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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
My favorite meme from Endgame might be from Thanos saying "A small price to pay for salvation."
Usually, it's some ludicrously high price for something completely not worth it, and Thanos has that reaction. Like:
- Add Cheese: $399.00
- Thanos: "A small price to pay for some cheese."
Or
- Would you press the button? You get "One apple pie", but "the state of Ohio is destroyed".
- Thanos: "A small price to pay for pie."
I know we have a separate Black Widow thread, so I posted there, but I do want to give my spoiler-free impressions.
This movie is perfectly adequate. It feels like it wants to be Natasha's Winter Soldier, and when it's being a family drama and/or a spy thriller, it works pretty well. I felt strongly for the characters, their relationships are believable, and the jokes landed.
When it's trying to be a balls-out action movie, it forgets that most of its characters aren't superhuman and can't take falling five stories without an extended stay in the hospital.
Taskmaster is fine. The MCU is under no obligation to copy the comics exactly. Get over it.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I've heard that the action scenes and rest of the movie were handled by two separate crews and that the action scenes were written before the rest of the script.
Something something mandatory action beats.
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What, for Black Widow? It checks out. They are very obviously disjointed.
I didn't really feel that from Black Widow but goddamn that explains a lot about Black Panther's action scenes.
I recall hearing that's the case with a lot of MCU movies. I'm not sure if that's true for all of them, but I remember hearing some discussions about how the action scenes tend to be first ones staged out, and the rest of the film is ironed out to work around those moments.
I kinda get the reasoning, since those are the most complicated scenes to shoot, but you can tell when the story feels a bit disjointed from the flow of the action scenes in certain movies.
That's pretty much the case with all action films. The main distinction is how much story they build around the set pieces. Black Widow has some particularly jarring continuity issues within the action scenes. Characters move from one set piece to another offscreen and with no real sense of how they got there. We leave characters falling to their doom and then they just show up a scene or two later.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Black Widow has the same too-many-cuts issue most Marvel movies do, which hurts it even more because Black Widow is a hand-to-hand combat movie where visible martial arts choreography should be what makes the action work.
The whole mandatory action beats this is a problem that's been showing cracks in Marvel for a long time, and I really hope Shang-Chi manages to avoid it.
Winter Soldier had some great action scenes, largely because the fights themselves told a great story from withinnote , and had purpose outside of sheer spectacle. You can't skip the action in that movie without also losing out on a whole lot of plot and character beats.
Nowadays, most MCU action scenes are unfortunately done primarily for flash and entertainment, and don't do much to distinguish themselves from one another in ways that make them worth going through on rewatch once you know what happens.
Edited for clarity.
Edited by AlleyOop on Jul 9th 2021 at 2:05:54 PM
I never got the impression that Winter Soldier's action scenes were disjointed from the narrative or lacked continuity. Everyone's pointed out the absurdity of Nick Fury escaping from Bucky by cutting a hole in the pavement, but other than that I don't see the issue.
Honestly I can't think of that many MCU films where the internal continuity is a serious problem. Endgame has a few issues with characters showing up wherever they need to be for the scenes to happen, but all of them serve a purpose of setting up the final showdown between Tony and Thanos.
Edit: I meant Endgame, not Infinity War.
Edited by Fighteer on Jul 9th 2021 at 1:37:16 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!""note For example, the way the Winter Soldier drops the knife between hands as a show not just of badassery but also of ruthless pragmatism"
Less pragmatism and more his mechanical and unrelenting way of fighting, Bucky as winter soldier is pretty much a terminator with nice hair, in that fight he push cap over and over and you feel he can barely contain it.
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Yeah, I was providing Winter Soldier as a counterpoint and an example of how those action scenes should be done. Whichever point they started pushing for the streamlined and separately-directed action scenes seems to have happened somewhere in the middle of Phase 3.
Edited by AlleyOop on Jul 9th 2021 at 1:52:47 PM
To ammend this statement, I'd say this is the case with most western action films. There has actually been a decent bit of literature written about how in the western cinema there's a general tradition of splititng the role of responsible between fights between the stunt coordinator, the choreographer, the (second unit) director and the editor, meaning there's a lot of cross fire and confusion between them. In the east, namely Hong Kong, a different culture developed (largely reverse-engineered from the Chinese theater tradition) of "fight directors" which essentially blend all the aforementioned functions under a single position which holds roughly equal weight to the regular director (and sometimes is the same guy) and oversees the creation of the fight scenes in all its stages, including post-production.
The Matrix was famous for basically lifting wholesale the HK model by way of hiring Living Legend Yuen Woo-ping, and the results spoke for themselves. Yuen Woo-ping's time in the Matrix bore fruit with Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, who'd go on to found 87 Eleven Action Design (a.k.a 87 North) which seem to have a vision to try to bring the HK model to the west (or bypass it entirely by just directing the film as well).
Chad Stahelski and David Leitch have more famously tried to do this with the John Wick franchise, Atomic Blonde, Hobbs & Shaw (which are all directed by Stahelski or Leitch, thus bypassing the problem), but Stahelski also tried to run a "fight director"-esque shindig with DC's Birds of Prey and Captain America: Civil War.
I went on this roundabout explanation to also note one of the main stunt coordinators in The Winter Soldier was Thomas Robinson Harper. Who got his start in the Matrix.
It all comes back to the Matrix.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."![]()
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Not even when Carol hit someone with a pinball machine?
Edited by Bocaj on Jul 9th 2021 at 2:01:44 PM
Forever liveblogging the Avengers

Thor's "is he really though?" in Ragnarok is another famous moment.