Pop Culture is Dead to Me etc. etc. etc...

You've been writing a lot of blogs recently? Asked no one in particular.

I'm trying to fill my days with something relatively constructive and writing blogs at least keeps my hand in, my mind active and stops me from playing on-line golf or whittling away my time doing little of any note. I find the latter stages of February and half of March to be frustrating times of the year, especially with the rather extreme weather we've been having

Let's kick off with what has been the TV highlight of 2022 so far...

Peacemaker - who would have thought the one-dimensional wanker from the recent Suicide Squad film would end up being part of the craziest thing on TV since the first The Boys? In what is essentially a direct follow-up/follow-on from Suicide Squad, we follow the misadventures of America's 2nd most right wing asshole as he tries to get back some semblance of life.

If you saw the film you'll know that Peacemaker was one of a number of 'villains' who had an explosive  charge put in their heads to ensure they do the work of the covert US government agency charged with whatever they need to do and didn't simply run away once they were out of prison. When we last saw Chris Smith (aka ex-wrestler John Cena), he had just 'killed' Rick Flagg - de facto leader of Suicide Squad and was gunning for the remaining - living - team members. This series picks up with Smith being given a new job to work with the back-up crew who 'betrayed' Amanda Waller and track down and destroy 'butterflies' - an alien race who take over human bodies, killing their hosts but remaining 'alive' thanks to the insects.

Peacemaker is joined by Murn - the leader of the group with a secret; Adebayo - Waller's daughter; Harcourt and Economos - both involved in the 'betrayal' of Waller at the end of Suicide Squad and Vigilante, who really needs to be seen to be believed or understood; he's essentially a version of The Punisher but with a kid's mind and a personality not too dissimilar to Hannibal Lector - he's a raging psychopath who thinks Peacemaker is his best friend. Together they make a brilliantly dysfunctional team and it's up to them to stop an invasion.

Throw into the mix Smith's complete fascist father and creator of all of Peacemaker's fantastically powered helmets. Played by Robert Patrick, he is also known as the White Dragon, an ultra-right 'hero' with a redneck following Donald Trump would be proud of. There is also a host of small supporting roles by various people which just add to the overall brilliance of the series. The guest stars near the end of the 9th episode almost make that worth the admission price alone.

Written and mainly directed by James Gunn, who's given us both Guardians of the Galaxy films and Suicide Squad, it absolutely whizzed past with all nine episodes released weekly but feeling like it was much quicker. It literally could be watched as one very long feature film and you wouldn't be disappointed. It drags the depths of bad taste; has a 'bitchin' 80s poodle rock soundtrack and was simply fabbo, even down to the totally unsentimental finale.

I suggest you try and watch it, you won't be disappointed. The presence of Eagly will guarantee that.

Raised by Wolves (season 2) is about a third of the way through at time of writing. The wife has refused pointedly not to watch another episode, saying that she doesn't have enough time left to go wasting it on such a shit show; I, however, decided to see if anything was going to happen.

It's clear that whoever has bankrolled this series has told the people involved to do something because more has happened in the opening four episodes than in the entire first series. It is still following the plight of Campion - the only survivor of a project to send human embryos to a new planet in a bid to save the remaining life on earth, which was in a totally destructive war between the Mithraic (God believers) and the Atheists and has moved into space. The embryos are protected by two androids - Mother and Father, but all but one dies in the hostile and virtually inhospitable part of the planet where they live.

Mother is also a Necromancer; an android capable of destroying most things - a kind of Terminator on super steroids who is also evolving to the point where she has become pregnant with a synthetic being - that turns out to be a flying snake-like creature. To be honest, I can't see how it's got such a high rating from film and TV websites, unless they're of the belief that the general weirdness, odd tone and bat shit crazy events will all lead to one great conclusion.

Add to this Marcos and Sue - two Atheists, who steal the identities of two important Mithraic leaders to escape the dying Earth. Whereas Sue is at heart an Atheist, Marcos, affected by the planet's strange qualities, slowly begins to believe in the existence of 'Sol' - their god and first tries to influence the other surviving Mithraic - portrayed as crazy zealots - and become their leader. They eventually split up with Marcos going it alone and Sue, now with a group of Mithraic children taken under the protection of Mother and Father, ending up with a settlement of Atheists, who no longer trust her and are themselves as barking mad as the Mithraic.

By the time the second season kicks off everyone has resettled in the tropical zone of the planet, which appears to be a safer place to live with food, but surrounded by a sea of acid that dissolves everything it touches. There are suggestions that the planet might have once - a long time ago - been occupied by beings that had a similar belief system to both the Mithraic and the Atheists and because Ridley Scott is involved there is a great emphasis on synthetic beings, with their general make up not much different from the androids in all of Scott's Alien films.

I actually quite enjoy it, even though I'd make no effort at all to try and second guess it because it is totally random. The acting is pretty dreadful; it's all a bit overwrought at times, but the setting is suitably alien and the Snickers Bar nuttiness is enough to keep me watching, at the moment.

Star Trek: Disco Very - is now in its fourth season and I'm not sure the wife or I really know why we're watching any more. It is what we affectionately call 'The Adventures of Black Female Space Jesus Repeatedly Saving the Universe' and despite all of the charm and un-Star Trek-like feel it had in the first season, it has become a real slog.

They've managed to get rid of a number of characters or relegate others to minor parts; it is now set so far in the future that the spore drive that was anachronistically totally wrong in ST:TOS days now seems to be futuristic even for the far flung future. It tries very hard to feel like Star Wars and even the likeable characters have become annoying or so marginalised by what I hate to call a 'woke agenda' that it's lost all that early charm and has been replaced with something that just exists.

I expect that once this fourth season concludes so will our viewing. It's just a habit now and like smoking not a particularly nice one... The problem is there are spin-offs due and the new series of Picard on the horizon. A new series with Jean-Luc is acceptable even if it's hindered by Patrick Stewart looking like a man in his 80s. However, the Disco Very spin-off (?!?) featuring Captain Pike, his Number One and the youthful Spock - essentially the sequel to ST:TOS needs to be interesting, because one thing Star Trek isn't any more is interesting.

Resident Alien (season two) - Have you ever had the feeling you've been conned? I thoroughly enjoyed the first season even if there were so many plot holes in it you could drive a space ship through them and it seems the second season has decided to go at a different pace and focus a lot more on the supporting characters. This doesn't so much seem to be about Harry now as the people of Patience and it seems to wander around aimlessly, like a TV show in search of the story it started. Or maybe there's more emphasis on the humans because once you start to understand Harry and his own alien race you realise there isn't much to like...

Astor has put on so much weight that it's nice to see a leading lady the size of a small van - she has the fattest arse on telly now - and there's an element of ... slapstick that's crept in, with more emphasis on the not so funny comedy and less on the fish out of water humour that made the first series such a cute and hilarious watch. Certain things have been concluded so easily and in such a contrived way that you have to wonder if the SyFy channel - who produce it and have form in the 'ruin good ideas' stakes - don't really understand what they have on their hands.

