FFAF: The MCU Needs a Reset

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MCU, more like MCU later because I don’t want to watch anymore because it stinkT now. That’s terrible. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers Apologist and speaker Trent Horn. Monday/Wednesday we talk Apologetics and theology. Friday we talk about whatever I want to talk about. It’s free for all Friday, and today I want to talk about the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the Colossal Wreck, the Shattered Facade, if you can count the poetry reference there, of what something great this obelisk, this monolith, what it used to be, and now it’s in shattered woke remains of poor writing and poor planning and bad CGI. And what happened here? What needs to happen? I think we got to just do control, alt, delete. We got to do a hard reset. We got to take the MCU, unplug it from the wall, and plug it back in, and do that a few times if we have to fix what is going on with it.

So that’s just what I want to talk about today. Maybe you’re not a big MCU person, but you’re probably familiar with it. It’s a cultural touchstone and I think it really became that way in 2012, like the MCU became this cultural juggernaut in 2012 with the release of Avengers, and that was monumental. Nobody had really been able to come up with a framework like that before where they had four relatively well-received films before that point to put forward major characters. Ironman was the sleeper hit that came out of nowhere. People loved that. Robert Downey Jr. was just perfect for the role. The Incredible Hulk was not as good. It’s very hard to make a good Hulk movie. Hulk not good protagonist. So that could be difficult, but it still put it out there, and it was really saved by having Robert Downey Jr. in the post credit scene that blew people away. Like wait, are these connected? What’s going on here? Oh man, it’s Avengers initiative.

Thor was okay because the show was trying to figure out Thor. They were trying to be faithful to the comics and he’s very Shakespearean and serious, and they realized you know what? That just doesn’t work. By Thor Ragnorak, and Captain America, which is pretty good because Captain America is kind of a goofy sort of nerdy idea, but they did a really good job with Chris Evans pulling that off all of the Hollywood Chris’, they’re pulling a lot of weight here. Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Pine, Chris Pratt. Chris’, man, they are just taking over. Chris Catan from Night at the Roxbury, Saturday Night Live. Anybody? Anybody? All right.

But recently it’s gotten bad, so it’s height like 2012. It’s when it ignited like oh man, what is this? And then they really couldn’t do anything wrong the next few years. I mean, Thor, The Dark World was not very good, but the films were generally where it was seen, and they were cultural events like people looked forward. And I remember that I … I don’t go to the movies very much, but when a Marvel movie came out, generally with rare exceptions, but generally I’d make sure to buy tickets in advance, reserve it, and I wanted to be there Thursday at three o’clock because there’s going to be spoilers, there’s going to be hints on where the saga is going, especially when it got towards the end where the Infinity Saga was becoming very clear, where it was all going, you’re like what is happening here?

And then Endgame, I remember I was in a little theater in North Dakota going to graduate from University of Mary Bismarck, but it was still amazing, this little theater, we all cheered when Cap holds Mjolnir and wallops Thanos with it. Oh man, you just want to cry. Now when I watch it with my kids at home, I still tear up for them to see that, it’s just … And then when everybody comes out of the portals, but that was the day it died, people. And then after that, the problem was Marvel Cinematic Universe is sort of like TV. It is. That’s what the Marvel Cinematic Universe was. Every movie was basically a new episode in the TV show, and so people watched it in that way just like you might get hooked on a TV show.

The problem is a lot of TV shows they don’t know where they’re going exactly. That’s the problem with television, right? Like making a great movie is still difficult, but at least if you make one movie, there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, and you know what you’re doing and you’re just going to go for it. And if you plan it all right, you can make it work. You could even stretch that maybe into a trilogy if you have a clearly defined end goal and you push it through to that, though like Indiana Jones, that trilogy ended perfectly. The Toy Story trilogy ended perfectly. And yet, the quest for money continues and the studios will never let a perfect ending just be a perfect ending.

So movies have that advantage where you know where you’re going and you can tell an encapsulated story, but television shows are hard. Why is it so hard to have great television? Because there’s a pressure to keep the series going season after season, and if you don’t know where the story is going, it can become aimless. It can lose its focus, its purpose, so many great television shows you can think of, think Scrubs or Community, lots of shows, very few television shows end gracefully.

My wife and I love Monk. We thought that Monk was a great series and it ended perfectly, though Monk is a little bit of a cheating, it’s mystery of the week. There are some plot threads and arcs, story arcs, but overall it’s very episodic, so if you decide to end it, you can just basically end it in one episode and it feels good. But it always maintained its same structure. But a lot of other shows you look at, I mean, The Simpsons is still on air and it’s just terrible now. Lost was the same way. You don’t know where you’re going, and I think that’s what happened with the MCU. The MCU was like a big television show, and then after the finale should have been End Game. That was it, it ended perfectly. It’s done. You don’t need anymore. But what if we had some more characters to throw? We got other Marvel characters, people. Don’t you want some Eternals? Don’t you guys want some Shang Chi? Don’t you want maybe some She Hulk? Hey, what if Wanda had a show? What if we did that?

