Quarantine Control #200: Unmasking the Curve

We have finally, and have somehow, reached the 200th entry of the Quarantine Control series on Damage Control. It was, well, 199 posts ago when this series started, as an outlet for this blog’s writers to document what they were playing, watching, or listening to while stuck indoors during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic is officially over now — though whether it should have truly ended so soon is debatable, because COVID-19 will never truly leave us. But we’ve continued the feature because we like having a weekly collaboration post where we share our thoughts about what media we’ve consumed with you. Of course, those can sometimes be thoughts about general matters and overall life.

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Geoffrey Barnes

It’s remarkable to reach the 200th entry milestone nearly four years after the COVID crisis began. But it’s also depressing considering everything we went through, and how little everyone’s learned from the ordeal following the period when the pandemic was declared over. It makes me feel hollow, though I do feel knightly about being on good behavior throughout it all. Hey, there’s a game with a fitting name here.

Hollow Knight (2017)
Source: Nintendo Switch (it’s also on every other current platform)
Episodes: It’s one video game, with a sequel well into development… I think

I’ve heard a lot about Hollow Knight over the years, which I couldn’t avoid as someone who’s enjoyed Metroidvania titles since being introduced to the platforming subgenre since the Game Boy Advance days. The crowdfunded game has been regarded as one of the best of its kind released in the last decade, and one of the most involved. It stood out because it fuses both elements from that aforementioned subgenre and the Souls games, two great tastes that, it turns out, mesh well together. But I wasn’t sure if the gameplay/subgenre fusion would be to my personal liking, the reason why I only spent $5 on it during an eShop sale. Turns out, I’m now wishing that I picked up a physical copy before starting it. This should tell you whether I enjoyed it or not.

Hollow Knight very much feels like a FromSoftware Soulslike title at its start, after the game starts you with very little — less than even other Metroid-style or Metroidvania games. The Knight begins with a small sword known as a “Nail” with intense pushback upon hitting an enemy or object, and no other ways to defend yourself. The intent here is for the player to make the best of what they have, and it can take a while to nail (pun, yes, intended) that into some people’s heads. I wonder who that’s referring to. It took a bit of time to master the attack timing, slicing upward, and especially the airborne downward slashing, the last of which has small delay before it comes out, and bounces the Knight up if the attack lands on an enemy or object.

The game is quite intimidating at first, and death will come often. But Hollow Knight always feels fair, and failure never feeling too punishing. Not to say they aren’t punishing whatsoever, of course. This game is not generous with its resting and fast-travel teleportation points. It can get a little frustrating when death is combined with the loss of all Geo (this game’s currency) in the Knight’s possession, especially before the bank is unlocked. But this is the way in which the game teaches you how to be a better player.

The translated words of Devil May Cry and Dragon’s Dogma series director Hideaki Itsuno were strong in my mind as I was playing through part of this, when noticing how far away fast travel points were. The player doesn’t need too many fast travel points if the world itself is interesting to explore. This, thankfully, goes for Hollow Knight. It’s yet another opportunity to perfect the unique platforming and combat controls, which the player will need.

Sure, the difficulty was a bit rough at times. You bet your ass that I died against every boss after the first, say, five times, and it was daunting when some were spaced a good distance away from the closest save points. But this is a game about perseverance and no handholding. The sheer lack of direction also shows this, which ensures that the player does the exploring for themselves to find their own path through the game’s labyrinthine world. This makes it very easy to get lost, but that’s part of the fun in a way.

The stellar presentation sure doesn’t hurt. The game looks beautiful, with well-animated sprites and backdrops alongside the tight controls. The music is also great and haunting, splitting the difference between atmospheric and melodic tracks. Another two tastes that taste great together.

One of the most rewarding aspects of a Metroidvania title is getting the extra powers necessary to eventually explore the map in its entirety. This applies to Hollow Knight too, though it took some time to get there. The game has a very… unique map system where unexplored spaces won’t automatically fill in while navigating through new areas. Those areas will fill in after the Knight reaches a save point. Even better, you won’t see anything on the map unless you purchase it first from the cartographer. You also need to purchase a Quill for the Knight to draw the map, and a Compass to detect the position on it. I understand the appeal here, but this got a little hindering and annoying 20 hours after playing the game. I could have done without it.

It speaks to Hollow Knight’s quality that the admittedly minor map issue is one of the few things I could have done without, between that and the last quarter of the game dragging a bit. It’s truly one of the best Metroidvania titles released in the last ten years, and I finally understand the obsession and impatience for Hollow Knight: Silksong between this and how appealing and intriguing Hornet is in the main game. Wandering through a lonely and dreary series of caverns would have been more fitting during the height of the pandemic, but life remains dreary enough for this to still be appealing now — and for years to come, honestly.

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Angela Moseley

I wrote in QC #198 about ordering part 1 of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean on Blu-ray from the Crunchyroll Store. My order didn’t ship until January 29, but once shipped it arrived quickly– today in fact. My order was shipped from the original address RightStuf’s fulfillment center used. The additional protective packaging is also the same, so that’s one positive. There’s your breaking news about my experience using the CR Store.

As I near the end of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild I’m at the point in the game where I’m wondering if how many side quests I need to do before storming Hyrule Castle. If I use my time wisely it’s very possible for me to end this game over the weekend, thus kicking off the Four in February challenge. In a week’s time you’ll know if the start of my challenge was successful or not. For this week, I’d like to focus on the milestone this particular column has reached.

I can scarcely believe it has been exactly 200 weeks since Quarantine Control first debuted. As the founder and Executive Editor of this blog, one of my favorite things to do is to step back see what topics my co-writers choose to cover. Quarantine Control is the brainchild of Joseph and Geoff. In the staff Discord I watched them hash out the shape and direction the column would take. They brainstormed the frequency of the column, the topics, the name, and even the header graphic. The overall idea was simple. How were those of us on staff making use of the Covid-19 lockdown? Why not create a new staff column on what we were all watching?

The question of if we should discuss things related to the pandemic or pandemics in general was raised. However, it was decided that those might be a turnoff for most. So Joseph and Geoff discussed among themselves what they were actually watching at the time, and if it was available on streaming services. It wouldn’t matter if the recommended shows were new or old, as long as people could find them easily enough as a way to stay sane during the pandemic.

I initially counted myself out of their column, as I wasn’t on lockdown being an essential worker and all. (To be fair, Joseph was also an essential worker.) I was starting to sour on the Fruits Basket remake I was currently watching and didn’t think I’d finish it in time for the column. Geoff lamented that I couldn’t contribute. I admitted I was watching other things, and Joseph encouraged me to write a few words about Beastars since I was also watching it. Drew also chimed in that not much had changed for him either, other than getting to work from home.

It took a little over a week to bring their conception into reality. Thursdays became the chosen day, since most of the other days of the week on the blog were occupied. A weekly column was picked over every other week. The staff account would be used to post, Geoff would be in charge of wrangling submissions, and on April 10, 2020, Quarantine Control was born. Geoff and Joseph were the only contributors, but they discussed multiple TV shows, movies, and YouTube series. By this time, I’d realized not much was happening on Saturdays and I ended up watching a lot of movies with friends on Discord. So I actually contributed to the second Quarantine Control.

Even so, my own contributions would remain sporadic until near the end of 2022, when I figured out a workable schedule. (Hint: It involved writing articles at least a day or week ahead of time.) Every so often Drew submitted a surprise entry for QC, but Joseph and Geoff remained the beating heart of the column. Nether of them have missed a week in the nearly four years since the column’s inception.

A lot has changed since those early months of 2020. The pandemic itself isn’t over, but vaccines and a better understanding of the virus has meant that life has largely returned to normal. The virus hasn’t gone away, and we haven’t completely learned to live with it either. Still society on a whole has decided to move on. So no one’s stuck at home just consuming media all day, and we’re seeing the ugly aftermath of companies that thought pandemic growth would last forever. That has taken the form of price hikes for streaming subscriptions, crackdowns on password sharing, and the addition of ad-supported tiers. On the general tech world side (gaming included), mass layoffs started in 2023 and as we get going in 2024 those layoffs are only accelerating. We’re also facing down an ugly presidential election, the continued rise of fascism, an ongoing war in Ukraine, and genocide in Gaza. In short, there’s strong need for people to take mental health breaks if possible.