It's become a bit of an annoying watch. maybe not as annoying as Disco Very but it has dropped down the Importance Scale considerably and it needs a real shot in the arm to claw its way back to the heights season one had. Sadly I can't see that happening and now it appears the US government agency that's attempting to find Harry are really inept, a little bit stupid and not at all to be feared (at least not in a sinister way), just removing even more from the blank slate of possibilities this show sometimes displays.

It's now been a couple of months since Hawkeye concluded, so long I don't even remember if I've mentioned it in a previous instalment, but I have to say, quite authoritatively, that it has been the best MCU TV series so far. It felt like a low budget Avengers spin-off; had some added multiverse teasers in it and was simply a joy to watch. It also managed to flesh out a character that's been in the MCU since the first Thor film yet we know so very little about.

With the next series up going to be Moon Knight, with Oscar Isaac as Marc Spector, I'm already scouring the schedules to see what follows that as I was never a fan of the character in comic book form and I've always believed him to be just another Marvel attempt at Batman. 

The Wheel of Time was a big budget adaptation of some endless stream of books. It had its moments, but generally it proved one thing to me, TV fantasy adaptations don't really work any longer. They're full of hammy bollocks and if you're not going down the extreme violence or 'get yer tits out' route then they have little or no redeeming qualities. 

This series, with its unfortunate acronym of TWOT, was almost laughable in its approach; was full of bad acting and had a conclusion that I've already forgotten about. I am aware that most of the streaming services are really splurging on fantasy with a host waiting in the wings and I seriously expect they will pass me by. I have no interest in the Game of Thrones prequel; I'm not interested in the Lord of the Rings prequel and I could continue this list through the entire schedule - none of it appeals and we won't be returning to TWOT world any time soon.

It wouldn't be right without a cursory mention for The Walking Dead. The final 24 episodes have been split into three eight-part chunks and the first of these parts was a real nadir for this woefully dull series. You'd think with just 24 episodes left they'd do something to move the narrative along at a pace, but instead we simply have another nutty bad guy to get rid of, who's reason for being the nutty bad guy is unclear apart from liking to kill people who don't treat him proper, like. By the end of those first 8 parts, I couldn't help feeling the producers of this show hadn't been told it was almost all over. While Daryl, Maggie and a bunch of expendables from Maggie's new home attempt to find a decent amount of food to save the starving back at Alexandria; Ezekiel, Eugene, Yumiko and Princess are all settling in with the Commonwealth - which is essentially 'the old world' with more danger and a bit more fascist.

The second chunk sees the Commonwealth coming to save the day, except not everyone from Alexandria wants to join this new group; some of them - led by Maggie - want to continue their existence away from the glare of re-modernisation; so I expect a conflict between them will eventually happen... However, my gut feeling is telling me that The Commonwealth might not be the good guys we've pretty much taken for granted, which suggests that that other band of organised society The Civic Republic, who have been painted as nothing but a bunch of feral Nazis, might not be as bad as we think. The few times the CR have been seen it's been their military division, which, it has been eluded to, seem to be a law unto themselves and not at all what the Civic Republic is supposed to be like. All is probably brewing for a final confrontation between the two societies with our heroes - and possibly Rick Grimes - in the middle (although, it's now been over seven TWD years since Rick's last appearance and he's going to have a lot of explaining to do0.

And... that's about it. A lot of the pre and post Christmas viewing has been films, both old and new. We have just started the final season of The Expanse, I've heard some poor things about that so it hasn't exactly been the must watch it used to be and I fell asleep during the first episode, so it doesn't augur well... We have the second and third seasons of a couple of shows - Servant is one-  but I expect that none will get seen and while there are a number of interesting things on the horizon to look forward to I think we're more likely to be let down by new series than enamoured by them, so when something like Peacemaker comes along, it's a real pleasure. We do intend to watch Ozark in the coming months; that's peer pressure.

Until next time...

Revisiting Old TV Series (part ?)

You would have thought, during lockdown - any of them - that this would have been the time to revisit things. I mean, people did all manner of things during the first couple of pandemic lockdowns; they filled their time up with new hobbies, new interests and in many cases rekindled old ones. I pretty much did none of that. In a time when my so-called creative streak could have been at its most productive, I pretty much did bugger all...

Recently however, while watching the old non-MCU Marvel films over the last few weeks, it got the wife and I talking about much-loved TV series and whether we had the inclination to revisit any of them. As we've been living in Scotland five years come the summer, we got talking about a couple of series we were avid fans of; Monarch of the Glen - which started in 2000 - and Hamish Macbeth - which started in 1995 and starred the excellent Robert Carlyle. The problem with watching TV series that are over 20 years old is either you have to know when ITV3 - the nostalgia channel - is going to show them or you have to hope that some nerd and aficionado made them available as torrent downloads. It's not like we even have a DVD player that's set up nor does there seem to be DVDs available of these now.

About three weeks ago, I was searching through my list of downloadable things and I noticed that someone had made all three series of Hamish Macbeth available and that was my cue to revisit the past...

The reason, other than availability, for opting for this was because Monarch of the Glen, while excellent for the first four or five series, pretty much lost the plot and jumped the shark by the end of series 5 and while it laboured on for another two series, when the likes of Alastair MacKenzie, Richard Briers and Susan Hampshire had left there wasn't really much reason to carry on watching. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with Tom Baker apart from the fact that whatever he's in makes you think of Doctor Who and the new additions to the cast diminished it rather than enhanced it and by the end all you had was Dawn Steele and Martin Compston and neither really could hold the show together.

So we opted for a trip down memory lane to Lochdubh with Hamish, wee Jock and TV John McIver...

Hamish Macbeth (series 1-3) - They simply don't make TV series like this any more. Despite this being 1995, there's an almost timeless feel about this series. If you ignore some of the dodgy outfits, track suits and some neo-mullet hairstyling, I doubt Plockton - where the series was filmed - is that much different out of tourist season than it was then*. You notice almost immediately that there are no mobile phones and that there is a distinct 'you're back in the 70s' feel about it, very much how I view parts of Scotland in 2022. In fact, there's a lot about the first six episodes that would work if it somehow was remade. The film quality dates it and there are elements that make you realise you're watching a snapshot of the mid-1990s, but rural Scotland hasn't really changed that much in the last 27 years and probably hadn't in the preceding 27 years before they made this.

The first thing you need to understand about Hamish Macbeth is it isn't anything like MC Beaton's original stories. Hamish exists, but instead of a tall, willowy Highlander, he's "A 5'8" Glaswegian with a chip on his shoulder," at least according to Ms Beaton when she saw what the BBC had done to her quaint Scottish detective novels. Not one single character remains from her stories, although in a perverse way they do; they've just all had their names changed, their personalities altered and the stories fiddled with to update them to a more contemporary setting. Lochdubh was also supposed to be much further north, arguably closer to Ullapool, Lochinver and Assynt and in the books the community was extremely small with maybe as little as eleven families living there. However, the premise remained - Hamish liking his leisurely life does everything in his power to stay off the radar of his superiors; he neither wants promotion nor does he want to move away from the idyllic place he calls home, usually solves all the crimes and then makes sure his nemesis DI Baird gets all the credit. In series 1 of the BBC adaptation this is the underlying idea even if it isn't explored.

