I know. Brie Larson wasn't too keen on honkies talking about her movie... But don't shoot! I'm black. :) "NAAAAAAAA" ~AvengE;Rs Suite~ Captain Marvel is the 21st movie in a franchise that was stale seventeen movies ago! "You take that back!" And it's directed by Jack Saint and his wife It's about an incredibly powerful and adept young woman with amnesia, pursuing her lost memories to defeat an invasive villain who can appear as anyone. My verdict: Alita battle angel was pretty all right. Well done, Spy Kids guy... Cameron... on the first alright anime movie out of Hollywood! No, this was based on a novel of a different name... and what a coincidence for two movies with so many broad similarities to release so close together and become spearheads in the public ""dialogue"" So why not a little side-by-side comparison to see what worked (Alita) and what didn't (Marvel) There will be major spoilers ahead for both movies So if you want my recommendations first: See a lotta Alita, and skip SpongePants SquareHead. Brie Larson: "Is that like a personal attack or something?" "Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh." I haven't read either's source material. So when I say Alita is alright, my opinion of it as an adaptation is still pending. When I say Captain Marvel is a giant yawn I mean what fucking comic am I even supposed to start with? The original ones where she's a dude? "No, thanks." ~Avengers Motel Room~ Marvel begins with the protagonist waking up on some alien planet. She's troubled by her dreams, which are memories of her past life as Carol Danvers, an Earth-born U.S. fighter pilot. Carol has "in"convenient amnesia, though So she thinks she's Kree, a species that conveniently looks, acts, and functionally are human. Except they have blue blood. "Oh Jesus!" She's also conveniently impervious! So she can't get a papercut and ruin the illusion... Carol goes to spar with her mentor, Yon Rogg, who's teaching her to keep her emotions in check. Such a hothead! Except this is a bit silly because there's never been a character MORE amazing at being unfazed by everything For two hours... Brie spent nine months perfecting that stony expression and... nine months well-spent... ~Avengers Theme as Thor summons Stormbreaker~ *BONK* After too much dialogue of characters expositing shit they should already know, "Yawn Law," Carol, and some other Kree warriors head off the hunt some Skrull commander named Talos: Principle member of an allegedly hostile shapeshifter race. ~The Who - Baba O'Riley~ The Kree fuck up, and the Skrulls take Carol to sift through her memories in search of some lady named Doctor Wendy Lawson, whom carol knew but had forgotten. This is also a bit silly because these memories blatantly reveal Carol as an Earthling yet it takes her another HOUR to catch up. Carol easily escapes the Skrulls
with her photon-blasting powers making snarky quips and brushing off
Skrulls all the merry way. She flees in a pod that crumbles
and plummets her to earth where she smashes into a Blockbuster. *CRASH* *WARNING SIREN* This all takes about 20 to 25 minutes. What this opening does well: It quickly establishes the goal for Carol, which is to hunt down Dr. Lawson's ship before the Skrulls do. The, uh, memory interrogation sequence was... cool. When it wasn't dumb... That's it. What this opening does poorly: A lot of what we're shown misleads us, with a twist in the last third of the film. As it turns out, the Skrulls, that are just perfectly designed for invading planets, and that have been SHOOTING AT and ZAPPING Carol and attempting to MURDER HUMANS... were beautiful innocent angels all along! So the opening has retroactively made that much sillier. Exposition is heavy, and there's nothing in-universe excusing it. Not even the amnesia... They wanted to set up the whole Kree civilization and the war with the Skrulls as fast as possible. Can't say they didn't! What the opening does the worst is fail to establish Carol as a character. They gave her a concrete goal, which, you know, good job, well done. But they forego giving her the motive to strive for it: Why does she want to stop the Skrulls? Beyond being told to... What does SHE want from all this personally? Does she want to make up for all the suffering she's caused? Does she want to be king? Does she want to be jacked? It can't be just standing up to her daddy and the rest of the evil bad flashback men... They're not on screen for longer than seconds each. They can't be standing up Yawn Law. She's friendly with him for most of the run time! The best answer I have is she wants