Monday, October 25, 2021

A Knight's Tale (2001)

A Knight's Tale (2001)

What a delightfully bizarre, strange, odd little movie this was. 

It's not often you get to see the Joker, King Bobby B, Wash, Vision, that one dude from HBO's Rome miniseries and a woman whose mouth is so wide it's like her teeth are a zipper for removing the top of her head gallivanting about a Renaissance Faire to the pounding beat of AC/DC. Where "We Will Rock You" isn't just the soundtrack, we have peasants clapping out the beat, where heralds announce their knights like hypemen at the boxing ring, where Heath Ledger in his prime shimmies to Bowie at a medieval ball.

It's camp, it's cheese, in that beautiful window of time when medieval movies were pure campy cheese. Look what came before: Conan the Destroyer (1984) The Princess Bride (1987), Dragonheart (1996) the Dungeons and Dragons movie (2000).

Then, bam. Fellowship of the Ring. 2001. 

And suddenly medieval fantasy was serious business. Beowulf, The Golden Compass, 2007. Game of Thrones, 2011. Warcraft, 2016. All deadly serious. And it keeps going, Wheel of Time. Lord of the Rings series on Amazon.

"You couldn't make that movie these days" is a common refrain, and they're probably right here, but not because of politics or Heath Ledger being undeniably dead, but because LotR and Harry Potter and Marvel and all that lot have drained all the goofiness out of fantasy. 

Whereas this movie is completely bonkers and it knows it:

What are the rules of jousting? Inconsistent!

How do you win a tournament? Unclear!

We emphasized how good a swordsman the main character is, how does this come into play later in the story? Not at all!

Why do the two leads fall in love? Because they're the leads!

Who is the female lead anyway? Doesn't matter!

No, but seriously, shouldn't we know more about her than just her name? Shut up already!

But the girl was destined for an arranged marriage with the bad guy, winning a tournament won't change that, will it? Sorry, the movie's over!

Why does the lead's main motivation suddenly shift to making his dad proud in the third act? Because!

It's like a time capsule, a little snapshot of the before times, and all the more precious for it.

Saturday, October 16, 2021

Dune: Part One

Title: Dune: Part One
Directed by: Denis Villeneuve
Written by: Frank Herbert, really

Just to underscore how totally topsy-turvy our whole world has because of the whole covid thing, here’s a major Hollywood movie that actually came out here in Japan first, instead of six months later. Score!

Now I know some of us, me included, have been a little nervous about how this was being adapted for the big screen. You know, what got changed, what got cut, that type of stuff. Well, let me quickly reassure you:

It is TOTALLY long.

Almost three hours long. At last, a movie that delivers what the fans have always demanded: increased running time.

Real talk though, since movie critics these days are about as impartial as figure skating judges, you want to know if this movie lands the jumps or if it just whacks you in the kneecaps and calls it a day. And who can you trust if not some random dude online using an outdated medium to spew incoherent opinions? I got you, bro. Here’s the deal: It’s okay.

Everybody says the novel “Dune” is a tough movie to film because it’s so complicated, and sure that’s partly it, but the other part is because it’s hard to get a handle on exactly what it’s about. Not in the surface-level plot sense, but in the sense of, what is the point of any of this? Like there's stuff on ecology on there, a lot about expanding the limits of human capabilities with people who can navigate between stars or make super-fast calculations and people who can use their voice to subliminally control others and people with super-fast reflexes, then there's this whole thing about the dangers of a charismatic leader because the mistakes of the leader are multiplied by the number of followers they have and wow, it's all a bit much. And this movie never really gets to that. It’s all muscle, no heart; all plot, no point.

Before we go on with the plot breakdown though, spoilers for a book that’s now around 60 years old and has already been adapted for the screen twice, so if you need a spoiler warning then you are weak, your bloodline is weak and will be among the first to perish when the apocalypse comes. Okey dokey? Great, here we go.