In many ways it was like whoever decided to make the TV series simply came up with their own concept but kept the name because it was catchy and to be honest with you, despite having not read any Hamish books, I'm glad they did it that way because from what I can gather Beaton's book were sometimes dour and lacked the humour and empathy that Carlyle and the scripts brought to the series. 

The first thing we took from watching the first series again - over three nights (only six episodes) was how it felt like stepping into some comfortable old slippers. No, we couldn't really remember that much about them, bits and pieces here and there, but the familiarity shone through and as we were reintroduced to different characters - Alexandra, Isobel, TV John, Lachlan and Lackey Jr McCrae, Barney and Agnes, Rory and Esme, the Major and the excellent Doc Brown, it was like reopening an old photo album and having fond memories flood back.

Yet, compared to TV series in 2022 it felt half finished, half-arsed almost. Much of the set-ups were contrived and while you sometimes wondered how three very disparate threads would tie up together to conclude each episode, they always did, however much of a weird stretch it seemed. The thing is, there was something a wee bit crap about the series and that made it even more loveable than you could imagine. If this was on Netflix or Amazon Prime now, episodes would be 90 minute TV films, with much more delving into depths and character studies, whereas in 1995 while you gradually got to know your main supporting cast, all the 'guest star villains' tended to be two-dimensional characters, usually dislikeable - it had a basic formula. I also don't know if updating it could make it any more black and dark, because what is essentially a homespun 'dramedy' has some of the most fiendishly nasty exits I can remember - a man being burnt alive in a coffin scam; a black widow accidentally poisoning herself rather than her intended victim; a couple of people falling down mountain sides or off of ledges.  Retribution for a child killer... Lochdubh could be a grim place despite the idyllic setting and friendly locals.

Series two further enhances the reputation of this series; it keeps the same tone as the first series, light-hearted in a serious kind of way and gets increasingly blacker with its humour and ideas and despite the constant feeling that things often get wrapped up incredibly quickly from the point of seemingly impossible positions. The point is Macbeth is supposed to be a dab hand detective, but is often simply on the periphery of the story until the denouement. 

What is strange about the second six-episode series is how it moves the story along; not only killing off a major character but also elevating a minor character into a more rounded position. It also introduced Billy Riddock as Lachlan McCrae, an actor who looked and sounded remarkably like Jimmy Yuill who played Lachlan in the first series but wanted to return to the RSC. I think we only noticed they were different actors because we watched the series so close together, we probably didn't notice back in 1996. Another observation is it suffers from the illusion of change; none of the characters seem to develop past the stage of where they were introduced - a bit like old Superman comics which started every month with Lois Lane never realising that Clark Kent was Superman with glasses - it's probably a bad example, because Hamish is no Superman, but it serves its purpose.

With the conclusion of the second series, we sort of said goodbye to the series that worked on several levels and were about to venture into the realms of the slightly ridiculous...

Season three arrived with some fanfare, but also with the news that there would not be a fourth series because Robert Carlyle was headed for A-list stardom. It would be an 8-part series instead of 6 and the production values increased - bigger sets, larger cast, more money on 'special effects' and a host of new locations. The problem with it was despite most of the original creative team still involved it felt like the success of the series went to their heads a little...

It was an interesting start; the first episode felt like the transition from the old Lochdubh to the new melodramatic slapstick one, where Hamish's raison d'être was examined in greater depth. That reason for his life there was to avoid being seen as too successful to be wasted on such a small community. He loved where he lived, the people living there and his peaceful, easy-going existence, but the arrival of a rookie police constable on secondment means he has to be seen as an upstanding policeman's policeman. This coincides with the Major becoming involved in a whirlwind romance with someone who turns out to be a Black Widow like murderer. After the obligatory gruesome ending, it did feel like series three was just going to be the same as the previous two...

And then episode two came along and suddenly Hamish was no longer in Lochdubh, but on the fictitious island of Lagga Laggas. He's there on a walking holiday, but soon gets involved in a 20 year old cold case about the death of the local Protestant vicar's wife and while it made an interesting change of location and pace, it simply didn't feel like an episode of Hamish Macbeth. It also was stitched together with the flimsiest of plots, very poor scripting and a conclusion that I'm still trying to completely understand. In fact it was clear that the homely feel of the series had been replaced with a certain procedural feel; like the show might end up going through the motions to get to the finish line.

In the grand scheme of things, series three, episode two was probably the last 'serious' episode, because what followed started to resemble a comedy homage series rather than the 'real thing'. 'The Lochdubh Assassin' is an episode which, on the surface, appeared to tick all the boxes but ended up being just wrong. It begins in Glasgow with the introduction of Frankie Bryce, a lad Isobel (now a journalist in the city) takes under her wing, taking him and his mother home hoping for the protection of Hamish as Frankie had inadvertently robbed the local mob and was now marked. What we end up with is an episode that drives a stake through the heart of the show; characters suddenly are acting out of character and finding themselves in unreal situations; Lachlan is almost killed, TV John takes on the guise of avenging angel and we have the most badly dubbed child you will ever witness on TV and a gang of villains that could have walked out of a Ronnie Barker sketch. Everything about the episode is bad and Hamish's involvement in it was almost non-existent; spending most of the episode standing around saying he can't do anything until the bad men commit a crime while crimes are being committed all around him.

It doesn't get any better after that. 'The Good Thief' continues to feature the new supporting characters from Glasgow and Frankie's badly dubbed Scottish accent (he sounds like he's being voiced by a woman trying to do a Scottish kid's accent) is again prominent. In fine Lochdubh tradition we have a black underlying story - a dying child - but by the end of the episode you're just wishing the kid would hurry up and die. We're introduced to a never before mentioned local rivalry with the town of Dunbracken, a singing competition and the realisation that while we were all under the misconception that Lochdubh was just a one street 'town' sitting on the shore of the loch, when it is in fact a huge sprawling city like  place with its own train station - also never mentioned before. This is only emphasised even more in the next episode when we discover that shopkeeper Rory is actually a member of the local council and we're introduced to parts of the town we never knew existed. The world in which our heroes inhabit was getting exponentially bigger with no real need or explanation.

By the end of what would have been the sixth episode, all of the weirdness that made the series such a huge hit to begin with had been replaced by poor humour, strange cinematic homages and characters no longer acting like they were for the benefit of the story. It also began to be increasingly more contrived, with stories that made little or no sense either in their plot or why they even were allowed to happen. Could the concluding two-part finale save the show's reputation or could it easily be considered a great series if you simply avoid season three?

Part One of 'Destiny' starts in an unusual setting - a rough and ready prison in South America - where we meet Kenneth McIver - TV John's dodgy brother, an unreliable soul plagued by bad luck and called Jonah by the locals because of it. He gets sprung from his 130 year sentence by an ex-pat with his hypnotist girlfriend because they think Kenneth might be able to help them find the Stone of Destiny, which most people think is under the Coronation Seat in Westminster Abbey, but apparently isn't. This is the first of what will be a long list of lazy plotting errors in this two-part series finale. How did the ex-pat know the stone in London was a fake before he'd even laid eyes on Kenneth?

