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Spoilers Marvel Cinematic Universe spoiler-heavy speculation thread

What grade would you give the Marvel Cinematic Universe? (Ever-Changing Question)

  • Total voters
    185
There have been plenty of great movies that aren't "political", but just because there have been some, doesn't mean that no movies should be political, and comic books have dealt with current issues going all the way back to the beginning, so it makes sense that the movies would too.

Christopher said:
Adrianna Tomaz is a comics character who's herself an ethnicity-swapped version of Andrea Thomas/Isis from 1970s TV. (Not to mention being an Arabic character played by an Iranian actress.)
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Didn't Legends of Tomorrow do that first with Tala Ashe as Zari Tomaz/Tarazi?
 
Turtletrekker said:
Also, art being political is hardly a recent thing. Once upon a time it was considered a good thing. Its only a an issue in these recent dark days because one side of the political spectrum has become so extreme, rigid and fragile in their narrow beliefs.
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People would have "hated" the Marvel Comics of the Sixties and Seventies. They were heavily political. Especially Captain America under Englehart.

wayoung said:
"Well, it didn't have gender/race swapped characters or force in someone who is LGBTQ. That's political. That other stuff isn't."
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Mind blown.
 
JD said:
Didn't Legends of Tomorrow do that first with Tala Ashe as Zari Tomaz/Tarazi?
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No, the comics did it first, introducing Adrianna Tomaz/Isis in 2006, loosely based on the 1975 TV character, and giving her Egyptian/Kahndaqi heritage. Both Zari Tomaz/Tarazi and the movie's Adrianna Tomaz are adaptations of the comics character. (Although it's interesting that both versions were played by Iranian-American actresses when Kahndaq is usually depicted as an Arabic-speaking country on the Sinai Peninsula.)
 
JD said:
Oh, I didn't realize she'd been in the comics.
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Well, I don't think they did that much with her in the comics. And what they did do with her, from the descriptions I've read, was extremely dark and disturbing for a character adapted from a wholesome children's show.
 
Christopher said:
No, the comics did it first, introducing Adrianna Tomaz/Isis in 2006, loosely based on the 1975 TV character, and giving her Egyptian/Kahndaqi heritage. Both Zari Tomaz/Tarazi and the movie's Adrianna Tomaz are adaptations of the comics character. (Although it's interesting that both versions were played by Iranian-American actresses when Kahndaq is usually depicted as an Arabic-speaking country on the Sinai Peninsula.)
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I think they made Zari Iranian-American in LOT.

JD said:
Oh, I didn't realize she'd been in the comics.
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The character has a convoluted history, beginning with "The Secrets of Isis" Saturday morining TV show, which was a companion to the "Shazam" show. DC later based a new character on the one from the TV. That character is the one the LOT and Black Adam is based on.
Wiki tells me "The Secrets of Isis" is currently owned by Universal.
 
Nerys Myk said:
I think they made Zari Iranian-American in LOT.
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Yes, they did, which is why they changed her surname to Tarazi after a timeline shift. In the original timeline, she came from a dystopian future where her family changed their name to Tomaz to avoid persecution, but in the altered timeline, they were free to keep their original Iranian surname.
 
Kai "the spy" said:
I'd just like to add that Michael Bay films are very political.

Aside from almost all of them being very pro-military (a pre-requisite for technical support from the US military), just Armageddon alone had NASA turn to blue collar workers (feeding the scientific elites vs. common person narrative) in order to save the world, those workers picking never having to pay taxes again for the rest of their lives as their rewards (because nobody is a patriot when it comes to taxes), and at the end when *spoilers* one of the people had to stay behind to detonate the explosives and destroy the asteroid, the Russian was the only volunteer, but STILL they picked straws, because God forbid the world is saved by a non-American.

And that's not even talking about films like 13 Hours or Ambulance.

Bay's films are very political. It's just taking stances that those complaining about politics in entertainment tend to agree with.
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Thank you. I wanted to bring up an example like this, but couldn't think of a good one. The only examples I could think of were movies like Rambo (the sequels) and similar flag flying action movies. Your examples work well because Michael Bay movies tend to appeal to a wide range of viewers--where people of different political opinions tend to enjoy them equally.
 
theenglish said:
Thank you. I wanted to bring up an example like this, but couldn't think of a good one. The only examples I could think of were movies like Rambo (the sequels) and similar flag flying action movies. Your examples work well because Michael Bay movies tend to appeal to a wide range of viewers--where people of different political opinions tend to enjoy them equally.
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What really gets me is the bit with the Russian at the end. Because they wrote him to volunteer and all the Americans to simply ignore that. They could just have had the Russian not volunteer at all, but they went with that.

People who don't agree with the politics of Bay's films tend to simply ignore them in a "brain off, just enjoy the movie" way, to a point where now a lot of people don't even see these movies as political. But even that bit, when my brothers and I first watched that movie as teenagers, we thought that was fucked up. It was like the point where movie-patriotism jumped the shark.

In the past, I've had some people try to defend that moment, saying the Russian wasn't trustworthy. Either they mixed up the Russian and Steve Buscemi in their memory, or they were kind of telling about themselves, because while the Russian was depicted as funny and weird, he was never depicted as incompetent or unreliable.
 
Kai "the spy" said:
What really gets me is the bit with the Russian at the end. Because they wrote him to volunteer and all the Americans to simply ignore that. They could just have had the Russian not volunteer at all, but they went with that.
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I don't remember the way the movie handled that scene, but just in general, it seems to me that if a group of characters ignore someone volunteering for a suicide mission but instead insist on a random drawing, that's not slighting the volunteer, it's showing regard for their life by insisting that everyone take the same chance. It's saying "We don't value your life less than ours, so we'll put ourselves at the same risk as you."

Although that could still be seen as a pro-American statement by saying that Americans value lives more than Russians do. Although it seems to play more into the usual trope of Russians being fatalistic by nature.
 
Rich Watson said:
What's been hilarious this month has been watching right-wingers get angry at The X-Men turning Woke. Because apparently they got through the past 60 years without realising what those characters stand for and have always stood for.
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Did something happen with the X-Men this month?
 
JD said:
There have been plenty of great movies that aren't "political", but just because there have been some, doesn't mean that no movies should be political, and comic books have dealt with current issues going all the way back to the beginning, so it makes sense that the movies would too.
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It is funny because I go to enjoy a movie. I often come out of a movie and say that was a good escape movie. Then someone next to me will say it was too political or woke for them. I am like "Really"? I never pick up on things like that. Just make an entertaining flick and I am good.
 
It looks like it was only posted an hour ago, so there is a chance it might get pulled, but Florence Pugh posted video from behind the scenes of Thunderbolts on Istagram an hour ago. Here's the IGN article, which is where I first found out about the post.
She jokes around a bit about what she can and can't show, so there is a chance if she caught something she shouldn't have, the video might get pulled. The biggest thing we see clearly is her new costume, which has a bit of a military, special forces look to it.
 
Oh yeah, I'm sure she was given the OK to take a video on set, but there's still a chance she caught something she was supposed to. They did seem to start to panic when she started panning around past the screens and the set.
 
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