to make sense of her memories, which is... "BULLSHIT WHAT THE FU-" She sat on that for about six years and has such an underwhelming reaction when Talos confirms they're not just dreams. So I'm not really feeling an impassioned drive here. It's precisely this LACK of drive which is why the Skrulls have to TAKE Carol, move her to earth, and force her to jump to it. If it had been left up to her, the movie never would have happened. What a bore. So how about Alita's opening? We begin with a scavenging Doctor Ido chancing upon Alita's core in the scrapyard underneath the floating city of Zalem. ~Baba O'Riley~ He takes her home and gives her a robot body to work with and when she wakes up, she has no idea who she is or where she's from. For a while she's just happy to be with Ido, to play motor ball with the neighborhood punks, and to learn about the world around her. It's not until she follows Ido though into an alleyway one night that she discovers he hunts ne'er-do-wells for money. As it happens, he was lured into a trap that fateful night. So Alita unlocks her combat prowess and even some memories and saves Ido. This all clocks in at about half an hour. What this opening does well: There's some fair world-building. Above all, it's done NATURALLY. Alita is the classic fish-out-of-water, so we have plenty of expository dialogue explaining Iron City, Zalem, Motor Ball and Centurions. Now, normally I'd whine about all this memory loss because it's the laziest way to manufacture conflict for a character and the criteria for resolving it tends to be... wishy-washy at best. But if you're going to utilize this plot device I think the way Alita: Battle Angel does it is MUCH better than Captain Marvel... ...at least... Alita doesn't have six years in a job as a space ranger to cushion her amnesia, so we get to experience Iron City in step with her. "IDO!" "What's that?" What this opening does... not as well: Alita's character is, on the flip side, kind of formless for a while. Her excitement to learn about Iron City is contagious but until her suspicions toward Ido take root, there's not that much going on with her besides being a cutie little patootie. (^w^) I find this forgivable since there really is a lot of world-building to get out of the way and it's much much cooler than "generic alien world" and 90's nostalgia baiting. That's it. ~triumphant music~ That said as well, it's a shame how painfully rushed Alita's pacing becomes from here on... ~Avengers but they ran out of money~ I've got some questions for these movies. We'll start with Captain Marvel. Why did the Kree want to genocide the Skrulls so badly if the Skrulls didn't do nuffin'? It can be as simple as "the Kree are evil," but why make a point of giving us the
WRONG answer to that question and... you know, not the real one? What were the Kree DOING with Carol? They weren't trying to weaponize her photon energy to use for themselves. They were training her to contain it. They weren't using her to find the Tesseract or at least not while parading her in front of their enemy POWER LIMITED and VULNERABLE during Star Force missions for YEARS. All I got is that the Kree realized they accidentally created an invincible, immortal goddess. So they figured the only way to prevent retaliation was by tricking her and... taking her to their home and making her intimately familiar with their command... struc-ture... Okay? Why was the Supreme Intelligence using Mar-Vell's likeness to Carol? The Kree are aware she doesn't remember whom Mar-Vell is, (and that if when she does their jig is up!) Does the Supreme Intelligence have no choice BUT to use the most important person to Carol? Doesn't sound so supreme to meeee! Why were Carol's memories wrong? She "remembers" a Skrull killing Mar-Vell, even when the Skrulls were examining the scene in her head. Supposing the Kree manipulated her memories, I'm guessing they were the ones who wiped most of them too? Yet they left some behind edited? Whether uhhh... naturally or artificially? Why not ALL EDITED or ALL WIPED? How come Talos didn't know to bring Carol to his side when he had her in the memory machine? "Hey toots! Here are your memories and, uh, would you look at that! We have the same enemy!" "Truce??" They make it out like he didn't know enough at that TIME... ...but that doesn't line up. He must've known her memory of the Skrulls killing Mar-Vell wasn't real and he HAD to have known Carol was not Kree. Yet he didn't even try to reason with her... Instead he did nearly everything possible to be the bad guy since well... Fuck, he is the bad guy!