The majority of the first part is taken up with Kenneth and the hypnotist finding clues from the Major, Rory, Isobel and Lachlan - all direct ancestors to the people who replaced the stone with a fake and hid the real one in the hills around Lochdubh. Before they have to find TV John for his final part of the puzzle, Kenneth realises where the stone is and he sets off on horseback with the hypnotist. In the meantime the will-they-won't-they relationship between Hamish and Isobel looks destined to grind to a halt before it starts again with Hamish seemingly getting cold feet as another opportunity passes him by. The episode concludes with Kenneth confronting his brother with a shotgun claiming there's unfinished business between them. 

It should be pointed out that all through this series, TV John has faced a lot of danger and always said he knew he was not going to die because whenever faced with death he hasn't smelled pomade, but the first scene with John and Hamish starts with the former telling the latter his time on Earth is nearly up and he will be dead soon. The scenes between the policeman and his right-hand man are some of the closest to classic Hamish Macbeth as we've seen in this final series and because of John's 'second sight' the entire town is taking his prediction deadly seriously. 

The problem with the episode, like most of this third season, is the propensity for almost slapstick comedy. It's like the producers wanted to capture the feel of the old Ealing comedies, but might have achieved this had they bothered to watch any of them. Kenneth, like so many other unwanted villains in the final series was too ludicrous to be believable and his ex-pat benefactor and hypnotist girlfriend just as unbelievable and unlikely.

The second part of 'Destiny' starts where we left off with TV John, his brother and the hypnotist finding the stone and setting off back down the mountain. Meanwhile Hamish and Isobel are attempting to cut them off by using a dangerous mountain path, while the Major, Rory and the McCraes' are hoping to find the boat that is likely to rendezvous with the villains. Then it all goes a bit weird. The series has always played the mystical as part of the ongoing story, what with TV John's second sight and an assortment of characters all being somehow affected by the supernatural elements in these remote Scottish hills, but in this final ever episode they crank of the mystic to number 11.

First off, Hamish and Isobel are saved from freezing to death by a mysterious benefactor who lives in a cave and burns wads of money to keep warm. There is little or no explanation as to how they happened there nor who the benefactor is and when they departed his company; it's such an out-to-left-field diversion it sits incredibly jarring with anything else that's ever happened in the series. Then because TV John saves the life of the hypnotist - who was bitten by a non-deadly adder - she betrays Kenneth (but we don't know to what extent until the end of the episode) and it becomes a race against time to stop Kenneth from delivering the Stone of Destiny to the boat. John keeps warning his brother that if he gets on the boat he will die, but Kenneth is more interested in showing off to our heroes that he'd beaten them, only for him to fall and get his hook caught in the engine of the boat.

John and his brother die in an explosion as the little boat they're on ploughs into the rocks and Kenneth's dodgy employer takes off without the hypnotist. It then turns out that her betrayal of Kenneth was to swap the stone for a fake, so the Stone of Destiny is still safe under the protection of the people charged with that task and now Hamish, who replaced John.

The series concludes with TV John's ghostly father visiting Hamish to tell him everything is fine and that Hamish needs to buy plenty of nappies because he and Isobel will be parents and then the announcement from the British government that the (fake) stone of destiny is to be returned to Scotland, meaning our heroes must plan a break in to return the real stone and that is how it ends.

In many ways, it was great to revisit a TV series we loved from the 1990s, especially as we now live in Scotland and the similarities of 1990s Scotland and today are strong; but the success of the show eventually made it less entertaining and a little annoying. What was almost a soap opera-like exploration of small village life in remote Scotland became something else entirely and stretched the boundaries of belief a little too much. Another observation about the series is that while Hamish (in the books) is a bit of a Sherlock Holmes-like genius, in the series this was replaced by a sometimes feckless individual whose laziness seemed to be his most prominent feature. Carlyle was great as the title character, but in the end you sometimes wondered why he was even a policeman.

I think, more than anything else, it makes you realise that sometimes revisiting old friends doesn't work out the way you expect. It's been over 25 years since we raved about this series and now I wouldn't have been so praiseworthy of it. It was entertaining, but I'm glad it's over.

* Looking at images on Google Street View taken in August 2021, Plockton hasn't changed much at all. What was the Stag Bar/Hotel is now a private house and two doors down from it is the Plockton Hotel which appeared to be a private house in the series. Rory Campbell's shop is still a shop and the house between the Stag Bar and the Plockton Hotel has a wisteria growing at the front of it; while watching an episode from series two, the wife pointed out the wisteria was in full bloom and still there 27 years earlier.

Revisiting Old Marvel Films (part 3)

In this third part, I look at the three Fantastic Four films and change my mind and have yet another look at the first Hulk film ...

The Fantastic Four - Well... I did think I'd remember this film, but in many ways it was like watching it for the first time. I don't think we ever got around to watching it a second time and I really can't understand why. As far as a 2005 Fox superhero film goes, I don't think they did a bad job of updating it for the 21st century. One gets the impression they learned a lot from the dreadful X-Men films, because this felt like a proper Marvel film at times, especially the interaction between Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm. Plus, It's like the current MCU took inspiration from this film, because the dialogue - at times - had a snappy comic book feel to it without being too cheesy; it showed how an iconic comic could be made believable, because it felt set in the real world, whereas X-Men and Spider-Man both felt slightly like they were in comic book worlds (of which, apparently they were). 

I kind of feel like breaking this down into good and bad points, because it really is a film of two extremes. Johnny Storm (played by Chris 'Captain America' Evans - which felt really weird) was pretty much perfect apart from the lack of longer blonde hair and his sparring with Ben was straight out of a Lee/Kirby comic. Ben Grimm (played by Michael 'The Shield' Chiklis) was both excellent and totally wrong. They got his tragic nature correct, but putting a man in a Thing suit kind of let it down. Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffud) is physically a great bit of casting, but retconning him into some kind of failing scientist with multiple bankruptcies and being more of a nerd than a geek didn't really work the way I suppose they wanted it to and Sue Storm (Jessica Alba) was probably a hot choice at the time, but she didn't really carry the role off and there wasn't really enough of either of these two in a superhero way. Coupling her with Victor Von Doom (Julien 'Nip/Tuck' McMahon) seemed like a bad idea, especially as he was quite awful as Doom and not at all menacing or convincing - but it was a means to an end, a plot device that made the rest of the film work, even if Vic soon forgot his adoration of Sue. 

However, the updated origin of the FF was well handled and I liked it; it was a shame they had to make Doom part of this experiment and give him powers, the VVD I grew up with was just a mad genius with power, more money than Croesus, and many more gadgets and tricks than a dozen Tony Starks. Making him some kind of electric metal man kind of stunk up the film a little, although as a villain it sort of worked. It's all wrapped up in less than an hour and 45 minutes and set up the sequel quite well (what should have been a post credits scene with his assistant - the excellent - Hamish Linklater seeing the seized up Doom back to Latveria). 

The special effects were strange - the Torch was excellent, but as I said Chiklis in a rock suit sucked; Reed's stretching ability, while underused, was a wee bit cheesy (a word I've already used once) and Sue's invisibility and force field could have been better, but I'm not sure how - she's the problem that the MCU will have when they get around to rebooting the franchise in 2025.

All in all, I think I enjoyed watching this far more than the Spider-Man or X-Men films, but the FF were one of my first great comic loves and this film did feel like it was made with a little bit of love towards the great Kirby/Lee era of the book.

