There's a lot to talk about. If nothing else, the pandemic seems to have flooded the world with new TV and film that is designed specifically with the geek in mind. It seems to me that the world of fantasy has had to step up to the plate and deliver, even if the results are patchy at best. So ...
Let's get the elephant or kaiju in the room out of the way first. Godzilla versus Kong is a children's film for all ages. I'm constantly fooled by these films; I think they're going to be fantastic and the spectacle is going to be so good I will walk around priapic all week, but they end up being warm bland wanks... I made the mistake of going into this film expecting there to be some woeful story woven between the unending battle scenes (like there had been in the previous Godzilla film); what there was was an hour and forty five minutes of televisual super-sugar. It was like someone gave LSD to an eight-year-old and told him to write an adventure story with two massive great beasties. That makes it sound good and on one level it is, but on so many other levels it's just infantile and a waste of some recognisable acting talent. It's proving to be very popular... I don't know if that says anything about how desperate people are for some normality in their lives that they've made this extremely well made piece of shit so popular.
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Let's throw my two-cents worth in about the big question: why are DC films so shit? As this is kind of my area of expertise, I find it ironic that DC did comics for years until Marvel came along and showed them how to do comics differently and eventually usurped them as the leading comics publisher in the Western World. There have been DC superhero film adaptations for donkeys years, most of them of independent vision - much like their comics output of the 1950s and 60s - and standalone. Even when they linked their Batman films of the 80s and 90s, it had the law of diminishing returns writ large all over them. Marvel looked like they were going to go the same way, especially when the company was essentially split up and film rights sold to all and sundry, but its gradual climb into being part of the largest entertainment industry in the world is probably down to the fact that when films finally caught up with Marvel's characters, they took the bold move of making it a shared universe from the word go.
By the time DC and Warner Brothers decided to unify and reboot their new superhero cinematic foray, Marvel was already building a universe in an oddly believable world. Iron Man was a stroke of genius in many ways, because while the character has always been a bit 'meh' in the comics, on film, with RDJ in the role of Tony Stark, you suddenly had a fantasy film that appealed to the Bond/Bourne fans and was witty and clever enough to tempt people who wouldn't dream of watching a film like that into watching it. By the time the first Avengers film came out, Marvel's cinematic universe was a guaranteed success - it was a juggernaut that wasn't going to be stopped.
DC, historically, has struggled to be ahead of the game and even when they get there they've never seemed to know how to stay there. There have been periods in the history of comics where they suddenly have a surge of popularity at the exact time Marvel hits the buffers, but they've never been able to find the right Viagra to keep themselves up.
With films their MO was basic; reboot Superman or Batman every ten years or so with a very capable director du jour and because of increased budgets and better special effects they can appease the converted with Easter Eggs of some geeky kind. The problem was as some of the producers of Marvel's X-Men and Spider-Man had discovered, that old friend the Law of Diminishing Returns is never too far away from spoiling the party, which is why the Spider-Man reboots seemed to happen so fast and why Spider-Man films work better now they've taken a new approach to them. DC's problem was it felt like Batman and Superman had already been done to death; cinematically Batman works better and like in the comics Superman suffered from essentially being too powerful making it difficult to come up with a suitable, believable, adversary.
DC, it is said, have all the best ideas, but dither about until Marvel steals them and shows how it would have worked. There is both actual and anecdotal evidence throughout the second half of the 20th century to prove this and back in 2002, long before Kevin Feige was going to create the MCU, DC had plans for an extended shared cinematic universe, but that didn't really happen until after 2013's Superman reboot The Man of Steel (a bit like with Iron Man in many ways), it then, temporarily, became the 'property' of Zack Snyder and we were treated to a number of bombastic Bruckheimer-styled slugfests in a cinematic style that just feels slightly out of kink. However, there was a anomaly - 2011's Green Lantern, a film I quite liked but bombed big time, despite having Ryan Reynolds in the lead role. Marvel kind of absorbed the second (largely standalone) Hulk film by tagging an ending on that tied it into Iron Man, despite it not being very good and not really having any connection to the Hulk as he's seen in the current MCU. In fact, the Hulk's presence in the MCU has never been dealt with, it's like it happened in that film and let's say nothing more on the matter. DC could easily have done the same with Green Lantern; it was a missed opportunity.
