I don’t even know if we can call this “arrested development” as much as it’s “born yesterday”, and unlike with Vision, Adam had nothing to baseline on. Vision had JARVIS, at the very least, and JARVIS’s experiences. Adam had… zilch. He was basically plucked from his birthing pod and then told to go wreck the Guardians and retrieve Rocket.

His origins here aren’t too dissimilar to his comics origins where he was created with nefarious purpose in mind (except he was created on Earth), but still if I remember correctly worked to enact his creators’ purpose before he learned to think for himself thanks to compassion from a superhero team dressed in blue (these heroes were a bit more… Fantastic than the Guardians though).

But that’s where we leave him. At the very tail end of his origin story, before his ascent to heroism. And in that regard, I think they did some really solid work with him. He’s not yet the hero we know him to be. He’s not yet the guy who founded the Infinity Watch, who struggled with his dark side, who dies and gets reborn again and again.

But he can be. And I think if we get to see more of him, and I hope we do, he’ll begin to hew a lot closer to what we know the character to be now. But for now, we’ve basically only seen issues 66 and 67 of Fantastic Four in regards to his story.

It’s all in how it’s coded.

A character can be born yesterday and be a literal infant like Wundarr in Man-Thing, or they can be born yesterday and have vast intelligence but extremely little empathy or learned experiences like comic book Warlock. Movie Warlock is coded as a mental child; not an intellectual lacking expertise. The coding is that they are a person in arrested development, and in this case, depicted as having juvenile ways of interacting with the world.

That is, movie Warlock feels more like Wundarr than Warlock to me. The arc you proposed in your last two posts sounds great to me if I get a more high-and-mighty version of the character who learns humility and perspective; not yet another acts-like-a-goofball manchild who maybe needs to grow up.

Again, totally fine if this version of the character works for you; the theming within the movie is good and clear. Your read is good. It just straight doesn’t work for me when I think it’s possible to make a more faithful version of the character AND give them a very similar emotional arc.

Well hey, at least he wasn’t 1990s animated Adam Warlock, a galactic warrior trapped in a time loop who decided he liked being stuck in a time loop and declined Silver Surfer’s attempt to get him out.

Adam must be a really tough character to adapt. I think overall they did a good job getting his ball rolling here, and I think all the pieces are there for him to become more like the hero we know him to be now. Whether or not anyone will take him there, I don’t know. But I do feel like if they wanted to, it wouldn’t feel out of place with what we have.

Granted, his story would be better served in serial format, but I have come around to believing that most superheroes would come off better in a show than a movie.

lol for sure, I’d forgotten how hard that show had wasted him. I think I preferred his tone in that, but that’s just a preference thing. Gimme spooky space hero Warlock! Or the one from Abnett’s 2008 GotG run. Space alchemist Warlock rules too.

I do agree about serial formatting being ideal for most of these characters. What really surprises me is that apart from SHE-HULK and WHAT IF, the Disney+ shows never did monster of the week-style episodes like many Marvel & DC animated shows did. That had always struck me as the perfect format for adapting comic books.

So did I like GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3? I got misty when Rocket was at the doors of the afterlife and when Star-Lord met his grandfather, but I’m an easy cry for stuff like that. I appreciated the “one take” (because it’s so heavily CGI it assuredly had multiple takes) hallway fight set to “No Sleep Til Brooklyn.” Orgocorp looked pretty cool from space. High Evolutionary’s face stretched over his mauled muscles was gnarly. Thematically, I respected all that the film was doing and saying. It’s very impressive on that level.

While I certainly think this was better than GotG2, for me, GotG3 is a lot of great ideas in an ungainly package, and I think I might be in the minority in saying that Gunn's style just doesn't work for me. I respect Gunn as a creator, but this era of his work continues to misfire with me.

The pic is too big, so here's a link:
https://www.comicbasics.com/wp-conte...ar-Pig-MCU.jpg

#193 Hellspawn
Team: No Affiliation
Range: 5
Points: 30
Keywords: Orgocorp, Animal, Robot

7 10 18 3

7 10 18 2

7 10 17 2

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So here’s something amusing: QUANTUMANIA and GotG3’s villains were very similar. Both were megalomaniacal dictators trying to create the perfect society. Both wore purple armor and primarily used telekinesis powers. Both are so arrogant that they throw the ball game by trying to play general during the final fight and wind up undermining their own forces. Both were more or less left alive to be a problem down the line.