If you were worried this movie was going to be a little dense and packed with all kinds of made-up names and stuff well then I gotta tell you buddy that is totally not untrue. Spot on really. Good call. The first third is disjointed almost to the point of incoherence, throwing scenes at you almost at random in the rush to set up all the storylines and characters, without making you really care about them.

First, we get a background exposition from Chani (Zendaya) about oppression, because oppression is HOT, though we’re going to be a little vague about it for the rest of the movie as we have all these other things we have to introduce. Cut to Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) heavily implying he’s part of the oppression and then there’s a made-for-movie yet largely unnecessary scene where his father, Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) is commanded by the Emperor to take over the planet Arrakis from their enemies, Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) and his bald albino friends. We take time out during this scene to meet Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson, an actor whose name is longer than his part is) who is a Mentat, meaning he’s like a human version of Excel. Pretty neat huh? Don’t worry if you miss it, this ability will never come up again.

We’re then introduced to the family retainers Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa), oozing Hawaii from every pore, Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) and Doctor Yueh (Chang Chen) then there’s this neat scene where an old lady from the handover scene (Charlotte Rampling) comes back and makes Paul stick his hand in her box until he screams. Then she just suddenly leaves without being clear about what that was all about, so we can have Paul’s mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) shout the explanation to him in a rainstorm. There’s also a cool fight scene where we see guys in the future wear personal shields that stop any high-speed blow or projectile which seems like it would be highly effective in combat, only it later turns out it’s really not and soldiers get killed super easily.

Then it’s off to the titular planet, where Paul survives an assassination attempt with a mosquito-shaped drone, meets some of the local “Fremen”, and goes to watch a crew harvesting spice, a psychoactive substance that extends life and grants prophetic visions. A giant sandworm attacks, and it’s really cool, kind of shaped like a dick but with massive spiny teeth, like a vagina. What? Oh yeah and the spice starts giving him visions and he starts hearing weird voices telling him to fulfill his destiny which turns out to be kind of irresponsible of the voices because they distract him immediately before the giant sandworm attacks and you’d think him ending up inside the stomach of a mobile Sarlacc monster would slow you down in the destiny fulfilling department.

Then Doctor Yueh knocks everybody out, surprise, he’s a traitor, too bad we never had a scene or two to set that up, and he turns off the house shields so the Harkonnens can launch a surprise attack which consists of these kind of upside-down fireworks that look really, really cool. There's also a badass laser beam that just slices through half the city. Paul and his Mom escape, meet up with Duncan, escape again, and then meet the Fremen, there's a duel where weird voices try to get Paul killed again by trying to chat with him in the middle of a life and death situation, and the movie abruptly ends but not before Chani turns to the camera, winks and says “This is just the beginning.”

So you see it’s a pretty faithful adaptation, though even with the long running time we don’t really linger on anything. Were you upset they made Kynes a woman? Good news is, she’s barely in the movie. Unsure about making the only Asian character a villain? Good news is, he’s barely in the movie. Worried someone is going to ask you to spell David Dastmalchian’s last name without looking it up? He’s barely in the movie. Felt a little queasy about having Javier Bardem play a quasi-Arabic tribal leader? Good news is you get the idea.

Part One is very much the story of Paul, and if there’s one thing this movie gets right, it’s Paul. He is very much the reluctant hero, an artificially manufactured messiah thanks to a literal human breeding program. This movie really doesn’t do the emotion thing very well, but one or two beats that actually land are about Paul and his slow realization that yes, he’s bred to be some kind of prophetic messiah, but rather than this being cool and awesome, he’s a freak and it’s going to be absolutely horrific. The horror part is a little vaguely done, just impersonal stacks of bodies burning and armies cheering his name, but it’s shot in such a way you just KNOW some evil shit is going on.

