DC, which for the best part of two decades has failed to put together a cinematic universe of comic book adaptations to rival Marvel’s MCU, regroups and goes again with director James Gunn in charge of what will be known as the DCU – and what better superhero to introduce the new brand than the original: Superman.
David Corenswet’s performance and physique are extremely appealing, recalling an era before steroids and dehydration were considered compulsory in order for a man to be thought of as sexy. We appreciate the film’s lightness of tone and sense of humour, although one of us argues that the whole experience is so audiovisually hyperactive and loud that the tone doesn’t support all the jokes, and it’s simply exhausting to endure. We also discuss wokeness, the right wing’s determination to have a culture war, and obvious parallels between Lex Luthor’s villainy and that of Donald Trump; destruction of cities and the concomitant human cost; what made the previous Lex Luthor interesting; and why putting on glasses is an effective method of disguise.
This podcast delves into Sam Raimi’s return to Superhero Cinema: Marvel’s ‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’.
Combining the classic horror elements of Raimi’s 1981 cult favourite ‘The Evil Dead’with his more modern Spiderman trilogy offering, this Marvel film follows Doctor Strange in his second solo movie as Strange tries to prevent the multiverse-shattering dark magic created by the vengeful Wanda Maximoff. We discuss the disjunctions present within the film produced by the Marvel/Raimi divide – how much of the film can be viewed as an auteur product separate from the Marvel franchise?
The most recent entry in the 58 year long canon of Batman films, Matt Reeves’ 2022 film, The Batman, represents a stark departure from every iteration before it. It takes the core aspects of Batman, its characters and its world, and presents them as grimmer; more beaten down. It warps the franchise’s trend towards realism into a gothic, brooding, detective noir. This episode delves into the varied history of the Batman film franchise, discovering how and why the series has evolved and morphed in the way it has. We look at film and societal changes that could have affected the franchise, and explore the breadths of such changes. Asking the question: how could a franchise surrounding one character go from being bright, colourful and campy in 1966, to something akin to David Fincher’s Seven in 2022.
2019’s Joker, which gave the iconic supervillain an all-purpose mental health disorder, a tragic origin story, and a name – Arthur Fleck – was never meant to have a sequel. But it made a billion dollars, so Joker: Folie à Deux is here. And, being a jukebox musical based primarily on show tunes from the mid-20th century canon, we ask who it’s for. The first film took risks in eschewing so many trappings of the comic book genre; did the filmmakers hope that their audience would respond similarly to further experimentation? Or is it a means of punishing an audience they attracted but loathe?
If the film hates its audience… well, so does Mike, which might explain why he got on with it. José, on the other hand, liked the first film, and is happy to see more of Joaquin Phoenix and hear those classic songs. Joker: Folie à Deux is far from a great film, not that close to a good film, and doesn’t have much of interest or intelligence to say about its themes – but it’s fascinating that it exists.
Deadpool 2 put us in such a foul mood when it came out in 2018 that we threw away our podcast on it. It was too toxic to publish. Fortunately, Deadpool & Wolverine, the third in the series, didn’t have such an effect on us – even José found some things to compliment about it.
Perhaps it’s the relative diminishment of Marvel since its peak in 2018, when it was reaching the climax of the story it had been building for a decade, that makes Deadpool & Wolverine work as it otherwise might not – its jokes about the X-Men joining the MCU at a low point really landed, for example. It’s far from perfect – Ryan Reynolds’ schtick remains smug, and the film tries to have it both ways, delivering snarky commentary on the sorts of things films like this do, then discarding the snark when it wants to do them itself. But it’s pacey, energetic, full of intense action with a delightfully cartoony attitude, filled with so many attempts to make you laugh that some of them are bound to work, and featuring a pair of enjoyable, charismatic villains: Matthew Macfadyen’s Mr. Paradox is a marvellously hammy presence, while Emma Corrin’s Cassandra Nova’s slight physique and genteel demeanour make her telepathic abilities all the more threatening.
The sequel to the best Marvel film by far has to deal with tragic circumstances – the star of the first, Chadwick Boseman, died at the age of 43 in 2020. His role was not recast; instead, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever shows us the funeral of his character, T’Challa, and his sister, Shuri’s, difficulty in dealing with his death. Letitia Wright, playing Shuri, has primarily been a source of comic relief in the MCU until now – we discuss how she copes with the dramatic heavy lifting now required of her.
