Revisiting the MCU (Part One - Phase One)

I realised while watching Iron Man what my problem with the Marvel Cinematic Universe is now. It was confirmed when I watched Thor and Avengers Assemble - at this stage - I'm watching the films in a totally random way (I'm still to decide to re-watch Iron Man 2 and Incredible Hulk) - the original Phase One films were by and large absolutely fucking brilliant. They oozed with great lines, fantastic special effects, nice compact stories and a theme that ran through them all like an analogy that suits this description. It's what's missing from 2022 MCU films; that sense of wonder; that feeling you're walking into something bigger and better than any other film franchise has tried to do; the sense of myth building happening in front of your eyes.

With the exception of Mark Ruffalo's version of the Hulk, we'd met Tony Stark, Thor, Clint Barton, Natasha Romanov and Steve Rogers before, either as cameos, guest-stars or in their own films and seeing them combine in a New York-levelling blockbuster like Marvel's The Avengers (or whatever it's called in whatever country it's shown) felt like the first time you read a comics-spanning crossover, or saw an Avengers comic with a galactic threat. No wonder Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame were record-breaking box office hits; the MCU had created a fabulous new world/universe and it was time to tear it apart...

You could argue that the current Multiverse story unfolding in the MCU is bigger, bolder and more daring, but it isn't just that, there's whatever new sub-plot Shang-Chi belongs to, which also might include some of the scenarios from the Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Hawkeye series, the new cosmic storyline involving the Eternals, other family members of Thanos's and the Celestials and other things waiting in the wings to further muddy the waters (Blade, Black Knight, etc). You could argue that after the Infinity Saga the only way forward for the MCU is to have a multi-plot even-bigger blockbusters styled series of movies that while linked to each other and the MCU are also new even-bigger threads of their own. Like I said, muddy the waters, because how the second Black Panther film, the Ms Marvel and Moon Knight series, the next Ant-Man and the Wasp film and The Marvels fit into the grand scheme of things will obviously become clearer, but all the while it just feels like an attempt to get as many people buying tickets to watch all their films as possible - and, yes, I know that's how the business of film franchises work, but it didn't seem to be a problem when the MCU was in its embryonic stages. I think that was because people wanted to see what happens next - like the first or second season of a great TV programme; the problems arise when you have to top the previous season with something even more outrageous and MASSIVE. 

I've forecasted a couple of times now that I believe the Fantastic Four film - probably due to drop autumn/winter 2023 - will be the conclusion of the Multiverse story and may also reset/reboot the entire MCU franchise by recasting characters such as Captain America, Iron Man, Black Widow and as many of the other 'Avengers' characters who have aged up to 15 years by the time we get to the FF film and will be hard pressed to continue as these super heroics without serious money on special effects or having them all get geriatric together (plus if Johannsson, Evans and RDjr aren't going to reprise their roles in a new reunified single universe, then you're going to need new actors to inherit the roles).

But this is all speculation and what I'm here to do, this time, is wax lyrically about why Phase One was the best of all the stages of the MCU so far...

Iron Man is an exceptional way to start a film franchise. Just about everything about it is perfect and largely believable - yes men in iron suits firing disrupters might sound far-fetched but even in the 1960s when Tony Stark was first wounded - in Viet Nam - and needed the armour to stop shrapnel from entering his heart and killing him, this was a concept that over the years stopped being science fiction and is now not far from being science fact. Marvel's choice of doing Iron Man first is at the very heart of why they've been so successful and frankly the only thing that has dimmed the MCU has been the fact that there haven't been more Iron Man films, specifically better ones than 2 & 3.

Robert Downey Jr was born to play Tony Stark and for 10 years he ruled the MCU as the stand out character, the soul of it and the backbone of it. Captain America, also brilliantly portrayed in the films, is a close second, but he didn't have Tony Stark's joie de vivre or one-liners or looks or suave and brilliant sophistication. Tony was the billionaire we want all our real billionaires to be like and he cemented his place in everything with the closing scene of the first film where, after a couple of poor attempts at suggesting the Iron Man was a bodyguard, he just comes out and admits that it's him and BANG! The MCU was not only born, it was there, in your face, in a way the comics could never equal.