Man of Steel was followed by Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), Suicide Squad (2016), Wonder Woman (2017), Justice League (2017), Aquaman (2018), Shazam! (2019), Birds of Prey (2020), and Wonder Woman 1984 (2020). However, you can take a few of them out as they might be part of the DCEU but their relevance - at the moment - is non-existent. The problem was none of the core films were particularly good. They were big, brash and full of mind-blowing special effects, but they are all largely soulless. Marvel invented 'family' in comics and they simply transferred that effect into the movies. Create a huge soap opera with fantastic interconnecting parts that can be read alone or as a group. DC created comic characters who did the same thing month after month after month. Clark Kent was a mild mannered journalist and Superman was a god; every month Lois Lane wondered about whether the two could be the same and every month the reset button was pressed. Not until the late 1980s did DC try and make their extended comics universe a family, by then just as they were getting the Marvel idea, their competitors had already moved on in areas DC had pondered but opted against.
I don't know if this is something ingrained into the DNA of DC, but it does feel like their film adaptations could easily just reboot again under a new 'top dog', whereas Marvel's current 20-odd film legacy will always have relevance even when film #120 comes out.
That brings me to Justice League. DC's Avengers (more irony, the Avengers were always classed as Marvel's Justice League) was on the cards the moment Man of Steel wasn't a box office flop. If Marvel can do it, so can we, shouted DC 15 years after they first thought of it. Snyder's films to date hadn't exactly set the world on fire and when he had to quit directing Justice League two-thirds of the way through, it seemed his vision was also going to become just another unfinished subplot in the dull life of the DCEU. Joss Whedon came onboard, reshot scenes, re-edited it, changed bits and pieces and the film came out in 2017 to absolutely stunned silence. I've seen the film and I can't tell you anything about it at all; it's just dreadfully forgettable.
It felt like that phase of the extended universe was over and subsequent DCEU films have all, by and large, been utter rubbish that feel like comics plucked from a bygone era in the way they interact with the world and each other. They all look nice, they all stink the house out as far as storytelling goes...
So, I knew nothing of Zack Snyder's Justice League until I started seeing adverts for it. I don't know the reasons behind it; it feels odd that DC would allow something like this to happen, but they did and whereas the Whedon cut has been erased from my memory, this version - at just about 4 hours - is epic. It's still soulless and devoid of any real empathy, but by the end of the film you're invested enough to give a shit, which is more than any of the other films managed. I also quite like Affleck as Bruce Wayne; I shouldn't, but his line of 'I'm rich', when asked by the Flash what his super powers were made me laugh out loud.
That said, I enjoyed ZSJL, even if it was 2 hours too long and is now effectively obsolete (especially Bruce's dreams of a dystopian future). It might be why subsequent films have been a) excrement and b) standalone. DC simply doesn't know how to play with the toys [read: ideas] that Marvel introduced them to.
ZSJL is utter rubbish but as escapism in lockdown it was better than watching Boris Johnson lie to the country.
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Wandavision was great TV. Not enough of it, but good enough to fill a void. This is where DC fail, but Marvel has mastered the art of prick teasing. Whether Wandavision was any good is another question. It was bold and definitely unusual, but it ended up being quite an unpleasant thing that was without doubt one of the bravest things a fledgling TV company (which is what this arm of Disney is) to do.
