in the first 20 minutes. This one is so short as to show nothing at all. Nice. I did like the Captain Marvel “Higher, Further, Faster” trailer, though.

Marvel (and Disney as a whole, really) has gotten really good at building hype around their tentpole movies without spoiling the general plots of the films. It’s a good move.

Guys there’s a raccoon walking all serious with the other A-list Hollywood celebrities in this billion dollar movie.

I just want to remind everyone about the raccoon. The super serious, emotionally charged scenes with the raccoon.

Meanwhile, WB keeps fucking up Superman. Again and again and again.

Every time I see this title on Qt3, I read it as “Avengers: Edamame (2019)” and I get hungry for sushi.

I’ve been telling myself that this is a summer tent-pole movie… April is pretty much just around the corner.

Yeah, that really struck me as incongruous in this trailer. There’s all these serious people, and then there’s this raccoon walking all serious too.

It’s a testament to the quality of these movies that I don’t find it strange at all. Rocket Raccoon has seen some shit, he’s lost some shit, he’s had a real character arc and I care about him as a raccoon being. I feel for him.

Marvel just understands their characters and owns them. They don’t try to change them to suit mainstream tastes or maximize audience revenue. They don’t try to make them dark and gritty, or deconstruct them because they are ashamed of them (coughDCcough). He’s a raccoon who likes big guns. His best friend is a tree. And when the tree died we fucking cried.

When I first saw Guardians 1 I kept thinking, who the hell are these guys, a walking plant and a raccoon… this is ridiculous and then, well magic happened. For all the bitching about these movies, I am not really convinced anyone else could have pulled it off like they are.

Yeah. Oddly enough, that fucking raccoon has more depth than a lot of human characters in other “dramatic” movies.

Bradley Cooper really deserves credit for making him come to life. His voice work is great.

I guess we’ll see if James Gunn’s magic translates to DC’s Suicide Squad 2.

And if GotG can maintain without it. . .

The characters and the universe are pretty well established. The combined movies are efforts from a number of people who worked on other movies. I think they’ll do fine with the Guardians.

Suicide Squad… not sure. Those movies are so awful you know there are a lot people involved with that failure.

I mean for what it’s worth GotG2 was a pretty major letdown for me; Thor 3 basically salvaged the entirety of 2017 for me. GotG2 wasn’t BAD by any stretch, and I still like it more than plenty of other Marvel flicks, and it’s got several amazing moments in it, but the first was genuinely one of the coolest goddamn things I’d ever seen.

Funnily enough, I was bored to tears by the first two Thor movies, but the third is my favorite Marvel movie by a pretty wide margin.

Anyway, yeah, I’m sure that Marvel will leverage its Superior Production Megateam to ensure that GotG3 and beyond are still Totally Good Comic Movies, but I’d be curious to see if anything comes close to the first, for me, at least.

Marvel can lose it though. I think they do have some overreach. I watched Antman and Wasp this weekend, and it was honestly pretty underwhelming. It had its moments because of the actors and characters, but the movie as a whole wasn’t there.

MarvelxThe Leftovers.

Though Carrie Coon already died in Infinity War.

Inhumans was a colossal failure, so there’s that. Marvel’s not immune to fuck ups but it’s not systemic failures like it is with the WB/DC universe.

I thought the main story was crap for Guardians 2, but they made me really like Yondu, the sister fighting worked, and I still liked all the characters more which made it way more enjoyable than several other movies and a repeat on my watch again list.

I barely remember Thor 1 or 2, something about Jane and one of them has dark elves, ice giants or something. 3 was, well it was great. So no, I don’t consider all of them hits out of the park.

Really happy that there appears to be a huge time jump from Infinity War to Endgame. Enables the movie to really show stakes for the characters experiencing these events, even if the overall “stakes” for the universe at large might not be as huge by the end of the movie and some characters come back.

I think the point is, Marvel movies, for now, are being made by folks who understand and appreciate the source material. The creators are given the freedom to create, and it’s paid off for them.

DC Cinematic and the new Star Wars movies are made in boardrooms and run through committees and it shows. They’re either just incredibly shitty narrative messes, or completely soulless like a Bethesda game.

Yikes! I think we might need to get back to Endgame here.

My favorite character in the whole marvel movie-verse is Groot

He has one freaking line and has more personality, development and growth (literally) than many.