THE MARVELS, LOKI, AND THE COURSE CORRECTION OF THE MCU
Anyone who knows me is aware I’ve got one of those addictive personalities. When I find something I like, I envelope myself in it, likely going overboard with my public praise and adoration of the thing. It can be any Goddamned thing. A game, a movie, a TV show, a band, a comic book… anything really. Growing up I couldn’t get enough of Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, KISS, Dungeons & Dragons, or Spider-Man.
Here’s a great recent example, I saw Amon Amarth live over the summer and bought a drinking horn and hip holster at Pagan Pride Day. My wife looks me dead in the eye and says, “You only got that cos of that band.” She wasn’t wrong. Now, any regular readers of my social media feeds can tell you my current musical love is Green Lung, a folk-horror, doom metal band from London. At any given time it could be Metallica, The Goo Goo Dolls, Seether, Ozzy, Black Label Society, Iron Maiden or the aforementioned KISS, only dependent on the era. Before Green Lung it was Ghost. And following them it will likely be Dogma (imagine if Ghost were a quartet of dirty little nuns…). I love following bands and watching them grow with their listeners through the years.
But what I REALLY love is when things I already dig come together. Those circumstances create a match made in my own personal Heaven. It could be as simple as an obscure song from one of my favorite bands playing in a movie I’m enjoying, or it could be something on the lines of a writer I know doing an adaptation of a beloved film.
Around the time I started focusing on my fiction, I discovered a writing directing team and they blew my mind away. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. Through the suggestions of my peers at This Is Infamous (the website I wrote and reviewed media properties for a decade ago), I saw their sophomore effort, SPRING. And it blew me away. SPRING forever changed how I perceive the horror genre and how I write fiction myself. You can see its influence all over my second novella, BELLA’S BOYS. SPRING stood at the forefront of the new and ever evolving Elevated Horror sub-genre, and remains there as a prime example of the art form.
At this time I still hadn’t seen Moorhead & Benson’s first film, the indy time loop flick RESOLUTION. It just wasn’t on my radar, and I’m grateful it wasn’t, for reasons I explain in this blog post from a few years ago, after I saw their third film THE ENDLESS. It immediately shot to the top of my list of favorite horror movies of all time. I won’t rehash the why’s of it here, you can read about it in the link above. Suffice it to say Justin and Aaron have a firm grip on what works in cosmic horror, and especially when it comes to time traveling and alternate realities. Now the duo has spread out, doing episodes of the Twilight Zone, and the MCU Disney + shows…
The addition of Benson and Moorhead to the Marvel Studios creative team on MOON KNIGHT tickled me pink. It was only logical, in my mind, for Kevin Fiegie to bring them on board. Which brings us to the topic at hand: the season finale of LOKI and the latest MCU theatrical offering, THE MARVELS.
Do I ever LOVE the MCU. I’ve watched every minute of every movie and TV show at least once. It’s my adult Star Wars, as it really does mash up my love of movies with my love of ages old Marvel super heroes. My favorite MCU films are Guardians of the Galaxy, followed by Captain Marvel and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Doctor Strange and Captain America: Civil War round off my top 5. The opposite end of the spectrum holds THE ETERNALS and IRON MAN 2 at the bottom of my Marvel barrel, alongside the disappointing SECRET INVASION (which I held out hope for and continued to disappoint me every week like a bad child destined for a trip to principal’s office!). I won’t deny there has been a decline in quality of the MCU properties since the Pandemic, both in the stories and special effects. The mad rush to mass produce content for people sitting at home during a plague subsided, but not until a tsunami of shit flooded across streaming services and spread into theatrical releases. I, for one, want to see an expanded “Director’s Cut” of QUANTUMANIA. Despite all of that, I’m happy to say the MCU is back on track.
It starts with THE MARVELS, which is a delightful balance of all that works in a Marvel movie. Nia Decosta’s follow-up to the polarizing CAPTAIN MARVEL is joyful and almost better, dare I say, than its predecessor. From the opening Marvel Girl-Power logo, we’re tossed right into the thick of things. After this brief intro, and a cold open introducing our villain, Dar Benn, the movie starts up where the MS MARVEL Disney+ show ends, and wastes zero time getting us into the action. We’re brought up to lightspeed on the new characters of Monica Rambeau, aka Spectrum (don’t call her that but that’s what her name is in the Little Golden Books so we’ll fly with it.) and, of course, the darling new mutant, Kamala Khan’s Ms. Marvel.
