David Vining's Blog, page 208

Captain Marvel

This is a movie with some ideas that fail at their execution, but at least it has some ideas. I don’t mean thematic ideas, but some basic structural ideas that place it above the worst of Marvel’s films that were more hodgepodge collections of different things thrown together to hit feature length.

Vers is a Kree military operative sent to fight the Skrulls on a planet. She gets captured and we see a montage that makes perfect sense to the audience instantly but Vers doesn’t understand at al...

Ant-Man and the Wasp

You get three movies in one with this, and not a single one of them is terribly satisfying.

Scott Lang is in the final days of his house arrest after violating the Sokovia Accords (steep price there) and has a flash of vision that prompts him to call Hank Pym and his daughter Hope. He saw a woman he thought was Hope’s mother. They promptly kidnap him because he could be a key in their experiments they are performing to try and get to the Quantum Realm and save her.

But wait! There’s more! Ha...

Avengers: Infinity War

With so many characters, the Russo brothers made an intelligent choice to center the emotional core of the film within a new character and the only one large enough within the narrative space to justify it: the antagonist. Outside of him, the movie’s essentially the biggest episode of a serial ever. It does that quite well, but it ends up squeezing out Thanos a bit. He’s good and enough to anchor a movie around, but everything else around him is pure spectacle and little else.

I say little e...

Black Panther

Expository dialogue from beginning to end, coincidence to make James Fennimore Cooper blush, an incoherent structure, a laughably small timeframe for the story, really dodgy special effects, incoherent world building, and a pretty decent bad guy make for a bad film overall.

Ryan Coogler took the situation the Russos made in Civil War, T’challa being the Black Panther, and added so much unnecessary complexity to the situation. For some reason, he tied being the Black Panther to being King of...

Thor: Ragnarok

Colors! Funnies! A decent antagonist! Just enough story to tie it all together!

Well, that’s certainly nice to have.

What makes this movie work is its sense of outlandish fun which seeps into every part of the filmmaking process. From the script to performances and even set design and special effects, the movie prioritizes being fun over anything else. I think it muddles some of the basic storytelling elements, but not enough to actually drag the movie down that much.

Thor is away from Asgar...

Spider-Man: Homecoming

It’s nice to peel back from world ending consequences and just deal with a bad guy who wants to steal stuff. It’s the kind of job for a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. And it’s not just the basic conflict that smaller in scale, the thematic and character driven ground of the film is smaller as well, but that’s a good thing.

Peter Parker, after his brush with the Avengers in Captain America: Civil War, hangs out in Queens, looking for little things to help with, in his new suit built by Ton...

Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2

James Gunn loved his characters too much. That’s the only way I can process this movie’s failures. He loves them so much he’s going to give them great big emotional moments whether the movie needs them or not. Mostly not.

As with several of Marvel’s less successful movies, I have to ask, what’s the story? Is it Peter reuniting with his dad? Is it Rocket coming to terms with his unpleasant nature? Is it Gamora and Nebula accepting their shared horrible past and becoming real sisters? Is it Yo...

Doctor Strange

A brilliant man of science gets injured and works with an individual from the east to rediscover his purpose, eventually fighting an enemy with similar powers in a city. But enough about Iron Man.

I know I’m in a minority on this, but Doctor Strange tells a similar story to, but is superior to, Iron Man in just about every way.

Doctor Strange is a brilliant neurosurgeon with a photographic memory who gets into a car accident due to his own negligence that robs him the use of his hands in any...

Captain America: Civil War

Out of all the Marvel movies, this is the one that I want to love the most, but I can’t quite do it. There’s so much going on that goes so well, that the fact that it doesn’t land as well as it should and has a couple of large distractions undermines the affair enough to disappoint me, but not enough to take it from goodness.

The Avengers are causing collateral damage. They’re doing good work, but they’re also hurting people along the way. The governments of the world appreciate the fact tha...

Ant-Man

This movie is intentionally light in contrast to the large movies that precede it. I think it’s a good idea overall to vary a franchise’s output in tone, scale, and even genre, but Ant-Man specifically doesn’t really work.

The problem is the fact that the main character has no real stake in the central conflict of the story. Scott Lang is an ex-con just released from prison for burglary who wants to go straight in order to be a good father to his little girl. After getting fired from Baskin...