TL;DR: Spidey? Awesome! WandaVision? Great up until the last 1/3. And guys I get a little long-winded on WanaVision.
Phase 1 Reaction:
https://texags.com/forums/13/topics/3278723
Phase 2 Reaction:
https://texags.com/forums/13/topics/3285463
Phase 3 Reaction (Part 1): Dr. Strange / GotG Vol 2 / Civil War
https://texags.com/forums/13/topics/3287952
Phase 3 Reaction (Part 2): Ragnarok / Black Panther / Homecoming
https://texags.com/forums/13/topics/3290581
Phase 3 Reaction (Part 3): Infinity War
https://texags.com/forums/13/topics/3291814
Phase 3 Reaction (Part 4): Ant Man & The Wasp / Captain Marvel
https://texags.com/forums/13/topics/3294976
Phase 3 Reaction (Part 5): Endgame
https://texags.com/forums/13/topics/3297903
Spiderman: Far From Home
Overall this sucker was a ton of fun to watch! Definitely had the same kind of vibe from Toby McGuire's SM2 with a different take on the, "I don't want to be Spiderman anymore, I want a break from this, etc etc" …and while I haven't seen the Andrew Garfield movies yet (will be doing so before watching No Way Home) I've heard his second movie has that happen as well. Interesting that all initial sequels for each series deals with the Spiderman second guessing his choice to be a hero.
The initial intro was actually really eye-opening and I'm glad we ended up deciding to go in release date order. It sounds small, but having that high school broadcast as the starting exposition for how much life changed for people that came back 5 years after Infinity War but were still the same age was pretty dang incredible and leaves the door open for so many amazing stories (more to come on that with WandaVision). And while it's never mentioned I guess Aunt May also must've blipped because they didn't make any effort to have her look 5 years older than Parker.
They go even further into how weird/complicated things are when Happy is trying to connect Parker and Fury together. Honestly these were scenes that were way funnier than I had expected because…yeah…if I was Fury I'd be pretty pissed off too. The guy's running things for SHIELD and doing his thing….next thing he knows a bunch of people are 5 years older, Iron Man's gone, Cap's gone, and Black Widow's gone….and now he can't get a teenager to answer the phone….that's sadly hilarious.
Probably my favorite scene out of this whole movie though is right here:
Just….I mean….he's Tony
That scene was so well written and so well done and was exactly what we the audience needed to see for Parker to be able to begin to let Tony go and start to move on. Man I love that scene!
Okay…..Mysterio….ugh…..
He wasn't bad. Honestly this might have been one of the hardest villains to write for the MCU so I don't want to be too rough but good grief we all know he's the bad guy so why act like you're fooling anyone? This formula of the "final showdown" taking place when we're only 45 minutes into the movie solidifies that he's the antagonist here. And I don't knock Gilynhall (I ain't looking the proper spelling up cause I ain't gonna remember anyways) for this he's a dang good actor and played the role fine….just wasn't written as well as it could have been.
Having the illusions being grounded in Stark Tech was also kind of confusing. So the illusions are all products of the drones, but then somehow he creates an illusion of himself on the ground without a drown to distract Peter while he tries to sneak up and shoot him? I don't know…like I said this was a hard villain to write and it wasn't terrible.
I did like how they tied in other people from prior films that were done wrong by Stark Industries to help him in his plot…although if this was real life someone in that big of a crew would've snitched for millions of dollars and gotten everyone arrested but that wouldn't have been as fun of a story!
MID-CREDITS SCENE
WHAT?????? So I guess he kinda is like Tony because everyone now knows he's Spiderman….course Tony revealed it willingly and was a grown multi-billionaire and Peter had it revealed unwillingly and he's a high school kid. Love seeing what's-his-name back as the head of the Daily Bugle though. That was fun to see….but he's definitely more of a dick in this one (Toby McGuire films he was at least a funny dick).
END CREDITS
Ewkjs sdkjsarew fkrfner ???? #@$@($??? How the hell long has THIS been going on???? What the hell man???? So was that even Fury at the end of Endgame??? Was that Fury who died in the post credits scene of Infinity War??? Was that Fury coming back alive in the last 1/3 of Winter Soldier???? I have…..so many questions….
WandaVision
Feel like I need to break this up in chunks…FYI we watched this entire series in one day we got hooked so much to it.
