Quarantine Control #85: Ten Rings for Hope

Do you know how easy it is to be cynical about the pandemic, especially in the United States? It’s a country where COVID-19 cases are rising yet again for the fifth wave. Or the sixth wave. Who even remembers anymore? They’re rising especially among the unvaccinated, despite vaccines being widely available in the country for free, at a point where the most immunocompromised people who were among those vaccinated the earliest need booster shots now. The experts who predicted that we’d never truly leave this pandemic behind were sadly right. If that wasn’t depressing enough, there could be more pandemics to come given how resistant conservatives have become to even the flu vaccine now. Great.

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Geoffrey Barnes

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)
Source: Disney Plus
Episodes: 1 movie (with a sequel definitely coming)

It was always clear that Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings would be among the particularly special Marvel films, for more than introducing a new hero for the fourth Phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This was the first Marvel film with a majority-Asian cast, fortuitously coming at a time when entertainment watchers, critics, and actors were demanding more big-budget movies with Asian casts produced in western countries. It’s also a movie being produced as part of a Phase that promises to have a more diverse line of heroes (and villains), beyond those from Black Panther, including those from the now-in-theaters Eternals (performing well at the box office despite the dismal critical reception) and the upcoming Ms. Marvel Disney Plus series.

Shang-Chi’s beginning and flow aren’t unlike other MCU origin stories. It starts with the movie providing a lengthy description of the, well, legend of the ten rings in largely Mandarin, with hints regarding how they’ll eventually connect to our titular hero (Simu Liu), masquerading as “Shawn” in San Francisco, California. He, and his friend and coworker Katy (Awkwafina), is eventually attacked by a group of ostensible villains after his pendant, and eventually come to capture one owned by his sister Xu Xialing (Meng’er Zhang) in Macau.

It doesn’t venture into new territory for a Marvel film in terms of its tone, with a mixture of supernatural seriousness and comedy, but the fact that I have no plans to site these as large problems is proof of how important the setting, character development, and writing can be over originality. Not that anyone would come into a Marvel movie expecting ingenuity at this point. They have a working plan and they’re damn-well sticking to it.

Again, the writing is largely solid throughout its duration, with the movie giving reasons to care for characters like Shang-Chi and Xialing, even though the brother-sister duo resolve their differences a little too quickly. That’s also despite their casting issues, with Zhang being notably older than Liu despite the former playing the latter’s younger sister. Hell, I even enjoyed Awkwafina, especially when her character Katy speaks little Mandarin, the movie’s way of forcing characters to explain certain matters. In addition to taking unsurprising inspiration from the Shang-Chi comics (though not every character is a straight adaptation of those from the comics), it also takes from Chinese-language films inspired by folktales. The combination works.

The great fight choreography also boosts the film. Plenty of fans watch Marvel movies to see good action in addition to all the other elements that make for quality superhero films, but this movie shows how lacking the fight choreography has been in them. Too many of them boil down to using excessive jump cuts that can make it tough to keep track of key parts of action sequences, or, worse, shaky cam. Shang-Chi takes inspiration from Asian Wushu films in capturing all the martial arts action, and the human fights are so good that it will be tough to watch action sequences in prior and, perhaps, future MCU films without making comparisons. This should be a signal to Marvel and Disney’s production teams to step this up.

Shang-Chi is a fun film that often looks great, a big part of that thanks to its martial arts action. It’s just a shame the movie had to follow the MCU Origin Formula to a tee by ending with a battle that utilizes a copious amount of okay-looking CG. The movie’s battles were at their best when featuring human-on-human action, even when they sometimes included a little CG supernatural content. The decision makes the final battle feel anti-climactic compared to battles from earlier in the film, and other battles that were teased. This is fortunately not enough to bring down the film, but it shows how it would be worth their while for Marvel to break from the formula a bit.

Shang-Chi is one of the better MCU origin stories in recent memory, boosted by its good settings, solid action that puts most other Marvel films to shame, and well done character development. The movie stands well above the recent Black Widow and, more comparatively, Captain Marvel. I’ll see how it stacks up to Eternals in the future, a movie that I will not venture to theaters to see. Phase 4 of the MCU has had stumbles with finding its footing, but this movie shows the potential that lies ahead.

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Joseph Daniels

Back in column #33, I took the week off, so to speak, and talked about the Desert Bus For Hope charity event instead.  Well, it’s that time of year again, which makes me even more glad for the Endwalker delay.  Otherwise, I would’ve been trying to watch the last several hours at the same time as I was trying to play as much of the new expansion as possible.  As inconvenient as it is that Endwalker now corresponds to this year’s Naughty/Nice columns, the conveniences that the delay has allowed me far outweigh that.

Desert Bus For Hope 2021
Source: Twitch
Time left: Only a few more hours

So far this year, the charity drive has raised approximately $800,000 for Child’s Play (as of this writing), and given that they raised over a million dollars last year, it looks like they’ll at least get as close this year, perhaps even surpass it.  They also reached that million dollars in the strangest way possible.  They got very close during the actual event and then found out afterwards that, through merch sales that weren’t added in yet, not only did they reach the million dollars that year, they also actually should’ve ran the event for an extra hour.  So in early 2021, they ran a parody of themselves doing a parody of Desert Bus For Hope for the extra hour and it was amazing.

As such, this year is the fifteenth running of the Desert Bus For Hope event and since they’re live right now, it honestly still feels like anything can happen.

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This is another reminder to take care of yourself and watch your surroundings. This always seems to go double for the US, but especially so with this time of the year. The Thanksgiving holiday is coming up, and cases are rising again before people go to meet their family members. More of them will be meeting this year thanks to people being vaccinated, so it’s also a good time to give a glare of judgement towards anyone who still hasn’t gotten their shots but is perfectly capable of doing so.