The art direction isn’t quite as iconic as the 1984 David Lynch movie, but it’s kind of engagingly weird. Instead of the decadent opulence and HR Geiger techno-organic look of the former, we get kind of post-modern brutalism. Everything is huge and blocky and bulky and the human figures are little scurrying mice down at the bottom. Oh, and two insectile appendages way, way up to whoever designed the look of the ornithopters. Kind of these dragonfly-looking helicopters. Very cool.

Aside from being long, the other thing that this movie is, above all, is loud. Like, settle the fuck down Hans Zimmer, all this kind of alien didgeridoo and drumming and atonal chanting is atmospheric as all hell but it’s also kind of distracting. We’ll be BRAAAP having a scene BRAAAAAAP where someone is BRAAAAAAAAP experiencing a vis BRAAAAAAP ion or so BRAAAAAAP meth BRAAAP ing and the score will BRAAAAAAAAP be so loud BRAAAAAAAP you can’t hear a word. Thank god for foreign subtitles.

It’s a shame we’ve only got part one to go on, because the stuff that I think works best is the wrestling with the destiny thing and that barely gets going. I think Denis does a good job of undercutting the “Chosen One” trope and shows us Paul is both uncertain of and unready for his destiny, and frankly it’s kind of a bummer destiny anyway. Denis does a much worse job of humanizing the other characters or getting us to care about their fates. Visually it’s interesting, but I was never knocked out, musically it’s intriguing but intrusive.

So I’m going to stick with what I said up top.

It’s okay.

Wednesday, October 13, 2021

The Suicide Squid

Title: Squid Game
Directed by: Hwang Dong-hyuk
Written by: Hwang Dong-hyuk
Network: Netflix


I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Korea is HOT right now. Hotter than kimchi, sizzling like a plate of bulgogi. It's been bubbling away for a few decades now, but at least in the West, it's now hitting the boil. As we speak, I have lost my wife to the clutches of BTS. I no longer have a human spouse, I have an automaton engineered to spend all its free time watching several elfin boy-men dance amid pastel colors spouting powder-pink lines about lemon yellow emotions. And now this.

From the country that gave us period zombie horror series “Kingdom”, claustrophobic horror flick "Train to Busan", pop horror genre K-POP, teens frantically pushing buttons as fast as they can video game horror Star Craft players, and a dramatization of the rich-poor divide in “Parasite”, comes a series dramatizing the rich-poor divide via a “Battle Royale” style bloodbath and has anybody checked in with Korea lately, make sure they’re doing okay. Because I'm pretty sure the answer is 'No.'

Does the number one show on Netflix in something like 90-odd countries need any explanation?

Even if you’re only vaguely aware of "Squid Game", you’re probably aware of the premise: A collection of 456 indebted poors are recruited by a mysterious organization to play a series of six children’s games like “Red Light, Green Light” and tug-of-war for the promise of a cash reward, the catch being that the losers are ruthlessly gunned down by the game organizers.

The organizers claim the games are democratic and fair, but of course it’s part of the joke that they aren’t, and the system is rigged to kill as many of them as possible in the most entertaining ways possible. Participants aren’t told what game they’ll be playing until after they’ve decided who to play with, the games are either childishly simple or devilishly difficult depending on which order you play them in or who you play them with, and the organizers might just change the rules if they think you’re having it too easy.

The lesson is simple: You will be humiliated, beaten, trampled, even worked to death for sums of money that are completely meaningless to those wearing the boots. Bezos could lose 10 billion a year and not even notice it for a decade.

Why this, why now, is an interesting question. Maybe the dearth of big-budget productions in our pandemic lockdown times might be part of it, though, like, Apple TV's "Foundation", so that can't be all of it. The theme definitely digs into part of the anxieties and insecurities and ongoing discourse over the slide of rich nations into increasing inequality. The simplicity of the games and the quality of the character work also play a part in making it accessible to a global audience. A perfect storm, the right show at the right time. Is a milquetoast take but it's the best I can do.