I bloody love this film. It's by far and away my favourite MCU film. It had just enough of everything without being OTT and felt so understated it allowed everything else to ramp up the peril and action without it ever feeling like they were simply ramping up the action because that is what was expected.

Thor has slowly crept up the list of great MCU films. I think there was a sense of because it's a Kenneth Branagh film it was going to be a bit too serious, hi-brow almost. It's not, but it does add some marvellous sense of cosmic and fantastic to the franchise. It's a big and bold film with lots of Shakespearean touches and a true sense that Asgard is a bonkers place with such grandeur and wonder that it's almost impossible for us mere mortals to comprehend it. Branagh does a bang on job and our introduction to Thor is, like Iron Man, a real nod to the original comics. It is however a proper foray into fantasy territory and at times feels a little rushed, almost like Branagh wanted to focus on the characters rather than the action. I was initially disappointed that The Destroyer was made too easy to get rid of - in the comics it was a character that was almost impossible to defeat, which was why it usually served Odin and wasn't used against our hero, unless Odin wasn't about and that was how it played in the film.

It also properly introduces us to SHIELD, although it was obviously a key component in the Iron Man film, this gave them more of an identity, albeit slightly more sinister than they would become. It's a really big film with some excellent stars camping it up and obviously having a great time. The real stand-out is Tom Hiddleston's Loki, who has truly metamorphosed from the nasty villain he became for the Avengers film into a truly heroic character. This film ranks very high in my list of favourite MCU films - top 5 at least and the crazy thing is I doubted whether they could pull Thor off and make him and his supporting cast into mainstays of the MCU, yet the three Thor films to date, in terms of quality and story, have all been excellent.

Marvel's The Avengers (or Avengers Assemble) almost feels like it arrived too early and yet as a spectacle it's a real powerhouse of a film and while Joss Whedon's stock might have fallen he was really able to flesh out some of the characters and yet feels like a proper rollercoaster of ride.

There are things about this film that feel a little off. We last saw Loki plunging into the abyss of space and time in the final moments of Thor and we're reintroduced to him as a sunken eyed, revenge-addled nasty with a disdain toward humans that felt misplaced in many ways, probably due to the fact that while he is a villain, his relationship with his brother has always been handled with love and tenderness, despite the God of Mischief always looking for an angle to exploit. The thing is, this film was designed to essentially introduce us to the threat of Thanos, without him really being in it apart from a brief mention and the first post-credit scene. This was the film that opened the world to threats from far away and there's an uneasy feeling about what SHIELD has been doing in the months after Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger.

It's also great to see the Hulk and the beginnings of the relationship that would never really happen between Banner/Hulk and the Black Widow. Ruffalo ended up being more than an adequate replacement for Edward Norton, who played the character in the appropriated Incredible Hulk. I also felt that the focus on Hawkeye, the Widow and Nick Fury was balanced extremely well; after all the other Avengers had their own films and while the Hulk was undoubtedly a slightly different one from the 2008 film, that was far enough in the past for Marvel to take the key parts from that and replace Norton with someone who was likely to be in for duration.

This film was the end of Phase One, because everything after this was either closely or subliminally linked to the thing that is often referred to as The Infinity Saga but it had everything you needed from a blockbuster stand alone film and while we're unlikely to see another Avengers film of this ilk again, it's a formula that worked extremely well and shouldn't be forgotten about, especially given how muddled the MCU seems to have become.

Captain America: The First Avenger - which I watched about four months ago - is a cracking film that completely destroyed my hate for the character. I've spent most of my life in comics struggling in vain to find a run of the Captain America comic that I've enjoyed, mainly because I've never really got the idea of Captain America (yet, perversely I've never had a problem with Captain Britain).

