by Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

Last week, the sweaty nerds — or one of them, anyway — had their say about Avengers 2: Age of Ultron. It was a review dripping with both sweat and unbridled nerdiness. It was a review jam-packed with self-referential prose about the movie-watching experience, wonderings about the Marvel cinematic universe, and well-thought-out arguments against popular critical positions.

And you should be aware that I, supposedly a normal person, agree with most of it.

Continue reading →

by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures and Marvel Comics.

As hopelessly optimistic and cartoonishly heartwarming as Captain America: The First Avenger may have been in telling the story of the greatest hero of our greatest generation, it was tough to swallow that whole pill without noting the bitterness it ended with. If you had any investment in the character at all, it was hard to watch him running through the streets, frantically taking in the sights of a world seventy years his senior, and not feel your heart sink just a little bit as he realizes what’s happened and how far from home he will always be. If you’ll remember, The First Avenger essentially ended with Cap’s musings on missed love, ending the whole film on a bit of a sour note before shunting us off to his first modern mission, a post-credits sequence leading into what was, at the time, our first, best look at the upcoming Avengers movie. It’s that man out of time aspect, that sacrificing it all and wondering at the price, that’s at the heart of the character, and if you don’t get that, if you don’t understand that Steve Rogers is someone who embodies the best of many traditional American values without being a slave to the system, then you’ll never really get the character.

Continue reading →

by Thom Yee

Captain America: The First Avenger images courtesy of Paramount Pictures

At the heart of the success of the Marvel Studios movies is a sincere desire to respect and honour the characters. While that may seem like an obviously necessary element of any adaptation, one need only look to the poorly translated and unnecessarily altered characters in movies like Fox’s Fantastic Four franchise to see what happens when producers deviate too far from the source material. The reason why so many of our biggest comicbook characters have transcended major societal shifts and uprisings through more than (in Marvel’s case) seventy-five years of existence is that, at their core, they represent a wholehearted commitment and (in the case of the heroes) a dedication to the fundamental good that we all hope is really at the heart of all mankind, even if that good is often hidden or deliberately suppressed.

I’m reminded of this fact as I recently re-watched Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, mostlybecause I was too lazy to turn over and change the channel, but also a little bit because that Human Torch-Silver Surfer chase is, admittedly, pretty sweet.  Continue reading →