Five Reasons Marvel Phase 4 Sucked

truly we find ourselves sinking ever deeper into clone world when it comes to the entertainment industry these days whether it's Jennifer Lawrence remember about five years ago when she was a thing proudly declaring that before catnip ever spleen bounced into theaters to Delight a whole generation of developmentally challenged 14 year old girls there had never been a female lead action movie before that's right Jen Cinema was basically the world's largest sausage festival before your Apple cheeked Visage graced our screens give yourself a nice big pat on the back girl or mindless activists with literally nothing else going on in their lives bemoaning the fact that Wednesday Adams isn't portrayed as explicitly gay in her new Netflix series because clearly it's just not possible for two young women to spend any amount of time together without automatically wanting to bang each other somebody put me back in the fridge but hey amongst all the unbridled Madness hubris ignorance and stupidity there's the occasional grain of Truth and common sense to be found like this article from the direct which claims that Marvel is extremely unhappy with phase four of the MCU and is planning to retool subsequent phases to fix their screw-up and I've got to admit my first reaction to this was no [ __ ] Sherlock I've been saying that for the past two years now aside from one or two success stories that managed to recapture some of the old Marvel magic not to mention turning an actual Prophet phase 4 has at best been a Relentless Deluge of bland forgettable sludge and at worst a mounting series of creative and financial disasters that are turning people away in droves now I could just sit back and laugh at the fact that Disney Marvel's greed and arrogance have finally caught up with them but the Drinker is a benevolent dictator you see and rather than just make fun of their failures I thought would be better to turn this into a learning opportunity for all of us so strap in as I take you on a Whistle Stop tour of the top 5 reasons why phase 4 sucked number one lack of creative Direction I said that before phase 4 even began that after the big blower action event game there was no real overarching storyline left to drive things forward no big looming threat that the heroes would eventually have to band together to combat and as a result there was no particular reason for people to stay invested in it and well it turns out I was proven exactly correct the infinity Saga was a piece of Storytelling genius because it allowed even the most mundane and unremarkable movies to feel like they were part of something much bigger and more important a rising tide lifts All Ships as they say it always felt like it was building up to something huge you find yourself tuning into movies that you might otherwise have skipped because you knew that sooner or later there would be some plot development post-credits scene or character Revelation that would drive forward that big overarching narrative and naturally you didn't want to miss it but that big narrative came to a close with endgame and what they really needed to do with phase 4 was move forward and establish a new threat something just as big and dangerous and compelling as Thanos and the Infinity Stones something that would grab the audience's attention providing a new Avenue to build up the tension and anticipation and they really needed to make every movie feel like it was tied into that storyline somehow instead what we got was a Meandering and often disjointed series of movies and TV shows with no particular narrative thread or overarching theme to tie them together it really felt like phase four was a ship without a Rudder drifting aimlessly wherever the winds took it it also didn't help that it was kicked off with a Trilogy of crushingly weak entries first up was Black Widow a holdover movie featuring a dead character that might actually have been successful if it had come out five years earlier and it wasn't [ __ ] then there was Shang Chi a movie so completely Bland and forgettable that I genuinely struggled to tell your single thing about it the cast was boring the writing was boring and it felt like a movie that had no real purpose for existence the fact that it failed to even reach 500 million is a telling example of how unpopular it was and lastly there was the eternals which sank under the weight of its bloated cast boring and Meander in story and ridiculously inexperienced director there were a few half-hearted attempts to build up the Multiverse as the new Battleground to be fought over but it never came through strongly enough or consistently enough to really make an impact as a result phase 4 was basically a collection of movies with no real sense of identity overarching story or unifying purpose and so it became a lot easier to tune out and Skip films that didn't interest us and believe me there was all too many projects like that because number two quantity over quality in the first three phases Marvel released a total of 23 movies over more than 10 years thus an average of just two per year for comparison phase four alone saw the release of no less less than 15 movies and TV shows in the space of just two years and the result is that it just became [ __ ] exhausting for audiences every few weeks it felt like there was another Marvel product Shout out into Cinemas and Disney plus and the more it happened the less meaningful it became the release of a new Marvel project used to be a big event yeah some were definitely bigger than others but it always felt significant somehow but in Phase 4 it became more of a dull monotonous routine just another boring task to be gotten through instead of something special to be enjoyed and if it was bad for audiences then a punishing workload like this was even worse for the people actually working on it even a studio as big as Marvel can only develop so many projects at the same time before the quality starts to slip and that's exactly what happens everything from the writing to the directing to the special effects began to go downhill as the face ballooned in size and scope the films that had once seemed so slick and Polished began to feel rushed clumsy and incomplete and if they were bad then the TV shows were even worse say what you want about one division's finale but the show at least started off with a create of an interesting premise that hooked people in you could tell that a bit of thought and Care had actually gone into it but then compare that show from the very beginning of the phase to Absolute garbage like She-Hulk that came out just a couple of years later and you can see the disastrous drop-off in quality basically what I'm saying is that they try to do too much too quickly spreading their time and resources too thin and the result was something hard to give and nothing turned out to be the quality of their products number three hiring the wrong creatives another Hallmark of the earlier MCU phases was hiring capable writers and directors that were up to the task at hands yeah it didn't always go perfectly but generally speaking they were pretty good at finding the right people for the right jobs James Gunn the Russo Brothers John Favreau and Joss Whedon were all great at what