Loki Archives - Page 8 Of 8

April 21, 2019April 21, 2019

“Avengers: Infinity Wars” Movie Review!

With Avengers: Endgame only a few days away, it makes sense to revisit the first part of the Infinity Saga – Avengers: Infinity Wars, one of the greatest movies of the past year and the beginning of the end of the current phase of the MCU. This movie is such a monolith of pop culture that it could be easy to overlook the fact that, first and foremost, it’s a film just like any other, and should be reviewed as such. So here’s my comprehensive and complete analysis of everything in Avengers: Infinity Wars that you need to remember before going into Avengers: Endgame, plus everything you need to know about Infinity Wars itself, as a film.

SPOILERS for Avengers: Infinity Wars ahead. Obviously.

So, in case, you’ve forgotten everything that happened (how could you?), we’ll start out with a brief summary of events: the film picks up where the 2017 film Thor: Ragnarok left off, with Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) among the last survivors of an attack on their spaceship. It is soon revealed that the attackers are led by none other than the Mad Titan Thanos (voiced by Josh Brolin), who is hunting for the six incredibly powerful Infinity Stones that have been scattered across the universe. Having already been armed with the Power Stone, Thanos is able to force Loki to divulge the location of his next target, the Space Stone – which, unsurprisingly, turns out to be in Loki’s possession. During the ensuing fight, The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) gets sent hurtling off into space, headed for earth, and Loki gets strangled by Thanos. The spaceship blows up (with Thor inside, still cradling his dead brother’s body), and Thanos and his minions go their separate ways, pursuing the other Stones.

This opening scene is fantastic: it sets the mood for the rest of the film (grim and tragic), and kills off two characters very quickly – Loki, and Thor’s best friend Heimdall (Idris Elba). It also sets up some important questions for Avengers: Endgame – (1) is Loki really dead? (2) What happened to two other characters, Valkyrie and Korg, who were on that spaceship before the attack? (3) Is this whole thing really Thor’s story?

These questions don’t have answers yet, but there are a number of good theories out there: (1) Loki was holding the Space Stone during the fight, so it’s possible he was able to use it to escape across the galaxy, leaving a clone of himself to die. (2) It has been confirmed that Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) escaped the attack, and that she will be returning for Avengers: Endgame – it’s still a mystery where she went, though, or what her purpose in Endgame could be. The fate of Korg (voiced by Taika Waititi) remains unknown. (3) This question has been asked a lot. Infinity Wars starts with Thor, and it ends with Thor (more on that later). The heroic Asgardian god doesn’t actually have very much to do throughout the film, but in Infinity Wars he was undeniably the only Avenger with a clear motive to stop Thanos. And it’s worth noting that Infinity Wars and Endgame are just two halves of one movie, according to the directors, Joe and Anthony Russo. If Thor was the protagonist in the first half, will that carry through into the second? I’d suspect not. While Thor is a crucial member of the team, Endgame truly belongs to Iron Man and Captain America. That’s my opinion, and you’ll see why in a minute.

But enough about Endgame! Back to Infinity Wars: so we follow the Hulk as he crashes through the earth’s atmosphere and rips a hole through the roof of the New York Sanctum, interrupting a conversation between Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Wong (Benedict Wong) about deli food and metaphysics – the Hulk, however, has now turned back into his human self, Bruce Banner, and is babbling about Thanos. Strange and Banner decide to awkwardly interrupt an intimate moment between Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) and his girlfriend Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). They themselves are then interrupted by Thanos’ minions landing in New York City, looking for the Time Stone, which just happens to be owned by Doctor Strange himself. This alien invasion also interrupts a certain school field-trip to MOMA, during which Peter Parker (Tom Holland) escapes out of a school-bus window and goes to help Tony Stark. Things don’t exactly turn out well, however, and Doctor Strange gets captured and sucked into a spaceship, where alien telepath Ebony Maw (voiced by Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) attempts to perform surgery on him but is interrupted by Tony and Peter, who have crept aboard the spaceship. Using techniques learned from Aliens and a good amount of help from Doctor Strange’s magical cloak, the heroes manage to toss Ebony Maw out into the freezing depths of space, and hijack the ship.