I don’t have much attachment to the classic version of The High Evolutionary outside of his appearance as (effectively) a Nazi scientist in Annihilation: Conquest, so it didn’t bother me as much that he was a dumb-dumb Mengele of animal experimentation in this. Not unexpected that he was an abusive surrogate father to Rocket, but it was kind of a bland, expected choice compared to how Chukwudi Iwuji played High Evolutionary at his comic con appearance.

So where is Marvel Studios now? I hold that the MCU is always judged as a whole by the most recent project. So as GotG3 is proving to be a critical and box office success, it looks for now like the MCU looks is back on track! We’ll see if the high quality keeps up with SECRET INVASION, LOKI S2, ECHO, and THE MARVELS —which will be releasing in that order over the rest of this year. Strangely, ECHO will be dropping all at once, which suggests that Marvel isn't happy with how it turned out. Unsurprising, considering the the rumors that it endured all kinds of production hell.

Put on your raincoat, kids— they’re turning the firehose back on full blast!




#194 The High Evolutionary
Team: No Affiliation
Range: 5
Points: 50
Keywords: Orgocorp, Cosmic, Ruler

6 11 18 2

6 11 18 2

6 11 18 2

5 11 18 2

5 10 17 2

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5 10 17 2

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THERE IS NO GOD SO I BECAME ONE: The High Evolutionary does not break theme on Animal, Monster, or Robot teams.
Inhumane Animal Experimentation: Leadership. Perplex, and when The High Evolutionary targets a character with the Animal keyword, instead modify a stat by 3 and at the end of your turn, deal that character 1 unavoidable damage.

I watched Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery the other day - fantastic movie, huge recommend, Daniel Craig should do nothing for the rest of his career except play Benoit Blanc - and thinking about it made something occur to me.

SPOILERS AHOY FOR GLASS ONION

Haha I agree with both of these reads-- that both Knives Out movies are phenomenal and that High Evolutionary can be read as a dumb-dumb tech bro.

It's funny that apparently Bron wasn't explicitly based on Elon Musk at the time of creation, but when the movie was released, the image of Musk as a brilliant, hyper-competent, beneficent billionaire was rapidly eroding following his purchase and disastrous handling of twitter-- not to mention his outspoken bigotry and transphobia.

That's kinda the brilliant thing - they didn't HAVE to write Bron as Musk. Musk is just such a basic tech bro that any movie in which a tech bro is the villain would have neatly aligned with his public image. Especially with the complete lack of original ideas and a manufactured image of genius, because when you get down to it, that's what they ALL are.

But yeah, it just completely struck me in the days since watching that movie that HE ticks all of those boxes too. There's never any evidence of him coming up with the ideas himself onscreen, and even if they were his ideas, they were kinda dumb ideas (the perfect society is a society of anthro animals in the suburbs!), yet he was perfectly willing to steal Rocket's idea and kill him ("for study", but I think he just wanted to make sure nobody could prove it wasn't his idea).

Sure, HE may not have bought a social media platform with the apparent intent to make it easier to say Nazi s**t online, but he certainly has the feel of a Musk, Zuckerburg, etc. in so many other ways.

The other really funny thing here is that billionaires might be able to recognize a social inconvenience or dysfunction, and instead of using their resources to help fix it, they feel like they have to revolutionize it by "creating" something new, which is almost always a worthless vanity project.

Zuckerberg went HARD into the Metaverse when he discovered that everybody was playing ANIMAL CROSSING during the pandemic. He wanted Animal Crossing's popularity but on his terms.

Musk wanted to get to baseball games faster so he "recreated" the subway in the form of the Hyperloop tunnel, which is an extremely inconvenient mode of travel that was clearly only ever intended for a single person.

It's hard to deny that disruption exists in technology --Netflix did just that with the film industry, but now we're seeing that model start to collapse upon the weight of itself-- but even as GLASS ONION pointed out, the bulk of disruption isn't really improving anything so much as someone trying (and often failing) to do the same thing but on their terms.

That is, the High Evolutionary has the potential to cure the woes of lifeforms across the galaxy... but he just wants to play god.

lol it's the Sauron meme writ large.

This decade of the MCU is going to go down as its single rockiest period ever, mark my words.