It’s visually striking, hats off to the art department, especially in its vivid use of color. Everything from the bright pink jumpsuits and PlayStation-controller-button masks worn by the organizers to the pastel-colored MC Escher maze the contestants walk through to reach each game just leap out at you and underscore the insane irreality of what you’re watching and by extension, the insane rules by which we live our lives.

The real core is the characterization, as we follow unlikeable loser with a secret heart of gold Gi-hun, his boyhood friend and ruthless embezzler Sang-woo, and North Korean escapee Sae-byeok as they work alternatively with or against the other contestants as the games shift and the rounds progress, like a more cutthroat version (but only slightly more) of “Weakest Link” or “Survivor”.

The absolute kicker comes when the players are told to form pairs, and only then informed they have to play games of marbles against one another, meaning one of them is going to doom the other to death. There are about four gut punches in a row here—a husband and wife team playing against one another, a betrayal of a trusting soul, a lie to an old and senile man, a young girl who gives up on life.

Kind of a shame the marbles game comes about 2/3 of the way through, because the rest never quite matches that emotional weight. The consequences play out pretty much as expected, with childhood friends Gi-hun and Sang-woo, representing the good of the working man versus the evil of the moneyed elite, fighting one another in the eponymous squid game in the final round.

That at least was just a bit predictable. The epilogue and final reveal of who was behind it all is just bullshit. Sorry, it’s bullshit. Sequel bait from a series that had, up to that point, had a clear end point and a clear message.

There I was, thinking the writers were geniuses from setting up the “play six games to select the winner” format, because it’s the cinematic equivalent of a BuzzFeed listicle, it instantly gives you a structure and milestones to look forward to, you know exactly what destination this thing is heading towards, so you can strap in and focus on enjoying the ride. I want to take the first eight episodes and rub them in every “Loki”, “WandaVision”, JJ-Abrams-mystery-boxing idiot’s face and scream LOOK, LOOK AT WHAT YOU CAN ACHIEVE BY BEING CLEAR ABOUT THE ENDPOINT OF YOUR STORY. Then they get there and spend the last 30 minutes get fucking around on bullshit.

I’d say stop watching about 1/3 of the way through the final episode, skip the rest.

Utter, utter bullshit.

It also breaks a clutch of good storytelling rules, everything from Chekov’s gun (“Here is a bomb that can blow up this entire facility, got it? Okay, now let’s never mention this ever again”) to tying up character arcs in a satisfying way (“This guy’s dead. Wait! No he’s not! Actually, yes he is.”).

Which is a shame because the other 8 1/3 episodes are damn good. The development of the core three players in particular is outstanding—we start of despising Gi-hun because he’s such a useless clown, a compulsive gambler and a shitty parent to his daughter (for her birthday, he gets a present from a crane game, only when they open it, they discover it’s a pistol-shaped cigarette lighter), but as the games go on we see his compassion and empathy for others. The mirror image is Sang-woo, who at first seems the smart one, coming up with strategies to keep everyone alive, only to show his true colors and we realize that keeping others alive was always just a strategy to make sure he becomes the final survivor.

It’s a foreign production, so it seems to get a pass from a lot of things that would have the Twitterati up in arms if Hollywood tried it. There are only two main female characters, both in supporting roles, and one of them is an untrustworthy, conniving bitch. The only gay character is a creepy American VIP in the game organization who tries to force an undercover cop to perform fellatio on him (the VIPs for whose entertainment the game is played are all either English-speaking or Chinese). The only non-Korean player is Ali, a Pakistani laborer who is childishly simple, trusting and can’t speak Korean.

On that note, I’m not sure North American audiences get this, but “foreigners are simultaneously evil creeps responsible for all our troubles and naïve simpletons” is an instantly recognizable stereotype in Japan, too (just off the top of my head, see: “In the Miso Soup” by Ryu Murakami or “Out” by Natsuo Kirino). It’s just our version of the “immigrants are lazy welfare queens who are taking all our jobs” doublethink.