Despite the foregrounding of Shuri, Wakanda Forever is reliant on an ensemble, and quite a radical one, as José puts it: the story of a male superhero has been adapted to feature a group of women in his place, and what’s perhaps most remarkable is how the film does it without the feeling of overt messaging and tokenism that is often present in tentpole films that do something similar. And the villain, Namor, has been given an ethnic background José assures Mike was never present in the comics, his new Mayan origins and historical conflict with the conquistadores allowing for his underwater civilisation to mirror Wakanda.
While memorialising Chadwick Boseman, Wakanda Forever is able to see a future following the loss of his character. That it would deal with Boseman’s death with tact and sensitivity wasn’t in doubt, but that the world of Black Panther could thrive without him was, and this sequel shows that it’s certainly capable of doing so.
We’re into the land of diminishing returns with Marvel, it seems, with the novelty of a shared cinematic universe having worn off and the big storyline everything was building to for ten years now over. Of course, another big event is sure to be on its way in another decade, but will we care by then?
Not if Thor: Love and Thunder is anything to go by. Between the thinning appeal of Taika Waititi’s self-satisfied comedy and the uninvolving and lazy plot, characters, and imagery, it’s an unmemorable failure of Marvel’s action comedy formula. Admittedly, Christian Bale makes his Voldemort-esque villain, Gorr the God Butcher, more threatening than you might expect, given his simplicity and lack of screen time, and there’s some fairly charming comic business between Thor and his semi-sentient weaponry. Tough to recommend just for those, though.
Marvel’s invasion of the multiverse is now well under way, and in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness this dense network of alternate realities sets the stage for a race to save – what else? – the world. Which world? Dunno. Our world, the most important one, at least, but maybe all the others too.
While director Sam Raimi has history with superhero movies, having helped to bring the genre to a new maturity with his Spider-Man trilogy, it’s his low-budget horror experience he brings to bear on the MCU – there’s more than a little Evil Dead in here. It’s surprising and invigorating, and the low-rent, rough and ready feel it conveys integrates well with the expensive computer-generated embellishments we’re used to from Marvel. Multiverse of Madness is visually dazzling.
Sadly, it’s not dazzling anywhere else, its plot overstuffed, its thematic through lines unsatisfying and problematic. It relies quite heavily on specific knowledge obtained from previous films and television programmes in the series; the less of that context you have, the less this story will mean to you. And magic and the multiverse are quickly becoming the cheap, mechanical get-out clauses they’ve always had the potential to be, rather than thought-through, coherently applied storytelling elements: write yourself into a corner? Make up anything you like! Magic and multiverse can paper over any cracks your plot might have. The result is a disappointingly joyless experience whose visual splendour can only fleetingly distract from some fundamental issues with the story and themes.
Sony’s Spider-Man Universe has given us a charming Venom origin story, a rather less charming Venom sequel, and now another film about a well-intentioned man inadvertently possessed by something that demands he feed on humans. In Morbius, Jared Leto’s brilliant scientist finds a cure for the blood disease that has tormented him and his best friend throughout their lives – except that it comes with a side of vampirism.
In short, Morbius is not a success. José describes it as what people who claim to hate Marvel, which has produced some very good films, truly do hate. It’s as blunt, CGI-laden and uninvolving as that kind of criticism implies. Mike tries to be fair to it – the hallway bit isn’t too bad – and we agree that there’s one actor to like in it, although we disagree on which one that is. José accuses the film of failing to appreciate that one thing a star should deliver in this type of work is physical appeal; Mike accuses José of shallowness.
But as fun as it is to tease José, Morbius is not a fun film to have to sit through in order to get to do that. One to avoid.
The latest in a long line of Batman reboots, The Batman claims the definite article for itself – and deserves to. Richly shot, dark, romantic expressiveness spilling from every frame, The Batman leans in hard on bringing the noir of the source material to the screen with unabashed sincerity. It’s the best Batman film of them all.
Deleted scene of Barry Keoghan’s character meeting Batman giving a clearer view of the Conrad Veidt makeup job
Venom returns after his surprisingly enjoyable, if trashy, 2018 solo debut, but we don’t find much of a way to have fun with this sequel. Its cast is underserved by both the direction and screenplay, Tom Hardy appears to want to be seen as a slob, there’s not a memorable shot throughout, and most of the comedy, while promising in principle, falls flat. Mike asks where the real carnage even is, the film scared to show anything even cartoonishly gory, while José decries the carnage generally present in American cinema in general, this film, like so many, unable to conceive of a way to generate excitement without blowing things up and causing destruction.