they did delivering some of the best movies of the entire franchise but with phase four for some reason they decided to bring in a series of writers and directors that were completely incompatible with the tasks they've been given Kate shortland had a grand total of three movies to name all of them low budget dramas when she was chosen to direct Black Widow a 200 million dollar action spy superhero flick [ __ ] really what did you expect someone like that was gonna deliver for you or how about Chloe Zhou whose main claim to fame was Nomad land a movie about a woman who drives around in a truck and talks to people who was suddenly put in charge of a massive big budget effects heavy superhero film with a huge ensemble cast much like taking a convenience store worker and putting them in charge of a Fortune 500 company or Loki an action Sci-Fi show about a former super villain search for Redemption directed by Kate Heron an obscure British director who specializes in feminist comedy well talk about a natural fit kind of explains why the show ended up the way it did or She-Hulk a superhero legal comedy written by a team of people who openly admit to not understanding how the law works or being particularly interested in superhero storytelling or understanding how [ __ ] humor Works presumably my point here is that while it's good to give newbies and unknowns a chance to prove themselves instead of just relying on the same predictable talent pool every time you also have to be realistic about what these people are actually capable of hiring directors that have only worked on a handful of Indie movies and expecting them to take command of enormous big budget Productions is a recipe for disaster you have to build them up give them a chance to get up to speed instead of just throwing them in at the deep end and hoping for the best number four replacing established characters time waits for no man and never is this more obvious than in the world of acting after 10 years and more than 20 movies a lot of the original MCU cast were looking to move on and leave their superhero days behind them normally that would be a good opportunity to refresh your lineup bring in new superheroes and change things up a bit but instead mom levels goal seems to be to just slot a different actor into the same character Steve Rogers has retired as Captain America no problem we'll just have someone else take up the shield Tony Stark is dead don't worry we've got Riri Williams who can do all the same things he did Natasha Romanov is gone that's fine we've got a newer cheaper version ready to go Hawkeye's getting a bit long in the tooth that's cool we'll just have someone else with the same exact skill set take over from him Chadwick Boseman passed away in real life nuts an issue we'll just have his sister become black panther now and I can't shake the feeling that there's something really cynical and soulless about all of this like having someone take over as your favorite superhero is as simple and mundane as upgrading your phone to a newer model whatever history and attachment you had to the old character is somehow expected to be ported over to the new version and it feels more like an assembly line than a living narrative personally I'd rather Captain America just end it as a character rather than forcing Falcon to become something he isn't I'd rather see the last of Iron Man instead of some cheap second rate Pretender taking up a mantle they didn't earn and I think audiencies are starting to feel just as jadeds believe it or not they're more than just Mindless consumers that will automatically move on to the next product they're human beings with emotional attachments to these characters and the more you try to manipulate them the more pissed off they'll get number five identity politics show me a male hero in the MCU and I'll show you a dozen females that are portrayed as smarter stronger and better than him in every way show me an American getting chastised for violating the rights of foreign citizens and I'll show you a platoon of wakandans doing the exact same thing and getting uploaded for it show me a white man being put in his place for being patronizing overbearing or morally questionable and I'll show you a metric ton of other demographics who get to behave in exactly the same way with zero repercussions the point is there's a very clear double standard in the MCU now and it's slanted very clearly in One Direction men in general and white men in particular have basically been relegated to the lowest tier of the Marvel higher turkey now match them up against any other demographic either in a battle a test of intellect or a simple argument and I can pretty much guarantee they'll come off worse every single time and what's really awesome here is when Marvel literally contradict themselves in their own Universe Falcon and the Winter Soldier made a huge deal out of American reluctance to share much needed Resources with people who need it most while wakanda gets to do the exact same thing and nobody bats an eyelash Wanda gets to mentally and physically torture an entire town of innocent civilians and be praised for eventually letting them go while the man who tried to stop her is apparently the villain of the Peace the antagonist from Black Widow is shown to be a morally reprehensible monster who enslaves women into becoming mindless killing machines but his willing accomplice is treated as a goofy likable Hero by virtue of her being female again and again the MCU ends up tying itself in moral and dramatic knots trying to appeal to whatever the current sociopolitical trend is or adhere to the increasingly nonsensical rules of social justice and identity politics and without wanting to be too blunt about it well pretty much everyone wishes they would just [ __ ] right off with this stuff politics is the death of entertainment bludgeoning people over the head with issues and messages they're sick of hearing about and all of this from a multi-billion dollar company of questionable moral standing written by Pampered narcissistic idiots that have never experienced a moment of true hardship in their entire lives and performed by vacuous morons with grandiose delusions that they're changing the World by performing in forgettable corporatized trash none of these elements by themselves are enough to sing think a franchise as big as the MCU but collectively they represent an increasingly heavy anchor that's pulling them down the more they try to bombard us with preachy pandering low quality trash that goes nowhere does nothing and says nothing of value the more people will inevitably get turned away from it so if there's a lesson to be learned from all of this it's that you really can have too much of a good thing and the moment a studio starts putting content money making or political activism ahead of quality storytelling they're already sowing the seeds of their own demise and it seems like those seeds are in full bloom for Marvel Now anyway that's all I've got for today go away now

Channel: The Critical Drinker

Views: 2,107,543

Keywords: Disney, MCU, kevin feige, feminism, critical drinker, funny, review, feminist, black widow, captain marvel

Id: 8rZVvSohF-Q

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 08 2022