Overall this was a great show and the different themes that each show carried was A LOT of fun and I know my wife and I enjoyed the look of the episodes way more than our kids did. The commercials were a great touch (and also foreboding) and even really fooled my 8 year old at one point with the depression medicine commercial from episode 7…..he goes, "Wait, I thought this was on Disney plus why is this commercial here?"
Episodes 1 - 4
Completely awesome!! Everyone told me the first episodes were bad and weird and didn't motivate people to want to keep watching….and I'm thinking to myself during the first two, "This is incredible!" Seriously. It's hard to even pick a favorite here because the first 3 episodes do such a good job of setting up this unsettling atmosphere that something is wrong and then episode 4 ties it all together.
Honestly to me it had become obvious that Wanda at least had some major hand in what was going on after episode 2. She hides the little colored helicopter she finds in the bushes, she destroys a radio with a broadcast coming through it trying to reach her, and then she somehow erases a scene with a man walking out of the sewer that she perceives as a threat and wants to hide.
The first 3 episodes each had a great little silly story to tell all while still keeping the mystery of this gloom of what was going on always in the forefront of your mind. And then we had 4 to tie everything in and I'd have to say the highlight of episode 4 was right at the beginning:
I don't know what it is about hospital scenes being used to convey fear, dread, danger….maybe it's because it's always thought of as a safe place to be….so having this amazing scene of suddenly people that have been missing for 5 years instantly re-appear and everyone freaking out…man, pretty incredible.
Makes you wonder what happened to people that blipped back that were on planes that ended up crashing due to the pilots disappearing….do they blip back 5 miles high and fall to their death? Or do they blip back in the wreckage even if the plane crashed in the ocean? I shouldn't be thinking this….
And last thing I'll say about these first 4 episodes….FBI guy from Ant Man 2 doing the magic trick he was practicing from that movie….I had to pause it I was laughing so dang hard…my kids got a real good kick out of that too.
Episodes 5 - 6
At this point the show is still going strong. We get a look at what kind of damage Wanda is doing with this world she's created and some dang good conflict at the end of episode 5:
And the same thing with episode 6 (Halloween episode). The conflict has gotten worse and now we see Vision completely questioning everything and trying to break free…only to have things get incredibly worse and force Wanda to make this world she created bigger.
And we get an even better idea of essentially the torture she's putting these innocent people through with this episode. There was a scene that stuck out to me that I can't find online but it showed as Vision was leaving farther away from town the amount of interaction people had with one another became less and less and it shows a woman repeatedly picking up her arm like she was going to hang something outside, and just lower it again and repeat that motion back and forth like she was a robot…and then we see a tear go down her cheek and it's like, "Man….Wanda is really the bad guy here." Which leads me to when this show takes an unfortunate turn…
Episodes 7 - 9
Why??? Why did we need a last minute surprise villain here??? This show was perfect. Matter of fact…ANY SHOW OR MOVIE that is so well written where a pure antagonist is not needed is a dang good example of writing and up until this point we had that. And ok, yes…this was knee slapping hilarious especially coming from Disney:
But dangit it's like we had a great thing going with this building conflict between Wanda and having to choose between the life she always wanted but struggling with the morals of what she's doing and how this is affecting the real world. And it was great!!!!
But nope…we still have to have a bad guy so let's just throw in some ham-fisted deal about how purple witch was causing little issues here and there in each episode…and throw in the Salem Witch Trials while we're at it (dafuq? Seriously?)…oh and now there's an evil Vision that we can throw in the last episode too…
Really??? You throw in 2 brand new villains in the last 2 episodes of the show???? No!!! That's not good writing!
And what really gets me is they still could've had the backstory stuff come up showing all the times when she was happy watching these old family sit-coms (and the tragedies around those memories) and showing what lead her to creating this fake utopia so she could cope with what she had lost. Some of the best characters are those who make terrible decisions with the best intentions (a certain purple, jewel fisted Titan comes to mind)….
And man even with the distracting villains the ending was still amazingly, gut-wrenchingly awful (emotionally awful…I loved that they did this) when she's saying goodbye to her 2 children knowing she's got to basically kill them to release everyone in the town. I really thought they weren't going to have the guts to go through with it and she was going to reduce the size of her hex to just enveloping the house so she could both keep her family alive and free everyone in the town….glad they didn't do that.
Also the addition of the kids did nothing but confuse the hell out of me every time they were on screen…literally every time. Still sucks they died though.
Overall this show was really good and the first 2/3 of it was some REALLY GOOD story telling.