A new day, a new entry in the MCU, and on this occasion we’re introduced to an entirely new set of characters and mythos: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings fills us in on the history of a young Chinese-American man and his dad’s magical jewellery. Like Doctor Strange and Black Panther, it’s a film whose connection to the wider MCU is light, establishing characters, a setting, and story elements that are certain to tie in to subsequent films, but free of the obligation to prioritise them at the expense of itself. And like Doctor Strange and Black Panther, that freedom works in its favour – it’s of a piece, interesting, pretty, and entertaining.
We discuss the film’s setting in a Chinese-American immigrant context, comparing it in particular to The Farewell and Crazy Rich Asians: all three films dramatise the cultural differences between the new and old country, and the ways in which the younger generation might face challenges in visiting or returning to their ancestral home. Indeed, Awkwafina appears in all three films, and, even in supporting roles, expresses this subject all by herself. We also think about the MCU’s use of the film to address its own past, a character from Iron Man 3 returning: Shang-Chi not only rejects the way the earlier film totally reconfigured him from the comics, but also addresses the Orientalism with which he has historically been associated.
And there’s more besides – Tony Leung’s beautiful, evocative performance of a character that nonetheless doesn’t quite work; the quality of the action, much of it a cut above what we typically expect from Marvel; and that classic Disney trick – if in doubt, animate a cute animal. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is a promising start to the MCU’s next phase, and we look forward to finding out how its world will integrate down the line, but it’s worth seeing on its own terms.
Apparently dissatisfied with the dismal reception of 2016’s Suicide Squad, DC has bravely decided to vaguely reboot the property with a spot-the-difference name change to The Suicide Squad, probably hoping that this new film will effortlessly send its predecessor down the memory hole. We ask whether it hits that whimsical tone it clearly wants to and discuss imperialism, satire, racism, gazing at males, rats, story structure, excessive volume and more.
Marvel’s triumphant return to our cinemas is… a film that fills in a plot hole nobody cared about for a character who not only should have had a standalone film long before now but who has since been killed off. To say that Black Widow feels like a kick in the teeth is an understatement, but still, the MCU is back with us and we see what it has to offer.
And what it presents us with is something much more earthbound than the spacefaring antics in which Marvel has increasingly indulged: a good old-fashioned Russian spy story, and a family reunion of sorts, Natasha Romanoff driven to reconnect with the other undercover Russian agents who formed her surrogate family as a child. We ask whether the theme of family is done justice here, especially David Harbour’s – the father’s – part in its expression. And, among others, we ask questions of the action filmmaking, the lack of humour in heroes, Romanoff’s conceptualisation, how the women are filmed, and whether it’s necessary to eschew edginess in order to pursue a progressive politics.
Black Widow is a film we enjoyed, though on reflection, picking out the reasons why is harder than picking at its flaws – but it certainly hasn’t dampened our willingness to continue following Marvel’s movies.
In 2017, Justice League, DC’s answer to Marvel’s continuing Avengers crossovers, flopped. Director Zack Snyder had left the film several months before release, his role taken over by MCU regular Joss Whedon, and significant changes were made in an attempt to lighten the tone of what had so far been a rather bleak series. Immediately, talk erupted of a director’s cut – the so-called Snyder Cut – that would represent Snyder’s true vision, uncompromised by studio executives’ fears and directives. Initially no more than a meme responding to that film’s quality, it was given oxygen by Zack Snyder’s insistence that it did actually exist, and it now reaches us via online streaming in the age of Covid-19. There’s perhaps no other set of circumstances in which it would have been made real – on top of the original budget, the creation of this director’s cut cost some additional $70m – but what an opportunity to compare and contrast two versions of the same film.
At four hours in length, this is a version of Justice League that would never have seen a theatrical release, but the time it affords its characters to develop is welcome, and a huge improvement over the sketchy treatment some of them received in the original film – particularly Cyborg, played by Ray Fisher, who arguably becomes the central character in the Snyder Cut. We discuss and disagree on the decision to change the original aspect ratio of 1.78:1 to 1.33:1, which José loves but Mike considers a mistake, and look over a few key scenes and shots to explore the differences between Snyder’s and Whedon’s aesthetics.
And we discuss that new ending, additional scenes which help the Snyder Cut conceive of the overall story as epic, mythological fantasy, and more.
It’s a surprise to us both that we enjoyed Zack Snyder’s Justice League as much as we did, but there you have it. The four hours flew by and if this leads to the studio’s renewed interest in completing Snyder’s planned series, we’re up for it.