At one point, the question was brought up about the continuation of this column, and we ultimately decided to keep it going. Even if lockdowns weren’t a thing, Covid-19 is still very much a thing. Additionally, the column provided a weekly dose of fun and stability. Since the April 2020 inception post, the column has changed a bit. We expanded the coverage to include video games, podcasts, books, and general happenings. With the exception of Joseph’s contributions, we trimmed our weekly discussions down to one entry per week as life largely returned to normal. (Personally speaking, I realized I could store a backlog of topics by only going with one entry per week.)

Quarantine Control also supplanted the need for regular reviews and some columns. It also made writing about media more enjoyable. The largely self-imposed restrictions for review writing were gone and instead a more spontaneous recommendation style flourished. With my own writing, I no longer had to agonize over what to include in a review. I could just get into the meat of what I wanted to discuss regarding whatever I was enjoying during any particular week. Reviews still happened, but the column was a great way to discuss newer interests more quickly, and in a more relaxed format.

At this point even if the name “Quarantine Control” goes away, I’d hope that we could keep the weekly discussion structure going. It has been a pleasure contributing to this column, and I look forward to doing so for the foreseeable future. Even if we aren’t keeping people sane while they’re locked down at home, we can at least have fun writing about the media that we’re following.

On a final note, I’m pleasantly surprised that there has never been any overlap about what we’re writing about each week. We don’t coordinate or discuss topics ahead of time. The slight amount of chaos is just more entertaining.

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Joseph Daniels

I am going to go right into things because there’s a lot to cover, but yay, congratulations, we’ve made it to 200 Quarantine Control columns.

Spoilers, by the way.  I’m not going to hide most of them.  I also end up talking a bit about the ending to Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker in my write up for Avengers: Endgame, so if you want all of the game’s surprises to remain surprises, I would recommend you skip reading about that one and message me on Discord, I’ll gladly talk about Endgame with you in as Endwalker-free a manner as possible.

Marvel Cinematic Universe, Phase Two

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

One of the things I noticed the most about this movie upon rewatching it was that the characters, both good and evil, would start to make posturing speeches, but they’d either be interrupted or completely shot down.  It’s something which I kind of appreciate about the script.  Right from the start, this sets the tone of the entire movie as being a bit of a light-hearted romp that’s still full of heart when it needs to be.  Peter Quill declares himself to have an outlaw name he goes by, Star-Lord, and Korath the Pursuer responds with, “Who?”  He has no idea who this Star-Lord is, nor does he care.

Star-Lord’s back story is that he was abducted from Earth on the worst day of his life, right after his mother died, and so he holds onto what few things he has to remember her by.  Sadly, this is limited to the items that were on his person when he was abducted, including a Sony Walkman that he’s been able to keep powered all this time along with the headphones that somehow still work, the mix tape she made for him which he was carrying at the time of his abduction, and a present that she gave him and which he has yet to actually open, even 26 years later.

Nowadays, he’s kind of a Han Solo/Nathan Drake/Locke Cole style character, searching for artifacts that he can sell in order to keep himself going for a while longer.  He sleeps with any woman who is willing to let him bed them and he has no problem with double crossing the people he’s supposed to be working for.  In the course of his treasure hunting, he finds an orb on a dead planet which it turns out a lot of people want.  Instead of bringing it back to the Ravagers, he tries to sell it himself and ends up caught up in a complicated bounty triangle: an assassin named Gamora is trying to take the orb and a couple bounty hunters named Rocket and Groot are after him.  They all get in each other’s way and end up captured, processed as criminals, and sent to a prison known as the Kyln.

It’s in the Kyln that the group meets the last member of what will eventually become the Guardians of the Galaxy.  Drax the Destroyer has a grudge against a fanatic and genocidal Kree known as Ronan the Accuser, and he recognizes Gamora as someone important to Ronan, so he attempts to kill her.  Star-Lord intervenes and uses logic (successfully) and metaphor (less successfully) to talk Drax down and convince him that Gamora is worth more to him alive.

Guardians of the Galaxy is the first time we ever actually hear Thanos speak.  If you recall, Thanos first appears during the credit sequence in The Avengers and then it’s assumed that he’s been in the background doing stuff since then.  Neither Iron Man 3 nor Captain America: The Winter Soldier did anything to further the Thanos storyline, and they were amazing films that respected the characters and told fantastic stories.

Guardians of the Galaxy has the unenviable task of introducing us to a new group of heroes and to the universe at large.  Despite needing to give us a good sense of who five different heroic characters are, when previous films sometimes struggled with introducing even one new hero, the film gives enough screen time to the individual Guardians that by the end, we’re ready to go on more adventures with this ragtag team of misfits who somehow fit together.

The Orb, by the way, turns out to contain one of the six Infinity Stones, artifacts of immense power that have the potential to destroy and reshape the universe.  Due to difficulties resulting from a bit of heavy drinking, the Guardians lose the Orb to Ronan and so Star-Lord needs to patch things up with the Ravagers and their leader Yondu, then pursue Ronan and the Orb to Xandar.  Ronan was originally supposed to hand the Orb over to Thanos, but this film is just full of betrayers and Ronan decides that he’s going to use it to destroy his mortal enemies instead.

The Guardians defeat Ronan, though, and save Xandar and in gratitude, the Nova Corps erase their criminal records, but still caution them against pursuing any crimes in the future.

Groot had sacrificed himself in the course of their battle with Ronan but he can be regrown, which is where all of the memes about Baby Groot came from.  Another interesting aspect of the film comes in the post credits sequence, where we see Howard the Duck in a silly little cameo.  As far as I know, he’s not going to feature in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in any real capacity, but it’s fun to see.  We also see… well, it’s a bit of a spoiler, but one of the characters from the stinger at the end is going to be important in the future.  Like, not in the Infinity Saga, but in the movies beyond Endgame.

Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

At first glance, this might seem like a stand alone Avengers film to kill time before the big team up at the end of Phase Three, but this is actually just as important as the original team up at the end of Phase One.  For one thing, it helps to set up the conflict at the start of Phase Three that will help answer the question people were asking in Phase Two: Where is [insert super hero here] during [insert different super hero here]’s movie?

See, just because they’re a team now doesn’t mean that they’ve worked out their differences and have formed a cohesive unit.  Not every hero is even around, because Thor rarely has business on Earth, other than his visits to see Jane Foster.  The pursuit of Loki’s scepter is the main reason why Thor is able to even be around in this film.

During the pursuit of the scepter, Tony Stark is shown a vision of a possible future where the entire Avengers team is dead and Earth is being invaded by the Chitauri again.  He’s been having panic attacks about this since the first Avengers team up, which we saw some of in Iron Man 3, but now he decides to try a new idea he has in order to do something about it.

Oh yeah, I’d thought that he’d already retired from superheroism, but I guess he came out of retirement in order to help retrieve the scepter.

Anyway, this is where Ultron comes from.  It turns out that Tony Stark ropes Bruce Banner into helping out with this and they invent Ultron as a means to try to defend the world from both external and internal threats, but it’s one thing to build yourself a suit.  It’s another thing entirely to build an artificial intelligence that you can trust to hand over the keys to the world, so to speak, and right out of the gate, Ultron kills J.A.R.V.I.S. and escapes through the Internet.  Way to go, Tony.

Except that J.A.R.V.I.S. isn’t dead and also escaped through the Internet, which is kind of clever.  I think that’s why the Avengers films work so well, they’re usually full of very clever writing.

They also know how to balance screen time among all of the important characters.  Well… the less said about Hawkeye’s involvement in the franchise prior to this film, the better.  Hawkeye is treated better this time around, and even gains a family here, who we meet when The Avengers crash at his place for a bit.  It sort of feels like this film is finally his origin story, or at least it’s the one that makes him feel like an actual Avenger.

