Robo4900 wrote:Doctor. wrote:or the MCU.
I take it you haven't actually watched any of the movies, then.
While I would absolutely agree with you that Ant-Man, and to a certain extent Doctor Strange are samey, I don't think any of the other films are samey. Give Guardians Of The Galaxy and Captain America: The Winter Soldier a watch, then come back and say that.
I've seen the overwhelming majority of the MCU films (including the ones you just mentioned). They are indeed the same tired, warmed-over, boring-ass shit over and over and over again, with whatever differences there are between them being exceedingly shallow and surface-level.
The closest thing to an exception out of any of them is Black Panther, and that's because that one had the courage of its convictions to at least SOMEWHAT tackle head-on the social and political implications of a city like Wakanda being a major player on the world stage, easily-offended white snowflakes be damned, not to mention its villains' motivations (I can't even imagine the kind of ungodly cringe of a movie it'd have been had it chickened out completely on that particular score). Beyond that, the closest thing to anything of even vague substance to come out of any MCU film was in Iron Man 3 (and that had to be covertly snuck in there deep,
deep under the radar by Shane Black, and came at the price of pissing off comic book purists who balked at the Mandarin twist).
People come to the MCU movies time and again because they provide easy comfort food (especially now, during a presently shitty and terrifying period in history). They'll never dare to challenge the audience to any substantial degree, and at most will only provide a surface-level illusion of differences between them; Winter Soldier plays out like "Baby's First Ever Political Thriller" without any of the actual subversiveness of an actual, for-real political thriller.
Dr. Strange pays only the most shallow and timidly weak-sauce of lip service to the character's psychedelic acid-culture roots (though that's frankly
way more than I was ever expecting early on: I was initially expecting them to reduce the character down to being pretty much just Middle Aged Harry Potter) while still chaining itself pretty firmly to the Iron Man formula (which in itself is just a warmed-over rehash of the Spider-Man 2002 formula, just with the shy teenage nerd that needs to learn confidence replaced with an arrogant loudmouthed adult who needs to learn humility).
Spider-Man: Homecoming wipes away every last bit of pathos that has ever defined Peter Parker as a struggling everyman superhero and reduces the character down to just sheer, raw geek wish-fulfillment... and Tony Stark's loyally sycophantic Boy Wonder, because marketing (which in and of itself has ungodly HORRIFIC unintentional and ill-conceived class implications about the character that further guts Parker of every ounce of his everyman depth that made him such a special character and touchstone to millions for numerous decades).
The Avengers is basically just a Saturday Morning kids cartoon in live action with A list talent behind it (catnip for some, not at all what I and others go to movies for though). And Guardians of the Galaxy is a James Gunn movie with pretty much EVERYTHING even
vaguely subversive about Gunn's usual work from his Troma days thoroughly sanded-off for the Happy Meal set.
I've never claimed to be Nostradamus, and god knows my predictions are as wildly all over the map as any other average person's... but I'm at least reasonably confident about this much: should we ever somehow, someday break out of the current cultural rut of endlessly daisy-chaining summer blockbusters acting as the be-all, end-all centers of the cultural water cooler conversations about movies (and that in itself is a BIG "if"), the MCU movies - the overwhelming majority of them at least - are going to age VERY poorly (to everyone except die-hard Disney enthusiasts at least, of the sort who'll champion just about anything from the Mouse), because there just ISN'T any "there" there ultimately.
In all but a VERY small few of them, there's nothing there in terms of creative identity (fucking
Edgar Wright was too "risque" and too left of the dial for the Disney suits to allow near these movies: and I absolutely love Wright as much as the next person, but Jodorowsky he isn't), nothing there in terms of genuine diversity or depth (unless you somehow just don't watch very many other movies outside of family friendly blockbusters: a suspicious recurring trend among many, though not all of course, MCU fans). Hell there's nothing there even in terms of cheap thrills; unless sterile, cartoonish CG monsters and robots bloodlessly smashing each other into buildings without almost anyone ever getting seriously hurt is enough to get your blood pumping, then by all means...
These are gonna be the kinds of movies that (again, if this era and zeitgeist of summer blockbusters reigning over all other movies ever somehow collapses in on itself someday) at least a decent swath of the generation after millennials, once they hit their teen years especially, are probably gonna roll their eyes at and cringe in embarrassment from their whitebread goober parents' non-stop continued raving about them.
And no: this doesn't mean that I'm in any which way a DC movie fan either... those movies are somehow even WAY worse than Marvel's. Mostly because they have such embarrassingly junior highschool-levels of pretensions at (completely faux, shallow, and illusory) edgy profundity despite their being just as equally vapid (and ultimately safe and not all that
actually edgy) as Marvel's output. Except for Justice League, which ditches any and all such pretensions and is basically just a xeroxed photocopy of The Avengers with DC's characters haphazardly tacked onto it instead.
I can probably count on just one hand the number of superhero movies over the years than have genuinely hit the mark and presents themselves as actual film-films rather than a hollowed-out, watered-down facsimile that plays out more like a glorified amusement park ride at Disney World rather than an actual movie (most recent go-to on that score is easily Logan:
that movie was indeed the real deal). The vast majority of the genre is, unfortunately, just tedious fluff; and not even INTERESTING fluff at that. Just thoroughly generic and made to please everyone and offend no one: which is basically anti-art.