Shang-Chi's Wenwu is the Best Marvel Villain

chongqi rules let me get that out of the way right off the bat it is a rock solid movie with an engaging story some fun leads and excellent pacing and yes i am a marvel chill i default enjoy most of what they make and i enjoy the connectivity i know some people have grown tired of it and i get it and i've also given up on the color grading and they usually end with lots of cgi but i still have fun with it in fact in this instance i was on board with the cgi ending it was really cool and the fight choreography in shanghai rules i'm gonna say some of those names that pop up in every single video i have seen about the topic here we go bill pope destin daniel simulator jackie chan brad allen r.i.p police story drunken master menger zhang and others those are the names that come up in every youtube video i have watched about chongqi i don't need to sing their places they all did an amazing job similar man he put in work you can watch behind the scenes of him in these stunts and my gosh the difference between this iron fist is night and day but i instead want to focus on one guy and you know i love me some marvel villains of ranked their plans i've made villainous scenes about them i have some favorites vulture thanos mysterio ego zemo killmonger loki i know real groundbreaking stuff but i really think there's a case to be made that chongqi's antagonist wen wu played by the incomparable tony lion is not only the highlight of this movie but maybe the best villain the mcu has produced so far so i want to make my case but first i need to explain why it is such a miracle that the character of wenmu is even remotely coherent because unlike most marvel villains wenwu is not a direct adaptation of a comic character he is instead a fusion of two very complicated characters one with a messy comic's history and one with an equally messy movie history so i guess this segment is a mini when woo isn't wenmu fantastic let's start with the simple one in the comics chongqi's father is a man named zhang zhu kind of he's the leader of an ancient organization however it is not called the ten rings it's actually called the five weapons society so a little different but you know simple enough right well you see back in the olden days of the 1970s marvel had to write some extremely popular character named foo manchu and when i say extremely popular i mean so popular that you've probably never read an old chongqi comic but you're kind of familiar with the name fumanchu that's because this character was also used extensively in radio plays and books and also his famous mustache beard combo that bears his name when nick cage dresses like this in the grindhouse trailer he's rocking a fu manchu but the character was also super racist so marvel did the right thing and renamed the character zhang zhu just kidding the rights lapsed in fu manchu so they needed to come up with a new name i guarantee that marvel never lost the rights foo manchu would still be around today but anyway shang chi's father in the comics is actually zhang zhu a little confusing but audiences will probably be able to follow the change since most of them don't know anything about shang chi comics but that's only half of it in this movie shanxi's father is also the mandarin a character that the mcu has been hinting at from the very beginning with seemingly no direction as you probably know in the comics the mandarin is tony stark's arch enemy his joker or lex luthor part of this has to do with tony stark's early connection to east asia via vietnam since his 60s origin had tony getting captured in the vietnam war like every few decades tony stark's origin is updated to be part of whatever the current global conflict is that the us either started or just made worse most recently afghanistan so tony faced off against many east asian enemies including the mandarin a chinese warlord with 10 magic alien rings each of which granted its wearer a different superpower pretty standard stuff and through the years the mandarin had a pretty consistent look with the occasional extreme redesign like how they turned him into a green monster man in the 90s cartoon where modok was a little baby so iron man one comes out and hey that's the ten rings like the mandarin and the villain he's got a ring i wonder if he's the mandarin or he's working for the mandarin could be and then iron man 2 apparently the 10 rings gave bonko his ticket to monaco they have their hands in a lot of different pots and they're meddling in tony stark's affairs again this has to be leading to something so then we get a comic that at least at the time was canon i cannot find anything official one way or the other about whether it is canon now but during the events of this two issue comic brody in the noon improved war machine armor goes to china to fight the 10 rings in fact he's been tracking the 10 rings all over the world because they're such a big deal and they have a hammer tech tank which fires ex-wife missiles that work because as has been pointed out to me by many people many times and i appreciate every single one the ex-wife was a kinetic kill switch which means it wouldn't detonate under a certain radius to protect the user and there is no way that 20 feet is the radius so the ex-wife worked perfectly rode used it wrong justice served anyway and here's where it gets really messy at the end of this comic which takes place during the events of avengers we actually kind of see the leader of the 10 rings like just his hands like dr claw and inspector gadget but he's a real guy and seems to be known as and is referred to by his subordinates as mandarin but then in iron man 3 we learn that the mandarin is a title invented by killian there was