Speaking of new Avengers, there’s more than enough time to introduce several more to the team, and as has become true to form in Phase Two, each new character fits well, as if they were always meant to.  The Scarlet Witch has been given the ability to manipulate matter and minds, and her brother Quicksilver is capable of super speed.  By far the most interesting character to emerge from this film is Vision, an android with one of the Infinity Stones in his head and with J.A.R.V.I.S. in his soul.  He gains his powers from the stone, and the Avengers are initially worried about whether they can trust him, but he’s able to pick up Thor’s hammer and give it to the Asgard warrior, a feat which none of the other Avengers were able to do, earlier in the film.  Only those deemed worthy of the hammer can do this, so the Avengers realize they can trust Vision.

At first glance, making the second Avengers film be about a villain that had never been seen before in the franchise and which will never be seen again might be seen as a waste of an Avengers film when the next one (well, two) is meant to be the finale for many of these characters.  That said, one of the strengths of Phase Two of the MCU, aside from being better able to incorporate new and returning characters into other people’s films, was their ability to come up with stories that felt like natural continuations for all of the characters involved.  When the second Thor film is pretty much the low point of the phase and even that film was pretty decent, you’re doing something right.  Besides, we need a movie like this to see the Avengers trying to work together to save the world.  They can’t all be event films because then it feels like we don’t get to see them just working together against a regular villain.

Plus, the third and fourth Avengers films won’t be the only time that the Avengers would all be seen together.  Before then, though, Phase Two was not finished and had one more ace up its sleeve.

Ant-Man (2015)

Marvel always seems to find ways to get people to care about superheroes that they otherwise might not have heard of.  I remember when I first watched Iron Man, I hadn’t even heard of the character since I rarely read comic books, but it wasn’t long before Iron Man was a household name.  The Hulk was much more widely known thanks to a very classic television series and the pop culture surrounding it.  Thor and Captain America came along within two months of each other and then it was three years before any new superheroes were introduced.  Falcon didn’t get his own movie, but the Guardians of the Galaxy did.  Marvel managed to get audiences to care about even more heroes that most people hadn’t heard of.

I admit, when it was Ant-Man’s turn, I skipped the movie in the theatres but I still watched it on DVD so this is a rewatch for me.  Ant-Man, at first glance, doesn’t seem like it immediately ties into the Infinity Saga, but it doesn’t have to because it’s a great movie that stands on its own, even as it acknowledges its place in the larger universe.  You can see Sokovia mentioned in a newspaper someone’s reading in one scene, and Dr. Hank Pym has no love for the Avengers or for the Starks, and specifically references the scene near the end of Age of Ultron when a city is almost dropped onto our planet.  In fact, the smaller stakes of this film is exactly why the Avengers don’t show up.  By the time they find out about what’s happening, all that’s left is probably the clean-up, especially if Tony Stark finds out that the headquarters of his father’s former associate has blown up and then immediately imploded into a singularity right after.

I remember it being noted that what made the Marvel Cinematic Universe work is that it’s made up of films that transcend genres.  Captain America: The Winter Soldier was a spy thriller, The Incredible Hulk was a monster movie, Captain America: The First Avenger was a war movie, Thor was a fantasy adventure, but everything seems to fit together as belonging in the same universe because the rules established in one movie don’t contradict another.  Admittedly, establishing that Asgardian magic and various applications of science exist in the same universe might not work if not done exactly right, but Marvel seems to know how to do it exactly right.  Ant-Man dips from the science well once more, this time for a heist film that is very entertaining and gets audiences on board with Scott Lang as the world’s smallest superhero (outside of the Mighty Mites, anyway, but they were always more about educating the audience than saving the world).

Post a comment or reply on Damage Control’s Discord server if you remember the Mighty Mites.

Scott Lang is an actual criminal, but then it’s hard not to be one in a heist film.  He’s the kind of criminal with a heart of gold that most heist films revolve around, and he’s trying to stay out of trouble for the sake of his daughter, but hard times along with the realities of having a criminal record push him back into pulling jobs, but the very first job he takes on is a bust.  All he finds is what looks like a high tech biking suit behind such tight security that he steals it anyway to see if it’s worth anything.  It has to be, to be locked in a safe, right?

The Santa Clause hasn’t taught him anything, though, because he tries on the suit.  Don’t wear strange suits you don’t know the origin of because you just might find yourself obligated to become the new wearer of the suit permanently.  In this case, he’s stolen Hank Pym’s Ant-Man suit and Pym fully intends for Lang to become the new Ant-Man in his place.

Time is short because Pym Technologies is looking to do what Obadiah Stane wanted to do in Iron Man and build weapons for war using Pym’s ideas.  In fact, this is also exactly like the Helicarriers in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and pretty much every other misguided idea explored in the series that were intended to police the world.  No matter how good the intentions, eventually this technology is going to fall into the wrong hands and what then?  Or it’s going to develop a mind of its own and try to drop cities on us.  It’s, quite frankly, a miracle that the superheroes that have been created thus far have been on the side of justice.

Speaking of the side of justice, the climax of the film has Scott defeat someone who went mad with power and he also manages to win over his ex-wife’s new husband, so all is definitely well.  He even finds himself getting called upon due to a chance encounter with one of the Avengers in this film.  This leads directly into…

Marvel Cinematic Universe, Phase Three

Captain America: Civil War (2016)

Do you remember when Batman and Superman were going to fight each other in a big blockbuster movie?  The question was, why?  Why would they be at each other’s throats?  They weren’t enemies and the plot reasons for why it happened were contrived and stupid, as was the reason that they set aside their differences.

Marvel thought ahead, though.  Not only was the Civil War set up several movies in advance, the team’s in-fighting and suspicion of each other was always a thing.  They set it aside in The Avengers long enough to save the world from Loki and come together as a team, but when Tony Stark got scared of what the future might hold for his new friends, he went behind their backs to create Ultron and almost brought about the world’s destruction himself.  That can’t be good for the team’s long term trust.  In Civil War, the team is seeing the consequences of their existence, and while some of them are against the sort of world government oversight that delays actions that could save lives, others have reasons to want to let others make the decisions for them.  Tony retired (again) at the end of the second Avengers film, but here, he tries to get the team on board with the Sokovia Accords, a document signed by over a hundred countries that agrees the Avengers must be regulated by the United Nations.

The movie opens, by the way, with a scene in 1991 depicting the Winter Soldier stealing some super soldier serum and assassinating the people transporting it.  Why is it that everything important in the last several films occur sometime in the late 1980s and early 1990s?

Meanwhile, in the present day, even though the Avengers won against Ultron, it feels like they took an L on that one.  The world doesn’t have a high opinion of the superheroes who left a mess behind in Sokovia and then packed up to go home.  Not only is this why the Sokovia Accords are a thing, the Avengers unintentionally give the world even more ammunition against them when their efforts to stop some villains in Nigeria from stealing a bioweapon causes collateral damage that kills innocent humanitarian workers from the nation of Wakanda.

I wonder if they didn’t want to make another Avengers film so soon after Age of Ultron, so they used Captain America’s name instead in the title, but this is very much an Avengers film.  Despite being the star of the film, it feels like Cap isn’t 100% right and Tony isn’t 100% wrong, but if we’re being completely honest with ourselves, I think that’s one of the intentions of the movie, in a way.  We’re legitimately supposed to see Tony as being wrong about the Sokovia Accords, but he has legitimate reasons for feeling the way he does.

As the official start of Phase Three, the MCU comes out swinging.  Plot threads that no one ever thought would come together ended up colliding, and we find out during this film that it was Cap’s friend Bucky that killed Tony’s parents, and this provokes the emotional conclusion of the film, where Cap and Tony fight each other one more time and split the Avengers apart, seemingly for good.