Movie lineup adjustments:
https://www.polygon.com/23759520/mar...d-kang-dynasty

Tenoch Huerta allegations:
https://www.avclub.com/black-panther...ult-1850529401

SECRET INVASION

EPISODE ONE

Things I Liked:
+Talos’ daughter Gaia is Radicalized
+Maria Hill catches a bullet (maybe)

Things I Didn’t Like:
-AI-generated titles
-slow, expository writing
-Disinterested that it’s Skulls instead of variants

My wife is super into spy thrillers, especially the works of Le Carré like Smiley’s People and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. She bailed during in the cold open when Ross was chatting with Prescott, and truth be told, I would’ve if not for this project. Prescott’s recreation of the Always Sunny in Philadelphia conspiracy meme was hackneyed as hell, and the exposition couldn’t have been less gracefully delivered.

The exposition continued throughout the rest of the episode, at all times feeling like sitting around talking was more important than drama, building characters, or even pacing. I’m glad that we have the stakes and ticking clock of nuclear war at least.

I like the idea of Talos’ daughter having been radicalized during the blip. That’s an interesting dramatic blip that was the most interested I was throughout the episode. I also thought offing Maria Hill was a good way to raise the stakes... unless she turns out to have been a Skrull.

And like, look, maybe some of my saltiness is on me— grounded spy thrillers aren’t my favorite genre, but you know it when you’ve seen a good one. The Night Manager, SALT, THE RHYTHM SECTION, or even lesser stuff like ANGEL HAS FALLEN and THE NOVEMBER MAN. Charitably, let’s say I’ll be seeing if this show manages to feel more worthy than a runaway Agents of SHIELD Skrull-centric season. Truthfully, I don't know why this show was necessary other than to give Samuel L. Jackson a starring role in an MCU property.

Special mention must be made of the shady use of the AI-generated title crawl, which sure sounds unethical as hell. Thematically, I get why they tried this —things pretending to be human and whatnot, but when real artists can make better quality images in the same style as with the Raised by Wolves intro, the choice feels even more problematic. And that’s made even more problematic by the current writer strike over AI creeping into Hollywood.

Last thought: Moviebob, a critic I follow, once mentioned it’d be cool that if instead of Skrulls, the MCU Secret Invasion was all about variants, heralding Kang’s arrival. I truly do love that idea more, but alas, it’s not to be.

EPISODE TWO

Things I Liked:
+Nick Fury training Skrulls
+Comment about humans constantly fighting each other
+Faux Tucker Carlson on FXN... who is also a Skrull

Things I Didn't Like:
-Yelling at Talos to get off the train
-Hill's grieving mother
-the overall focus on xenophobic themes

Episode two was a bit less expository than the pilot, and definitely more propulsive... but it's still overall expository like FALCON & WINTER SOLDIER was. There are good scenes like "Tell Me Something I Don't Know," Nick Fury training Skrulls (which felt like a commentary on America's history of training and arming different groups to fight proxy wars), and of course Olivia Coleman's torture scene, but there all inflected with and interspersed by characters just telling each other things at length. This isn't a cloak and dagger affair like ANDOR; it's too blunt and direct for that, which aren't things you want to say about a spy thriller.

That's why Fury yelling at Talos and Hill's mother yelling at Fury strike me as weak spots in the episode-- they feel like juvenile, uncalculated reactions, the mother's response seeming to be angry and personal for the sake of being angry... maybe that's just grief, but I didn't buy it in this context.

While I do think the show has interesting things to say about radicalization, the way America's proxy troops eventually become their enemies (the Taliban is a notable example), and the moral ambiguity of most nation's actions (I don't know what the show wants me to make of the torture scene), I think it's still struggling to be its best self. I also think that the themes of "illegal aliens," beings masquerading as "normal people," and a permissiveness toward warcrimes to achieve goals are, for our current global political moment, particularly badly timed.

I don't see the overall point of this show unless the goal is to retcon a bunch of stuff ahead of THE MARVELS... if any of it matters. The funny thing about the D+ shows is that, apart from WANDAVISION and soon MS. MARVEL, none of them have had any real impact or interactivity in the film MCU. They aren't quite as separate as the Netflix shows were... but they're close.

EPISODE THREE

Things I Liked:
+They said "Super Skrulls."
+Practical locations

Things I Didn't Like:
-Fury's weird relationship with wife.
-Fury's bad relationship with everybody
-Parley resembled nothing of the sort
-"Help me Talos, because I am worthless without you."
-"good guys" torturing people

I liked Gravik saying "Super Skrull," because I think Kl'rt is cool.

Meanwhile, the rest of the episode continues to be a slow spy thriller for grandpas. Fury seems to be on everybody's bad side, and it's not expressly clear why... unless, based on the stinger, that everyone formerly on his side is now a skrull on Gravik's side. Why Fury didn't take his wife with him on his retirement, though, is baffling. A product of her being cast for the show and not retroactively being given a character with history.