And what’s hard was that after End Game, there was still a lot of morale, there was a lot of goodwill towards the MCU and I gave them a chance. I gave them a chance on Wanda Vision and Loki, and I kind of liked Wanda Vision until the ending. I didn’t think the ending was very good, but it was really interesting. If they had just made Wanda the villain, that would’ve been great. They make her a villain for phase four, that would’ve been good, but the other … And Loki was pretty decent. But then I just kind of … I did stick with it in the end because I thought it was really fascinating. But now all of the shows, there’s no direction.

I guess here’s the big problems with the MCU now, why they need this reset. So for a few reasons. One, there’s really no direction. Where is this going? At least with the Infinity Saga, it was clear at the beginning, Thanos, the Infinity Stones, there was an idea for it. It was there, so it all fit together. Now this thing with the multiverse, it doesn’t really make any sense at all. I feel like it’s going to end up with Secret Wars and there’s going to be like 30 minutes of exposition of grabbing people throughout the multiverse like hey, remember this guy from this Marvel Disney+ show you never saw? No, and they’re all going to be jumbled together like action figures thrown on each other without a heartfelt story that you really built to.

And that’s the other problem, these characters haven’t been built up well because you have to do homework to keep up with it. You have to watch … There’s so much content on Disney+. It used to be that once a year a Marvel film came out and it was a cultural event, but now it’s like every … At one point in phase four, every three months, there was a new Marvel television series, and they didn’t do that before. They just had Agents of Shield and you didn’t have to watch Agents of Shield, it was more of an Easter egg. So there’s just way too much content. You don’t want to keep up with it, and it’s not that interesting.

The people that you do like the people that you do want that had heart, they’re gone. They’re talking now to try to juice up the final Avengers movies, bringing back Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, and Scarlett Johansson, bringing back the original Avengers for the last films or get audience butts in the seats. And I just really loathe that idea. It would be one, I don’t even think they could make money doing that because it would cost them probably $30, $50 million to get Robert Downey Jr. Back, Scarlett Johansson.

And also, it’s ridiculous. It’s going to be a multiverse version or time travel and all the stakes are lost now that you have multiverse and time travel. Now that you have that, there’s really no stakes. Nobody can stay dead. It’s just pointless, really. And the people that gave it the heart, even Nick Fury, I mean, Samuel Jackson’s getting old. He can’t do this role forever. You see, eventually characters die or get written out or they age out like Chris Evans didn’t want to be Captain America forever, even though that is really his most famous role. Robert Downey Jr. is good. He was in Oppenheimer. He’s trying to become a movie star again, which is good.

But MCU actors aren’t really movie stars. I mean, the only exception would be like Scarlett Johansson and Robert Downey Jr., but the others, you don’t see them in a lot of other stuff. They’re not breaking out in other films. They get used to Marvel and Marvel … Martin Scorsese had a good point in his criticism of Marvel. Marvel doesn’t really make films, it makes product. It makes stuff that’s safe and widely consumable and there’s a time and a place for that, but it’s hard. They don’t take risks, so every movie feels the same. It’s cheap. It’s not lovingly directed as a piece of art. So it’s sent off to some CGI workshop in South Korea or the Philippines or who knows where, where it’s all done terribly or it’s just companies here that are the lowest bidders and get it done cheap. And it shows, it shows in some of the more recent work.

The other problem, it got woke. It got woke. It’s just like I love the original Infinity Saga. I can show it to my kids. No worries. None of this woke politics or identity politics in it, but now you have She Hulk twerking. You’ve got identity politics. It’s like just forget it. I don’t want my kids to watch She Hulk twerking, okay? Well, it’s not for kids. Well, who’s it for? Who is She Hulk for? She Hulk, there are men who like She Hulk comics. She Hulk comics are funny, but you are leaning into it with too much of that girl boss, weird modern feminism, all of this raunch, and it’s terrible. So it goes woke and you’re just not interested.

Oh, and here’s the other thing about woke that I don’t like, so the Marvels just came out. I have not seen it. It’s the sequel to … It’s supposed to be Captain Marvel II, but it’s the Marvels and it’s got Bree Larson’s, Captain Marvel, an unlikeable character, Monica Rambo, that other Miss Marvel, who’s like the Pakistani teenage girl who has powers, who is a Disney+ show, didn’t watch it, don’t care. And they’re all together and they did this film, and I hear it’s garbage. I hear it’s bad. It’s like got weird … Like now the MCU does a lot of weird humor where they over crank the humor and it’s not funny. That was really bad in Thor: Love and Thunder. And they do it in this film as well, but it’s girl power, it’s woke, but it’s bad storytelling. It’s disparate. It’s all over the place.

