I just saw someone say that there's no stakes in the Black Widow movie because we already know Natasha's final fate.
Some of you never read an entire series of books by getting the individual parts at a used book store as they became available and it shows.
Some of you never read an entire series of books by getting the individual parts at a used book store as they became available and it shows.
And before anyone replies with one of the 11,732 other reasons they're not interested in the Black Widow film, consider: I was talking about this one specific thing, and also I didn't ask. :)
There are a lot of things I find annoying pitfalls in prequels. One is the tendency to get the gang together too early, shoving characters whose relationships we watched start/grow organically together as childhood friends or whatever.
("Darth Vader Made C-3PO Syndrome")
("Darth Vader Made C-3PO Syndrome")
I grew up in an age when you had to watch TV shows as they came on, which meant missing episodes, seeing re-runs out of order, etc. Movies? Even worse. Home video was still kind of an emerging technology when I was a kid.
And I guess in fairness I think it's possible it's less about dramatic tension ("Will Black Widow die in the superhero movie about Black Widow? Who knows! Oh, wait, we know she doesn't.") and more about having already had a sense of closure on her story?
But again, I think that comes from having a specific sort of experience/relationship with storytelling that was once an inaccessible luxury for more of us and is now pretty commonplace in this on-demand world.
This thread isn't about other people being wrong. It's just weird to me to consider "Oh, I already know how this ends." as a reason to not be invested in a character.
Of course, it's also weird to me to think that it used to be Very Normal to buy a ticket for a movie that was already playing, go sit down in the middle of it, and watch through the ending until you got back to where you came in.