I think it’s significant that Japan’s precursor to this, “Battle Royale”, was not so much about society as about the failure of the education system, a theme repeated in e.g. “The Sky Crawlers” (where the enemy ace is known only as “The Teacher”). We’re still a little too enamored in the Skinner boxes we’ve built for ourselves over here so blaming society as a whole doesn’t go down well. Part of that is probably the key to Korean cinema's success, that unlike Japan they're not afraid to call out the fucked up things they see around them, though I'm sure there are a few Koreans less than thrilled to have their dirty laundry aired so publicly.

I don’t think Japan has yet to slide quite so far as Korea down late capitalism’s slipperiest of slopes, but we’re getting there, slowly but surely. Workforces are divided between the elite core guaranteed employment for life, and temporary workers guaranteed a kick in the backside when their contracts are up. We may not have quite as many billionaires as the States, but we’re working to close that gap even as we widen the income one.

Give us another decade and boy. Wow. We’ll be making some great content. You wait.

Saturday, October 9, 2021

Black Widow


Title: Black Widow
Directed by: Cate Shortland
Written by: Eric Pearson
Network: Disney+
 

Yup, finally got around to watching White Actress, the movie that launched a thousand lawsuits, once it became free—well, no additional cost, whatever, shut up—to us cheapskate Disney+ subscribers unwilling to shell out $30 to watch it alone on our iPads.

Eh, by this point I’d waited around two years to see this, not like another few months was going to make much of a difference. I’ve already missed whatever cultural moment this movie might have had, and I don’t think it really every had much of one, other than people’s morbid curiosity about its box office numbers and the current schadenfreude over the Mouse getting fucked over by the talent, for a change.

So with the incredible timeliness and cultural impact that could only be achieved by a Blogspot site written by a middle-aged white man, here are my thoughts.

“Opinion without insight is worthless”, or so they say and they’re probably right, so with that in mind …

Fuck.

Like having no impact, no audience and no relevance has ever stopped me before. On with the show. More content! More! MORE!

My overall impression is the movie hamstrings itself by trying to do too many things at once. There’s some genuinely nice interpersonal drama about a fucked-up family kinda sorta learning to forgive one another and reconcile, but there’s also this whole other storyline about the exploitation of women that doesn’t quite link to the family drama, then there’s a kind of dealing-with-guilt thing CMYK 0/0/0/100 Woman Whose Husband Has Died is supposedly going through, all of which has to be squeezed in between cheesy CGI slugfests.

The family business is easily the strongest, as it’s the most developed, gets the most screen time, is the most concrete and as a result, hits hardest. Turns out Female Venomous Spider used to live Stateside as a kid, in a fake family that was part of the deep cover identities of two Russian agents. She has a happy life until their cover gets blown and they have to fly a Cessna from Ohio to Cuba, and no that doesn’t make much sense to me or anybody else who knows anything about geography. On landing in Cuba, the mission over and her usefulness at an end, ScarJo and sister Florence Pugh are promptly discarded by the people she had come to regard as her parents and the two girls are recycled for training as assassins.

The tangled feelings here are some of the best character work Marvel has ever done, which is a low bar for a property mainly about punching things, but still. Florence resents ScarJo for getting out and escaping to the West without ever trying to get her out, or even see if she was okay. They both hate foster-dad Red Guardian (Dave Harbour), an ageing, insensitive, sloppily sentimental and self-centered has-been interested only in war stories about his glory days. Meanwhile scientist mom Malena (Rachel Weisz) is a cold fish who can’t admit, even to herself, that these people matter to her. There’s a nice conversation between Flo and ScarJo beginning to bond over beers, then a dinner scene where all these old feelings come bubbling to the surface that is just the chef’s kiss, topped with a nice cherry of a bit between Dave and Flo where a Homer-esque Red Guardian reveals the soft side beneath his loutish exterior.