[Digression #1 - Deadpool. The enigma in non-MCU Marvel films; not because of any other reason than the way it does its own thing in a breaking the 4th wall way. Both films are funny, fast paced, violent and rubbish but in a fun way. Obviously, the Wolverine Origins film introduced us to a different character, also played by Ryan Reynolds, which confused people, but fitted in perfectly with the absolute fuck up Fox had made and was about to continue making with the X-Men and its entangled continuity. But don't worry too much; it's all about the multiverse, ennit?  The thing is the two Deadpool films are enjoyable, throwaway films, but have all manner of problems if you look closely, but are also, in many ways, far closer to the comic book character than anything else Fox ever did with mutants - not that I've ever thought of Wade Wilson as being a mutant, although I'm sure they've found a way of making him one in the 22 years since I last read a Deadpool comic. The films fit nicely into a place that also has TV series like The Boys, Peacemaker and the Umbrella Academy included and when the MCU finally gets around to Deadpool 3, I hope they don't try to change it too much because the films work as 'adult' hero films and probably wouldn't work half as well if the character was homogenised.]

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer - Seriously, after all the reasonably good work of the first film this stunk to high heaven; such promise, such rich history to mine and they came up with a piece of shit that effectively ended the franchise just as it was getting started. Almost everything about this film was awful; from the scene with disco Reed Richards that makes the hipster Peter Parker scenes in Spider-Man 3 look like a masterpiece of cinematic genius to the story that simply made no sense from start to finish; if they could do something wrong with this film they were all over it like a rash.

I don't think I've seen a worse superhero film (yet). They even managed to make a film about an all-life-on-Earth-threatening cosmic entity and wrap it up in 85 minutes; if this was a modern MCU film it would have been at least two films running in at 5 hours plus. Where I happily could break down the first film into good and bad points, this film is almost lacking completely in redeeming features; it's just awful - apart from maybe the initial meeting between the Silver Surfer and the Human Torch; that was a well-handled, if slightly confusing, few minutes of racing around the world. There is literally nothing else. 

As the wife and I started watching it I casually chucked in the comment that it must have done something wrong for it to have killed off the franchise so effectively. By the time Reed was 'doing the twist' at his stag party (about 7 minutes into the film) I realised what. If some superhero films feel like bad concepts, this felt like it had been plotted and scripted by some mentally challenged 6 year olds with a check list of cool things from the FF comic that they had to cram in. In fact, it felt like half the film ended up on the cutting room floor and left me wondering if the Fox executive who green lit the release of this film still had his job ten minutes after it hit cinemas.

When you have someone as interesting as Doug Jones playing the Surfer, why do you need Laurence Fishbourne to do his voice? That was a minor gripe but one that resonates even more if you see Jones in the original Hellboy films or recently in Star Trek: Discovery; he's a unique actor perfectly suited to play the Surfer and be his voice and personality. The same could be said for Andre Braugher - a great actor of his generation - reduced to the position of snarling distrusting army general prepared to give more rope to a guy who attempted to raze NYC to the ground rather than the people who saved it and in that I'm talking about Doctor Doom, newly restored to full Julian McMahon mode thanks to an unlikely encounter with the Surfer in the opening 20 minutes when it seemed all the silver one was doing was flying around the planet changing the chemical composition of anything he came into contact with - something that was never explained properly, but allowed them to have some comedic moments by transferring the FF's powers between them all. 

I literally cannot emphasise just how shit this film is and how disappointing considering it pretty much had the same creative team on it as in the first film, but where that was quite a tight, well-scripted film, this was just corny and full of awful stereotypes and a lot of unnecessary innuendo. I also got the impression that the budget was less than the original despite the bigger premise - a common thing among Fox films, I believe - much of Reed's stretching ability seemed like bad CGI; the Thing seemed to have his head more humanised making him look a little weird and Sue's invisibility and force fields seemed to be used even less than the first film and with less effect. They still got the Torch right, but somehow managed to crank Johnny's twattishness up to level 11.

Awful, awful film.

Which brings up nicely to...

Fantastic Four (2015) - I know a person who liked this film. A person so contrary he'll like anything most others dislike, so we'll discount his opinion...

Let's get one thing straight; this isn't the Fantastic Four as anyone remembers them, nor does it feel like a standard superhero film. It's an attempt to post-modernise a concept first dreamt up in 1961 and to sex it up and make it appeal to a younger audience, because, you know, the FF are really three older people and the invisible one's hot-headed younger sibling. I mean, Reed Richards has got grey hair...

The problem with this new-look, ultra modern young team is that it doesn't work on all number of levels, but that's not to say the film isn't bad, even if it is. In fact, it's something of an enigma why they made this film the way they did. I understand it was the need, at the time, to keep the franchise going and now 20th Century Fox had acquired it they could destroy its heritage in the same way they destroyed the X-Men.

Whereas the first FF film had its feet firmly in the original concept, this did not. Instead of cosmic rays and space flights, this was about travelling to another dimension and being exposed to unknown forces that would transform our team of intrepid misfits and nerds into something better. At least that's what the tin is trying to say, but what it turns out to be is yet another superhero film where the US government has far too much of a say in everything. This is a film where the villain kind of has a decent enough reason to want to destroy the planet and the heroes are really dull and annoying and that probably shouldn't be how it was intended.

Toby Kebbell (most recently seen playing the chef in the odd horror/drama The Servant) plays Victor Von Doom, an altruistic scientist who dislikes playing by the rules of those governing him and has a history of being a bit of a loose cannon. Miles Teller plays prodigy Reed Richards, who since he was about 12 years of age has wanted to build a machine that taps into other dimensions(?!?!). His best pal is Ben Grimm, son of a bullying scrap yard owner and played by Billy Elliot himself, Jamie Bell. Linking this together is Susan Storm (Kate Mara), adopted daughter of uber-scientist Franklin Storm and also a genius in her own field and her... ahem... hot-headed, wanksplat of a brother Johnny, who is also a genius, this time at constructing things and is played by Michael B Jordan, the guy who played the villain in the recent Black Panther film. Johnny and his father are black Americans, Sue is white - this isn't a problem apart from the obvious 'Right On' signs posted throughout the film.

The clever ones - Ben is still out on the scrap heap - come up with a way of sending people to a new dimension, fleetingly referred to as Planet Zero, expect to be the first to test drive this new toy and are firmly told by the US government that thanks were in order but they were not having anything to do with the testing, because, you know, they're just kids and obviously won't be able to identify potential weapons benefits over their insatiable scientific curiosity. So the three boy scientists all get drunk - seemingly on one small hip flask - and decide 'fuck the government, we're going to test drive our new toy' and call Ben up to accompany them, because that's what you need when you're young scientists, take the guy who lives in a junk yard along for the ride.

Obviously, it all goes tits up pretty quickly; Victor is seemingly lost to the strange green energy flowing across the surface of this place and Sue is hit by a huge amount of that energy when they return from the hell dimension, conveniently by-passing her need to have gone there to acquire her super powers. This is where the film dallies briefly with the comic book; we have a Human Torch, a Thing, a Mr Fantastic and an Invisible Girl/Woman, except unlike the comic, they're all being experimented on by the government, so Reed escapes, leaving his pals behind to be turned into weapons. He then evades capture for over a year, as he tries to create his own teleportation device, until he's finally tracked down by Sue using her pre-power innate ability to spot patterns in anything (or the fact he's using a nickname on the internet that is also the name of the hero in his favourite book). She rats him out to help her dad to try and recreate the experiment and possibly help cure the four of them, even if the US government has different ideas.

