billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
The plot is barely there? A plot is a sequence of interrelated events. Endgame definitely has that. So you must have some other criteria to define what a “plot” is here. What do you mean?
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Spoilers Agatha All Along discussion
- Thread starter trappedslider
- Start date
The plot is only there as an excuse for the fan service. The only thing in the movie that comes close to character development is Thor meeting his dead mother and coming to terms with his failures instead of hiding them behind beer and video games.
I mean, to some degree all the MCU movies have plots that are an excuse for fan service, but Endgame takes it quite a few steps further. I mean, I get why they do it, because to some degree it's the payoff for the previous decade of movies, but still.
Tonguez
A suffusion of yellow
isnt that the case with most movie franchises though, how is the Star Wars saga or Lord of the Rings different?
Paul Farquhar
Legend
LotR has a beginning middle and end. And so far they haven’t really messed that up, but they are working on it. Star Wars used to have that, but has accreted too much garbage now. MCU is too obsessed with comic book Easter eggs to either tell a cohesive serialised story or use the shared universe to tell unrelated stories.
Crimson Longinus
Legend
And it is a chore to keep up, as it is far from obvious at a glance in what order the things go and what, if anything, is skippable. Like yeah, it makes sense that if I'm to watch the third Ant-man movie, it is expected that I've seen the first two first, but the whole of MCU? I like Agatha ALL Along, as it seemed to be pretty unconnected to the rest of the MCU, like I kinda forgot that this is the same setting with all the superhero shenenigans and I could just treat it as a cool witch show. Like sure, you ned to have seen Wandavision, and know that Wanda died in Multiverse of Madness, but you don't really even need to have seen the firm. (Though unfortunately I did.)
As for whole the Infinity Saga, apart the main issue of the central antagonist being impossible to take seriously due their plan being blatantly nonsensical and the film utterly wrecking the setting (which the later instalments just basically ignored,) it just had too many chracters and too much going on. Standalone films with more limited cast are way better way of telling stories, as there is more time to focus on couple of people.
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I'm not sure they have.
Fans are a fickle lot, and we cannot conscience stories that are repetitive, while also rejecting any sort of change. Especially, we tend to reject any new element that may have us have to think about the original in a new light. Introspection isn't our favorite pass time.
MarkB
Legend
Change is fine, it's the lack of coherence that's an issue since Endgame. I get that they essentially had to put their original cast of characters out to pasture - aside from the actors aging out of their roles, any further contracts with them would presumably have been prohibitively expensive.
But they haven't really built anything new in place of the Avengers - we've just had a load of isolated story threads trailing off in all directions, with few if any new stand-out characters, and no sense of a larger underlying narrative bringing them all together.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
We do have more varied narratives heading in a variety of directions, that's true. But I don't see this as all that different from the early days of the MCU where we had 4 different characters headlining their own movies and just the plan that there would be a movie tying them together to finish Phase 1. And the plan that, several years later, all these threads (which were increasing) would culminate in a much bigger, crossover extravaganza. It's like people forget all the work and uncertainty that went into the early movies because they managed to pull it off in the end.
Now, we've got a few obstacles the MCU is grappling with that they didn't before. COVID slowed everything down and disrupted plans. The exit of the actor picked as the main, unifying villain due to his legal problems forced them to massively pivot. And now we've got an audience that has different expectations than in the early run. Now, the audience has higher expectations than when Iron Man debuted because they've seen the MCU pull off an unprecedented level of success. So that has become the new expectation when, before, it was "let's see what Marvel can pull off with their B list of characters" (their A list of X-Men, Spider-Man, and Fantastic Four having already had film rights sold off long before).
Everyone will have their rationale for why they are critical.
So, one person complains that they are always setting up for something else, and another complains that they aren't setting up for something else.
Sounds like the criticism lacks coherence more than the movies.
By the way, as for them building anything new in place of the Avengers: Wiccan, Ms Marvel, Hawkeye, Ironheart, Cassie Lang - all members of the Young Avengers.
Thomas Shey
Legend
Yeah, I'm going to have to agree with the person that said this is an odd definition of "barely there".