And, of course, there are more hints about Endgame here too: most notably the fact that after Tony gets on the alien spaceship, he makes a call to Pepper – as the connection goes out, Pepper tells him either “I’m going to-,” or “I’m going too-“. The latter seems more likely when one takes into consideration that Gwyneth Paltrow posted a photo of herself from the Avengers: Endgame set wearing a superhero suit. Could we see Pepper suit up and fly off into space to follow Tony in Endgame, or is she going somewhere else? Or is it just a misdirection?

Now, obviously, we’ve still only discussed Thor and Tony Stark, and Infinity Wars wouldn’t be much of an Avengers film without Captain America, Black Widow and Hawkeye – which is exactly why Infinity Wars is not a proper Avengers film in my opinion. Captain America (Chris Evans) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) get maybe five or six minutes of screentime each, while Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) doesn’t show up at all. Instead, we get a fast but admittedly impressive fight scene in Scotland as Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) defends her robot boyfriend Vision (Paul Bettany) from getting a certain Mind Stone ripped out of his forehead by Thanos’ minions, who interrupt them during a romantic moment – what is with all the interruptions in this movie? Nobody can finish a conversation without having magic doctors pop out of portals or aliens stab them through the chest! Thankfully, Captain America and Black Widow spend their five minutes of screentime rescuing Scarlet Witch and Vision and then ferrying them to the nation of Wakanda, where they hope the genius inventor Shuri (Letitia Wright) can separate the Mind Stone from Vision’s body by non-life threatening surgical methods.

By now, the plot is literally jumping everywhere in the universe. The Guardians of the Galaxy find Thor still alive, floating in space, and rescue him: he promptly steals their escape-pod and flies off with their captain, Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and their talking tree, Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel). Meanwhile, Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) takes the remaining Guardians on a suicide mission to stop Thanos from getting his hands on the Reality Stone…which fails…massively. Thanos’ daughter Gamora (Zoe Saldana) tries to kill him, and then, in desperation, calls on Star-Lord to kill her – which also fails, massively. So the Reality Stone now belongs to Thanos, and so does Gamora, Thor is lost in space with a raccoon which he thinks is a rabbit, Tony and his crew are looking for Thanos, Thanos’ minions are hunting Vision, Scarlet Witch is having a crisis because Vision keeps telling her she needs to kill him, Black Widow and Bruce Banner have literally two lines of dialogue to address their entire romantic history, and those two lines are, respectively, “Bruce” and “Nat”. And meanwhile Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) is getting a new metal arm that has absolutely no consequence on anything that happens later in the story, and – oh god, not flashbacks too!

(Actually, the flashback is one of the best scenes in the movie, as Gamora reminisces about her first encounter with Thanos. Young Gamora learns to balance a knife on her fingertip while her people are systematically slaughtered by firing squad in the background – beautiful, heart-wrenching stuff, and all complimented nicely by some beautiful music).

Eventually, the plots and subplots start to come together, after a rocky first act. Gamora agrees to lead Thanos to the Soul Stone, located on a desolate planet, where (surprise, surprise) the movie has time to reveal that Red Skull is still alive, even though he has absolutely no consequence on anything that happens later in the story. Though presumably there’ll be more time to deal with the effects of this reveal in Endgame, where we might see a final showdown between the Red Skull and his arch-nemesis Captain America. Thanos learns that the Soul Stone demands a sacrifice before it can be won: specifically, that which you most love. Thankfully, Thanos came to this planet with Gamora, the only person he ever truly loved! Thankfully there’s a giant cliff nearby that is just perfect for throwing people off of! Thankfully the so-called “fiercest woman in the galaxy” chooses this moment to resort to trying to ineffectively punch Thanos’ arm as he throws her off of the aforementioned cliff!