I approached this film a decade ago thinking I'd dislike it and was proven wrong and now I've seen it three times I can safely say it's one of the three best Marvel films ever. It's a great war film that feels like a costumed version of an Indiana Jones film. It has sexy characters, a great script, a relevant origin story and, like all the others, seemed to stick with the origin story to a tee. There's little wrong with it, even the pantomime Nazis and Red Skull are a perfect fit. It sets so much up that I feel was needlessly ignored in later MCU films and has the Howling Commandos, who were rather let down by there not being a Sgt Fury to lead them - now that would have been something, especially if Nick Fury had been nearly 100 years old when he became director of SHIELD.

It's almost a perfect superhero film, let down by the tiniest of quibbles.

While I have The Incredible Hulk to watch again - it was only about a year ago since we last watched it - along with Iron Man 2, I firmly believe that Phase One of the MCU is the best of everything that was to follow.

Pop Culture blah blah blah (part many of lots)

In these end of times - famine, pestilence and war - the only thing we have is the television to remind us of our mortality, or the things we no longer have or the situations we're glad we've never faced... yet.

So I'm going to kick off with something I ended with last time...

Raised by Wolves has to be the oddest thing on TV. I said it really needed to up its game and it seems the people who made the show have done just that. It's utterly bonkers, makes no sense and suggests that mankind were settlers on Earth from this other planet. It's choc-a-block full of bizarre characters, weird monsters and acid seas. The acting is stilted, almost like the cast were deliberately told to copy the last am dram show they saw and the story seems to be like a stream of consciousness, going in whatever direction it feels like. There are undersea creatures that steal babies and live in seas of boiling acid and there are ancient androids that can regrow themselves, oh and you have Mother, Father and they're brood of protectorates. Mother is a Necromancer - an android capable of destroying cities, while Father is a docile, slightly naïve character who seems to have lost his direction. Then there's Marcus, who was superhuman but isn't anymore (or is he?); he was an atheist infiltrator but now is a converted Mithraic; his wife Sue who was a doctor, who briefly became a fruit-giving tree but her fate is undecided as she was recently eaten by the floaty snake dragon thing... There are killer child androids with no faces and Campion - who is probably the main protagonist - born on the planet, he's utterly annoying, ridiculously trusting and the kid that plays him can't act for toffee... As this shorter season concludes, Mother has been imprisoned by Grandmother, the new video game is slowly brainwashing the atheists who are now viewing Mother as their messiah, Marcus is dead but might not be and they're all slowly transforming into the acid sea aliens. I am not making this shit up.

***

The highlight of the year so far has been Yellowjackets. This is a story told mainly in two time zones - 1996 and 2021. In 1996, a team of schoolgirl footballers are heading to the National Finals in a privately owned jet when it crashes in the Canadian wilderness, leaving about 20 survivors. In 2021, we follow the lives of four of those survivors 25 years on, in the knowledge that whatever happened in Canada stayed in Canada, except everyone else wants to know what happened in Canada?

Unlike Raised by Wolves, which I could literally talk about continuously as there is so much going on it and probably wouldn't spoil it for anybody, Yellowjackets is a different beast entirely and talking about it is simply saturated in potential spoilers. The four women, now in their 40s, are all psychopaths in their own way, with exceptional performances from Melanie Lynskey and Christina Ricci - and their 17 year old counterparts; but it's what actually happened in Canada that is the main focus. Obviously the adventures of the four psycho survivors is compelling and unexpected, but these people had to have had something devastating - other than surviving a plane crash - happen to them in the wilderness and we've yet to find out what it is yet.

There is, I'm worried to say, an element of Lost in it, because there is something decidedly strange about the place they crashed and the strange log cabin they find to live in, but don't let that put you off because the ten episodes were all excellent. The only thing that worries me is the cliff hanger ending suggests that there's something even odder going on and maybe the four ladies focused on in this first season are the least mad of all those who returned...

You should watch it; it's absolutely fantastic.