Until the movie changes its mind... While the Skrulls failed I repeat FAILED to get the coordinates of the MacGuffin, they did confirm Dr. Wendy Lawson was on Earth. And that they were "on their way." The fuck you mean "on your way?" They're THERE! And they already knew Lawson was from Earth, right? Talos has assumed the post of S.H.I.E.L.D. Director for a little while now! It's not something he managed in under 12 hours of finding earth! Right?! Why a Light-Speed engine as the MacGuffin, when all these alien fucks are warping everywhere anyway? How did Fury find Carol at the bar? And JUST as she got there? Carol interrogates Fury to see if he's really Fury. You don't think a Skrull could B.S. the life story of a guy you've known for like two minutes? There's randomly an alien cat wandering the halls of this classified facility So S.H.E.I.L.D., with its ALIEN DIRECTOR, mind you does already know about and shelter aliens? Maybe? Was Fury too low level to get the memo? Why the fuck did Carol accept Talos's side of things so easily? After his guys have spent the movie SHOOTING at her? Talos himself even tried to kill Fury! At some point, even if Talos had his reasons, you gotta draw a line, right? Like damn... Maybe I missed something here... but why does Talos beg Carol to decode the coordinates he shouldn't have? When did he get those between the memory machine scene and this scene? Why make Nick Fury into a complete fucking JOKE? And I don't remember this OP cat and any of the other MCU movies... I know this is a complaint in like every other one of these movies, the "Why didn't 'X' show up to help stop this world ending threat?" question, But... ~Wolrd-ending Threat noises~ "Right..." "Army." You don't think it might have been an excellent time to page Carol? just sayin' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ "All right for the good of mankind, we're set to nuke New York City." "Unless you have some fantastical godsend who can wipe out alien fleets in a literal flash..." "...or something..." "If you don't have something that goddamn incredible in your goddamn pocket," "it's bye-bye New York." "THEY DESERVE TO DIE, N' I HOPE THEY BURN IN HELL!!!" My questions for Alita are: Why is a white guy named Ido? Now, I like Mr. Waltz's performance a lot, and the man has wonderful on-screen presence with waifus "Are you engaged?" ~Japanese Translation~ "...We'll discuss it later, okay?" ~Somber music~ "FUCK YOU!" But Ido? Well, I looked into it, and, yeah. The original character is pretty much a blonde German. So this is only the adaptation being faithful, apart from changing the first name from Daisuke to Dyson. Which makes absolute sense to me. You know what? I'm going to retract this question... I wouldn't have done it any different. What was that war between Earth and Mars all about? Was Earth the bad guy because of Nova? I get the dude setup himself as a kind of god lording over Zalem and Iron City, So, in doing that, did he drag Mars into a conflict? That really needed answering sooner rather than later. but... eh. We know Alita doesn't have all of her memories back, and at least she already has concrete reasons to despise and want to take down Nova, without having the full backstory yet. Does Vector not know who Ido is? Despite his partner being Ido's ex-wife, and his underling tussling with Ido twice? If he does, then why ignore him? Find Ido, find Alita. Like he wants... Right? Or why not find her through Hugo? Why this harebrained scheme where Vector dangles entry to Zalem over Hugo, which somehow translates to Alita entering the Motor Ball tryouts, to kill her there? I'd understand all this hoop jumping if Vector or Nova couldn't FIND Alita but at no point in the movie am I led to believe they couldn't effortlessly do just that any time. Why in the WORLD did Alita have her boyfriend's head ISIS-ed off? Okay, so because she humiliated this hunter-warrior named Zapan. Uh... "Zappin?" (editors note: "Yep.") he mortally wounds her much more mortal boyfriend in front of her. Due to some monumental bullshit, Hugo is framed as a criminal. So, by law, the kill must be finished. if Alita impedes that, the Centurions will kill her and Hugo both. Cheaper still, Alita just HAPPENS to have a master surgeon arrive on scene to slice of Hugo's head and connect it to her heart... Which somehow... keeps the head alive? Alita then "pretends" Hugo's decapitation killed him, except a Centurion scan confirms he was killed? Is it only looking for Hugo's heart or something? In cyborg land???? And if that wasn't bad enough, just a couple short scenes later, Alita angrily marches into hunter-warrior HQ And GUESS WHAT SHE DOES??? Takes out a SLEW of Centurions! With ease! She unscrewed her boyfriend's head from his body for NOTHING! Terrible setup, terrible execution... When's Alita 2? ; ) "The winner is..." Alita... ~Avengers but it's a Russian bootleg~ I liked Alita's action quite a bit. it's rated PG-13, yet we still got Alita punching a Splicer to death, leaving his head a bloody blue pulp. We got Alita nailing a hoes' head to the wall with her foot, stabbing a robot dude with a robot arm... Just a lot of puncturing! It's great! The violence has weight to it! Even Alita sustained some significant damage at one point. Captain Marvel's also PG-13... ...and the action sucks... There's NO weight to the violence. Very little blood, no puncturing "WROOONGG!" *cat scratch* Just Carol playing "Whack-A-Skrull" with her invincible, bad self. The ending battle is sooooo boorring... Carol just flies around like she's a light projection herself, with NO chance of being touched. And blasts everything away
