New full trailer dropped today...




YES PLEASE! Can't wait for this one. It looks freaking amazing!

-M

Saw this yesterday afternoon with my wife, daughters, and one of my younger daughter's friends who has become an honorary member of the family for when we go to see MCU films (I think this is the third or fourth in a row she's come to see with us).

Not a huge crowd at 12:30 PM, but the theater had started showing it the previous evening at 8:00 PM and had started Friday morning at 9:30 AM and had three other showings already going when 12:30 rolled around.

They addressed Chadwick Boseman's passing right off the bat, using the opening scene before the usual MCU fanfare to get that resolved and allow the movie to deal with the aftermath. It was a bold move to not tap-dance around it and just get to work.

The movie shone in the quieter moments, particularly with Queen Ramonda and Shuri dealing with their emotions of their loss. However, the action sequences were very frenetic, making it difficult at times to keep track of what was going on as the cuts jumped from character to character and never letting you settle your eyes on what was going on for too long.

Riri Williams' introduction was fine, and I liked her here much more than I did in the comics. It was a good idea to incorporate her into this story, as it made a lot of sense and gave her a peer in Shuri to interact with instead of someone like Tony Stark who might have been written as being threatened by her as a competitor.

I started watching it yesterday night, and thought I'd drop a few notes right now since up to that point I enjoy the film a whole lot. Hopefully it doesn't degenerate into a long CGI slugfest in the second half! After one hour, it's a very decent SF-fantasy flick, and a great introduction of the Sub-Mariner to the MCU!

Things I really enjoyed :

I was surprised by how the passing of T'Challa was dealt with right from the start, and then mostly dropped to leave the supporting cast in control. It worked amazingly well; despite my initial doubts, characters like Shuri, Okoye and Ramonda are strong enough to handle the spotlight. The addition of Namor and Riri Williams rounded the cast in such a satisfying manner that I never felt that this was a film in which the main character was missing. Good job.

On Namor's new origin, I was again pleasantly surprised. I am by default quite reticent to see comic-book characters changed drastically when they get to the silver screen, but here the transition went very smoothly. Giving the MCU Atlanteans Talokans a connection with the Mayans works extremely well for me, since Atlantis and Meso-America have been linked for the longest time in pop culture and "ancient aliens" literature; there's also the matter of the Aquaman film having been there first prompting Marvel's Atlantis to have a different name. (Why not Mu, though? Mu would have been cool. Perhaps it sounds too much like a cow's bellow). Making the Talokans the result of magic rather than evolution is also pretty parsimonious; no need to explain how such an apparently impossible evolution might have happened, and how we could have missed it. The only drawback I see there is that the Talokans are a fairly recent group, a few centuries old, and I sort of liked the idea that Namor's people had been there for thousands of years... but that's small potatoes (or small sea cucumbers). I also really, really liked the origin of the name "Namor"; simple and clever. (Funny thing is that while Namor presents himself as "Nah-mor", non-Spanish speaking characters keep calling him "Nay-mor").

M'Baku is back. I love M'Baku, the vegetarian gorilla guy.

Shuri is a hard core realist. I love that in a scientist.

Wakanda is not depicted as a fairy tale kingdom where everything is fine. While highly advanced, it also has its dark aspects, adding to its verisimilitude. Its monarchical system is a very, very bad idea (as demonstrated in the first film by showing how a thug can replace a grood king just by beating him up, or by showing Ramonda firing a very competent officer just because she's upset). 

There is Vibranium outside of Wakanda, no matter what legends say. That makes sense, brings an interesting development to the MCU, and shows us that contrary to what most films pretend, legends don't always have to be right.

The Talokans look great. 

Yup, off to a good start!



Things I hated :

I got nothin' yet.



A few nits to pick, because why not :

- Valentina Allegra de Fontaine is agent Ross's ex-wife. I'm not sure I find that to be a good idea. Too many connections in a make-believe universe hurt our willing suspension of disbelief.