In fact, the intricate plotting that was present in The Winter Soldier is present here as well, due to there being some well done bait and switches.  The super soldier serum created more Winter Soldiers like Bucky and we’re led to believe that the Avengers are going to need to fight against these Winter Soldiers at the end, but Cap and Tony are lured into a trap instead that is meant to undermine their friendship.  This is all because the villain of the film is resentful over what happened in Sokovia.  The Super Soldiers were a smoke screen for the audience and they’re all executed in their statis, which is probably the best outcome they could possibly have expected.

Unfortunately, the Avengers are very easily baited into fighting.  Early in the film, the United Nations meet to pass the Sokovia Accords and the meeting is attacked by what seems to be Bucky Barnes.  The attack kills the king of Wakanda, so Captain America ends up fighting against Black Panther, who wants to take Bucky’s life in exchange for his king’s.  It turns out that the whole thing was orchestrated to flush Bucky out so that he could be apprehended and put back under his Winter Soldier mind control.

The big fight scene at the airport that everyone remembers shows that these are characters who are on opposite sides but still respect one another and I swear, some of them are probably pulling their punches.  The fight is personal to only a few of them, and the rest are playing support here, including the other brand new character, Spider-Man.  This isn’t like when Batman and Superman are actually trying to kill each other for really weak reasons.  In fact, it isn’t until the much more personal fight at the end where Cap and Bucky fight Tony to a draw where it actually feels like they are trying to destroy one another.  Even then, I don’t think Captain America was trying to kill Tony.  He wasn’t lying in The First Avenger when he said he doesn’t want to kill anyone and despite that Tony has a very good reason for wanting Bucky dead, Cap doesn’t have any reason to actually kill Tony.

The sad result of the Civil War is that the Avengers are now broken apart with several of them having criminal records and now we really have a good reason for why superhero cameos are rare in the MCU.  Who would risk showing themselves if they could be apprehended by the government?

Doctor Strange (2016)

The last MCU film I watched in the theatre was Civil War, followed by watching Ant-Man on DVD and then for some reason, I stopped.  I’d always meant to continue watching these movies, but then I didn’t.  A part of it was that they kept on tying the MCU into Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and I was feeling a little punished for living in a small town whose theatre wouldn’t get movies right away.  The episode that tied into Thor: The Dark World aired the same week that the movie came out in major theatres, leaving me behind.  Then, when Hydra was revealed to have infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D., it immediately became a plot point in the series, so I basically stopped watching the show and never caught up.  After season one, they stopped trying to tie the plot of the series to the plot of the movies, but even still, I kind of fell off of the MCU in general around when the universe expanded onto Netflix with several shows that eventually joined together in their own Avengers style crossover, and I just gave up trying to keep up.  I can see where feelings of burnout can come from, regarding this franchise.  When it was merely a series of interconnected films and you only had to pay attention to two or three per year, it was alright.  Even a television series that aired once a week was acceptable to keep up with.  But the expansion onto Netflix is probably what tipped the scales for me and made the MCU feel too overwhelming, even if the canonicity of certain aspects of it were unclear.

It’s kind of appropriate that I’m talking about this sort of thing when discussing Doctor Strange because this is where the multiverse is first hinted at.  One of the strengths of Final Fantasy XIV, to me, is that the developers work far enough ahead that things can be seeded years ahead of when they’ll actually be relevant.  This is certainly true of the MCU.  See also the credits sequences, some of which reach ahead as far as three or four films in the continuity.

This is also where magical powers are made canon to the series, although they have a plausible explanation which allows for them to not cheapen or devalue any of the other powers the series has introduced, although admittedly, it’s probably for the best that this movie was saved until after Civil War.  I can’t imagine it would be easy for any of the Avengers to fight against Doctor Strange.

The film begins by showing us Benedict Cumberbatch basically playing House.  Stephen Strange is a skilled neurosurgeon who is arrogant and is played by a British actor putting on an American accent.  He also only takes on patients that he finds interesting or challenging, but he also drives distracted and crashes his car as a result.  Andrew Younghusband would probably have been yelling angrily in the movie theatre at that point.  The crash leaves Strange with permanent damage to his hands and renders him unable to perform surgeries any more.  In his desperation, he hears about someone who was irreparably damaged but still learned to walk again and finds out that the miracle happened in Kathmandu, at a place called Kamar-Taj, and so he travels there and begs to be trained.

Through the course of Strange’s training, he secretly starts to learn things that his teachers would prefer him not to know, things which would potentially lead to him bending the laws of nature in ways that they weren’t meant to be bent.

The film does a good job of introducing the power of the Time Stone, which has been contained in an artifact known as the Eye of Agamotto.  When the Sanctums of the world fall to the ambitious Kaecilius’s attacks and the Dark Dimension starts to swallow Earth, Stephen Strange uses the power of the Eye to reverse the damage as best he can and also to trap Dormammu in an endless time loop.  Time is supposed to not exist in the Dark Dimension, so this is especially torturous to Dormammu, and eventually he’s forced to bargain with Strange.  He agrees to leave Earth alone in exchange for taking his followers and only his followers into the Dark Dimension.  It’s actually pretty brilliant that Strange basically lets himself be killed over and over again, trusting that eventually Dormammu would get sick and tired of it and do anything to release himself from the loop.

I really regret not watching this in the theatre because this is a fun film to watch and although Benedict Cumberbatch is clearly typecast (I can easily see the character being compared to his version of Sherlock Holmes), it’s also clear that he’s the perfect man for the role.  I have yet to see any real instances of bad casting in the MCU in general, although I definitely prefer Aunt May from the Sam Raimi version of Spider-Man a lot better.  Then again, the Sam Raimi version already gave us the best versions of all of the Spider-Man characters, and the best that the MCU can do is try to reimagine them in acceptable ways.

Phase Two had a very strong lineup and so far, as of Doctor Strange, it looks like Phase Three is keeping up the momentum with another pair of heavy hitters.  I would, unfortunately, not feel the same way about…

Guardians of the Galaxy, vol. 2 (2017)

My father left my mother when I was three.  I don’t know why he did, maybe he just didn’t want the responsibility of helping to support two children.  I mean, that would track, since he never paid child support either.

It sucked, sharing his name.  At one point, my credit union put a freeze on my account because the government was trying to locate my father’s assets in order to get him to pay what he owed mom and I had to tell the credit union that yeah, that’s my account, not my dad’s, and the reason the government is looking for money is because it was meant to help raise me.  I wasn’t the one owing.  If anything, I was one of the ones owed.

Over the years, I suspected that some of the jobs that I was turned down for were because people thought that the name on my resume was my dad and not me, but I never knew for certain.  When he finally did reach out to me, it was after I had become an adult and didn’t need to have a parent or guardian to legally take care of me, because of course that’s when he wanted anything to do with me.  But there’s something unsettling about hearing someone who is basically a stranger to you call you “son” despite not having been in your life for close to twenty years at that point, and it put my back up that he was finally willing to have me in his life after he no longer had to take legal responsibility for me.

There was one time during high school when I heard that he wanted to see me, but I didn’t feel any kind of pull to see him.  He’d basically made it clear to me that he wasn’t putting much effort into seeing me, so I made zero effort to see him.  In fact, I kind of put effort into making sure we didn’t meet up on that day.  I wasn’t ready, and when I was ready to finally see him, I realized that he didn’t feel like family to me at all, and the familiar terms he tried to use with me felt unearned.

So I hope you’ll forgive me if I pretty much saw the whole Ego is evil thing coming from a mile away.  If you have a biological father like the one I had, you tend to get suspicious of other fathers who abandon their wives and leave their kid in the lurch for decades at a time only to come back and try to act like no time has passed at all, with no plausible explanation as to why he did it.

Incidentally, this is also why I can’t stand the Monk quest giver in Final Fantasy XIV.  He also uses familiar terms with the Warrior of Light and it put my back up because I associated that kind of thing with my father and that made me uncomfortable.  I have a friend who also uses familiar terms, but she earned that level of trust and love and it doesn’t sound wrong coming from her.  That’s probably the biggest difference between a found family and the one you were born into.  You can’t always choose your relatives, and I love the ones on my mother’s side as well as the ones I gained when my sister married, but you can choose your friends and I’m happy to have found some very good ones.