The comedy of THOR: RAGNAROK or GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY is present, without getting into the campiness that befouled THOR: LOVE & THUNDER. Much of it is the family dynamic as represented through Kamla’s mother, father and brother having a presence through the movie. Kamala’s nativity and innocence also adds to the mix. I laughed out loud more than I can ever recall in an MCU movie during the comedy scenes, which included, among other things, a musical homage to a one-shot comic book and a litter of Flerkens.
Iman Velanni’s Ms. Marvel is the clear heart of the film. I also loved Brie Larson’s lighter Carol Danvers, showing sides of the character we didn’t see in her origin story. Teyonah Paris’s Spectrum goes deep with the character’s morose grief from losing her mother. And I would be remiss if I didn’t say it was good seeing Nick Fury fully recovered from his bungled SECRET INVASION mission. But it’s the fate of Spectrum that will have most viewers talking, and it implies that the Fox X-Men universe has a Binary Captain Marvel in the form of a Maria Rambeau variant.
The threat of the villain, Dar Benn, was real, and their impact on the overall Multiverse Saga story arc was as important, if not more so, than anything Stephen Strange did in SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME and DOCTOR STRANGE AND THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS. But Zawe Ashton’s villain suffers from the same malady too many MCU villains succumb to: banality.
I mean, not everyone can be Thanos…
Or LOKI.
And this brings us back to the brilliance of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. You see, as excited as I was learning Moorhead & Benson involvement in the MOON KNIGHT show, seeing them brought on the LOKI Season 2 team blew my mind. Kevin Fiegie did something fantastic and brought in the cinematic kings of cosmic horror to work on the second season of the hit Disney+ show. They directed four of the season’s six episodes, and worked closely with head writer Eric Martin to give us what turned out to be the craziest, most fucked up climax of any MCU entry.
This is where Moorhead and Benson come into play, with their imaginative approach to time and space in science fiction. Taking the tricks they utilized in their previous films, like THE ENDLESS, SYNCHRONIC, and SOMETHING IN THE DIRT, the writing/directing duo have crafted a masterpiece of television programming fans of science fiction and cosmic horror will be fawning over for decades to come. The bar is raised so Goddamn high at Marvel now, I fear future programming on Disney+ may suffer in the same manner the theatrical films have been pandered since AVENGERS: ENDGAME made a couple billion dollars.
The themes of time as a cycle were rampant throughout the series, and its conclusion, aptly titled with the same words as the series’ debut GLORIOUS PURPOSE. And what is Loki’s purpose revealed to be? The one fated to be imprisoned, holding the strands of the World Tree, the Yggdrasil, together. The God of Mischief’s arc is complete, and it was heart wrenching to behold his damnation.
So, we finally got to see the fate of our favorite MCU villain, the original gangster, so to say, have his promise of glorious purpose revealed. What happens in the LOKI show is a reflection of what has happened in the MCU, these are the actions of Gods in a realm outside of space and time, and they have an impact on the real world. The syncing of Wandavision’s finale and Doctor Strange’s Spider-Man spell with the He Who Remains threshold scene, for example, comes to mind.
The end of LOKI reveals the 616 universe already pruned their KANG problem… a verification some online reviewers will be unhappy about (the running theory was Kang the Conqueror was He Who Remains), and this series verified the Kang of QUANTUMANIA is, indeed, dead. We also learned Victor Timely isn’t He Who Remains, either. The door is open for the KANG DYNASTY to arrive.
Make it a Marvel Weekend, my friends. If you haven’t watched LOKI Season 2, binge that shit. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is back, people. We have a bar to measure the quality of Super-Hero cinema with now, and LOKI stands atop the heap. THE MARVELS is a fun entry, breathing positive life into the MCU theatrical entries with a button, where X marks the spot.