Seriously, I've lost the will to live just typing two-thirds of that synopsis... The means to teleport is recreated, a team of crack US marines go over discover Doom, who shouldn't be but still is very much alive and looks slightly like the Doom from the comics, but not necessarily in an accurate way. They bring him back - I'm not sure why - so he can just about kill everybody at Area 51, return to his new home and initiate something to create a black hole to drag and destroy the Earth into it and leaving him to build a new world on his new home. The limp that was so pronounced when they found him mysteriously disappears and he blows everybody's heads up, apart from the FF. This Doom is a proper bastard, much worse than Julian McMahon, yet nowhere near as psychopathically driven. He almost sounds like a slightly demented climate activist.

From then on in it's a battle on Planet Zero between our heroes and Doom and by working as 'a team' they manage to despatch the villain, return to our planet, via the closing rift in space, and negotiate a new working contract with the US government where they're in charge - the end...

It's a truly dreadful film. It isn't really the FF despite the Thing possibly being a better bit of SFX than the first/original films. The Torch didn't seem as torch-like and some of his distance shots looked straight out of the 50p FX bin. Reed's stretching powers were, again, not really used to any great effect and while they managed to make Sue's invisibility and force fields slightly more cinematically interesting, they were more like the Not-So Fantastic Four than anything else

It is pretty much the lowest ranked modern non-MCU film on IMDB (not counting Man-Thing) and as a Marvel film it deserves every brick bat that's thrown at it; however, if it had been tweaked so that the heroes all didn't resemble Marvel's Fantastic Four, it would have, at least, felt like a weirdly original bit of plagiarism without any reason to put your finger on why. I have to admit I hated the film first time around and yet I feel less inclined to hate it on second viewing; I think it's a better film than Rise of the Silver Surfer, but only in that what we were watching was written to make a little more sense than the previous film - whether that was intentional or not.

We still have at least three years wait to see what the MCU's reboot of the FF is going to be like. We've had teasers that some incarnation of the team is likely to appear in upcoming MCU Multiverse-themed films - whether it's a brand new team or a reprise from any of the previous eight actors tasked with playing the team, who can say. I'd like to think that the FF could still be a massive smash for Marvel and could lead the wave after next of MCU films; they've got a third opportunity to do something right with Marvel's first family; the ball is in Kevin Feige's court.

Which brings us nicely to...

Hulk - You won't like it if it's Ang Lee...

... But first, a minor digression or two. 

Despite becoming a huge fan of the X-Men in the 1980 and 90s, it was never in my top 10 superhero comics until it became a comic book phenomena. I was never a real fan of Spider-Man; I enjoyed it, but, you know it wasn't a patch on the Fantastic Four, the Hulk or Thor. For me comics had to be extra special bonkers crazy with apocalyptic villains, marvellous set pieces and an unbelievable back drop. I like Spidey, Daredevil et al, but there were very few of their adventures that put them at the top of my must read pile. Usually when I collected my monthly comics it was the earthbound issues that sat at the bottom and might not get read for two days.

The Hulk was a comic I fell in love with; Ol' Greenskin was my hero. I don't know why, but when I first discovered Marvel Comics it was the Hulk that I liked the most (followed by the FF because they had The Thing and he was also powerful, but not as). So after the disappointment of the TV series in the 1970s, which felt like the Hulk had replaced Daredevil in an awful comic on screen, the news that there was going to be a Hulk film made me go into complete fanboy mode despite being 40 years old. So I felt I had a lot invested in this film, in the way that people who have nothing invested in something but believe they do kind of way...

This might be an apocryphal story and a mix of fact and hearsay, but Universal Pictures had massive hope that a Hulk film - like the comics - was a great idea. It was the most bankable character from Marvel because of the success of the TV series and therefore arguably a more iconic position as far as your average viewer was concerned than Spider-Man or X-Men fans, especially as they were from other production companies. Universal saw this as their opportunity and they wanted to do something that blew the competition away...

Marvel couldn't care less; it was another film.

That's how Ang Lee got associated with the film, because the production company could tempt an Oscar winning director because of the Hulk's place in culture. There had been a script floating about since the late 1990s that would largely become The Incredible Hulk a few years later, which was then appropriated by Marvel's MCU, but Ang had his own ideas and people he wanted involved and what we got is arguably the reason why all superhero films should avoid using auteurs and indy directors because you don't get the desired effect - Eternals is a perfect example, IMNHO.

So... Ang Lee's Hulk with Eric Bana [snigger], Sam Elliot, Nick Nolte and Jennifer Connelly - it had Oscar nominations written all over it. However, while there were a few moments in the film that evoked both the comics and the 70s TV show, this was an overwrought, over-acted and overblown film with absolutely zero levity in it. It was just a two hour plus humourless slog with little to redeem it.

Random observations: The Hulk was far too pretty. While for the only time in his cinematic life Ol' Greenskin was actually the size he should be and the strength anyone who knows the character would welcome, there's little or no gravitas about his face; it's almost cherub-like and obviously a riff on Bana's boyish looks. 

Jennifer Connelly looked like she was still starring in Aronofsky's Requiem For a Dream, where she portrayed a heroin addict. At times in this film she looked ill, almost like she had anorexia. She also flips between great actor and someone who phones it in - this was the latter for most of the film.

The desert scenes were arguably the best in the film; one of the things Ang did correctly was the conflict between the Hulk and Thunderbolt Ross's army team. No one has even got close to using Hulk's ability to almost fly through his tremendous leaps since and it was a welcome sight.

The tweaks to the origin sucked big time and essentially making Banner's father a low rent version of the Absorbing Man didn't really work, especially as he was the main villain of the film and the finale lasted less time that a teenager could have a wank in. 

Did I mention how utterly fucking humourless it is. There isn't one moment in the film where you crack so much as a smile. It was just relentlessly grim from the start to the finish, although the ending was the closest we got to a borderline light-hearted moment, with Bruce explaining to yet another arsehole - the film is riddled with them - that he really wouldn't like him when he's angry.

It was about 45 minutes too long. It paid homage to the TV series with lots of split screen shots and at times the special FX seemed almost cheap and tacky. Stan Lee and Lou Ferrigno both had brief cameos and I got the impression that Ang Lee wanted to make a film about anger, because anger was the underlying theme throughout the film. Bruce's dad - angry. General Ross - angry. Glenn Talbot - angry. Betty Ross - smouldering anger. Bruce - you won't like him when he's - angry. There's almost as much anger as there are arseholes, because let's not forget: Talbot - an arsehole. General Ross - an arsehole (who somehow managed to become a 3 star general). David Banner - arsehole. Even Betty managed to do a bit of an arsehole thing when she ratted her ex-boyfriend out to her dad after he saved her from gamma-irradiated dogs. I totally get why people didn't like this film, probably because virtually everyone in it was dislikeable and by the end of it you wanted Hulk to not only beat the shit out of them but fuck them so hard they remember where their arseholes are supposed to be...