The podcast can be listened to in the player above or at this link.
An ambitious, large-scale Netflix production, The Old Guard throws special ops, behind-enemy-lines-style action together with intriguing superhero-style mythology. Charlize Theron leads a team of immortal warriors, ranging from hundreds to thousands of years old, who find themselves on the run from corporate and military-industrial pursuers.
José is captured by the film from the beginning, his love for Theron’s action stardom and the film’s mysterious setup pulling him in; Mike takes an age to warm up to it, his inherent suspicion of all things Netflix keeping him wary. But when the story develops its romantic side, he softens, and both agree on what the film does best: the defiant declaration of love from one man to another, surrounded by armour-plated, heavily armed police. The Old Guard approaches representation of different sexualities and ethnicities in heartfelt, open ways, and the prospect of sequels that develop that further – perhaps even a universe – is promising.
Ultimately, José loves The Old Guard much, much more than Mike, but it wins us both over.
We finish off Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy with The Dark Knight Rises, the most entertaining and enjoyable of the three films. In a Gotham free of crime thanks to the draconian Dent Act, passed in the wake of Harvey Dent’s murder at, so the story goes, the hands of Batman, who hasn’t been seen since, the intriguing, intimidating, revolutionary figure of Bane arrives to terrorise and occupy the city. A recluse since the events of The Dark Knight, the threat of Bane gets Bruce Wayne back in his cowl, but he finds he’s met his match.
We again question the film’s politics, Mike arguing that its fascism isn’t so much particular to this series as a core component of Batman in principle, and that maybe the most a Batman story can do is ignore it, rather than fix it. Its aesthetics come back into focus too, in its cinematic style and militaristic sensibility, José taking issue with both, though he loves the opening set piece. He finds a new appreciation for Michael Caine, and we take pleasure in the new additions to the cast, particularly Tom Hardy and Anne Hathaway, and we leave the series in agreement that no matter our problems, it ended on a fun note.
Having established a muted tone in Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan’s Batman series receives a welcome injection of flair in Heath Ledger’s Joker, the villain and main attraction of 2008’s The Dark Knight. Ledger’s Joker captured imaginations and helped the film to a billion dollar box office gross, back when hitting that milestone was rare. José, as with Batman Begins, never got The Dark Knight, while Mike was so hyped for it that he saw it twice in IMAX before its official release. We discuss what holds up today and what doesn’t, what the appeal is, the 70mm IMAX cinematography, how and why the film became a cultural meme, and what ideologically drives it.
Cineworld’s reopening brings socially distanced screenings of past hits while the studios figure out their strategies for new releases, and with the highly anticipated and imminent release of Christopher Nolan’s new sci-fi, Tenet, his previous blockbusters are once again showing. José chooses Batman Begins, hoping to understand what he didn’t get when he first saw it in 2005, and why it matters.
To Mike’s generation and demographic, Batman Begins is, if not a great film, an important one, as its muted aesthetic and attempt to render Batman and Gotham as plausible entities, capable of existing in the real world, signalled a significant difference from the outlandishness of both previous and contemporary comic book adaptations, and its tone conveyed a seriousness of purpose – how honestly or successfully is up for debate – that contributed to the idea that superhero films could begin to be taken seriously and even considered as Oscar contenders. And, although his previous three films had all been successful, Batman Begins was the first blockbuster of Nolan’s career, and the financial success and cultural impact of his work would only increase, making him a dominant figure in cinema for people like Mike.
But Nolan’s Batman trilogy has always left José feeling lost – something that might be true of Nolan’s work overall – and he’s keen to work out what he might be missing, whether it’s more than just a generational thing, or whether, indeed, it’s the children who are wrong.
We think through how Nolan reimagines Batman, and how differently Batman Begins feels now that it’s fifteen years old. Mike suggests that the benevolent billionaire figure of Thomas Wayne, Batman’s dad, is no longer believable, if indeed it ever should have been, and José turns a peeve about Nolan’s almost entirely European casting into a working theory about the Britishness of his film, and what that means for its fidelity to the themes and tone of the comic books on which it’s based.
We’ll be following this up with discussions of the two successive Dark Knight films, as well as Interstellar and Inception, in this impromptu Christopher Nolan season. It’s all thanks to finally being back at the cinema, where, as José loudly shouts in the face of everyone who think their big telly is great, all films are best seen – especially Christopher Nolan’s.