With four of six Infinity Stones now in his grasp, Thanos promptly heads to his ancient homeworld of Titan to go deal with Tony Stark and Doctor Strange, who by now have run into the other Guardians of the Galaxy. On earth, the nation of Wakanda comes under attack from Thanos’ minions while Shuri works frantically to try and get the Mind Stone out of Vision’s head. Meanwhile, Thor is skiing around a frozen star (okay, fine, he’s lighting the forges of Nidavellir or whatever, but it looked like skiing to me). And…Peter Dinklage is an awesome actor, but this movie is already overcrowded with characters – did we really need a giant Peter Dinklage manning the forges of Nidavellir and loading us down with boring exposition? The only interesting part about this sequence is the fact that there’s an Infinity Gauntlet up there in Nidavellir, which may or may not be important in Endgame.

But finally…we get to the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Thanos arrives on Titan and uses the full power of his own Infinity Gauntlet to wreak havoc on the planet. What follows is one of the best fight-scenes in any movie, ever: nanotech weaponry, a moon pulled from its orbit, Doctor Strange transforming into a Hindu deity, the robot assassin Nebula (Karen Gillan) crashing her own spaceship straight into Thanos – and all of it is in vain, because idiot Star-Lord goes and starts punching Thanos in the face while they have the Titan sedated. Seriously, Star-Lord?

After that, the rest of the movie is just tragedy after tragedy. Doctor Strange gives Thanos the Time Stone in exchange for Thanos sparing Tony Stark’s life. There’s apparently a reason for this: Doctor Strange looked into the future and saw only one outcome in which the Avengers win the Infinity War. But to win, Tony Stark has to live, and Thanos has to get the Time Stone.

And Thanos doesn’t waste a single moment before teleporting to Wakanda and going after Vision – whose operation has not been going well. The poor robot literally gets thrown out of a window, on a surgical table, down a cliff. And then (finally) Scarlet Witch puts an end to the whole thing by blasting him in the head and destroying the Mind Stone.

Good thing Thanos didn’t literally just receive the ability to turn back time!

As if having his surgery rudely interrupted by aliens and getting killed by his own girlfriend wasn’t enough, Vision then has to endure being brought back to life and killed again – as Thanos simply reaches into his forehead and plucks out the Mind Stone.

Nobody saves the day in this movie. Not Doctor Strange, who tells Tony sadly that it was “the only way”. Not Tony himself, who is still recovering from having a very large piece of metal shoved into his chest. Not even Thor, when he finally shows up in Wakanda wielding an incredibly ugly ax. Thanos gets what he wants: a fully-powered Infinity Gauntlet that allows him to wipe out half of all life with a snap of his fingers – which he does, without hesitation. The audience is forced to watch in horror as beloved characters turn into ash and disappear: Doctor Strange, Black Panther, Spider-man, Star-Lord (serves him right), Scarlet Witch, etc, etc. Who gave Marvel the right to do this?

Even worse, who gave Marvel the right to use such sloppy CGI on the Hulkbuster suit that Bruce Banner wears during the Battle of Wakanda? And for that matter, the Battle of Wakanda is filmed in such a boring fashion that it’s a crime all in itself: boring color palette and boring choreography make that fight scene one of the most forgettable in any recent Marvel film.

I’m not trying to look for fault in the film, of course. The film is quite good, overall. But the storyline is all over the place, and certain characters (ahem, Star-Lord) did not need anywhere near as much screentime as they got, while other characters (ahem, Captain America) got little to no screentime, when they should have been stars. Hopefully, everything will be resolved in the second half of this still very incomplete movie, which is only a few days away now. Half of the Marvel universe is currently dust, the villain has won and is relaxing on some paradise planet, and the Avengers are all split up across the galaxy.

Let’s hope Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) can do something about this problem when she arrives on earth…

Movie Rating: 9.5/10

March 9, 2019March 11, 2019

Captain Marvel Review (SPOILERS!)