***

In the last one of these I talked about how Resident Alien felt like it really jumped the shark. A few weeks further on and while it still is a far inferior season to the first, it is, at last, starting to pull together into something that resembles the pace and excellence of the first series. The thing that really sets it apart from most alien TV shows is the fact that Harry's species are actually quite bloodthirsty and savage - just like the humans they want to eradicate. There is a feeling that all the preamble and seemingly wasted episodes in the first half of the season might just have some bearing on the rest of the series. This was kind of confirmed in episode 8 of season two, when all the stuff you were frowning about, thinking they were just padding out and treading water, somehow came home to roost. I'm still not sure how it relates to the ongoing story, but at least we now have an idea why we all wasted hours wondering when something was going to happen.

***

We started to watch the sixth and final season of The Expanse. We watched the first episode about a month ago and neither of us have felt compelled to return to it. It feels a little like Babylon 5 when it wrapped up the cosmic story early in season 4 only for the remainder of episodes to never really feel like they were any good (on the whole, they weren't). The Expanse has focused heavily on the Belter story and season 6 is essentially all about that struggle. If there is some conclusion to the ancient alien proto-molecule story then I've not heard about it. Most of the people I know who loved the series have condemned the sixth season as dull, uninteresting and overlong - at just six 50 minute episodes... I may never finish it. That doesn't seem to bother me much.

***

Picard is head and shoulders the best Star Trek series to come out since probably The Next Generation. While Disco Very has, at least, finally woken up and done something, Picard simply takes ideas and themes from the past and plays with them in an entertaining and enjoyable way. The problem really is Patrick Stewart, who, as much as love him to bits, is about 120 years old and is becoming frail and it's difficult to imagine him in these situations. This series should have been made 20 years ago when Patrick could still pull it off; the thing is it wouldn't have been and it's only the advent of streaming and saturation of product that has got us to this point. It's still an interesting series that appears to be taking a leaf out of old NG episodes and the still wonderful Star Trek: The Voyage Home.

As for Female Black Jesus Saves the Universe Again, the season concluded with what really felt like the concluding part of the series. It felt like an ending; like the show wasn't going to be renewed so they were tying up loose ends and setting sail into the nearest star. Even Tilly was back for one last display of chunkiness. So imagine my horror to discover that Discovery has been renewed for a fifth season... Except, not in this house. That's it for this Star Trek series and we'll probably give Strange New Worlds a miss as well. The retconning of Spock's family and history has rather spoiled it for me, this and countless other things. Time to say goodbye.

***

We've finally started watching Ozark. I've had a number of people recommend this series to me and the reviews I've seen all suggest it's a series we needed to watch, so last week we started... It isn't exactly what I expected, but that's a facile comment because I didn't really know what to expect. I knew it was about an 'accountant' who laundered drug money for a cartel and that it was set in the Ozarks, but after that it was a blank slate.

As I said the other day, it's good but it's certainly not up there with great series such as Breaking Bad and The Sopranos. It's full of characters who are really dislikeable and with the exception of Jason Bateman's Marty Byrd (the main character), I really couldn't give a shit about the fate of anybody. But, here's the thing, even Bateman's character isn't particularly nice; he's a very clever and successful man who just happens to be quite, decent and honest man involved in the worst possible things who allows that culture to become his own life. His wife is an entitled bitch; his daughter even more so and his son is borderline psychopath. The supporting players are all rednecks and hillbillies without a shred of decency among them and what is compelling about it is just how far it will go to compete with great crime shows of the past. I'm sticking with it, but I'd like to see it really go off the rails over the next three seasons.

***

My cursory The Walking Dead mention is not a criticism, for once. The final season, split into three eight-part sections is almost two-thirds of the way through and we're deep into The Commonwealth territory. There is at least a feeling of dread about the series once again, except this time it isn't the dead that bring it but the fact the Commonwealth could well be very bad guys indeed. What with the Civic Republic looming large in Fear and the lame World Beyond spin-off, one gets the impression that eventually we're heading for a showdown between all of our hero factions and these two giants of the living world that's left. For anyone that cares, I'm betting 50p the Civic Republic - not their military wing - will end up being the good guys.