So in a way, this second Guardians film is pretty personal to me.  It’s just a shame that it took a somewhat sillier tone than the first one.  In fact, there were times when it felt like it didn’t take itself seriously at all, and I didn’t think that was the right tone to set.  Drax was also laughing so much in the film that it made me realize that this film is a lot more in your face than the first film was.  The humour in the first film was more soft spoken and subtle, but in the second, it was like they were going out of their way to be funny and remind the audience that they’re trying to be funny.  Oh look, Drax is laughing at something humourous again!  Isn’t that funny?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

The story itself was decent enough, but I guess after watching the first Guardians several times, I had high hopes for the second to feel similar to the first.  The first movie felt like the kind of Star Wars meets Indiana Jones style space adventure that I love to watch, and at the end of the first film, it sounded like that was the direction this part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe would travel.  The second film was going to involve them doing something good, something bad, and a bit of both, but I guess I should’ve realized from Rocket’s exaggerated winking in the opening of the film that this was going to be over the top in some of the worst ways.

I get that the Marvel Cinematic Universe constantly jumps genres.  Each movie does its own thing and you never get the sense that they’re painting themselves into a corner.  I guess I was hoping that at least the Guardians would remain planted firmly in one specific genre, but I guess I was wrong.

I also don’t feel satisfied with the stakes of the film.  I get that the good guys are the Guardians of the Galaxy, but the galaxy wide Ego bomb just didn’t feel anything other than silly to me.  I guess I also feel like the Guardians don’t have to be saving the literal entire galaxy.  Both Ant-Man and Captain America: Civil War proved that you don’t need the stakes to be the entire world, you just have to make it the characters’ world.  Things were very much personal for Scott Lang in Ant-Man and that made the story feel satisfying.  Then, both Steve Rogers and Tony Stark found their worlds were turned upside down and instead of a world to save, they were fighting for a cause that they both thought was just.  The rest of the world wasn’t ending, it didn’t need to.

I guess this is my way of saying that I didn’t think the second Guardians movie was a step up from the first like everyone else thought.  I think my own personal history may have had something to do with it, but I’m writing this after having literally just finished watching it, and I guess I’m going to see if the rest of Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is like this, or if Guardians 2 was a fluke.

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Tigers?: A briefly seen school mascot

I wonder if Phase Three starting to feel like a bit of a let-down to me is more because Phase Two was so great, and Phase Three is merely a little bit of a step down in quality.  I’m sure all of these movies are great.  The second Guardians movie was still a good story, and so is Homecoming.  But I don’t know, there’s just something about Spider-Man using Stark tech that rubs me the wrong way.  I get that he’s young and that he is a big, big fan of Tony Stark, but the Tom Holland version of the character feels like both a step back and an escalation, in a way.  He’s a step back because the Tobey Maguire version of the character was much more competent within the first movie, and here, Tom makes lots of mistakes due to his youth despite the MCU basically skipping his origin story.  It can be frustrating to watch because we all know he can do better, but is being held back due to being such a young Spider-Man.

I do appreciate that the MCU decided to skip the origin story this time around because quite frankly, we’re already well aware of who Spider-Man is and what happened to make him Spider-Man.  There have been plenty of animated shows and film adaptations already, we don’t need to see him get bit by a spider yet again and lose his Uncle Ben yet again because he needs to learn the same lesson the other versions of his character learned.

There always seems to be some kind of escalation from one Spider-Man movie to the next.  The set pieces are Iron Man style this time around, including having Spider-Man clinging to the side of a plane with malfunctioning stealth technology for several minutes, but Spider-Man trying to hold a ferry together does feel like an authentic Spider-Man thing to do.  I’ll probably still watch the next couple Spider-Mans, but the MCU version of the character is pretty much Iron Man with webbing.  For one thing, both Spider-Man and Iron Man have an AI they communicate with during their missions.  He didn’t need that before.  He also didn’t need a drone to help him before, but he does now.  I guess he needs all the help he can get?

His youth causes him to make so many cringe-worthy mistakes here, and that also makes Homecoming painful to watch.  This is a boy who is trying his best to fight crime, but he doesn’t have the same understanding of what crime is that other versions of the character figured out.  I guess this is a case of, Steve Rogers was shown being more than capable when he put his mind to it, but Peter Parker is here to show that not everyone is born to fight crime, some of us need to make mistakes and learn from them.

The whole Vulture storyline also had the potential to be a commentary on wealth inequality, since the villain is trying to steal tech and distribute it among the less fortunate, but he’s turning it into weapons so he’s basically an arms dealer, making him automatically wrong no matter what else the character may believe in.  What I appreciated about him, though, is that at the very end, he protects Spider-Man’s identity from someone else who might’ve wanted to kill him, showing that Vulture still has a very high level of integrity.

What I found true and authentic about the character is that he tries so hard to balance both his life and his superheroism, but he loses out on a lot of his life because he’s always chasing after crime.  Somehow, every other superhero has a good balance between their work and their life, but Peter Parker loses out on so much of it.  His school life suffers, his personal life suffers, and his relationships suffer.  He both gains and loses a girlfriend in this movie and it feels just like Spider-Man to mess up his relationship because he’s trying to keep his being Spider-Man a secret.

And yet his secret comes out so much.  You’d think he’d get better at lying.  True, there’s no way he could hide it from his friend once he was seen crawling along the ceiling, but at the very least, I hope he told his Aunt May at the very end of the movie that he’s preparing Spider-Man cosplay for Comic Con.  I was half expecting him to pull out that excuse when Tony Stark visited him in Civil War, but I guess that’s the difference between me and Peter Parker.  Someone with a lot more life experience might be able to think fast and come up with an excuse like that easier than someone who doesn’t have a lot of life experience.  He’ll have to come up with a good excuse in the sequel if anyone else almost finds out he’s Spider-Man.

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

One of my favourite translation anecdotes involves the official English version of Tales of Phantasia on the Game Boy Advance.  The term ‘Ragnarok’ appears once in the entire game and it’s assumed that when they translated the script and then ran it through a standard Microsoft Word spell check, it flagged the term as being spelled incorrectly and the translator just trusted that the spell check knew was it was doing and clicked Replace on every spelling error that came up.  Ragnarok, therefore, became Kangaroo.  So from now on, I want to call this movie “Thor: Kangaroo” because I find it incredibly funny.

It also feels appropriate since Ragnarok heavily incorporates the Planet Hulk storyline from the comics and I don’t feel like it fits the same tone as in the previous Thor movies.  It also feels a lot like Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood, because you set out to free Ala Mhigo, get your ass beaten and instead you go somewhere else for the majority of the game before returning to Ala Mhigo for a final battle.  It was dissatisfying because it sort of felt like one plot line got left hanging to deal with another before returning to finish what was started.

Thor: Kangaroo deals with Loki’s impersonation of Odin pretty quickly, as Thor discovers the deception and then finds Odin on Earth, but Odin is old and ready to die, and so he passes away and leaves Thor as the king of Asgard.  Unfortunately, this means that Thor’s and Loki’s sister Hela returns.  Odin has been keeping her a secret after exiling her, but his death means that Hela is freed and she is so much more powerful than both Thor and Loki.  Unfortunately, this means that she overruns Asgard completely and both Thor and Loki become stranded far from home on a colourful garbage planet.

The planet of Sakaar is the home of gladiatorial games, where a clownish tyrant known as the Grandmaster presides.  He has a champion that he forces people to fight against and now it’s Thor’s turn.  It turns out that the champion is the Hulk, having been lost in space after flying off in the Quinjet at the end of Age of Ultron.  Hulk and Bruce both feel like no one on Earth is safe from him, and refuse to go back, but Thor’s insistence that he escapes from Sakaar eventually gets Hulk and a new ally named Scrapper 142 on his side against the Grandmaster, and so they are eventually able to escape and make their way back to Asgard to try to fight Hela.  It turns out that Scrapper 142 is the last living Valkyrie, but it looks like there might not be much of a home left for the Asgardians, since Hela is killing any who oppose her and most of the people of Asgard oppose her.