never anyone known as the mandarin and when wu makes the same point in shanghi and i can already hear some of you shouting well in the all hail the king bonus one shot on the iron man 3 dvd someone working for the real mandarin who i think is supposed to be darkhawk or something kidnaps trevor as punishment also justin hammer has a boyfriend first gay disney character suck it background characters holding hands and all the other stuff and then in ant-man we see one of the goons working for mitch whatever his name is has a 10 rings tattoo so they are still a thing the tricky part of all of this is that most audiences only know about the iron man 3 trevor twist as far as they are concerned there is no mandarin and the tenderings is fake and was set up by aldrich killian but canonically there totally has been a mandarin character in the background buying weapons and yellow jackets and tanks who also seems to have some sort of vendetta against iron man and the real mandarin is chinese even though that is not part of the identity of the ten rings and no one knows who he is so why did killian make up the chinese name mandarin for his white terrorist who operates primarily out of the middle east since it did not come from wenwu why the china connection at all and i'm not saying this to nitpick although i do have a nitpick for later i'm just demonstrating how confusing the idea of the mcu mandarin is so we're adding zhang zhu's confusing comic origin with mandarin's messy mcu history and getting wenwoo how on earth is this character supposed to work he should be a disaster of canon and contradictions but instead the filmmakers craft a character who makes complete sense he's a conqueror who thinks all of the iron man 3 mandarin stuff is stupid so he doesn't really want to talk about it basically a completely new guy with a weapon that matches some flags from other movies but that's it it is genius so that's the back story first actual reason why i believe when woo is the best marvel villain wen wu has the best marvel weapon the ten rings are cool as hell move over me only move over stormbreaker move over shieldy the captain america shield that's probably what he calls it move over whatever the eternals do glowy outlines the ten rings rule it is a downright inspired move to turn the finger rings into arm bracelet rings they're based on the iron rings that are typically used for training gets your arms strong and your forms tight as seen in drunken master but like in kung fu hustle the best movie you can also use them as weapons since they will protect your forearms from some weapons too also they just look cool and the 10 rings are an incredibly clever weapon because of how versatile they end up being you can use them to make energy blasts you can use them to make a big punch or you can put all 10 on one arm to make the biggest punch they also extend into this energy width thingy and then on the other end they can be a shield or steps or bars to swing off of or they can help you hold on to something or you can use them to do a big jump the 10 rings seem to be limited to what a character can imagine and since xiangxi has never trained with them before they also seem to work based on instinct you don't need to know how to use them beforehand so if wanda or doctor strange or bucky got their forearms on these things you assume the rings would work for those characters in ways that are unique to their individual fighting style but the best part about the 10 rings is that they don't interrupt the flow of the fight they enhance whatever the user is already good at so exciting well choreographed kung fu gets elevated to the level where it can destroy an entire army but the core of what makes the fight work is still intact and they lend themselves to some absolutely killer fits who rolls up sleeves on a suit to their forearms someone whose forearms are deadly weapons it is a mean look that's tough to pull off if you don't have the weapons on your wrist to back it up second reason when woo rules he's in it for kind of the right reasons when will really had it all he was a conqueror with a vast army and a bunch of vague weapon trafficking organizations apparently and he gave it all up 100 for his family a lot of times in a story like this you can't take the warrior out of the man right the father figure is called back into the world he used to be a part of maybe because he needs to or maybe because he just misses the fight we're never sure but the father gives up on his family so he can return to the world he knew it's brandy his life his love and his lady is the sea but when wu is really all in on family he doesn't stray he isn't secretly using the rings no one confronts him and says it's us or those damn rings it isn't until lee is killed and he believes his family is destroyed that when wu goes back to the only life he knows he doesn't want to when wu believes he needs to and listen if another villain makes this move it's easy to dismiss him but when woo is literally an old school conqueror i completely understand why he thinks this is the right thing to do but unlike it seemed in the initial trailers wenwu does not want chongqi back because he wants an heir to his empire when he was completely driven by his desire to reunite their family by rescuing their mother and the relationship between wenwu and lee is also completely believable they complement one another stylistically and the few seconds we see of xiangxi and xiling's childhood playing dance dance revolution as a family suggests that mom and dad were happy together if the opening scene did not sell the idea that lee is able to stop one woo in his tracks that she is the only one for him then i don't think wen wu's relentless pursuit of talo to