I was stunned at the fact I've seen this film twice and yet still managed to not remember almost 2 hours of the 2 hours and 18 minutes. There was the element of familiarity - the dogs, the split screen, San Francisco, but huge swathes of it were like watching a new film and not one I was enjoying. I would imagine the team behind this were horrified because they had such hopes for it, what with an Academy Award winning director involved and that his attempts to make a serious, almost adult, superhero film ended up being such a huge pile of green shit...

Anyhow, there are at least four other non-MCU Marvel films that I haven't even seen, so that is being remedied...

Next time: Daredevil, Elektra and two Punisher reboots. I'm so excited my teeth itch. 

Revisiting Old Marvel Films (part 2)

The one thing I expected when I ventured back in to the old world of Marvel films was an improvement in the special effects as the years clicked forwards. By 2007, the third and final of the first Spider-Man trilogy had arrived, hot on the heels of the first X-Men trilogy (which we come to in a bit). 

Spider-Man 3 - If you read the first instalment you'll know I thought Spider-Man 2 was overlong, a little boring and needed more to happen in it. The third part was far too busy and dispensed with logic, yet again, to make a blockbuster film. There is actually a lot to like about this film, unfortunately there's considerably more about it to hate.

The plus points: special effects are much better. In the 7 years since the first film, Sam Raimi had changed the entire way the films looked, while keeping that same 'out of a comic book' feel. Thomas Haydn Church as the Sandman - what a cracking likeness, it was just a shame everything else about the character was wrong and how it was shoehorned into the story - needlessly - to try and circle the entire thing off. Having a jazz club seemed to be an odd idea that almost worked. There really isn't much else to be positive about.

Some negative points: Tobey Maguire stopped being a decent Spidey about 10 minutes into the first film. James Franco isn't a good actor and his bit part cameos felt like so many other elements of these films, of contractual obligation rather than strong narrative. I'm still not convinced why we had James Cromwell as Captain Stacy and then have him appear in about 45 seconds of scenes and have one line, nor Bryce Dallas Howard as Gwen Stacy when all she was was a plot device. The hip Parker montage thing - which actually lasts less than 3 minutes just feels much longer! Eddie Brock and Venom - not so much the idea as the execution and the fact Brock is portrayed as a spoiled arsehole, when he was never that. There were so many contrived elements of this film it was like they used the second film to test a few theories out and when they got away with them they loaded this one to the hilt.

Yet again very little made any sense; why would Sandman even consider teaming up with Venom; there is little or no motivation or sense in it, especially as Flint Marko (who becomes one of the best villain/anti heroes Marvel has ever created in the comics) had never met the symbiote prior to their best buddies act. It's just an awful bunch of ideas stitched together much like the second film and leaves me wondering if Sam Raimi is actually capable of making a proper half decent film, because this is a mawkish, bombastic load of tripe with a degree of silliness - much like pretty much every other film he's made.

In conclusion, while this film is awful, so are the other two in the grand scheme of things. Blaming all this film's woes on the bizarre 3 minute section where the Venom symbiote influences the distraught Parker is a cop-out because there's loads more to really dislike about this film.

[Digression #1: Before we get onto the next couple of films, I wanted to make a point about the most recent MCU film I've watched - The Eternals. If you read part one of this, I placed the throwaway line about the X-Men having already been attempted by the existing MCU in both the Inhumans and the most recent Eternals film. I think the reasoning behind that statement is that X continuity, which I used to be the oracle of, is akin to being more about how a database works rather than what's listed in said database. When you become obsessed with X-Men/mutant continuity, it stops being about quality and quickly becomes a bug hunt - a box ticking exercise. The Eternals had to cover so much in its 2½ hours and be entertaining you can be forgiven for thinking it was just a exotic PowerPoint explainer, and then realise that Eternals 'history' and 'story' is a fraction of the Mutant Story. 

One of the things that Eternals suffered badly from was the little time the audience had to really get to know the characters, not in the way we have with single, solitary heroes. The only non-singular or team Marvel film other than the Avengers has been Guardians of the Galaxy and the cast of that were small and moulded well enough to get away with it. People could get a human, a green woman, a racoon, a tree and a stupid strong guy - there was enough there to totally get. But... the Eternals are just not iconic enough outside of the minds of certain nerdy Kirby fanatics and there are too many of them and the powers that most of them possess are variations of the powers that the X-Men will eventually have. 

Also, when you compare 2022 Marvel films with earlier ones in the MCU, you have to wonder what's been going on in the minds of the people who design these films. Eternals is visually stunning in places, none more so than the scenes around the birth of a Celestial, but having just watched Thor: The Dark World for the third time all I can say is the word grandiose isn't quite as grand is it once was? The second Thor film, while not even as spectacular as Kenneth Branagh's opener, is quite brilliant in its scope and where the first Thor film didn't do a lot in terms of character development, the sequel does an outstanding job of fleshing out the characters we met a couple of years earlier. The Eternals special effects seemed similar to a clutch of recent superhero films, too much going on making you realise it is an effect rather than just cool. I also felt there was something a little wrong about it and like it should have been set much earlier in the MCU's history or possibly not even been made...]

X-Men 2 or X2: X-Men United - whatever you want to call it, it desperately needed to improve on the first film. Bearing in mind I have zero directing experience, barely know how to use a camera and am not particularly artistic, I now think I could have made X-Men better. It was always going to be interesting seeing if Bryan Singer could fix his own mess...

It certainly seemed that way; the opening 25 minutes is probably the best sequence in any X-film to date. Nightcrawler's special powers leant themselves to visuals and because there was a degree of vague familiarity it felt slightly fuller and more rounded. Everything that was slightly plastic and forced about the first film was missing from the second, but despite feeling more like a structured story it starts to fall apart a lot towards the end. The majority of the 'mutants displaying powers' scenes feel almost staged managed and there isn't the free-flowing visual composition of the fights or the choreography of them - watch an MCU film and the fight scenes have a balletic quality; nothing in either of the first two X-films feels structured; they're all individuals, they're not a team.

Oddly enough, I remembered a lot more about this film than I did about the first; probably because it's arguably the best film of the three even if that's really condemning the other X-Men films to an ignominious fate. However, the moment they arrive at Alkaline Lake in pursuit of William Stryker it descends into a jumbled up mess, with no real opposition to the X-Men apart from a slightly lame Yuriko and only towards Wolverine. I should also point out the dialogue is atrocious, unbelievable and so so melodramatic. There's also this injected subplot about Jean's powers growing exponentially stronger; apparently hinted at at the end of the first film; this is a deux ex machina ploy that I'd hoped most superhero films had dispensed with by 1990. It is also obviously setting up the third and final film, which was [looking like] an adaptation of the Dark Phoenix Saga from the comics; one of the most controversial Marvel comics series. I have that to 'look forward too' in the next couple of days.