It’s time to talk about everything that happens in Captain Marvel, so if you’ve not seen the film yet – don’t go any further!

Still here? Good. Let’s dive right in.

So there are several surprises in the movie, obviously: Carol’s backstory was completely unknown to us, so piecing it together is not only an incredible journey but also uncovers a lot of interesting stuff; the truth of the Kree-Skrull War; the history of the Tesseract; a surprise villain; and a very shocking end-credits scene. Not to mention some hints as to what might come next. Let’s break it all down.

For anyone who was confused during the movie, here’s what happened, in chronological order:

Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) was a USAF pilot in 1989 when she and her friend Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) found work testing new aircraft designed by a member of Project PEGASUS: Dr. Wendy Lawson (Annette Bening). Lawson had created a lightspeed engine core for her aircraft which harnessed the power of the Tesseract, the Space Stone – it seems she worked for S.H.I.E.L.D and thus was able to get her hands on the powerful artifact, which allowed her aircraft to fly at seemingly impossible speeds, and even into space. What no one knew, however, was that Dr. Wendy Lawson was a rogue Kree agent, who had discovered that her people were fighting an unjust war against the Skrull shapeshifters: the lightspeed aircraft were designed to be powerful enough to end the war. The Kree found her, however, and intercepted Danvers when she and Lawson were flying one of the test-crafts. Forced to make a crash landing, Danvers and Lawson were injured, but Lawson attempted to destroy the lightspeed core before it could be taken by the Kree. Before she was able, Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) the Kree pilot who had downed their plane, shot and killed Lawson. Carol Danvers, however, was able to destroy the core – but not fully. She absorbed the power of the Space Stone when she blew it up, and was then knocked unconscious. Yon-Rogg, seeing this, took her back to the Kree planet of Hala to try and harness the power she now possessed. By the time we see her in Captain Marvel, Carol has no memories of her past life, and has been completely brainwashed by the Kree.

Captain Marvel Review (SPOILERS!) 2 — ign.com

The obvious shocker here is that Carol Danvers received her powers from the Space Stone, which could mean that, like Vision and the Mind Stone, she is inextricably linked to that Stone’s power. How will her own powers be affected by the fact that the Space Stone now resides in Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet? There are differences between this and the situation with Vision: Vision was created by the Mind Stone, given life by it, and when it was taken from him, he died. Carol, however, only got her powers from the Space Stone, and seems to retain them without needing the Space Stone at all. However, this does not rule out the possibility of a link between Carol and the Space Stone in Avengers: Endgame. She should be capable of wielding the Stone, for instance, and that would be quite an interesting possibility.

On a side-note, it’s cool to learn just a little bit more about the Tesseract, between its appearances in Captain America: The First Avenger, and The Avengers. Before Captain Marvel, we all thought it had just been in S.H.I.E.L.D hands up until the time Loki stole it. Little did we know it had started an intergalactic war, created the most powerful entity in the MCU, and been carried around in an orbiting laboratory, a lunchbox, and the insides of a Flerken, in between those two movies.

Speaking of the Flerken, that was one surprise I saw coming: it had been all but spoiled for me months ago, when toys were revealed that showed a muzzled Goose the Cat. Considering that there is only one species of alien in the MCU that takes the form of cats and has tentacles that explode from its mouth, it was pretty easy to guess that cat was a Flerken, especially when early reactions said that Goose stole the show.

The next surprise has to do with the Skrulls: throughout the first half of the film, we think we should be siding with the Kree, even if they are a bit warlike, and their leader, the Supreme Intelligence, is downright creepy. At any rate, it’s quite easy to see that the Skrulls are the bad guys: they’re green aliens who can shape-shift, and they take Carol captive in an ambush. They strap her into a device that makes all of her memories visible to the Skrull leader, Talos the Tamer (Ben Mendelsohn). Like, seriously, with a name like Talos the Tamer, how can you not be a villain?

