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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
The thing with Miles is that because he's from inception built to be Peter's successor and so fundamentally needs to be younger than him. Like even in media where Miles is one of Peter's school buddies (I think the Disney XD show does this) he's still coded to be Peter's junior.
And to go back to the Power Pack, I think the big issue there is that it's conceptually a team of Kid Heroes which is trickier to do in live-action - even after finding child actors who could pull off the roles you still have a setting that fundamentally averts Comic-Book Time on top of the IRL issue of said actors actually, y'know, getting older. The Shazam! movie actually did a good job with this (in part because the DCEU no longer cares about having a set timeline which allows things to slide around vaguely) and even then it still had to bump Billy to high-school age.
(On that note Faithe Herman would be downright perfect as Lunella Lafayette and even then at 13-years-old she's probably now too old for the role. I've been wondering for a while if Marvel's superpowered literal children are going to have to be aged up into preteens if not teens just because of the need to work with IRL actors - after all people here and elsewhere are dogging MCU Spidey for still being in high-school when Holland's now 25.)
They can only keep Tom Holland on age-reducing drugs for so long. Eventually, Peter's going to need to grow up.
Or, more likely, be written out so Sony can reboot him again with a younger actor.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 3rd 2021 at 7:57:18 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub."Or, more likely, be written out so Sony can reboot him again with a younger actor."
I hope not, I'm already tired of the writers obsessing over Peter having to stay a teenager, or college age at most.
The animated film showed us that it is perfectly possible to have a movie with a Peter already at a mature age.
In fact, something that bothers me about the 5-year time skip is that I can't help it that this was just an excuse to keep Peter as a teenager for an extra 5 years.
Edited by JoLuRo075 on Sep 3rd 2021 at 10:14:21 AM
Have a trailer of Enter the Dragon edited to look like the trailer of Shang Chi (more specifically this one
). Nice homage to the character's roots, I think.
Edited by Gaon on Sep 3rd 2021 at 1:10:54 AM
"All you Fascists bound to lose."> Had to be sure.
If they're incapable of reading Humor Mode when its there that's on them and not you
have a listen and have a link to my discord serverI just watched Shang-Chi and it’s an excellent film.
He/His/Him. No matter who you are, always Be Yourself.I liked Shang Chi. I can't say that I loved it exactly. My son really got into it, so that's a bonus.
Nothing struck me as particularly bad, but at no point was I particularly surprised by a novel usage of tropes. I also found it hard to reconcile the idea of a warlord with these Ten Rings living for a thousand years and "ruling the world" with a clearly un-ruled world that existed for those same thousands of years, unless the "world" in question is just a small part of China and the story is a tad hyperbolic.
I mean, Western history books might have mentioned this dude at some point. I know it's a conceit of the Marvel universe and we should just accept it, but nobody has any right to be shocked when beings with godlike powers rain destruction on cities any more. Someone has been putting on a very good masquerade or performing mass neuralizations or something, but see below.
None of that is spoilers; it's right there in the introduction, so let's move on.
Marvel does not disappoint with the mandatory battle against a CG army. It happens right on cue, conveniently carrying the film when the emotional character moments run out. I had a little bit of difficulty feeling investment in those stakes, as predictable as the story beats are. I also had a hard time figuring out what the exact powers of the Rings are supposed to be. I suspect the writers didn't want us asking.
Okay, highs, with spoiler tags on:
- Ben Kingsley is just delightful. I love him in this film; he more than redeems himself for Iron Man 3.
- The visual effects are A-grade MCU, and the fight choreography is fantastic as always.
- Wong's appearance does a great job of tying the story in with the wider universe and he's hilarious as always.
- Keeping in mind what I said above, the dinner conversation with Shang Chi and Katy's friends is delightful and hangs a lampshade on all the superbeings that people can't ignore any more.
- The scenes in which the characters are using their
airbending formsdragon magic are hauntingly beautiful.
Issues/lows:
- Shang Chi's character arc seems to be about everyone but him. Does he really change at all, other than a generic "accept who you are" message?
- If I had been writing down my guesses about where the plot would go on a napkin about five minutes ahead, I would have hit about 99 percent. It's as straightforward as I've ever seen a superhero film. This isn't necessarily bad, but was anyone really surprised when the dragon showed up?
- As noted above, without any clear idea of what the Rings' powers are, I couldn't really engage with the scenes in which they are used. There was no thought of, "oh, it totally makes sense that they can do that."
Miscellaneous:
- A bit of fridge brilliance: the story does manage to explain why Xu Wenwu didn't come to the attention of the Avengers. He hung up his powers and had a family for the relevant time period. I guess he was on vacation for the Snap and nobody he cared about got dusted.
- For some reason I got flashbacks to Far Cry 4 while watching the film. I can't quite figure out why. Can someone help me? That is sarcasm.