***

Moving onto films, briefly. I know Ryan Reynolds is an acquired taste; you either love him or hate him and there doesn't seem to be much middle ground with him. Some of his films are great, others are meh, but after the utter disappointment I felt watching Spider-Man; No Way Home, watching  Reynolds in The Adam Project (along with Mark Ruffalo and Zoe Saldana) was a breath of fresh air. I thoroughly enjoy a good time travel caper and this certainly ticked all the boxes. It was also over an hour shorter than the Spider-Man film, which suggests to me that Marvel's films can't just be 90 or 100 minute self-contained treats - like Iron Man - and have to be bloated and full of navel-gazing and unnecessary bullshit.

Oddly enough that last sentence seems to be how I'm feeling about the forthcoming Moon Knight series, debuting on Disney+ in about ten days. I know a lot of people who bang on about not writing the character off or thinking he's just an all-white Batman and many of them site the Bill Sienkiewicz drawn issues of his comic in the late 1980s and 1990s, but I simply never got the character. For me he was just Marvel's Batman copy with some mystic Egyptian shit thrown in to obfuscate the obvious rip-off.

This forthcoming series honestly fills me with no real feelings at all - it will exist, like Corrie or Peaky Blinders (both of which I've never watched). Apart from never really liking the character, I'm not a huge fan of Oscar Isaac; I can take or leave (mainly leave) Ethan Hawke and having seen a number of trailers for it, I just wish I probably didn't have to watch it...

Just to make matters worse, the first trailers for Ms Marvel fell in the last week or so and it appears that this will be a series designed for the 8-11 years bracket and while it probably won't be it kind of pisses me off so much more than Marvel's incoming Batman rip-off.

Ms Marvel will feature heavily in the next Captain Marvel film, now called Marvels presumably because Brie Larson's Captain Marvel wasn't the multi-billion dollar smash that some other Marvel films have been and they could be seen pandering to the fan element that hated her being cast in the first place. Now unless Marvels is going to be a teen superhero film, I can't see the point of targeting the trailers for Ms Marvel to pre-teens. I mean, it's not likely to have old farts like me falling over themselves to watch it, nor do I think that anyone who hasn't got kids or falls outside of the demographic they appear to be aiming at. In fact I'm struggling to understand why Marvel and the MCU is going in the direction it is. It's not just the Multiverse, it seems, but also more emphasis on the cosmic and the mystic. Everything is as clear as mud at the moment, something you could never accuse Phases one thru four of ever being.

I have been accused of being a curmudgeonly old git who refuses to accept the direction the MCU is going. I've almost had arguments with people because I really disliked Eternals, didn't like Shang Chi, think the MCU/Sony Spider-Man films are no better than the shit Sony-on-their-own-ones and I couldn't understand why the hell they didn't make Black Widow as the film to follow Infinity War rather than the Ant-Man and Wasp film - which wasn't bad, but, you know...

Waiting in the wings are the bigger guns; like they've been wheeled out because the new direction isn't making the kind of money they hoped. The Doctor Strange film had better be good because employing Sam Raimi to do any film sounds as though it's based on nostalgia and belief rather than using any common sense - he's a dreadful director with a catalogue of crap films with only The Quick and the Dead having any redeeming features and that was a heavily-stylised 'western'. 

This will be followed by Thor: Love and Thunder with Natalie Portman becoming the God of Thunder and likely to feature The Guardians of the Galaxy and another villain from the Simonsen era of Thor (which, however brilliant, had almost as many corny, duff stories as it had gems). 

Is it me or are Marvel wheeling out the remaining 'Avengers' because the other films have simply been shite? Maybe they need to remind people that the characters - who are left - that drew them in originally are still out there doing stuff?

I am also aware that my growing dislike of Marvel films is probably sounding like a stuck record and not going to get a lot of people agreeing with me, but I write blogs like this, I'm not about to ignore Marvel; it's like talking about football generally in 2022 and omitting both Liverpool and Man City from your discussions.