Falcon & Winter Soldier next….course I really just want to skip that and go to Loki but I'll be good.
Phase 1 Reaction:
https://texags.com/forums/13/topics/3278723
Phase 2 Reaction:
https://texags.com/forums/13/topics/3285463
Phase 3 Reaction (Part 1): Dr. Strange / GotG Vol 2 / Civil War
https://texags.com/forums/13/topics/3287952
Phase 3 Reaction (Part 2): Ragnarok / Black Panther / Homecoming
https://texags.com/forums/13/topics/3290581
Phase 3 Reaction (Part 3): Infinity War
https://texags.com/forums/13/topics/3291814
Phase 3 Reaction (Part 4): Ant Man & The Wasp / Captain Marvel
https://texags.com/forums/13/topics/3294976
Phase 3 Reaction (Part 5): Endgame
https://texags.com/forums/13/topics/3297903
Spiderman: Far From Home
Overall this sucker was a ton of fun to watch! Definitely had the same kind of vibe from Toby McGuire's SM2 with a different take on the, "I don't want to be Spiderman anymore, I want a break from this, etc etc" …and while I haven't seen the Andrew Garfield movies yet (will be doing so before watching No Way Home) I've heard his second movie has that happen as well. Interesting that all initial sequels for each series deals with the Spiderman second guessing his choice to be a hero.
The initial intro was actually really eye-opening and I'm glad we ended up deciding to go in release date order. It sounds small, but having that high school broadcast as the starting exposition for how much life changed for people that came back 5 years after Infinity War but were still the same age was pretty dang incredible and leaves the door open for so many amazing stories (more to come on that with WandaVision). And while it's never mentioned I guess Aunt May also must've blipped because they didn't make any effort to have her look 5 years older than Parker.
They go even further into how weird/complicated things are when Happy is trying to connect Parker and Fury together. Honestly these were scenes that were way funnier than I had expected because…yeah…if I was Fury I'd be pretty pissed off too. The guy's running things for SHIELD and doing his thing….next thing he knows a bunch of people are 5 years older, Iron Man's gone, Cap's gone, and Black Widow's gone….and now he can't get a teenager to answer the phone….that's sadly hilarious.
Probably my favorite scene out of this whole movie though is right here:
Just….I mean….he's Tony
That scene was so well written and so well done and was exactly what we the audience needed to see for Parker to be able to begin to let Tony go and start to move on. Man I love that scene!
Okay…..Mysterio….ugh…..
He wasn't bad. Honestly this might have been one of the hardest villains to write for the MCU so I don't want to be too rough but good grief we all know he's the bad guy so why act like you're fooling anyone? This formula of the "final showdown" taking place when we're only 45 minutes into the movie solidifies that he's the antagonist here. And I don't knock Gilynhall (I ain't looking the proper spelling up cause I ain't gonna remember anyways) for this he's a dang good actor and played the role fine….just wasn't written as well as it could have been.
Having the illusions being grounded in Stark Tech was also kind of confusing. So the illusions are all products of the drones, but then somehow he creates an illusion of himself on the ground without a drown to distract Peter while he tries to sneak up and shoot him? I don't know…like I said this was a hard villain to write and it wasn't terrible.
I did like how they tied in other people from prior films that were done wrong by Stark Industries to help him in his plot…although if this was real life someone in that big of a crew would've snitched for millions of dollars and gotten everyone arrested but that wouldn't have been as fun of a story!
MID-CREDITS SCENE
WHAT?????? So I guess he kinda is like Tony because everyone now knows he's Spiderman….course Tony revealed it willingly and was a grown multi-billionaire and Peter had it revealed unwillingly and he's a high school kid. Love seeing what's-his-name back as the head of the Daily Bugle though. That was fun to see….but he's definitely more of a dick in this one (Toby McGuire films he was at least a funny dick).
END CREDITS
Ewkjs sdkjsarew fkrfner ???? #@$@($??? How the hell long has THIS been going on???? What the hell man???? So was that even Fury at the end of Endgame??? Was that Fury who died in the post credits scene of Infinity War??? Was that Fury coming back alive in the last 1/3 of Winter Soldier???? I have…..so many questions….
WandaVision
Feel like I need to break this up in chunks…FYI we watched this entire series in one day we got hooked so much to it.
Overall this was a great show and the different themes that each show carried was A LOT of fun and I know my wife and I enjoyed the look of the episodes way more than our kids did. The commercials were a great touch (and also foreboding) and even really fooled my 8 year old at one point with the depression medicine commercial from episode 7…..he goes, "Wait, I thought this was on Disney plus why is this commercial here?"
