Really fascinating to see a lot of superhero fans who hate Alan Moore holding up Grant Morrison as a creator who writes with “shame, malice or false pretence.”

(I love Morrison, to be clear.)

Have you not read any of their work from the past decade and change? Since around 2011, there’s been a really profound sadness and disillusionment to Morrison’s mainstream superhero work, which is often about the limits that exist within the framework of corporate comics.

It’s really not subtle.

https://twitter.com/darren_mooney/status/1163412517605040129

Broke: "Oppenheimer's politics will be 'wrong' viewed through the lens of Twitter discourse."

Woke: "'Oppenheimer' is likely about how guilty Christopher Nolan feels for reshaping pop culture with the 'Dark Knight' trilogy and studios taking exactly the wrong lessons from it." I don't know if it will be, but Nolan's movies are often *about* his own work. Often specifically the morality of it.

Whether that's the morality of tricking the audience into catharsis ("Inception") or abandoning your family to make an epic adventure ("Interstellar").

It'll be "The Marvels" before we have any real sense of how/if "superhero fatigue" is progressing.

"Guardians", "Spider-Verse" and "The Flash" are exceptional cases in ways that will likely boost their box office. "Blue Beetle" and "Kraven" are exceptional in the opposite way.

https://twitter.com/ScottMendelson/status/1655621552455680000

"Guardians" is a capper to a beloved trilogy. "Spider-Verse" is, as @ScottMendelson has argued, primed to be a breakout sequel starring Spider-Man. "The Flash" has two Batmen in it.

Whereas "Blue Beetle" and "Kraven" would be tough sells to general audiences at "peak superhero."

I adore Jim Starlin's cosmic comics. I think they are massively under-appreciated as part of the evolution of seventies Marvel, and belong alongside the work of Miller or Claremont or Simonson.

Adam Warlock is one of the great Marvel characters, just like Thanos was. The Adam Warlock who appears in "Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3" is very different from the character who appears in the comics.

But, you know what? So was the version of Thanos who appeared in "Infinity War" and "Endgame", and people seemed fine with that.

#NowWatching "The Long Good Friday"

"The Long Good Friday" remains one of the best gangster films ever made. Even just in terms of pure filmmaking, it's a ruthlessly efficient piece of work with a powerhouse central performance from Bob Hoskins. "The Long Good Friday" is also one of the great snapshots of the early Thatcher era, a vision of Britain on the cusp of the eighties, caught between its past and future.

Enchanted by visions of bringing American capitalism in Europe, but haunted by the legacy of its empire.

This week at @EscapistMag, I wrote about the big announcements from Marvel at #SDCC.

As the larger structure of the "Multiverse Saga" comes into focus, we can clearly see its antagonists.

But, who exactly are supposed to be the heroes of this epic?

escapistmagazine.com/marvel-mcu-mul… The "Infinity Saga" had a clear structure.

Each phase had standalone projects, dovetailing into a crossover at the end of the phase, with the scale escalating each time.

Each "Infinity Saga" phase had a movie led by Captain America, Iron Man and Thor.

escapistmagazine.com/marvel-mcu-mul…

Since the big Marvel Studios announcements yesterday, I’ve been thinking about a very niche and very nerdy thing that bothers me about the MCU compared to the comics from which it is drawing.

Head’s up, it is very nerdy and very niche, but it still bugs me just a little bit. So, obviously the movies theoretically draw from across the length and breadth of the source comics.

However, in reality, they are largely driven by the mainstream continuity since around 2005.

That’s where you get events like “Civil War”, “Secret Invasion”, “Dark Reign”, etc.

I feel like nobody has really commented on the fact that Warner Bros. marked the streaming release of a fairly major film with an overt hit piece on that film that was very clearly sourced within the studio.

And not the sort of “gossip” pieces you saw with “Fant4stic”, etc. That’s not conspiracy theory stuff, to be clear. It’s why that story was timed to drop when it did - to coincide with the film’s availability for digital purchase.

It’s a remarkable piece of messaging *from* (not *about*, but *from*) a major studio about one of their own films.

I empathize with this, truly.

But given that “Prey” is easily the best franchise film Disney have produced this year, unless you consider “Pixar” to be a franchise, and given that so few theatrical franchise films allow just basic storytelling, it’s maybe not the worst thing.

https://twitter.com/_ChristopherM/status/1550363400802377728

Like, a theatrical “Predator” movie probably has to look like “The Predator”, in that it has to serve larger long-term franchising goals more than just being a film.

Similarly, “Alien: Covenant” is what a theatrical “Alien” film has to look like, serving those same demands.

#NowWatching “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.” “The Wrath of Khan” is one of those great movies that has somewhat been flattened in the memory of it. It’s brilliant, and epic, and propulsive.

But it is also elegiac and mournful, the story of old men who lead the young to slaughter while chasing phantoms of glories long past.

I actually quite like that there are certain recurring settings/characters in #DoctorWho largely tied to a particular version of the show.