***

And that's about it for this time. We have a number of shows to catch-up on and some new ones that sound intriguing. From appears to be another weird series with inescapable scenarios and, um, monsters, while there's obviously going to be a slew of other new things that'll land in the next couple of months. There's my promised final round up of the non-MCU Marvel films that we have to watch - Elektra, the two 21st century Punisher films, which I expect will be as bad as they're rated on IMDB and a bunch of other films that we have but can't find the enthusiasm to watch. By the time I pluck up the guts to watch them Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness will have its cinematic release and as I said earlier this is a film that might just drive the final nail in the coffin of my MCU infatuation. I'm also finding the DC films to be hit or miss affairs, but on a basic level some of them have been more enjoyable than I expected. That doesn't mean I'll be rushing out to see a Batman or another Aquaman film, but Black Adam, The Flash and another Shazam film will be welcome changes, I hope.

I'm getting recommendations from people, which I kind of want to try, but I also kind of don't, because people have differing tastes to me and I'm often let down because I expect more and they don't fulfil the initial promise. I still feel reluctant to get involved with many UK-based dramas, mainly because the number of people who recommend them is balanced by people who don't rate them and I know I should gauge them for myself, but you simply can't escape other opinions and they influence me more than I should allow...

A Late Review: Spider-Man: No Way Home

Having just watched all of the old Spider-Man films not too long after watching the first two Sony/MCU reboots with Tom Holland, I went into this with high hopes, great expectations and a bunch of other cliched phrases about optimism. I should have been wary... You know, you're looking forward to something and it's awful, as opposed to going in expecting the worst and being pleasantly surprised.

I don't think I've truly enjoyed a Marvel film since Avengers: Infinity War. The second Spider-Man film left me a little cold, Ant-Man and the Wasp ditto and this year's films - Black Widow, Shang-Chi and Eternals - all left me feeling like maybe it was time I stopped investing what time I have left on this planet with Marvel films. But Marvel is like a potent and addictive drug; the comics had the same affect on me for a lot longer than they should have and while I haven't been a comic book fan for 20 years now (that long?!?) the MCU has allowed me to return to the awe and wonder I felt in the 20th century.

The wife and I watched Iron Man and then Thor last week and while it was the third time of asking for both films I pretty much enjoyed them as much as the first and second times. They are cracking films with a real sense of something new and different, yet by the time I got to Avengers: Endgame (with its flaws, plot holes and overwrought battles) I was suffering from Marvel fatigue.

So, as I said, I went into this with a lot of optimism, especially as I'd heard so many positives about it and it has an IMDB rating of almost 9 and was the first post-COVID film to exceed $1billion at the box office. You know there's a 'but' coming, the thing is it's not quite as simple as that...

No Way Home starts like an express train; in fact it's one of the strangest starts to any Marvel film I've seen. It literally kicks off where the last one finished and for the first 40 minutes it flies past in a flurry of magic, teen angst, media frenzy and the kind of reaction you would expect if Spider-Man was real and his identity had just been given away. Then the wife paused it to go and sort something out and while it wasn't her fault, from that point onwards it seemed to go wrong with only fleeting scenes where I felt I was watching a good film...

Presumably Thomas Haden Church wasn't deemed good enough to be in the film as the humanised Sandman, with him depicted as a sand man rather than the one who appeared in Spider-Man 3. He makes a fleeting appearance towards the end, as does Rhys Ifans as the Lizard, but both are depicted as their counterparts throughout the film in what felt like a dehumanisation of two characters depicted as victims in their respective first appearances. Alfred Molina was great and without giving too much away he became the man he was when he saved Spider-Man and the city in Spider-Man 2; he really was the best thing in this film. Jamie Foxx as Electro wasn't the nerdy scientist he was in the Amazing Spider-Man, instead he seemed bigger, stronger, more confident and actually a little bit nasty and corrupted by the power he had and the Green Goblin, ably played again by Willem Dafoe, ditched the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers look-a-like villain and actually became a truly evil piece of shit; arguably far worse than the megalomaniac depicted in the first Spider-Man film. I felt a little let down by this Sinister Five (should have been Six) because it all felt a little too contrived.