- Has anyone in this world heard of guns? We have some weird crossbows, and there are archers, but everyone seems to content to fight in melee. You'd think that Xu Wenwu's goons would have brought more ranged weapons at least. Yeah, I get it, suspension of disbelief. /sigh
Edited by Fighteer on Sep 3rd 2021 at 11:01:46 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I haven't seen the movie yet, but in the "All Hail the King" short film, he is described moreso as ruling from the shadows as a The Man Behind the Man figure, so if that is indeed the case that would be easier to reconcile. Mandarin didn't so much rule the world per see as he was a powerful voice in the ear of untold powerful men and women throughout history.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."The implication I got from his backstory in the film was that he went from military might hundreds of years ago to eventually doing basically what HYDRA tried to do - run the world secretly from the shadows by controlling wars and influencing governments and such - but more successfully because all he cared about was making himself rich rather than ideology.
I kind of wanted to see a little of how he and HYDRA might have interacted, since as described HYDRA was pretty bluntly stepping on his turf.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Sep 3rd 2021 at 8:11:57 AM
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I suppose these might be true, but then did he really have "all the power he wanted"? I get that it's necessary for the premise of the film but the hyperbolic nature of the claims grinds my mental gears a bit. And yeah, HYDRA might have been curious about this other organization competing with it for secret world domination. Bring in the Red Room and its Widows and there's got to be some kind of Gambit Pileup going on.
Also, in line with the ill-defined powers of the Rings, surely one CIA sniper could have put a bullet through his head while he was in the bathroom or something. He could certainly do a lot of damage before someone dropped a bomb on him, but his powers amount mainly to punching people really hard from a few dozen meters away.
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The joke about "The Mandarin" being a western invention whose name was borrowed from a chicken dish had me in stitches.
Edited by Fighteer on Sep 3rd 2021 at 11:20:00 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"All these secret conspiracies competing against each other makes me think of this one bit from Ask a Ninja:
Ninja: “We have! This is exactly the way we want it.”
I really wasn't a fan of the Ten Rings themselves. Mainly, they just didn't feel like The Ten Rings at all to me. They share almost none of the same traits besides being ancient ring shaped tech salvaged from a meteor. I was thinking at least they were going to do a thing where the rings would cycle through different powers based on the user's martial arts form or something, but no.
They didn't come across as all that powerful, and I wasn't massively impressed with how they were used in fights.
Kaze ni Nare!Red Room and HYDRA also technically have different endgoals from what has been established. HYDRA wanted world domination, Red Room as presented seems to mostly act like a black-ops, mercenary organization for the rich and powerful (as implied by the opening credits). They weren't really in the "world domination" business.
It is in fact plausible the Red Room and HYDRA worked together on occasion, although it is to be noted they might hate each other for the shared past (Red Room being a soviet offshoot and HYDRA a nazi off-shoot. Bad blood there.)
"All you Fascists bound to lose."![]()
The Rings being vague and undefined is admittedly something of a problem, especially towards the end of the film. I think they might have been avoiding being too definitive just in case they wanted to do something even bigger with them in a future film.
Now imagine bringing in the older tv shows, with "Real HYDRA," plus the Hand, and so on also secretly running the world from behind the scenes, some of which with absolutely no knowledge of one another.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Sep 3rd 2021 at 8:27:20 AM
So it's not just me. The Rings are absolutely the weakest part of the film's supernatural elements. Good to have that confirmed. Now I haven't read a single one of these comics, so I have no idea what they are supposed to be able to do.
Edited by Fighteer on Sep 3rd 2021 at 11:29:32 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Admittedly, the comics rings are so very close to the Infinity Gems in concept that it's unsurprising that they got an overhaul.
I don't think the movie rings are too bad, but they are very much undefined in what they can actually do. They're yadda yadda explosive energy whips, but also sometimes they can do [REDACTED] spoilery amazing things that don't quite follow from what we had seen of them thus far, and literally nobody knows where they came from yet, making it clear that the lack of limitation or answers was an intentional choice for better or for worse.
Some of the action scenes that utilize them make sure to keep consistent how they behave, to great affect. Some of the other ones... don't, and get a little noticeable upon inspection.
The almost befuddled way Wenwu says "he named me after an orange," cracked me up too. He almost seems more stunned at the audacity and ridiculousness than angry.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Sep 3rd 2021 at 8:36:03 AM
Just imagine how cool it would've been if you had stuff like (to use very generalized examples) Wenwu dropping into tiger style and suddenly seeing the rings become wreathed in fire, or adopting crane style and seeing them become suffused with lightning.
To me, the thing that makes the ten rings the ten rings is the ten unique powers they have.
Edited by GNinja on Sep 3rd 2021 at 3:38:02 PM
Kaze ni Nare!

Good point, even if Marvel isn't exactly willing to let go of teen Peter in a lot of other cases, live-action tends to make people listen.
Even if Tom Holland is pretty babyfaced.
Imagine if Sony decides to not renew and make their own version of Spidey, though.
Edited by Blueace on Sep 2nd 2021 at 1:17:56 PM
Wake me up at your own risk.