Apparently I'm a supervillain


  • Impossible Mission - B

    I just saw Spider-Man: Homecoming. One of the guys on The Vulture's crew is named Mason. (Amusingly enough, he's their techie/engineer guy.)

    Other thoughts on the movie:

    My first impression came from the first thing we see: the Marvel title card. They didn't use the usual intro music here; instead, I was pleasantly surprised to hear the cinema speakers booming out a sweeping, majestic, orchestral remix of the classic Spider-Man cartoon theme. (You know the one. "Spider-Man, Spider-Man. Does whatever a spider can...") That's pretty audacious, as it's making a very serious promise to the viewer: "we're going to take the familiar and make it awesome and epic!"

    There's no origin story for Spider-Man this time. We know all the details plenty well enough already. There is, however, an origin story for The Vulture. Interestingly enough, he's framed as motivated by hatred of Tony Stark (but in a completely different way than Baron Zemo of Civil War; Stark just has so many different ways of pissing people off, it would seem!) He views Spider-Man as simply a meddler coming in out of nowhere, who he and his crew keep having the misfortune of bumping into.

    The Vulture is arguably the best MCU villain yet. The top 3 would definitely be Loki, Zemo, and The Vulture, and he may well have the other two beat.

    Several canonical characters have been changed around. Some make sense, ("hot young Aunt May," for example; your aunt, being the sister of one of your parents, should reasonably be old enough to be your mom, not your grandmother,) others... not so much. Without giving any spoilers, one of the characters who appears to be original is revealed, right at the end of the movie, to be a completely new interpretation of a major Spider-Man character, and the characterization is so completely different that it just really pointless and detrimental, because this is a person who's always been very important to Peter Parker and his story.

    Speaking of unexpected characters showing up... the press conference scene. Ohhhhh wow! :D 🎆 That was just... absolutely perfect in every way. (As was the lead-in with Peter and Tony. Just perfect. Although it does kind of make me wonder what Spider-Man's role is going to be in Infinity War. You'll see what I mean when you get to that scene.)

    I've never been much of a fan of the Idiot Plot, and unfortunately a huge amount of the dramatic tension in this story is based entirely on Happy Hogan (who Tony Stark assigned as Peter's handler) carrying around an Idiot Ball for 95% of the film, ignoring him and treating him with outright contempt even at the points where he obviously has something important to contribute. (Iron Man is somewhat better, but he's carrying the Idiot Ball a few times too. Most notably, one of the biggest screwups in the film simply would not have happened if he had just told Peter that he had received a certain report from him and was acting on it, so that Peter didn't end up feeling that no one cared and he had to take care of it all by himself.)

    Lots and lots of humor, on par with the Guardians films. The girl in the seat next to me looked to be in her late teens, and I'm not sure if there was a 2-minute span anywhere in the film where she wasn't laughing.

    There are two "stinger" scenes. The one halfway through the credits is great. The one at the end of the credits... someone at Marvel apparently decided to :trollface: the entire audience. I'll just say that.

    All in all, it was a really fun experience, and this was probably the best movie of the year so far, beating out even the incredibly highly acclaimed Wonder Woman IMO.

    Definitely worth going and seeing, even if your name isn't shared by one of the characters.




  • Impossible Mission - B

    One other thing: The way "instant kill mode" got mentioned repeatedly, it really felt like a gun on the mantelpiece, a bit of foreshadowing of something that would happen later, probably at the climax. (Sort of like how, when Mason mentions the "high altitude seal for that special job" and Vulture says "no, let's not do that," you immediately know that whatever that is, it's going to feature in the climax of the narrative.) Then it never got used. That was disappointing.



  • @masonwheeler said in Apparently I'm a supervillain:

    "high altitude seal for that special job"

    Without having seen the movie yet, I would assume it's a reference to the first Iron Man movie.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @sciencecat Or to a flying marine pinniped.


  • FoxDev

    You can only be a supervillain if you're British. We know this is a true fact that's true, because Hollywood says so.



  • @raceprouk said in Apparently I'm a supervillain:

    You can only be a supervillain if you're British. We know this is a true fact that's true, because Hollywood says so.

    For England, James.


  • 🚽 Regular

    @sciencecat said in Apparently I'm a supervillain:

    @masonwheeler said in Apparently I'm a supervillain:

    "high altitude seal for that special job"

    Without having seen the movie yet, I would assume it's a reference to the first Iron Man movie.

    Well... Without saying too much, the parentheses in @masonwheeler's post close where they close.



  • @zecc looks like my parser ignored the --pedantic flag again.



  • Transporter 2 set up the main bad guy as an expert in bow-staff fighting, then the final fight takes place in a tiny corporate jet where there's no room to get out a bow-staff.

    Then again, the special effects of that sequence look like they would have been rejected by Channel 10 Action News for looking too fakey, so I think someone fucked up the budgeting.

    Is it bad or wrong that I have absolutely ZERO interest in Spider-Man? I mean Spider-Man 2 was a pretty good film, but. Just the character, I do not give a shit about him at all even slightly. Yet they make like 20 Spider-Man movies in the last 15 years, so someone sure loves the guy.

    Black Lightning, which ripped-off the same formula but replaced the spider super powers with a flying car was much better IMO.

    EDIT: This Black Lightning:

    0_1499613208733_p8331972_p_v8_ad.jpg

    Not the lame-ass DC Comics hero who is, apparently, getting a TV series somehow. I get wanting a black superhero in the completely white-washed superhero genre, but how about Jon Stewart: Green Lantern? That guy kicks ass, PLUS you can put Killawog in the show.


  • Impossible Mission - B

    @sciencecat said in Apparently I'm a supervillain:

    Without having seen the movie yet, I would assume it's a reference to the first Iron Man movie.

    That's kind of what I thought at first too... ;)


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