I'm also tired of good guys torturing people. Full-on. America got too comfortable doing that after 9/11 (and they weren't great beforehand), and this nativist, cultural purity vibes of this show make it all the more uncomfortable. To be clear, I'm also uncomfortable with Spider-Man & Batman psychologically torturing people or threatening to drop them from great heights (nobody ever had a heart attack and died from that?). All the torture in this just seems like an escalation of that.

I'll give SECRET INVASION credit for being shot on practical sets and on location, something the MCU hasn't consistently done for awhile. It gives this show the grounded feeling that it needs-- and that frankly the MCU has been needing.

The mistake I think the show keeps making is that people weren't crying out for a grounded MCU; they were crying out for a good MCU-- one that worked as well as films with real sets, props, locations, and clear directorial specificity AND as comic book adaptations with deep, nuanced takes on the characters. This show as a self-recriminating, past-its-prime isn't what MCU needs; it needs to put its best foot forward, dwelling not on past success, but reaching for future glory.

EPISODE FOUR

Things I Liked:

Things I Didn’t Like:
-Talos’ “model minority” speech to G’iah and what it revealed
-Rhodes just… drinking the obvious poison

The writing on this show continues to be bland, juvenile, obvious, and ineffective.

This article goes into how half-baked it all feels, with special emphasis put on the many deaths the series has already had.

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/sec...w-beloved-mcu/

EPISODE FIVE

Things I Liked:
+The Harvest (though it was a predictable macguffin)
+Sonia’s character

Things I Didn’t Like:
-The same vices the show has been displaying weekly
-“This Is Personal” is dumb af
-Why would they put all the Avengers’ DNA in one place? Why not dispose of it? That’s also dumb af.
-graveyard secret spy base

So we have a tablesetting episode for the finale, and it seems like it's mostly just to get Sonia up to speed. I do like Olivia Coleman playing Sonia at peak British proper only for her to be violent af. It's a fun, easy dichotomy that works for the character... but her lack of critical intel or extrapolation about why the Skrulls would bomb themselves hurts the credibility of her character, just as every character has demonstrated some kind of baseline incompetence throughout the series.

Speaking of baseline incompetence? Fury's reason for not calling the Avengers in is a stupid non-reason. It'd make WAY more sense if he said that A) they were disbanded --it isn't like we know any better. Marvel Studios hasn't provided us with a status on the team since ENDGAME. And B) that if the Skrulls somehow captured an Avenger, they could synthesize powers from their blood. But even that breaks down because wtf is Gravik gonna do against the Hulk, let alone Thor or Captain Marvel? Oh, he got some Hawkeye and Black Widow blood? lol whatever.

Fury's graveyard secret bases is also stupid as hell, turning what was a semi-grounded spy thriller into outright spy-fi. Cities aren't going to notice the power draw to the cemetery? A gravedigger isn't gonna hit a cable?

And why in God's name would you combine the Avengers' blood into a single vial if you didn't want it to become a macguffin for a global threat just like this one? It's stupid as hell, and yet another example of the plot creating conflict out of dumb character choices and dumb worldbuilding.

In other news, did you know that SECRET INVASION cost $212 million yet its pilot didn't even break 1 million audience members in viewership? And that's without knowing how Disney+ calculates views. Is a few watching an entire episode or watching a couple minutes and peacing out like several people I know did? Based purely on those numbers, it sure looks like SECRET INVASION overspent (though the show certainly doesn't look like that much money!) on a viewership failure. https://comicbookmovie.com/tv/marvel...4393#gs.38db8z

EPISODE SIX

Things I Liked:
+Again, Gravik’s assertion that Skrulls were exploited for proxy wars.
+one of the few MCU shows whose finale is narratively in line with what preceded it.

Things I Didn’t Like:
-Gravik’s base doesn’t have internal guards? Or guards that check on gate guards?
-“The Blip.” For f***’s sake, either do something meaningful with it or let it go. It was only used to advance character motivations.
-So G’iah didn’t go to Gravik’s lair fully empowered? The goal was to be in Gravik’s device so they’d both be empowered? Why didn’t she arrive empowered or why didn’t she just shoot him during the many points when his guard was down.

I’ll give SECRET INVASION credit— it’s one of the few MCU shows whose climax doesn’t go off the rails, but instead is a logical escalation of all it had been building too (but it hadn’t been much in the first place).