And what makes me really mad is that the cultural critics protect this because they love if something is woke and “on their side”. So you go to Rotten Tomatoes, like the Marvels, they were hovering … Rotten, I hate Rotten Tomatoes. I cannot stand them because it’s just a business now, and they’re in cahoots with Hollywood. And so for certain studios, they will rig the critical algorithm so that a film, a film is 60%. If it gets 60% positive reviews, it’s rotten. It gets the red tomato. It’s below 60%, it gets a splat, which I think is a horrible dichotomy.

A movie is not good or bad, it’s on a gradient. At least Meta Critic puts it on a gradient. That makes more sense, but just oh, does it have red orange tomato or the green splat? But they’ll finagle it. Like they’ll categorize a review that gives it as 2.5 stars. Is that good or bad? I would say that’s bad, but if they need it, they need that review to get over the 60% threshold, they’ll label it a red tomato instead of a green splat. And I’m thinking wow, that’s real sheisty. So all of it is just like give me a break.

I really do feel like though that the superhero, there’s nothing wrong with superheroes. The problem is this superhero genre where learns powers, goes out, fights disposable CGI army, big blue sky beam at the end, tension then quip, tension then quip. That’s the superhero genre. And it’s old and we’re sick of it. It reminds me of how the western genre was. I mean, before what was it like? The fifties through the sixties, at least in the fifties especially, but during a period in the 20th century, it was just westerns were dominating the landscape, and eventually people get sick of westerns. They want grittier crime dramas. People get sick of gritty crime dramas and they want romantic comedies. They want the comedy, the great comedies we had in the nineties.

So you go through these phase where you get genres. People get all hopped up and they get sick of them, and that’s the way it should go. I remember in the 2000s, this also reminds me of zombies from 2003 to ’05. I mean, it’s like in the early two thousands, everybody was zombies after Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. I mean, that was … It was a cool zombie horror, apocalypse survival film, and I remember going with my friends and after we saw Dawn of the Dead, for months we would talk about nothing but how are we going to survive the zombies? How do we survive the zombie apocalypse? That’s all we would talk about. So it was a cultural zeitgeist. But what’s nice about zombies, it’s such a basic premise, that genre flamed out after a few years. Like okay, we saw zombies we’re done now.

I think superhero is the same thing, the superhero genre, but you can make a movie with a superhero that doesn’t follow that genre. That’s more of an interesting genre play, and that’s what Marvel needs to do. So what do they need to do? They need to reset or they got to nuke the whole thing, reset it, get rid of it, we’re done. It was a good run, but reset. Comics do that all the time. DC does that, did that with a crisis on Infinite Earths where they reset all the continuity. That was back in 1985. They have crisis events in DC to reset things, but you can reset it and just try something new.

For example, during phase four, one film that I liked was Werewolf By Night. It was really cool. The first intro of it, … I mean, I’ve mentioned this before on the channel multiple times, but I love the intro of the Screams and the Gothic MCU theme. And it was so different from other MCU films, it made it enjoyable to watch. Try a radically different genre. MCU films are at their best when they really lean into a genre that’s not the superhero genre. Captain America Winter Soldier is a noir crime thriller. Antman, people don’t like Antman, I like Antman. It’s a heist film, but it’s at least it’s different. But when you lean into something in a different genre than superhero, then it can be really good.

So I think with Secret Wars and the new Avengers movies coming out, nuke that multiverse or shut it down, combine … It ends with combining. The heroes save the day, but combining everything into one. And they’re probably going to do this. Save the day, combine everything into one universe, and that’s it. And the next phase of the MCU, they got to have two rules. There is only one universe and time travel is impossible. Now the stakes are back. You can’t travel through time and you can’t go to another universe. It’s collapsed into one universe. But maybe you could have the X-Men come into the MCU finally. They’re going to have that X-Men 97 series, and I just hope it’s not woke.

Like in the original X-Men animated series, Wolverine was a Christian. He would talk to Nightcrawler about it. I don’t know if he was a very strong Christian, but there was an episode where we find out Nightcrawler is Catholic and that’s pretty awesome. They’re in a German monastery talking about that stuff. I remember that. It’s back when you could have that kind of stuff in a cartoon. So reset it and it’s one universe and open it up where the superheroes already exist. They’re already there. You don’t have to establish it, but make it so that people don’t love superheroes as much, that there’s a lot of tension there. Like the mutants are really treated like mutants, and those mutants who can hide their abilities or facial features and can be more like superheroes, so to speak, put them in. Put them out there. Others are hiding in the shadows more. There’s a lot that you can do there, and just change up the tone a bit and allow the stories to unfold naturally. Try different genres. Don’t worry about a mega crossover event. That’s just my free advice for Marvel Studios.

So that is all. If you didn’t like Marvel MCU stuff, I doubt you stuck with me this long unless you’re a super fan. If you did, hopefully, maybe you agree, maybe you don’t. Always love to hear people’s thoughts. Go to TrentHornpodcast.com, or you can comment on the episodes there. Love to see what you think. Thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very blessed weekend.

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