But that’s promptly interrupted by an action sequence.

They all have to go galloping off to take down the “Red Room”, a secret aerial facility where young orphan or homeless girls are turned into killers by a creepily Harvey Weinstein-esque dude named Dreykov (Ray Winstone). Giving Marvel’s most prominent female character a #MeToo moment isn’t necessarily a bad choice, but it doesn’t connect with any of the family stuff we’ve just been immersed in.

It’s not an issue that really gets shown to us, other than the odd choice of having a slowed-down, female vocal version of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” play over scenes of Nat’s indoctrination into the Red Room and I love this song, man, haven’t listened to it in ages, but love it, had to go back and listen to the whole album again, I remember everybody in class getting excited when one kid came back with a copy of “Nevermind” the day it was released and there was me wondering what tf everybody was losing their minds over and I later found that same kid became like a Jesuit or something, man, life’s paths are weird and ANYWAY, much as this song hits all my nostalgia buttons, let’s admit the lyrics are so very, very not about women’s oppression, "Here we are now, entertain us" is in no way, shape or form a call to action about anything and neither is most of this movie.

To complicate matters more, we learn through disjointed and vague flashbacks that part of the deal for ScarJo becoming an Avenger was to try to kill Dreykov with a bomb, only the bomb not only failed to kill Dreykov, it also mutilated his daughter (Olga Kurylenko and there’s something odd about casting a model-beautiful woman as a scarred burn victim, but hey, it’s cool that Olga is getting to do all these roles). The movie never actually shows us any of this, maybe because they worried it would make ScarJo a little too unlikeable, or else it was a late addition to the story and there was no footage.

In any event, the total lack of dramatization other than ScarJo looking a bit mournful for a few seconds means the whole overcoming guilt thing adds nothing to the story other than a mild sense of confusion as to why it was included at all.

In that sense, it is better than the victimization of women angle, as this relies on a series of out-there-even-by-Marvel’s-standards bullshit plot devices, pheromone lock anyone, overdone CGI and an unconvincing henchman whose superpower is kind of lame: The Taskmaster is supposed to be able to mimic the fighting styles of anyone she sees, but all this means is she strikes one or two poses—poses the movie goes out of its way to make fun of in two other scenes, neatly undermining any sense of threat.

The best things here are Harbour and Pugh, the first because washed-out superhero dad isn’t something Marvel has ever tried to do before so it’s a refreshing change, the second because her character is just the right shade of Deadpool self-aware while also being the emotional core of the story. Doesn’t hurt that Pugh is just button cute and fun to watch in every scene.

Black Widow is the least super of the Avengers superheroes (c’mon, even Hawkeye has a bow) so this movie could easily have been more of a slick spy story in the vein of “Atomic Blonde” or “Salt”. It absolutely isn’t and the over-the-top Marvelly bits jar strangely with the very down to earth reconnecting with your past bits.

I think focusing on family would have made a nice capstone to the character and to ScarJo’s run in the MCU. I’m not one who thinks there’s no relevancy to this movie just because we know the character gets killed off in movie that came out earlier but supposedly takes place later, I mean Jesus people, “Titanic” made over a billion at the box office, not like anybody was exactly shocked how that one turned out. Still, they could have leaned into the dramatic irony a little more, maybe giving us more of a signpost as to how this character came to feel that the world was worth sacrificing her life for.

This movie had a veritable Lord of the Rings plethora of endings as they tried to tie up the family thing, the family thing again, the guilt over the past thing and the exploited girls thing, AND the setup for “Avengers End Game” thing AND the setup for Flo’s ongoing role in the MCU and yet … and yet they never give us a satisfying goodbye to Natasha.

They come close. There’s one shot of her looking into the sunset, determined, steeled, ready to do what needs to be done. That might have done it. But then we get ScarJo in a blond wig saying goodbye to some dude we, the audience, barely know, with a flip line about having two families. It’s more her fixer’s big moment than hers, really.