For what is ostensibly a worldbuilding show, it doesn’t answer many questions like how long Rhodes & Ross were captured; what precisely Sonia’s angle is; if she uncovered more captured people or different kinds of captured people; etc. We just know going forward that America will be more xenophobic, and that possibly G’iah will return in some capacity… if this show is ever referenced again. So far, few of the MCU shows have reverberated in the films, so this could be a dead end.

I appreciated this episode’s better balance of action and dialogue, but I did still feel that the dialogue was weak. The Skrull vs. Skrull fight felt disappointing to me… a bit hard to differentiate selected powers, and the CGI arms just looked goofy to me.

Special note must be made of the president’s xenophobic speech. I hated it, both for what was said and for that it felt out of the blue coming from a character without character development. Why wouldn’t a president demand to be briefed on WTF they’d just experienced? Or are they just straight-up a member of the radical right? There’s no clarity.

At the end of the day, I don’t see why this show was necessary, who it was for, or what it’s setting up that, meaningfully, the events of the MCU films (America is increasingly warlike and responding to the existence of aliens and Wakanda) aren’t already doing. It was an inelegant, slow, hackneyed spy show that didn’t answer many of its own questions and that, frankly, did a disservice to Nick Fury.

I’m just happy it’s over.

Commenting on episode 1 of the MCU's Secret Invasion:

I definitely get what you mean about the overuse of exposition. It felt like there was so much setup, that they just wanted to get out of the way.

In particular, I really hope they actually show us how Nick Fury supposedly lost his touch after the blip. How did he go from the spy to a guy everyone dismisses out of hand? Have we seen anything from him since "Infinity War", other than him being on vacation in space?

Also, I'm curious why you liked that Maria Hill got shot. Is it just raising the stakes, or do you dislike the character?
I'm not too fond of comics-Hill, but MCU-Hill has been much easier to generally root for.

Edit:
Also, for a team of super-spys, who knew they were going up against shape shifters, it's ridiculous that they were so careless about confirming people's identity. That's how you get shot by a fake Fury!

Great point, I forgot to mention my thoughts about Maria Hill-- yep, I liked that her death hypothetically raised the stakes. She could always be revealed to have been a Skrull, so... ::shrugs::

The Nick Fury past his prime point is interesting-- I read this article suggesting that Fury is pitched here as an avatar of the MCU as it currently stands-- it hasn't reached the same heights since ENDGAME, is looking for purpose, and has to find its roots to perhaps rise again. Sam Jackson being an older actor helps sell this in-universe.

In that same vein, I've heard rumors that Marvel Studios hopes that SECRET INVASION will be their ANDOR-- a grounded thriller set in a big-scale universe that brings credibility back to the franchise. I don't think the MCU needs that so much as they need quality control and greater selectiveness about their shows. If they're trying to be ANDOR, though, the lessons should be in how much ANDOR shows instead of telling. It's a deliciously tense and dramatically rich series, and even within the pilot, it communicates a great deal without expressly delivering exposition dumps.

Again, I hope SECRET INVASION finds its footing and that we're just seeing "pilot syndrome" playing out.

Commenting on episode 2 of the MCU's Secret Invasion:

I think I'm more excited about where I hope this show is going, than about what's actually in the episode. Most notably, the Skrull computer with samples from various superhumans suggests to me that we'll be getting some version of Super-Skrulls. But I don't know if this show really has the budget to deliver on that.

As for the contents of the episode, it was okay, but a lot of things annoyed me.

First, why did Fury send away his only ally? Anger or not, that's just not a good idea. Especially since Fury insists on keeping the big guns out of this conflict.

Second, I really don't appreciate how both Rhodey and Fury joked about carpet-bombing an entire country, just because their political representative was giving Rhodes a bit of attitude.

Third (or fourth, I forget the exact order), Fury's dinner with Rhodey. The whole "help a brother out"-angle just made me uncomfortable. And Fury's retort to getting fired felt more desperate than intimidating. I really hope we get a more clear explanation for how he fell so far in everyone's eyes. An explanation for why he just ran away to space.

Fourth, Gravik's coup seemed way too easy. They were all on board with exterminating a whole species, just like that. Why did a single chop to the neck cause the NATO leader to give up like that? Did he think Gravik would actually kill him? Gravik didn't kill the lady who refused to join, so it doesn't seem like he would have killed the NATO leader.

Oh yeah, and Fury is married?! To a Skrull? Does he know she's a Skrull? I'm really not sure what to make of that reveal.