- Riri is introduced as an annoying teenager. I get that most teenagers are annoying, and since she's a genius as well she's probably entitled to it. However, I find it hard to care for her at this point; not the way I cared right away for, say, Kate Bishop.

- We are treated to this oft-used trope: that killing an inventor (or destroying "the only working model") is a good way to prevent a dangerous invention from being re-created. In this case, we're talking about a vibranium detector that Riri created for her metallurgy class. That is naive and a bit daft; first, once the technology has been developed, plenty of competent people will have a very good idea of how it works and will be able to reproduce it (or something similar) with much less effort than if they had to work from scratch. Second, and more importantly, this is a SCHOOL PROJECT! Riri's teachers went through every design, every spec and every plan of her machine, you can bet your grant money on it.

- At some point, Riri says : "My professor said it was impossible. Not the first time that someone took a look at me and didn’t think I was worth shit. To be young, gifted and black, right?" Oh, come on Riri. You're a kid who built a frickin' flying armor in her spare time. Nobody at MIT, of all places, is going to discourage you because of the way you look. I don't think the writers actually frequented a research institution.

- CGI elephants. Why, oh why I get that it's hard to train a humpback whale to jump out of the Charles river and drop Talokans on a bridge, and that CGI has to be used in such a case, but when you just want to show elephants at a water point then the real thing would look MUCH better. 

- The lady who plays the French representative speaks impeccable French, but her accent betrays her. It wasn't as jarring as George St-Pierre's accent when he played Batroc (he can most assuredly not pass either as French or North African), but it felt a bit fake. I suppose people who make comments about actors from the UK trying to pass as American will understand what I mean (although I never thought that Spider-man sounded like anything else than an American).

Jodie Foster is very good. Not good as in "gee, this American lady speaks pretty good French" but as in "why did she use the feminine instead of the masculine? Oh, my, she's not a native French speaker!!! Amazing!!!"

Foster studied at Lycee Francais de Los Angeles, a bilingual school, in her youth.

I find that Australian & New Zealander actors do the best American accents, though you can occasionally hear them slip, on certain words. A lot of British actors sound very nasally, when they do it. I have seen very few American actors who I thought sounded remotely British (or Scottish, Irish or Welsh). Some are more consistent than others; but, if you give them enough dialogue, you'll hear odd pronunciations or just the wrong attitude, which I think is a major element in pulling off an accent. Someone speaking in Received Pronunciation is going to have a different speaking attitude than a Yorkshireman.

Bad accents can be fun, though, such as Dick Van Dyke, in Mary Poppins or the exaggerated Australian accents that Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie would do, on their show, parodying the Australian soap opera Neighbors. I laugh my head off, every time, when I watch The Longest Day and listen to Sean Connery try to pass himself off as an Irish soldier (almost as comical as his Russian submarine commander). In fact, Highlander is the best for that, as the Egyptian, from the Spanish court, speaks with a distinct Scots accent and the Scottish Highlander speaks with a distinct French accent (and barely spoke English, according to the producers).

Oh, examples, please. I watch a bunch of British mysteries, too.

in fact, I just watched an episode of MI-5 and a guy playing an American was way unconvincing. Plus it seemed as if he was trying to do a Boston accent.

Of course, when I looked him up on IMDb, it turned out he was an American. And he was from New Orleans! So much for my skills at deciphering someone’s native language.

We enjoy Vienna Blood a lot, and Foyle’s War is an all-time favorite. We liked Vera’s early seasons more than the last couple. The problem with Vera, like so many crime shows is that viewers love the formula and thus the characters rarely change or adapt to each other’s foibles. 

Same goes for Shetland. The last season was a real disappointment.

Don’t know those others; I’ll look for them.

we liked Wire in the Blood, about a quirky psychologist who is a consultant on serial killers, dozens of whom live in or the city where it takes place. 

We’re now watching MI 5, which is sometimes unpredictable enough that it’s fairly suspenseful. Think Mission Impossible crossed with Jack Ryan.