I never knew MJ was Michele Jones-Watson. That realisation felt like a real blow to the stomach, but, you see, in my day Ned Leeds wasn't a American Chinese kid, he was a reporter for the Bugle and had his best stories in Daredevil. Betty Brant as a TV reporter with blonde hair? Oh and Flash Thompson was a moron, not a cretin...

The inclusion of Doctor Strange should have made this an inspirational film; Cumberbatch isn't bad as Stephen Strange yet he was almost reduced to a comedy foil in this, especially as scenes shown in trailers were not in this film - a red herring often used by Marvel in their previews; they've done it before but never so obviously than in this one. In fact all the film seemed a bit rushed considering its almost 2½ hour run time.

The reintroduction of Maguire and Garfield in their Spidey personas was good, but that's where the continuity errors start to show themselves. Maguire is now in his 40s and looked it; Garfield was far more emo in this than he was in his two outings and ultimately their involvement in the film ended up feeling like they were forced into a film they almost didn't belong in. It's also a remarkably sad film with deaths and (mini) endings that all felt part of the plot rather than the story. Don't get me wrong, it was good to see them, but it also didn't feel right. A device to shoehorn the multiverse fully into our newer understanding of this post Endgame MCU. 

I'm actually quite torn about this film; it's fresh in my mind and yet I almost feel like I need to watch it again to perhaps fully understand what happened, the thing is I don't know if I could watch it again, at least not for a couple of years, because it felt over long, drawn out and that's after the opening 40 minutes which in itself felt like it was becoming the best of this new Spider-Man franchise.

For those that care and don't know, Parker returns to New York with the news that Mysterio has revealed his identity to the world's press and after interrogations by the FBI, an appearance from Charlie Cox as Matt 'Daredevil' Murdock and being moved to Happy Hogan's super-apartment replete with Stark technology, Peter decides to ask Dr Strange to make the world forget he's Spider-Man so that his life can return to some normality; the problem is everyone needs to forget he's Spidey, but Peter wants MJ and Ned and May and Happy to know his identity because he doesn't want to go through the problems he had the first time they discovered he was a superhero. Naturally this spell ends up going badly wrong; everyone still knows he's Spider-Man and as a result Strange has ripped a hole in the fabric of the multiverse allowing anyone who knew Parker was the webslinger into the MCU all with a consuming passion to kill him. So far so okay. It's from this point it stops making sense.

Peter wants to cure these people of their powers so when they return to their respective universes they won't die as a result of fighting alternate versions of himself - this in itself makes little or no sense, presumably because these villains have been plucked from their universes before their deaths, which like Endgame would mean that divergences in the time continuum were being created. I come to this conclusion because of an exchange between Doc Ock and Tobey Maguire when Otto remarks that Peter is all grown up. It does all the right things for seemingly all the wrong reasons and begs the question if these dead villains can come back to life in the MCU how come MJ and Gwen don't appear as well (naturally because Dunst and Stone are serious actors now who probably didn't want to be or weren't needed in this film)?

The film feels slightly disconnected from the point all these old characters and the other Parkers appear; the narrative feels sewn together rather than a flowing story and in conclusion I have to say that it's essentially a poor film stitched together with emotion-wrenching scenes almost designed to deflect from all the film's faults. I don't think I liked it very much, but then again (like Batman) I can take or leave Spider-Man, so that isn't much of a surprise.

Oh and what was the point of Venom? Relegated to the mid credit scene, while leaving a little present that has me slightly puzzled considering the character is 'owned' by Sony. Oh and the end credits scene was the biggest cop out of the lot - a rehashed version of the Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness preview...

This leaves me feeling nothing but dread about May's second Doctor Strange film, mainly because it's directed by Sam Raimi, who, apart from two Evil Dead films, isn't actually that good at making films (and they weren't that good). I think Marvel's shot its bolt and now struggles to produce anything anywhere near as good as their first few years. The best thing they've done in the last four  years was the Hawkeye TV series and even that copped out at the end. If you haven't seen this film then it's probably because you're not a Marvel fan; therefore if you want to see it I'd wait a couple of years before it appears on TV, because if you're competent enough to see the massive plot holes, hammy acting and poor writing in this film you really won't enjoy it.