Episodes 1 - 4
Completely awesome!! Everyone told me the first episodes were bad and weird and didn't motivate people to want to keep watching….and I'm thinking to myself during the first two, "This is incredible!" Seriously. It's hard to even pick a favorite here because the first 3 episodes do such a good job of setting up this unsettling atmosphere that something is wrong and then episode 4 ties it all together.
Honestly to me it had become obvious that Wanda at least had some major hand in what was going on after episode 2. She hides the little colored helicopter she finds in the bushes, she destroys a radio with a broadcast coming through it trying to reach her, and then she somehow erases a scene with a man walking out of the sewer that she perceives as a threat and wants to hide.
The first 3 episodes each had a great little silly story to tell all while still keeping the mystery of this gloom of what was going on always in the forefront of your mind. And then we had 4 to tie everything in and I'd have to say the highlight of episode 4 was right at the beginning:
I don't know what it is about hospital scenes being used to convey fear, dread, danger….maybe it's because it's always thought of as a safe place to be….so having this amazing scene of suddenly people that have been missing for 5 years instantly re-appear and everyone freaking out…man, pretty incredible.
Makes you wonder what happened to people that blipped back that were on planes that ended up crashing due to the pilots disappearing….do they blip back 5 miles high and fall to their death? Or do they blip back in the wreckage even if the plane crashed in the ocean? I shouldn't be thinking this….
And last thing I'll say about these first 4 episodes….FBI guy from Ant Man 2 doing the magic trick he was practicing from that movie….I had to pause it I was laughing so dang hard…my kids got a real good kick out of that too.
Episodes 5 - 6
At this point the show is still going strong. We get a look at what kind of damage Wanda is doing with this world she's created and some dang good conflict at the end of episode 5:
And the same thing with episode 6 (Halloween episode). The conflict has gotten worse and now we see Vision completely questioning everything and trying to break free…only to have things get incredibly worse and force Wanda to make this world she created bigger.
And we get an even better idea of essentially the torture she's putting these innocent people through with this episode. There was a scene that stuck out to me that I can't find online but it showed as Vision was leaving farther away from town the amount of interaction people had with one another became less and less and it shows a woman repeatedly picking up her arm like she was going to hang something outside, and just lower it again and repeat that motion back and forth like she was a robot…and then we see a tear go down her cheek and it's like, "Man….Wanda is really the bad guy here." Which leads me to when this show takes an unfortunate turn…
Episodes 7 - 9
Why??? Why did we need a last minute surprise villain here??? This show was perfect. Matter of fact…ANY SHOW OR MOVIE that is so well written where a pure antagonist is not needed is a dang good example of writing and up until this point we had that. And ok, yes…this was knee slapping hilarious especially coming from Disney:
But dangit it's like we had a great thing going with this building conflict between Wanda and having to choose between the life she always wanted but struggling with the morals of what she's doing and how this is affecting the real world. And it was great!!!!
But nope…we still have to have a bad guy so let's just throw in some ham-fisted deal about how purple witch was causing little issues here and there in each episode…and throw in the Salem Witch Trials while we're at it (dafuq? Seriously?)…oh and now there's an evil Vision that we can throw in the last episode too…
Really??? You throw in 2 brand new villains in the last 2 episodes of the show???? No!!! That's not good writing!
And what really gets me is they still could've had the backstory stuff come up showing all the times when she was happy watching these old family sit-coms (and the tragedies around those memories) and showing what lead her to creating this fake utopia so she could cope with what she had lost. Some of the best characters are those who make terrible decisions with the best intentions (a certain purple, jewel fisted Titan comes to mind)….
And man even with the distracting villains the ending was still amazingly, gut-wrenchingly awful (emotionally awful…I loved that they did this) when she's saying goodbye to her 2 children knowing she's got to basically kill them to release everyone in the town. I really thought they weren't going to have the guts to go through with it and she was going to reduce the size of her hex to just enveloping the house so she could both keep her family alive and free everyone in the town….glad they didn't do that.
Also the addition of the kids did nothing but confuse the hell out of me every time they were on screen…literally every time. Still sucks they died though.
Overall this show was really good and the first 2/3 of it was some REALLY GOOD story telling.
Falcon & Winter Soldier next….course I really just want to skip that and go to Loki but I'll be good.