Captain Marvel Review (SPOILERS!) 3 — mcucosmic.com

But they’re not. Turns out, the Skrulls are the victims of brutal oppression at the hands of the Kree, and they have been scattered far and wide across the universe. Talos himself is looking through Carol’s memories because he’s trying to find Dr. Wendy Lawson’s laboratory, where she was keeping Skrull refugees safe from the Kree. Not only that, but the Skrulls are also incredibly funny, and Talos himself is just hilarious. The Skrulls become instantly likable, especially after we see Talos reunite with his wife and daughter, who have been waiting for him for years.

At the end of the movie, when Carol has defeated the Kree, she promises to help the Skrulls find a new home: we see them vanish into the darkness of outer space, but their destination after that is still unknown. Where will the Skrulls go? Will the Kree find them? And what about Secret Invasion, the comic-book storyline that everyone and their mother thought was going to be started in this movie: the story where Skrulls infiltrate the Avengers for evil purposes? Well, there are definitely still opportunities for that to happen, even with the Skrulls on the good side for now. It’s possible that other Skrulls could challenge Talos’ peaceful goals, and want to continue their war. It’s also possible, as Grace Randolph of Beyond The Trailer speculated, that Talos’ daughter, who was featured prominently in the film, could turn down a dark path and initiate the Secret Invasion.

Now let’s talk about some other things that I found noteworthy in the film: at the end, when Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) has been foiled in his attempt to blow up most of the western side of the United States, Captain Marvel hovers above the earth, daring him to try again. This immediately brought to mind the Alpha Flight storyline, in which Captain Marvel and a team of other superheroes act as Earth’s first line of defense against extraterrestrial threats. Whether this will be expanded upon in a Captain Marvel sequel remains to be seen, but I would be here for it.

There’s also two things relating to Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) in this movie that are worth talking about: well, three, really, if you count the fact that we learn here that Fury cannot bring himself to eat toast that is cut diagonally. But we see how he lost his left eye, and how he came up with the name “The Avengers Initiative”. The answer to the first question is simple – perhaps too simple: his left eye was scratched out by that angry Flerken cat Goose. The answer to the second question – well, to call it a question is misleading, since I’m not sure anyone was really asking for an answer, but we got one anyway and I like it – is that Fury was inspired by the name of Carol Danvers’ plane, “Avenger”. It was a very cool scene, right at the end, when the Avengers theme started playing. A great way to finish a great movie.

However…it wasn’t technically the end. There’s a mid-credits scene and a post-credits scene, which we’ll talk about now: the mid-credits scene is actually from Avengers: Endgame. So firstly, you remember that in the post-credits scene for Avengers: Infinity War, we saw Nick Fury desperately trying to page Captain Marvel, before he was dusted. Turns out that pager was found by the remaining Avengers and brought back to the base, where we see it still beeping. Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), War Machine (Don Cheadle), and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) are all gathered together when the pager suddenly stops sending out its signal: but as Black Widow tells them to charge it up again, she turns around to find…CAPTAIN MARVEL! Yes, Carol Danvers, standing right behind her, looking very serious and no-nonsense. It’s a scarily good scene, and really sets us up well for Avengers: Endgame, where we know we’ll see Captain Marvel and the Avengers face off against Thanos.

Captain Marvel Review (SPOILERS!) 4 — theverge.com

Oh yeah, and the post-credits scene? Typical Marvel prank: it’s simply Goose throwing up the Tesseract, which he had been carrying around in his stomach during the final act of Captain Marvel. We know from that scene that Nick Fury will thus be able to recover the Tesseract and put it into the secret base where Loki, years later in The Avengers, would steal it, setting off a chain reaction of events. It’s amazing how much the Space Stone has caused in the MCU, and I am curious to see if there’s a reason for that. Could the Space Stone – and, by extension, Captain Marvel – be the key to defeating Thanos? Only time will tell.