Unfortunately, it also looks like Hela is too powerful to fight, and the best idea Thor can come up with is to trigger Kangaroo on purpose in order to destroy Asgard with Hela on it, and so he evacuates those who remain including his friend Heimdall.  The body count on Asgard is high, though, and this includes the Warriors Three from previous films.

I don’t think that the progressive rock used in the movie is particularly out of place, by the way.  It fit the movie well.  However, Kangaroo still feels so much different from the epic fantasy of the previous two films, due to how colourful and garish Sakaar is.  I get that the browns and greys of Star Wars style wretched hives of scum and villainy can get old, and maybe I need to watch it again before I can gain an appreciation for the movie.  I also wonder if trying to watch several of these in quick succession is also lowering my opinion of them, but Kangaroo just doesn’t feel like a Thor movie.

So by the end of Kangaroo, the Asgardians have become a nomadic race and are on their way to Earth to find a new life.  However, in the post credits sequence… it looks like Thanos has found them.

Black Panther (2018)

Okay, now I’m beginning to see what’s going on.  I liked Doctor Strange, probably because I had no preconceived notions of what a Doctor Strange movie should be.  Then the Guardians of the Galaxy let me down because I was expecting the sequel to be almost exactly like the first.  Then Spider-Man: Homecoming let me down because I was expecting something similar to the Sam Raimi trilogy and I should’ve known better because Homecoming wasn’t directed by Sam Raimi.  Then I was let down by Thor: Kangaroo because I was expecting something similar to the first two Thor movies.

Black Panther has shown me that I can still like MCU movies because I have nothing to base my expectations on.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  The African setting makes me think of Africa in general and I was expecting something distinctly African in flavour, so I was not disappointed by that at all.

In fact, I loved the soundtrack to this film so much that I think it’s probably about as good as my all time favourite soundtrack, the one to the original Thor.  Between that, the visuals and the story, I would say that Black Panther is one of the best films in the franchise and the movie that redeemed Phase Three for me, just in time for the big team up movies and the grand finale.

I also appreciate that Killmonger, the villain of the film, speaks with an American accent to set him apart from the Wakadans.  It really makes him seem like an outsider trying to remake the nation as he sees fit, so it’s very satisfying to see him fail because I don’t want to see an Americanized Wakanda.  I don’t want to see McDonalds come to Wakanda.  One of my least favourite things about Avatar: The Legend of Korra is seeing the entire world suddenly in the 1930s and it feels like they’re well on the road to turning into the flawed modern society we have today, but with bending.  I didn’t hate the series, I just hated seeing that the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender has lost a lot of its unique flavour in favour of modernization.  Besides, Wakanda is modern.  It’s modern in its own way, a way that does not spoil the natural beauty of the African continent.  It almost looks like Cocoon and Pulse from Final Fantasy XIII got merged but without any of the bad stuff from Cocoon.

So the way I see it, T’Challa is fighting for the Wakandan way of life and I feel like Killmonger might end up imposing an American style of modernization on Wakanda even as he uses the Wakandan people and technology to wage war on the world.  I don’t know if this is the right way to interpret it, but that’s how I saw it.

Also, knowing what was going to happen to Chadwick Boseman before the second Black Panther movie made the burning of the heart-shaped herb all the more tragic.  I don’t think the writers of the MCU expected that they’d need to pass the mantle of the Black Panther to someone else so soon after T’Challa’s father passed away in universe, but that’s what ended up happening.  Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to be easy to pass the mantle along.  I look forward to watching the sequel in order to see what they come up with.

What I mostly got out of this movie is that I did like it, and before this point, I was getting legitimately worried that Phase Three and the MCU in general were going to leave me behind.  When I had access to a movie theatre, I loved going to see each new MCU movie when they released, and with the exception of Ant-Man, I had watched everything up to Civil War, but then circumstances changed and now I live somewhere without easy access to a movie theatre.  I’m kind of glad I didn’t pay to see movies like Thor: Kangaroo in the theatre, but I wish I had been able to see Black Panther there.

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

I think the biggest downside to waiting until 2024 to watch this is that the impact of its ending is ruined a little bit by the fact that another six years of films exist as well as an extended Disney+ universe of TV shows, most of which star characters which are killed in this movie in some manner or another.  I’d better remember to put a spoiler warning at the beginning of my post.

Another reason why the impact is ruined a little is because two days after watching this movie, I watched Endgame, so I didn’t have to wait a year to see how everyone could possibly have defeated someone like Thanos who has the power of a god on his side and can reshape reality however he sees fit, to the point where if he wants to turn you to ribbons, he can.  He turns weapons to bubbles and can make you see whatever he wants you to see.  It’s a miracle if you can even fight him.

I imagine everyone’s already debated the whole “half the universe must disappear in order to save the rest of the universe” philosophy that Thanos has.  He rigged it to be sort of like a lottery where randomly, 50% of life just turns to ash.  He wanted it to appear like he wasn’t favouring anyone in particular this way, but even if he doesn’t see those trillions of lives as murders but instead sacrifices so that everyone else can live, he’s still guilty of murdering countless millions, possibly countless billions, just from collateral damage.  Every day, there are always people whose lives are in others’ hands.  If the doctor operating on a patient turns to ash, the patient may die as well.  If the pilot of an airplane vanishes, everyone on the plane is as good as dead too, even the ones who don’t lose the Thanos lottery.  In the post credits scene, a helicopter crashes into a building and it’s likely that there were people in that building who perished because of that.  Thanos granted those people the ability to live and be grateful in a universe where they would have enough to eat, only to die as a direct result of Thanos taking someone else away.

And what about planets where, say, the working class is disproportionately affected by the Thanos lottery?  What do you do when you no longer have the factory workers or the truck drivers necessary to keep your society going?  Thanos has probably condemned several civilizations to extinction just because of how random numbers actually work.

I suppose they didn’t want to acknowledge that a lot of the reason people are starving is because of the hoarding of wealth, because the first superhero featured in the franchise is also the one with the most money and yet somehow also has a “I worked my way up from nothing” origin story, if you look at it in a certain way: he built his first Iron Man suit in the desert from a box of scraps.  That’s the big thing about the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  It’s very much a series that tries to paint its millionaires as favourably as possible, and even when Tony Stark is in the wrong, he has a sympathetic motivation and he does what he does because he’s trying to help people.  They wouldn’t dare to call out the role that millionaires play in society.  But yeah, the point is, Thanos uses an outdated and disproven philosophy as his motivation, probably because no one wants to piss off the suits that keep the MCU going.

Thanos desperately needs to be told that there are always people who, if you ignore wealth inequality, are still much more valuable than others in the immediate moment.  You can’t turn a single mother to dust who is nursing a baby and not also turn that baby to dust.  If the baby is to survive the Thanos lottery, the mother must survive as well or have relatives or friends that can take her baby in, or else Thanos has still killed the baby.

Another problem with the whole Thanos lottery thing is because of how interconnected the MCU tries to be.  A scene at the end of Doctor Strange sets up the sequel, suggesting that there will be more adventures after the Avengers fight Thanos, but then Infinity War and Endgame feel like an ending of sorts.  It probably would’ve been better if they hadn’t tried to work so far ahead and started laying the groundwork for sequels already.

As someone who plays Final Fantasy XIV, I appreciated that the game wasn’t trying to set up new storylines before Endwalker was even finished.  I can’t help but wonder what Mordo from Doctor Strange was doing during the Infinity War and whether he was one of the ones who lost the Thanos lottery.

I wonder if it says anything that out of everything that the movie does, that one event at the very end of the film is what I wanted to focus on so much.  As a meet-up of every superhero in the MCU, Infinity War is pretty effective at showing off everyone’s skills, and we even get to see a few smaller victories as the heroes defeat the Children of Thanos one by one, but Thanos himself proves to be too difficult and troublesome to beat, and at the very end, he has all six Infinity Stones and is therefore much more powerful than he was at the start of the film.  The question, of course, is how will the Avengers defeat a literal god who can influence and reshape reality on a whim?