If, like me, you realised almost before it started, that this was going to be a series about grief and escapism, then pat yourself on the back. It didn't matter what flesh was put on the bones, this was going to be about wrong footing everybody and doing something extremely clever and also... have I said brave yet? This is a brave move - on two levels: the first by making Wanda a villain, albeit through obvious mental health issues, but also by making her essentially the Phoenix - from X-Men mythos - means that whatever Marvel does with the X-Men, it might not be in any familiar way. For those who haven't got a clue what I mean, Jean Grey 'died' and was resurrected by the universal Phoenix force, unfortunately it turned her into a planet devouring monster and she had to be killed. It was highly controversial as a comic, was poorly done by Fox's X-Men and now the MCU appears to be setting Wanda up as one utterly mega-powerful entity, capable, possibly of breaking down the barriers of alternative universes and destroying worlds... It's almost like Kevin Fiege saw the abomination Fox made and now wants to do it the Marvel way.
Wandavision was essentially a bridging arc. It tied up some loose ends, did a handsome job of examining the effects of such accumulative grief on someone so powerful - especially in a world that no longer has a Cap, Iron Man or Black Widow (or Vision) she can go and seek solace with. She is alone, with no one and she's gone mad. What's not to love?
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The Falcon & The Winter Soldier is four episodes in and was I getting the feeling it's going to end up setting up another film or TV series. At 45 minutes an episode you'd expect the first three to have moved the story along pretty quickly, but it took episode four to finally tell us what this series is really about.
The main actors are great and they've been fleshed out to a degree that sometimes comics didn't bother with and the series feels like Wandavision in that it's dealing with issues that wouldn't work that well in films, specifically the relationship between heroes and the aftermath of the reverse of the 'blip' that wiped half the life of the universe out.
It is also funny - funnier than Wandavision - and feels like an extension of the darker Captain America films and that also isn't a bad thing. In fact, I said to the wife, it feels like an extended Marvel film.
Oh and the new Captain America - played by Wyatt Russell (who appeared in JJ Abrams Overlord, in case you were wondering where you'd seen that ugly mug before) is an arsehole and proved it in the shocking ending of ep four.
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Remember Fringe? What a great series that was and I don't think there's been anything that quite does 'odd' as well as it did. Well, Debris might be the exception to the rule. It is about fragments of a destroyed alien spacecraft crashing into the planet bringing quite unbelievable consequences when it does. It reminds me of Casualty at times; the start is always about what is going to happen, but instead of wondering who is going to be thrown into the thresher or fall down a drain, you wonder how the next fragment of spaceship is going to interact with the world and the people.
It's also quite clever in that it starts months after the first bits of debris hit the planet; so we're walking into a series that has been going on (in the minds of the creators) a lot longer than where we started to watch; therefore it allows us to move forwards without being bogged down by the 'set-up' and it also promises to explain the past but through the eyes of a bunch of people thrown together by fate, who no longer really trust each other.
6 episodes in and it's weird and distinctly creepy and Scroobius Pip is in it as a cockney 'villain' who can teleport using bits of alien metal. The strange thing is it's almost dealing with a similar theme to that of the MCU; whereas that is having to deal with the return of 3½ billion souls and where they belong in a world that was slowly forgetting about them; this is about something oddly similar, the argument that the debris is a gift from the universe and it belongs to all people and should not be controlled by the planet's most powerful governments.
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I think it would be safe to say that the end of The Walking Dead cannot come soon enough. The tagged on extra six episodes of the most recent season were execrable - 6 x 45 minutes of some of the most boring excuses for an ongoing TV series as you could possibly imagine. Even the two episodes where you thought you might see some kind of progression ended up being handled in a very poor way; some could almost argue unnecessary additions to a dying series, with the Carol/Daryl second episode failing on almost every single front - if this is what to expect from the mooted series featuring these two main characters then I'll start watching Strictly.
Even Fear the Walking Dead seemed to have fallen into the 'we haven't got a clue what to do' camp, with the first 7 episodes of its 6th series not doing much at all to make you want to stay loyal, however on its return it showed how good this franchise can be with arguably the best episode of all the TWD series in years. It needs to keep this intensity up now it has learned to kill major characters off - pointlessly - again. Pointless deaths of major characters is what made it what it is today; 'no one is safe' was always the motto (apart from Rick Grimes) and that made it edgy. FTWD seems to have rediscovered 'edgy'.