rescue lee would work but we see some genuine chemistry between wenwoo and lee that helps make an audience hope against hope that wen wu might be right and he could reunite with his long-lost love and that's why the journey here is so tragic he's not in it for greed or power a love crafty and soul-eating dragon has tricked wenwoo into freeing it under the guise of saving his wife now not to nitpick not unlike my podcast mostly nitpicking you kinda figure at some point in their at least eight year lee would have told wenwoo about the evil monster trapped in her dimension that promises you whatever you desire most and how that thing that it's promising is a lie and that's just a monstrous cries for help that would be a fun convo even if she's not saying hey if i die watch out for this just like hey you know what's interesting about my village we have a monster tied up that lies to you but maybe when moon's just a bad listener i don't know either way when woo's love for his wife was corrupted like changji he was driven in the wrong direction by grief because this is a phase four marvel property and the theme of phase four appears to at least somewhat be grief and then the third reason i think wen wu might be the best villain he hits all of the good antagonist boxes most importantly he has something to teach chongqi and the film through michelle yos yingnon spells this out pretty clearly wen wu believes in family above all else and he's willing to burn down tallow to get it and shanxi is on the other side of that spectrum he wants nothing to do with his family he feels guilty for leaving shelling behind for doing nothing when his mom was killed and he hates his father for forcing him to kill the leader of the iron clan so chiang chi completely abandons his family and in doing so sean chief throws the baby out with the bathwater he gives up martial arts and even after he comes back into the world of kung fu shanxi does not embrace the style that his mother taught him perhaps because he wants to create some distance from the most traumatic moment of his life but chongqing needs to reconcile his issues with his family to reach his true potential he needs to engage with the memory of his mother in stark contrast to wen wu whose big issue is his inability to let lee go he can't accept her death either now could these guys both benefit from a healthy dose of therapy yes but in shanghai's case he'll have to settle for his aunt telling him that he has a product of everyone that came before him his mother and his father and if he wants to move forward he needs to embrace or at least acknowledge his history and create something new sure chiang chi is not breaking all that much new ground but a villain with a fun power set a reasonable motivation and who can act as a clear foil to our hero is about as much as you can ask for and at least for me wenwoo is all of those things tied up in a beautiful tony lion bow and there are so many excellent shang qi comics you can read that explore the relationship between zhang zhu and shang qi the recent run of shang chi does this really well even though zhang zhu is dead throughout it and there's another shang chi comic that a lot of people i talk to haven't read i consider it kind of a hidden gem and i talk about it in an extended version of this video that you can find on nebula you already know about nebula if you aren't subscribed to nebula there's never been a better time to join we've got so many cool originals that i have been a part of and i put all of my videos up on nebula early with a little bonus content at the end we call it nebula plus any video that has that little plus sign next to the runtime means that video has a nebula plus segment for me at the end of the video i know some people do it a little bit differently there's an extra three or four sometimes even 10 minutes of content related to the video that you have not seen if you haven't watched the nebula plus version here's the tease of the bonus from this video the first reason this book is cool is because i find these books a lot of fun if you spend the whole book just looking at all the characters and who is that supposed to be some are very obvious because some characters are just called caliban or whatever but there are other characters like this henchman for zhang zoo who's apparently supposed to be a version of task master which makes sense because you can get a take over different fighting styles and we have partnered with this video's sponsor curiosity stream for a bundle that gets you a year of curiosity streams high quality documentaries on things like science and nature there's even documentaries about bridges like the world of bridges talk about china they have their wind and rain bridges and there's a documentary about how those are created and maintained what they mean for the culture and the history how they weren't built with screws or anything like that just joints it's very interesting so if you want to get access to that bundle that includes nebula and curiosity stream a yearly subscription is only 15 which not only helps you support your favorite creators but it also means you don't need to watch sponsor reads and you get to see exclusive nebula plus content the link is in the video description it is curiositystream.com nando v movies go check it out as always gotta say huge thank you to everyone who continues to support 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Channel: Nando v Movies

Views: 357,086

Keywords: Wenwu, Shang chi, Shang-Chi, marvel, MCU, avengers, Tony leung, Xialing, dragon, Disney, phase four, villain, one Villainous Scene, Mandarin, Fu Man Chu

Id: BIY4j4ZJbUY

Length: 18min 32sec (1112 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021