"Peladon" (and arguably the "... Space" stories) for the Third Doctor, Sil for the Sixth Doctor, "the Other" for the Seventh and so on.

https://twitter.com/saintwalker98/status/1549604658234138624

In the Moffat era, you have characters like the Paternoster Gang and Rivier Song largely tied to the Eleventh Doctor.

In the Chibnall era, you obviously have the whole "Timeless Child" mythology. All of which, within the show, remains largely tied to a particular era.

We have reached the point in the "Top Gun" discourse where the "Top Gun" discourse consists of debates over whether there should be "Top Gun" discourse. To be fair, "Maverick" gets away with what it does by (a.) being less jingoistic than "Top Gun" and (b.) being more open in its jingoism than most of its competitors.

You go into "Maverick" knowing you're getting a recruitment film. That's not true of "Captain Marvel", say.

This week, I discuss at @EscapistMag about how #StrangeNewWorlds demonstrates the limits of allegory.

In its eagerness to retreat to the nostalgia of nineties "Star Trek", "Strange New World" eagerly shoves Spock back in the celluloid closet.

escapistmagazine.com/star-trek-stra… This week's episode of #StrangeNewWorlds is about how gender non-conforming individuals lie about their identities to trick people.

And the humanitarian crisis at the border is a ruse orchestrated by criminal gangs to infiltrate/invade.

It's not good.

escapistmagazine.com/star-trek-stra…

An interesting aspect of the "Mission: Impossible" franchise compared to other big franchises is that it's not really about fighting advancing impersonal technology, which is even there in "Top Gun: Maverick."

It's very literally an old-school action hero fighting postmodernism.

https://twitter.com/AceyMainman/status/1528124222190460928

Obviously that theme is the subtext of the modern "James Bond" franchise, but it's couched metaphors about drone warfare that makes Bond outdated - until he's not!

I love that the later "Mission: Impossible" movies are like, "Ethan is fighting the very idea of moral ambiguity."

I am quite enjoying Christopher Cantwell and Cafu’s “Iron Man” run, in large part because it feels like a very clever exploration of what superheroes should be, as fictional archetypes.

(Iron Man #1.) There’s a sense that this version of Tony Stark is quite exhausted by the sort of genre shifts that have taken root in American comics in the past few decades, where these characters are effectively demi-gods, and so wants to get back to basics.

(Iron Man #1.)

“A Good Man Goes to War” is very much about the idea that the Doctor probably shouldn’t be (or at least shouldn’t primarily be) an unstoppable universal force like “the Oncoming Storm.”

It’s something of a deconstruction of Davies’ post-Time War characterisation of the Doctor.

https://twitter.com/vacuumcomments/status/1527237603359064064

It’s very much a deconstruction of the angsty “darker and edgier” version of “Doctor Who” that could be seen to extend from having a protagonist who committed multiple premeditated genocides.

It drops him into a rape revenge narrative, and points out how that just doesn’t work.

“You’re running out of time.”

#NowWatching “Minority Report”

Apparently I’m on an accidental Steven Spielberg binge.

This is my first time rewatching this in decades. I last saw it as a teenager, and I didn’t love it.

I thought it was too cynical. I was so young. “Most of our scrambIes are fIash events. We rareIy see premeditation anymore.”
“PeopIe have gotten the message.”
“Uh-huh.”

It’s hard to believe, but “Minority Report” was written and shot before 9/11.

Which odd, because it feels like a quintessential War on Terror film.

Not that he needs me to say it, but @SiddhantAdlakha is a gentleman and a scholar, and one of the finest critics to write about the Marvel Cinematic Universe from a place of knowledge and insight. Also, it is frankly terrifying that @ign would consider replacing him as a reviewer on #Loki because he gave an opinion on the show that rabid Marvel fans didn’t like.

It’s a potentially chilling critical precedent. “Validate fans’ opinions, or else…!”

#NowWatching “Starship Troopers”

I haven’t watched this in years, but I remember it being the kind of movie that I was astonished people hated.

I’m really glad to see the critical opinion is slowly coming around on Paul Verhoeven’s satirical masterpiece. “Service guarantees citizenship.”

“Starship Troopers” is one of those movies that I remember seeing for the first as an eleven year old kid with my parents when it first came out on DVD/VHS.

And even as a dumb eleven year old kid, I was smart enough to “get” it, to an extent.

#NowWatching "Suicide Squad" (2016)

I have a reason, I promise. "Floyd, step up to the door."

One of the most interesting things about "Suicide Squad" is the weird middle-ground that it occupies in terms of production.

It's a Marvel-style IP-driven project, but it was clearly designed as a Warner Bros. talent-drive production.

Just following on from that discussion of Zack Snyder’s “Justice League”, some thoughts that were too nerdy and esoteric for the article.

In terms of positioning “Justice League” as a reconstruction, it’s obvious even looking at the comics from which it draws. “Batman v. Superman” drew very heavily from two of the biggest “dark age of comics” stories, and hinted at a third.

A lot of the Old Batman Versus Institutionally Challenged Superman stuff comes from Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns”, which ushered in “the dark age.”