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

First, though, the MCU has a couple more films up its sleeve.  It’s stated in Infinity War that Ant-Man and Hawkeye took deals and accepted house arrest since the Civil War and so this is one of the main conflicts in Ant-Man and the Wasp.  Scott Lang is trying to be a good father for his daughter, but being stuck in his home means he has to get very creative, but the feds who have been harassing him deliberately look for any and all excuses to enter his home without a warrant and search for… something, anything.  I think if wealth inequality isn’t being addressed by the MCU and they’re deathly allergic to even mentioning it outside of discrediting the reputation of those affected by it, at least they’re acknowledging overpolicing.

Meanwhile, the Pyms have been running experiments to see if it’s possible to retrieve someone from the Quantum Realm, now that Scott Lang did the impossible and returned from there, and when they receive a message from Scott that he had a dream about Pym’s wife Janet, they realize that she’s sending him messages from the Quantum Realm.  This is pretty much what the rest of the movie entails, the struggles of Scott and the Pyms to get Janet back, despite several different people working against them for their own selfish wants and desires:

-Sonny Burch is a criminal who trades on the black market and who tries to screw the Pyms every chance he gets, to the point where he wants to steal their mobile lab because I think he already has a buyer for it?  Sorry, I watched the entire rest of the Infinity Saga and most of the films were first watches, so I might get one or two details incorrect here.

-The FBI, who are portrayed here as being desperate to bust someone for anything, and especially Jimmy Woo, who leaves the impression that he can’t stand that there are things Scott can do that he can’t.  At one point, he’s trying to learn prestidigitation because Scott learned how to do card tricks during his house arrest, and it’s really funny to me that Jimmy has to prove he has the bigger dick by trying to make cards appear out of thin air.  Dude, you don’t have to try so hard, I’m sure there are things you can do that Scott can’t.

-Ghost, also known as Ava Starr, a girl who is fighting for her own survival after an accident left her in a state of painful molecular instability and who is in danger of pulling apart completely if something can’t be done soon.  She sees Janet’s time spent in the Quantum Realm as the source of her own potential salvation, but she’s only really an antagonist, not a true villain.

In fact, I don’t think there really is a true villain in this movie, and that’s okay.  After such a hard hitting film like Infinity War, we desperately need something like Ant-Man and the Wasp as a means to wash the bad taste of the Avengers’ defeat out of our mouths.

In the end, not only is Janet rescued, Ghost is helped as well, and the other minor antagonists are dealt with.  The FBI agents are defeated in their attempts to lock Scott away forever, and Sonny is hoisted by his own petard.  Jimmy Woo is also not redeemed like Jim Paxton was in the first film, which I do appreciate.  Not all law enforcement is reasonable, as much as those of us who like watching police procedurals might not want to admit.

The stakes don’t always have to go up with every movie released, and after Infinity War, the stakes are certainly stacked to the roof.  Sometimes you just need a personal drama, and that’s what the Ant-Man films are good at.

Of course, if everyone was curious who amongst the Ant-Man cast got affected by the Thanos lottery, the post credits sequence shows that Scott gets trapped in the Quantum Realm during a routine mission when literally everyone who would be able to get him out turns to ash.  The film just couldn’t help but remind us that the Avengers lost the Infinity War.

Captain Marvel (2019)

What’s interesting to me is that I don’t think anyone actually says the name “Captain Marvel” at all in the movie.  It’s an origin story about a character named Vers who turns out to be a human girl named Carol Danvers who accidentally absorbs a bunch of power and gains abilities.  Earlier, I made fun of everything important to the present day happening in the 1980s and 1990s, and this film takes place in the mid 1990s, around when I was listening to the Lion King Soundtrack and its follow-up album, “Rhythm of the Pride Lands” on repeat.  This is one of the reasons why I’ve been such a fan of African music and learning about cultures not my own.  If you think about it, I was predisposed to liking Black Panther, and not just because of the whole feline aspect of it.

Music has been a very important part of the MCU, both its original scores (Thor and Black Panther containing my two favourites so far), and its licensed music.  You can tell a lot about a character by the music that they listen to.  A rock soundtrack that’s heavy on the electric guitars has become the playlist of Tony Stark, the Guardians seem to love classic rock, Thor: Kangaroo seemed to want to set the franchise up for a prog rock reimagining, and Captain Marvel embraces the pop music of the 1990s.

I think in reality, a person’s tastes aren’t so rigidly defined.  I go through many moods when it comes to music, and lately I’ve been enjoying progressive trance, but classical music also catches my attention, especially if it’s by Claude Debussy.  I’ll champion the music of Darren Hayes and Delta Goodrem, despite the fact that they’re mostly unknown outside of their home country.  African music is still good to me.  A lot of the 1990s pop I used to listen to ended up feeling vapid and uninteresting after I matured a little bit, but there is still some that make me feel nostalgic.

I’m sure there are people who prefer specific heroes due to the soundtracks involved, but I don’t think I’ve met a superhero in the franchise who likes music that I absolutely detest.  Hearing TLC’s “Waterfalls” in the background in Captain Marvel is quite a treat for me.  Now all I need is for someone in one of these movies to listen to something like “The One” by Solarstone & Stine Grove or “Lynx” by Miranda.

I remember when this movie was coming out and there was a certain group of people who were trying their hardest to gaslight the rest of us into thinking of it as a failure ahead of its release so that no one would go and see it.  They were complaining about Captain Marvel being as powerful as she was, but here’s the thing: the problems she solves require more than just her powers.  That’s one of the strengths of the MCU: the threats that each superhero has to face are scaled to their powers.  Vulture would not have lasted more than ten seconds against Iron Man or the Hulk or Captain America, and that’s why he was perfect for Spider-Man to face.  That’s why Spider-Man gets to face villains like the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus.  That’s why the Guardians of the Galaxy fight cosmic villains like Ronan the Accuser.  And that’s why Captain Marvel has to face off against the shapeshifting Skrulls.  Captain Marvel has to fight beings that require her to use more than just the large amounts of power she can command, or else the movie will end up being a lot shorter and a lot less interesting.

When watching this film, I got the impression that I was watching a Guardians of the Galaxy style film, and that was definitely helped by the appearance of characters from the first Guardians film, as well as focusing at least in part on the Kree and showing us more of their society.  It might have mainly taken place on Planet C-53, but it was pretty much a Guardians film without the Guardians.

Of course, it turns out that the Skrulls aren’t the enemy here, which will make it interesting when I start watching the Multiverse saga and there ends up being some Skrulls who are supposed to be evil.  I was all ready to see them as evil too, because Secret Invasion has been getting hyped up a lot lately, so I was already expecting the Skrulls to require being defeated, only to find out that the villains were the Kree after all, and in the end, Captain Marvel leaves with the Skrulls to find a new homeworld for them.

In a way, despite taking place long after Captain America, this feels like the origin story for the MCU.  This is The Magician’s Nephew, the prequel that gets released right before The Final Battle.  This is where Nick Fury gets the idea of The Avengers and starts looking for superheroes, although I guess he didn’t find any until almost a decade later.  It’s not like heroes were going to just suddenly start to appear because S.H.I.E.L.D. wanted to find them, these heroes still needed to happen naturally, so it’s no wonder it took a decade after Captain Marvel came to Earth for Iron Man to declare himself.

Actually, if you want to look at it a certain way, Iron Man could be considered the newbie of the group when they first got together in The Avengers.  Thor and Captain America existed long before Iron Man, and the Hulk likely got his powers before Tony Stark built his suit.  Black Widow and Hawkeye also show up in Phase One already being able to do what they do.  The only reason we think of Iron Man as the first is because his was the first movie made.  The Marvel experiment was still in its infancy and it was very possible it was going to fail.  However, a decade later, they were able to make Captain Marvel and tell the origin story of what would become the Avengers Initiative.  And then, after Captain Marvel…

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

After more than twenty movies, the Avengers must face their toughest fight yet.  Thanos has the Infinity Gauntlet and thus is infinitely powerful.  The Avengers have been cut in half with most of their heaviest hitters turned to dust.  They have a new ally in Captain Marvel, but will she be enough to turn the tide against someone who can reshape reality with a snap of his fingers?

