Last Week In Movie Stuff: The trailer for Captain America: Civil War dropped last week. If a trailer's purpose is to whet your appetite for what's to come, then GODDAMN, this was 2+ minutes that would make any Marvel fan drop to their knees and thank the geek gods. I'm not going to bother doing a whole breakdown of the trailer because a solid week has passed so EVERYONE has likely done a breakdown of the trailer by now and in the immortal words of Ricky Bobby, "if you're not first, you're last." So, I'll just point out a couple of awesome things about what I saw.
First and foremost, the best thing they could do to adapt Civil War from the comics is keep it firmly in Captain America's wheelhouse. They don't have enough established heroes (or villains) to make it a standalone Marvel event and the plot itself is flawed (giving the most irresponsible superhero in comics government oversight), but tying it directly to the existing Cap timeline is smart. "Cap loses Bucky, Cap finds Bucky, Cap fights for Bucky's freedom." That's about as straightforward of a trilogy as you can possibly get while still conveying a basic theme of the bonds of war (which is a big selling point for movies about soldiers from The Greatest Generation). Having said that, the thing that worked the best about Winter Soldier is that it worked independent of the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, free from having to sell other movies. After the middle-of-the-road response to Avengers: Age of Ultron, Marvel has to prove that they can balance a large cast of characters effectively. Sure, the pulled it off in the first Avengers movie, but now there's twice as many characters to cram into one movie (including Spider-Man's Marvel debut which, I suspect, will be a post credits scene). The only other time we've seen so many superpowers on the screen at the same time is probably Fox's X-Men movies and it's arguable that was way too many.
Also, there's the little matter of the Black Panther. We didn't get much to go on, but judging from what we're given, the Panther seems to be fighting on Iron Man's side against the Winter Soldier. I hypothesized a long time ago that he might appear to bring Bucky to justice for some former Hydra crimes committed against Wakanda. It's entirely possible that they might set Bucky up as being T'Challa's father's killer while he was brainwashed by Hydra, adding to Cap's whole "Bucky's a changed man" thing. Black Panther is such a long hyped character that we've waited for, I'm going to say that, to make the fans happy, T'Challa is going to have to dole out no less than three ass whuppings. The first is to prove that his fighting prowess is comparable to Cap (who has taken on Georges St. Pierre Da Gawd), the second is prove that he can take on Bucky, who has stood toe to toe with Captain America himself. The third is just for awesomeness' sake.
Meanwhile, This Week In Movie Stuff....The new Dawn of Justice trailer debuted and umm...I don't know if they grade trailers on Rotten Tomatoes, but if they did, the general public so far would have rated this one somewhere between Alex Cross and Stealth. Personally, I feel like the trailer is taking it in the teeth a little worse than it deserves. The whole thing was "meh" and for some reason, people in this 0 to 100 culture have decided that "meh" immediately equates to bad and it really doesn't.
I WILL say that the trailer shows way too much of the plotline even though most of us had guessed the plot long before we saw any trailer. "Heroes don't get along, they get manipulated, they fight, they join forces to beat manipulator." That's a long standing trope of superhero lore that has carried this whole Batman/Superman rivalry for ages now. So, I don't understand why fans are pretending like they're disappointed as if they didn't at least entertain the notion that this was where the movie was going. Part of the backlash is very clearly due to the underlying notion among the collective consciousness that Marvel is basically reigning supreme over this film genre and DC is desperate to play catch-up (I mean, they are), so in many ways, it's become cool to piss on DC. At the same time, I guess they're making it easy, so there's that.
My comic reviews for the week on Star Wars, Invincible Iron Man and Cyborg are up and available on Black Nerd Problems for your viewing pleasure. And don't forget the latest page of my ongoing webcomic series, Neverland: The Untold.
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