with her lame-ass beam powers... It could have been, you know, OKAY, if it were really such a Level-Up, But it's not like Carol could ever get hurt anyway... By the end, she can just... light shit up more... and fly! SPEAKING of being an overpowered bitch... ~Gangsta Rap - Nigga Nigga Nigga~ Carol and Alita are Mary Sue's. There I said it sue me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But they're not equal. First, Carol: There's the usual stuff... She's invincible with enhanced strength and has no weaknesses to her powers... To be fair, All that can be levied against a couple other Marvel heroes, to a degree, (through gritted teeth): But they weren't doing the cringy eyebrow arch thing... (normally): Before sassing their enemies. Plus, Carol's flat (heh...) I mean, as a character. :^) (good save E;R) Cap and Thor still had character arcs; with Cap coming into his own as a Super Soldier, and Thor overcoming his ego to be worthy to wield the hammer again. But(t) CAAROLL, starts HER movie needing to overcome her impulsiveness and using her powers, then spends the movie not being hampered by it AT ALL. And ends the movie realizing: "Wait no, actually her powers are too AWESOME to contain!" No self reflection and no overcoming any character flaw... because her ONE SHORTCOMING, is actually her best feature... There is no arc... Just the arch... There's even a scene to mimic Rey and Luke in the tree; Fury asks Carol why she's here: So, Fury answers for her... Ma-Rey Sue: "Something..." "...inside me has always been there..." Sure, Carol's CURIOUS about her memories of being on earth, but "curious" is about as desperate as she gets. She acts so aloof and unaffected so much of the time, that you have to wonder if she DOES care. She turns back to save Fury when it counts, so she cares about him, I guess but she's known him for all of an hour. Their connection is just incidental and convenient. And when the twist happens, Carol almost IMMEDIATELY sides with the Skrulls and is smiling and yucking it up minutes later. African Teacher: "Ain't" African Children: "AIN'T" Teacher: "Loyal!" Children: "LOYAL!" It doesn't matter that she be loyal anyway, when EVERYONE adores her. Fury loves her the BAD GUYS end up loving her like, damn, her pilot friend gives her a SPEECH about how marvelous she is. But, maybe with the exception of fury, they don't really admire her for what she does, just WHO she is What carol has inside of her... ...heh... ;) ...is much more valuable than what she's DOING for the majority of the movie. The Skrulls want her because she has the location of the MacGuffin stored in her head, the humans want her because... otherwise, they really have no fucking clue what's going on, and the Kree want her because... Well, they want her... Toward the movie's end, Carol's actions matter a lot more as she enters the "Marvel-Tar" state and starts shredding an alien fleet like paper, by... removing the power limiter... (seriously...) the ONLY things holding her back were aliens lying to her, men telling her the truth, and a rinky-dink neck pod device. No inherent physical limitations No antagonistic force that, at least at one point, is more powerful than she. An. An. Anime. An. Anime. Power Limiter........ ~Happier music begins to fade, more ominous music enters~ ~ominous music building~ ~music is REALLY loud rn~ (NO...) Okay, what about Alita? At first Alita is probably Sue'ier than Carol a slightly blank-e;r slate to self insert into She's amazing at everything she sets out to do, because she was some kickass Martian soldier in her past life And now, just about everybody loves her upon meeting her. Who couldn't? I could stand to this freakish Bush-Baby eyes forever! (^w^) AND she saved a PUPPY!!! aww... :D But as the minutes tick by, Alita takes shape as a real person. She comes to love Ido like a father, yet goes against him to become a hunter-warrior, so that she can unlock more of her memories. She falls in love with Hugo, a little TOO hard, to the point that she's literally shoving her heart in his FACE. Her fanciful interest in motor ball becomes so much more, transforming into a means of helping her man reach Zalem, and then to a means of revenge. Alita's power level does reach "Super-Mensch," but it doesn't stop her from losing Hugo. And by the end, Alita's not smiling anymore She wants to reach Zalem and destroy it. This Martian-Cyborg girl feels so much more human than the ALIEN who WAS human... I'm not saying Alita's arc is perfect, by the way. The switch from naive girl, pleading with a bar full of bounty hunters, to street smart hard-ass, mocking and knocking heads in a bar, is packed into like a minute... "HOLD ON THERE, JETHRO!!!" My verdict? Alita's probably only a Mary-Sue to start, and works her way up to honorary "(Gary)-Stu" status. Carol however, a Mar-Vel-Sue... "Duh..." ~Avengers but not as cheap as the subtitlE;R's jokes...