Yes.  Thanos is dispatched fairly quickly, but it turns out that’s because he no longer has the stones.  Unlike most villains, Thanos doesn’t hold onto his power as soon as he has it.  He really, truly is done with it when he accomplishes his goal, and he destroys the Infinity Stones because he doesn’t want to be tempted to use them over and over and over again.  Thor lops off his head, but doesn’t seem to be pleased by it.

This is devastating to the remaining Avengers because without the Stones, there’s no way to bring everyone back.  They’re gone.

Forever.

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.

.

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Five years later, the world is trying to adjust.  Memorials have been set up for everyone who lost the Thanos lottery because there aren’t even any bodies left, there’s nothing to bury.  Everyone just blew away on the wind and those left behind must try to figure out how to move on without their loved ones.  The remaining Avengers are doing what work they can to keep the world together, but it doesn’t really seem like their hearts are into it.

At least, not until Scott Lang returns from the Quantum Realm.  He had been counted among those turned to dust, due to there being no trace left of him, and no one had known to look for him in the Quantum Realm, or would even have been capable of it.  He’s devastated to learn that his daughter is five years older now and that half of the world is just gone.  It’s worse for him because this all happened over the course of what was five hours for him.

This is when an idea starts to form.  If time works differently in the Quantum Realm… can they use this to go back in time and steal the Infinity Stones in order to reverse what Thanos did?  Of course, having the idea isn’t enough, they need help from the Avengers who were left behind in order to develop and perfect the idea, and to pull it off.

This is what makes the whole “getting the band back together” portion of Endgame so realistic to watch.  Tony Stark was lucky in that his loved ones were safe and so he wants nothing to do with the idea.  He doesn’t want to risk losing what he has.  Thor, meanwhile, has withdrawn to the refugee colony of New Asgard and gets drunk all day and harasses people on Xbox Live.  Yeah, I get that he probably didn’t find killing Thanos to be particularly satisfying, but I’m sure he’s making up for it by fighting weed420swaggins instead.  I’m sure they’ll be singing songs in Valhalla about such a grand and glorious victory over weed420swaggins for generations to come.

Sorry, bad gamer behaviour is one of my berserk buttons.

Eventually, though, everyone does get together and there’s a newfound hope for the future.  It’s a far cry from the bleak atmosphere from the start of the film, when Tony Stark tries to cobble together a way to get off of the dead planet Titan with Nebula and even his brilliant mind is only able to strand them in space with a dwindling supply of oxygen, facing certain death.

Unfortunately, the team is limited by a rapidly dwindling supply of Pym Particles, due to the only scientist who was ever able to develop the technology being gone.  They’ve been able to come up with the most efficient means possible to gather up the Infinity Stones from the past, but they still only have one shot and if they only get five out of the six stones, it’s still pretty much game over.

The time heist is actually pretty brilliant because even though many of the characters in the MCU are dead and gone, we get to see the majority of them one more time.  Noticably absent, sadly, is Quicksilver, but I don’t think they were able to fit him in.  They do the best they can to show off nearly everyone, and it truly feels like a celebration of the ten years of absolute fun that they had putting together some very excellent films.  Even the ones that I wasn’t as happy with were still decent enough stories and I don’t think I would remove any of them from continuity.  There may have occasionally been clumsy attempts to shoe-horn certain plot points and characters into movies in order to set up future films, but for the most part, the foreshadowing was amazing, and the way they worked ahead in order to influence the stakes of future films was brilliant.  Showing Scott stranded and the Pyms turned to dust at the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp does more than just provide Endgame with the means to introduce time travel into the MCU, it also puts an effective limit on that time travel.

I keep thinking about Final Fantasy XIV and how far ahead its developers work, and it feels like the same thing.  The Warriors of Darkness and their doomed world are brought up in the Heavensward content patches and directly set up the story of Shadowbringers, and the various elements that come together to get the main character to the world of Shadowbringers are introduced in the 24-man raids of A Realm Reborn and the raid bosses of Heavensward and Stormblood, with Stormblood’s raids also serving as lore for Endwalker as well.

Of course, the movie isn’t just about the time heist, or else there wouldn’t be any stakes for the final battle.  An earlier version of Thanos catches wind of the idea and arms himself with the knowledge that he dies at the hands of the Avengers in the original timeline.  Not only has Earth been a major thorn in his side, he also sees one of the flaws in his original plan and comes up with a new and twisted one: he will disintegrate the entire universe and instead remake it as he sees fit.  This is perfect because Infinity War had half of the universe at stake.  Now the entire universe is at stake, and if the Avengers lose, there will be no way to undo the damage.  Everything will be gone, every person, every monument to their lives, every record of what happened.  History will not record these events because there will be no history left behind.

Instead of splitting the party like what happened in Infinity War, everyone has come to Earth in order to bring the fight to Thanos, and this proves to be much more effective.  Ten years of heroes all come together and this is quite literally the ultimate team up.  We even get to see all of the strong women introduced into the MCU team up during the fight in a scene that likely pissed off all of the alt-right YouTubers in the audience.

It is a shame that Black Panther was one of the ones who lost the Thanos lottery, because he doesn’t return until the climactic fight at the end.  This wouldn’t have been much of a problem if the actor playing him hadn’t passed away after Endgame, but then no one knew at the time that this was going to happen.  Real life does tend to ruin good things, unfortunately.

I think what I appreciate the most about Endgame is that the movie owns its three hour run time.  They could’ve cut a half an hour of content and rushed things, but we needed the initial post-Thanos scenes to feel slow.  The world has been struggling to come to terms with what happened, even five years later, and the audience is supposed to try to adjust to the new reality that the characters are trying to adjust to as well.  I also don’t like when sacrifices are glossed over due to needing to rush characters to an ending.  The scene where one of the characters sacrifices themselves for the Soul Stone is especially touching, and then the end of the movie where a major character also pulls off a heroic sacrifice to finish Thanos and his army off for good gives us time to feel the emotional impact of the sacrifice.

This is one of the biggest reasons why Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker didn’t resonate with me as much as it did others.  It didn’t linger on the sacrifices everyone made in Ultima Thule and with how many the game piled on right at the very end, it got excessive enough that I was pretty certain they wouldn’t stick and sure enough, everyone came back right before the final battle with the Endsinger.  I hate being right because it ruined the ending of the game for me.  Instead, Avengers: Endwalker (I just remembered that I wanted to make this joke, but Endgame is so much better than Endwalker so it feels like I’m doing a disservice to the movie by making such a joke) is written to make us feel the impact whenever a character dies trying to save the universe.

I don’t know how to fit it into the article, but I appreciated at the very end, seeing Captain America having the promised dance with his one true love.  And then after the end credits, instead of any post credits scenes setting things up for the future, we hear the sounds of Iron Man making his first suit, bringing the entire thing full circle.  This is very much a stopping point for anyone watching the MCU if they want to take a break, and I honestly think I need to.

I don’t know where the MCU is going from this (okay, that’s a lie, I know they’re going to the Multiverse), but I want to watch something else for a bit.  Yes, I know that Phase Three has one movie left but I’m tired and it’s an epilogue of sorts, apparently.  It’s a Final Fantasy XIV style patch x.1, so it can wait.

This Week’s Short Film

No.  I’m too exhausted from this to even look for one.  This was too much and I think I’m going to try something else if Quarantine Control makes it to #250.

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It’s still amazing that we made it this far, to the 200th entry. Thanks for reading all these entries after so many years. Or even some of these entries. Or just this one if it’s your first. It’s fine; we appreciate you regardless. Let’s do 200 more.

P.S. Image courtesy. It’s a real image from Spider-Man on PS4, which released a little over a year before the pandemic. Not eerie at all.