If ever an X-Men film needed a proper antagonist it was this one, because at a fraction over 2 hours it ultimately had less interesting action sequences than the shorter first film. It is also clear there was never an awful lot of love for Cyclops or James Marsden by the film makers; his position as angular plot device and boring cypher continued. It's like no one can think of anything decent for him to do apart from unintentionally blow shit up. The same has to be said of Rogue; in the comics she's a pivotal super strong hero capable of flying whose power isn't just the ability to steal life forces from others; maybe the producers thought she'd be a bit too 'Supergirl'? The main thing I take from the first two X-Men films is how much of a wasted opportunity there was to do something different, but they opted for blockbuster and fell well short...

[Digression #2 - Why haven't I included the Fantastic Four films in this round-up? Good question and I suppose I have to wade in there and watch them - including the third film - and report back here with my findings. What about the first Hulk film? Nah, not fussed about watching that again for a while.] 

Back to the next incarnation of everybody's favourite webslinger...

The Amazing Spider-Man - it's rare that the wife and I will sit and watch a film and literally not remember a single thing about it. I know we've seen it because I wrote a review of this film - and I wasn't particularly complementary about it. The review I wrote in 2012 essentially said, 'Okay film, but simply not my Spider-Man' and 10 years later I'm struggling to understand why I thought the film might possibly be okay.

This is reimagining Peter Parker in a totally different way and Andrew Garfield's take is more skater boy outcast rather than science nerd; in fact there's little to like about Garfield's Parker (and very little to like about Marc Webb's film) - he's not really like the character Tobey Maguire portrayed (in the first three films) and again they opted for an actor pretending to be much younger than he really is, meaning you already have a situation of slight disbelief from the offset. 

I used the expression 'a curate's egg' on something else recently and it's an expression that seems to pop up in pairs; if you use it once then something else will come along to warrant the description. Everything from the slightly revamped Parker family set-up to the slightly risky origin scene and the Parker-as-an-outcast-rather-than-a-science-geek fit in nicely with the need to 21st Century-ise the franchise, but there was something else at play here, almost like the director wanted to remake Spider-Mans 1, 2 & 3 into a single film - in this case a bit of retro-continuity fiddling with the main antagonist's relationship with Spidey and similar themes from those first three films being... re-explored. At least Garfield's Spidey costume manages to stay relatively in one piece; Maguire was unmasked so often you started to wonder why he wasn't just known as the Amazing Peter...

My main problems with this film are the villain really is a bit shit and there isn't another one to balance things out. The other problem is, yet again, you don't really give a toss about Peter or his friends and this time his 'outcast' image means he doesn't even have geek mates, he's a proper loner. The film is also remarkably long for something that covers less ground than a one-man tent. The story is forgettable; it doesn't feel as though anyone is having a good time, the big sequences felt... insignificant (bear in mind this film was made four years into the MCU breathing new life into their superheroes). There's a good sequence where he uses his webs like a spider to track someone, but everything else about this film feels contrived, but we did have our first, brief, mid-credits scene.

Onwards and downwards...

X-Men: The Last Stand - seems to have a reputation that somehow it's much worse than the first two films. I think this is unfair - all the films are crap and in many ways this one is no more crappier than the others. With no Bryan Singer, the director's job fell at the feet of Brett Ratner who did the very sensible thing and killed off Cyclops really early on. I vaguely recall being somewhat aghast at this in 2006, over 15 years later and it feels like one of the calls they got right.

The problem with this X-Men film isn't how it looks; there's nothing too wrong with most of the SFX (well, apart from the 'flying' beast), or even the fact that like the first two films there seems to be a certain 'well, you know the characters so we won't bother telling you anything about them' attitude about the new or unusual. It's how they'd veered way off the course of the mutant comics by X2, by this finale of the trilogy the background story didn't even feel like it was remotely mutant; the entire raison d'être and ethos of the comic stories had disappeared. The later Fox X-films have limitless faults, but at least they sort of tried to adapt some of the greatest X-Men tales ever told, these old films show everyone how badly ideas can be adapted.  

I actually thought the death of Cyclops was treated like some throwaway line - no dignity there - and Prof X's death was truly pointless and the way they changed characters' abilities and tinkered with the underlying 'mutant' story totally unnecessary - there's an unevenness about the way the three films sit together; almost like they're not quite in each others' universes. There's a distinct nastiness permeating in the film too; from Magneto's casual disregard for fallen friends to the way Rogue's character was treated. There's nothing nice about these films...

And that brings us to the final film in this clutch of old Marvel films. There are very few big superhero films I have never got around to watching, there are a couple of Batman films that I've never bothered with - the fourth film in the 90s franchise and the last of Bale's outings. I feel about as much affinity with Spider-Man as I do with Batman and that's one of the reasons we think we haven't seen the second Garfield film, that and the fact we didn't enjoy the first one.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 - Well... we'd never seen it. It was literally a brand new film for us. It is also arguably the best of the pre-MCU/Sony films. We enjoyed it, but that might have been because we'd never seen it. We also enjoyed it because it felt more like a proper Marvel film, it was like Marc Webb - the director - had watched the half dozen or so MCU films that existed at the time and thought, 'I need to be more Marvel!'

Everything about this film is more fluid and while the [whole] story ends up being a bit too circular and inevitable, the fact the film makers pushed the envelope a little makes me think the writing was already on the wall for this part of the franchise. I mean, it doesn't have a happy ending - as such - and an awful lot got tied up in the film even if it ended with the promise of more. It has its problems - Garfield was never a particularly likeable Parker, but the English actor did a far better New York accent than American Tobey Maguire. There was little or no real development between Peter and Harry Osborn despite the pair having known each other well until they were 10 and there was little to make you think that Peter would want anything to do with Harry now they're adults. Max Dillon - Electro - was terribly stereotyped and nerdy; his character walked straight from the pages of a comic whereas none of the other characters in this duology felt the same way. Plus, there are the usual gripes about crap dialogue and in this case almost too much of it. It felt like this film needed a lot of explainers.

The set pieces were excellent and while the revamping of Electro all felt a bit too PC/Not PC, his new look and use of powers was really well done; his demise seemed a wee bit too easy to be honest and the eventual fight to the finish with the new Green Goblin was over really before it started; it was like the action - again - came second to the human drama (of which there was little). And, of course, if Spider-Man was a loose adaptation of Amazing Fantasy #15 and The Amazing Spider-Man #122 (the origin of Spidey and the death of the original Green Goblin), then ASM2 does that weird thing of being a very very loose adaptation of The Amazing Spider-Man #121, regarded by many as one of the most iconic comics of all time. That comic featured the death of a major character for the very first time in a Marvel comic and caused ripples throughout comic books at the time; while the film handled it differently it had the same outcome and reason for that outcome.

The thing is this is a longish film that didn't feel long. It starts far too slowly and suffers from what all the previous four Spidey films suffered from, wasted opportunities, yet it was more enjoyable and felt more like the Spider-Man films we get now. There's things about it I didn't like, some rather contrived events, a couple of rather unbelievable scenarios and some oddly unexplained plot devices to aid the flow of the film, but none were that jarring as to detract from enjoying it. It also has an interesting ending, one that promised possibly the Sinister Six as the next antagonists - which would obviously finally get done this year and it will be interesting to see both Maguire and Garfield reprise their roles for Spider-Man: No Way Home, which, of course will be reviewed in a couple months, once I managed to find a decent rip.

Next time: The three Fantastic Four films and maybe the rest.