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I used to like cartoons, but as they became easier and cheaper to make they kind of lost that proper animation feel and anyone who watched anything by Hanna-Barbera in the 60s and 70s were always left wondering how Tom & Jerry could live in such a long house with really boring décor and the same picture hung every ten feet for several miles...
So, when I saw nothing but praise for Invincible - a comic series I vaguely recall being a bit of a fan of in the late 90s early 00s and created by Robert Kirkman, the guy behind The Walking Dead, I managed to persuade the wife to give it three episodes to see how it progressed.
I no longer 'get' cartoons. Everything kind of smacks of anime influences and they're so melodramatic. Invincible is no exception; it might have a host of well known people voicing it - Steven Yuen, JK Simmons, Sandra Oh, Zacchary Quinto, Seth Rogan, Clancy Brown, Mark Hamill, Mahershala Ali and John Hamm, to name but a few - but it's overwrought and kind of falls between two stools. It's too silly to be considered a proper adult cartoon and too violent to be considered a kids' one and frankly, after three 40 minute episodes I really didn't want to waste any of my time on it again... Shame.
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A quick return to Marvel: the new trailer for Loki dropped this week and it looks like its going to be huge fun and, I expect, this will be the main reason for the Multiverse of Madness due to appear in the next Dr Strange film. I really don't expect them to have a series with Loki and then kill him off at the end because he's a space-time anomaly (see Infinity War and then Endgame); it simply gives us him back to where he belongs and will obviously have massive repercussions throughout the MCU.
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For All Mankind is still the best thing on TV at the moment. A fantastic mix of alternate history, soap opera with a side salad of Sci-Fi. It's by the guy who brought you Battlestar Galactica's reboot, but, seriously, don't let that put you off. It's ace.
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Started really well and ended really disappointingly. That just about sums up my feelings about Resident Alien. The first five episodes were LOL-worthy and I did laugh out loud on a number of occasions. Alan Tudyk is great as Harry the alien who lands in Colorado, by mistake, kills then adopts the life and fizzog of a holidaying doctor and ends up being co-opted into the search for the killer of the resident town doctor. The problem with it started when it left behind it's small town charm and introduced a bigger picture; from that point it stopped being as funny and started to feel a bit... fake (a little like Harry).
The wife loved it, but I started to feel like it was a record that was good but after repeated plays starts to get on your nerves a little. There is enough 'intrigue' to make me want to watch the second season, now it's been renewed, but without spoiling anything for you, it seems very few people are really as they seem; too many of them are so one or two-dimensional that they either need fleshing out or killing off and a few of them are just annoying.
The comic was written by my friend Peter Hogan, so I hope his version didn't deteriorate as quickly as this TV show seemed to. Another real shame, but maybe renewal will renew the interest. Oh, and Asta has an unbelievably massive arse, it should be said, apropos of nowt.
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And in many ways all of the above are just the tip of an iceberg heading our way over the next 12 months. we're going to have new fantasy series, new Marvel films, new Sci-Fi and new weird shit that might end up being uncategorizable. There are new anthology series scheduled, including something called Them* which looked like it might be good, but I thought that about Lovecraft Country but that turned out to be a pile of dog shit (but, frankly, doesn't everything related to HP Lovecraft and the cult of Cthulhu?). Joss Whedon's back with a steampunk-looking series about a group of women with super powers in the late 19th century called The Nevers** and there are many more of which none of them have made me wish for time to fly by so I can see them...
* We watched the first episode of Them last night. It's overwrought and heavy handed with the racism, but there's also something a wee bit creepy about it and not just the neighbours; there's some other horror, far worse than bigoted racists and it seems to reside in the house now owned by the black people.
** We have the first episode of The Nevers to watch tonight.
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And finally, the very last episode of my beloved Shameless was sad, tragic, disappointing, fulfilling, funny, hopeful, poignant and tipped its hat, bowed and honoured the source material with Frank's final monologue which was almost the same one as you used to hear at the start of every episode of the UK version. It was also the one thing it always aspired to be across nearly 12 years; it was real.
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