~ Alita doesn't really have "haha" comedy. So I'm including this section to harp on wanna-be Guardians Of The Galaxy over here... No, Marvel "comedy" in general... What I call Marvel comedy consists of two jokes: One I'll call "Stark Snark," where characters fancy themselves comedians and spout off "witty" lines Ultron: "You'll never-" Cap: "Never what?" "YOU DIDN'T FINISH!" Iron Man (O-S): "Got tired of shootin' golf?" Hawkeye: "Well I played 18, shot 18..." "...just can't seem to miss." ("Mia Khalifa" song fades in) And the other's when they undercut a tense and/or dramatic scene by going Haha, we almost got serious for a second! Doctor Strange: "Stop." And the snark will often combine with the tone-deaf to make the ultimate "haha, funny." *cloak starts cleaning his face XDD* Doctor Strange: "Stop." And the snark will often combine with the tone-deaf to make the ultimate "haha, funny." Cap: "New haircut?" But then EVERYONE became Black Widow. It worked with Tony because there's the dissonance of being simultaneously a noble hero Black Widow: "I wouldn't stress about it... ;)" *oof* (captioner felt that) Ant-Man: "I really don't want to hurt you." Why don't you start "Romanoff" my DICK! "Stop." "Did I step on your moment?" Why don't you start "Romanoff" my DICK! and Carol Danvers wastes no time hopping on THAT train... "Stop." Does Joss Whedon regularly burst into the writing room like "Where's the SAUCE?" is that if she did anything more or less, she and Ido were dead. Not great, but it isn't PAINFUL. And when a Alita beat up the robo thugs in the alley she treated the threat seriously, Not saying a word as she KILLED them because what we're supposed to get out of this situation is that if she did anything more or less, she and Ido were dead. And Captain Marvel... *Skrull roar* *Carol roar, mocking the Skull* (hAHa CoMedY XD) Is that even supposed to be funny? Or is it supposed to make the enemies non-threatening? I'm being a little harsh. There are some good comedic bits in Captain Marvel, like when Carol knuckle-fucks an old lady in the face on a crowded train "Worldstar dat mah nigga!" Passengers: "OOOOHHHH..." Real passengers: *Loudly clamoring* Man filming: "NAHHH..." "Worldstar- "Worldstar dat- "Worldstar dat mah nigga!" Or how about when Carol kills some passengers by blasting a hole through the roof of the car they're in? *Photon blast, killing EVERYONE BELOW* I liked that.. (he didn't) Or how about when they are checking out alien penises? GOOD SHIT. ~Avengers but now it's distorted~ Captain Marvel doesn't get ANY. So I'm including this section to harp on harpies who think that's a "good thing." Maybe I'm just a SAP, but romance and these kinds of stories is... usually a boon. (I agree, E;R) And why? Because it raises the stakes! If your protagonist has a love interest, they have that much more to gain, and that much more to lose. I'm NOT saying romance is necessary for, or enhances every story... Wade (getting pegged): "Erhm nope... no." E;R: ...or even that Captain Marvel would have benefited from shoehorning it in. But why is Carol, "the lone hero," singled out to be a spinster, while every other core Avenger got SOME sugar and THEIR origin movies? Female Text-to-Speech: "What has happened historically with female protagonists is we will define them in terms of who they love or who loves them." "And it's usually about a man." (gimme a break...) "Then everything is in relation to the man and about whether or not he will give her validity." (BWAHAHAHAH) SURE!!! Like in Alita, where loving a man supplied the female protagonist with MORE and STRONGER motivations making her a BETTER CHARACTER.(!!!) I can't really say the romance between Alita and Hugo was grrreaaattt... If anything it was overdone, yet REALLY undercooked But Alita losing her husbando still tug at the heartstrings a little... *sobbing* Hugo: "Thank you..." "...for saving me." Alita: "I love you..." Who did Carol have? You know, in lieu of any love interests? A friend she didn't remember, A S.H.I.E.L.D. agent she barely knew and mentors she ended up not knowing at all... pathetic ~Delicious, finally some good fucking Avengers~ To round this video out, let's take a gander at Rotten Tomatoes; see how the masses are leaning! Hey! People like Alita! Critics... weren't as receptive... Told you! It's alright! How about (Captain) Marvel? Ouch... the people didn't like that one as much... well, maybe it's being reviewed bombed by the... "mAn BaBiEs." Let's see about on opening day... Dayum! (with a chuckle) At 10k people too! pursuing her lost memories to defeat an invasive villain who can appear as anyone. and Carol Danvers wastes no time hopping on THAT train... *Skrull roar* *Carol roar, mocking the Skull* (hAHa CoMedY XD) Or how about when Carol kills some passengers by blasting a hole through the roof of the car they're in? *Swelling music that gives a SERIOUS TONE* *cloak starts cleaning his face XDD*
The affect of a magic Jew controlled element. TIME