And with that she CGI flies into the sunset. A kind of flippant goodbye that serves as an appropriate commentary on her throwaway role in the series, maybe, but not exactly a rousing climax to a decade of movies.

Friday, October 8, 2021

Marvel's "What If...?" (Episode 9)

Episode 9: “What if we tied the whole thing up with a big ole bow? And arrow?”

Sort of a part two this week that wraps up the Ultimate Ultron storyline from last week, and before I start with the bitching, let me say it wraps it up, as well as the whole first season, in a pretty satisfying way. All our favorites are back from their one-off episodes, so here’s Captain Britain only they call her Captain Carter because you don’t want to alienate the yanks, Party Thor, Killermongerer, Cthulhu Strange, Chadwick “Star Chad” Boseman, Post Apoc Widow and a new friend in the form of a Gamora who feels like her episode got cut from the season at the last minute, sorry babe. The zombies are even in there.

It’s basically one long fight scene, which gets a bit repetitive, here they are ducking behind a magical shield, ah here they are ducking behind a magical shield again, wait, what’s this, oho, they’re going to duck behind a magical shield this time. Lots of punching but then it's Marvel so I think you could have guessed. Ah, but it’s all good fun in a kind of hammy, cheesy way. Some of the twists don’t make a lick of sense, but then again neither does the whole concept of a robot who is so tough he just punches his way between dimensions.

There’s always been a bit of an RPG feel to the MCU in the way it has attempted to impose consistency and rules on the pull-whatever-out-of-our-asses world of comic book writing, and here we see the problem that arises in many long-running RPG worlds and campaigns: Power creep. The constant need to have this or that character be even biggerer and more badder and tougher than the last results in Ultimate Ultron, an invincible bad guy who is not merely the strongest thing in the universe, but the strongest thing in ANY universe EVER, thereby making him fairly useless as an antagonist because who could ever be a threat to that?

The workaround is, as usual, to have a good guy who ALSO just happens to be the strongest thing in the whole wide entire universe of universes times a zillion, what luck, so the two perfectly cancel each other out and the fight scenes can progress with the punching exactly as they do in every other single MCU movie. This was my gripe with the last episode, yes, I know, I am still on the "Resolving everything with punching" thing. OK. We’ll move on.

The writers have evidently learned the trick that audiences only remember the peak and the ending of any experience and nothing in between, because this episode is rescued from mere adequacy with a nice little series of vignettes promising happily ever afters for some of the more abused characters. Last-human-alive Widow gets a whole new universe to play in, Dr. Very Strange gets a job keeping a lid on a pocket universe, and Captain Carter goes back to what will evidently become a threesome with her, Widow and a resurrected Steve Rogers. Yowza. The sexual tension between Carter and Widow might be the best bit of this whole episode, nay, the whole season.

Q: Wouldn't it have been cool if, instead of the usual opening credits and intro monolog, they'd had Ultron take over the show and deliver the opening lines, had all the credits be "Producer: Albertron Davies" or "Director: Kevon Ultreige" by "Ultron Studios" y'know really play up the fact that this character has taken over the entire universe, huh, huh, wouldn't it?

A: No.

Q: So at the end, two forces are locked in eternal, perfectly balanced battle: An evil genius in an indestructible robot body versus … some guy with a chip on his shoulder?

A: Yes. Totally evenly matched.

Q: Enough about the individual episodes, what do we think about the series as a whole?

A: Limited by its obsession with resolving everything through punching. Yes, I am back on the punching things beef. Deal with it.

But yeah, a little unambitious, a little unimaginative, content to doodle and draw silly faces in the margins, gender or identity swap one character or have slightly different combinations of superheroes beat each other up, when it could do some interesting storytelling and use our familiarity with these characters to explore what makes them, us, anybody tick.

It won’t and as a result this series was at its most fun when it was at its least serious. Not everything has to have some deeper meaning, I guess.