The finale of What If was today, and though I’ve had some pretty big quibbles with this show I liked it overall. But I was so confused when Gamora showed up! Pleased but confused, because despite her being on the posters we’d seen absolutely nothing regarding her so far?
Turns out her episode was cancelled due to COVID restrictions and it’ll be on next year! That’s something to look forward to I guess, but as soon I saw her on the poster I was really looking forward to that episode, couldn’t they have cut the Party Thor one instead?
Anyway! Some thoughts on that finale:
-Black Widow and Captain Carter were giving each other some very significant looks in that episode but of course Disney wouldn’t go there.
-Frankly the last five or so minutes of this episode felt like a better tribute to Natasha than the actual Black Widow movie did.
-How can you all not guess Killmonger would betray you? He has “kill” in his name!
-Blink and you’ll miss this, but T’Challa went back to get Peter Quill and now they’re bros! Oh that’s nice. Wonder if we’ll get any of that in season two.
-The revelation of a living Steve at the end of the credits was expected, but I really wish Peggy would get at least one ending that doesn’t involve Steve.
This isn’t a bad movie, the opening sequence alone is worth the price of admission, but oh man I just feel like it would’ve landed so much better if it actually had released between Civil War and Infinity War, y’know? Cos since Natasha is dead in the MCU now it just feels so…begrudging. Like it feels more like a origin movie for Yelena as the Black Widow replacement than a showcase for Natasha, which is what it should have been.
BIG SPOILERS ahead:
I was really happy to see the after-credits scene, finally we see that someone bothered to give Natasha an actual grave even! …and yet the touching moment gets ruined when Julia Louis-Dreyfus shows up blowing her nose and making quips. See I hate it when the MCU does that, instantly throwing aside actual emotion and going straight for the jokes and this movie does it a lot. Also the only scene we ever got of someone mourning Natasha post-Endgame and it was just a teaser in disguise for the Hawkeye Show, blegh.
Other feelings:
-So the thing referenced in The Avengers about Hawkeye and Natasha in Budapest, turns out that involved Natasha killing a child?! (Or so she thought, but still.) And then in Avengers she and Clint are all cute and quippy about the event which involved Natasha killing a child?! Okay I know that probably it’s just that no-one bothered to go back and check all the dialogue in the previous films but oh my god that makes Natasha sound like a total monster now.
-Melina is much, much too easily forgiven for a character who helped deprive people of their free will and is partly responsible for the Red Room in the first place. (The Mary Sue thinks so too, turns out.) Plus you know, there was that scene where she tortures an animal for at least a minute in front of horrified onlookers, which didn’t EXACTLY endear her to me.
-A lot of Natasha’s driving force in this film is regarding the guilt she feels about the aforementioned child being collateral damage, which is good, except… There is an insane amount of OTHER collateral damage in this film! Even assuming there were somehow no buildings around the very large area where the Red Room fell, what about the cars on the road during the tank chase scene, or the hundreds of people in the prison?! Oh, that’s another trope I hate, I hate it so much. In a movie about someone making up for an act of collateral damage the decision to show all that is… ?!?!?
I’m sorry! I liked a lot of this movie! But I always loved MCU Natasha and I just wish I felt more from her solo movie than, “oh… that’s it?”
For the FIRST EVER! edition of Fourteen Favourite Shots I decided to do Avengers Endgame.
…which is in many ways a very ugly movie. I’M SORRY! But when I was screencapping it it felt like, so many scenes have this weird grey filter over them? Why?
However since I’m enhancing all the colours I suppose that doesn’t matter much.I still found it much harder than I expected to get a whole 14 shots I really loved though.
But! I do really love how the scenes on Vormir are lit. And that shot of Gamora on the top right is possibly my favourite shot of her ever – this tiny figure facing down the whole world.
I also totally love how there are two shots in here of a man staring at the woman he loves from the wrong side of a timeline.
Hey remember how I posted a bunch of good Star Wars cosplays for May 4? Well, I’m gonna stick with that idea! Here’s a bunch of equally good MCU cosplays I found on Reddit.
The news Marvel fans didn’t want to hear has arrived. Black Widow will not be released on May 1st. Variety confirmed the news today. There is no new release date set for the first film in Phase 4. This follows the major theater chains in the United States shutting down over the last 24 hours,…
Looks good. Man it’s weird to think MCU fandom asked for this for years and years and years and it only happened after she was canonically dead.
This being the MCU I suspect it will have some heartwrenching twist, so my money is on one of Natasha’s other family members being the person under the Taskmaster mask.
To celebrate the occasion, here’s some of my favourite ladies from fiction!
Row 1: Amy Pond (Doctor Who), Sephy Hadley (Noughts and Crosses), Gamora (Guardians of the Galaxy/MCU), Rose Tico (Star Wars), Elsa (Frozen/Disney), Melissa Chartres (The Last Man on Earth)
Row 2: Eowyn (The Lord of the Rings/Middle Earth), Quinn Ergon (Final Space), The Thirteenth Doctor (Doctor Who), Princess Bubblegum (Adventure Time), Jane Foster (Thor/MCU), Amy Santiago (Brooklyn 99)
Row 3: Brook Soso (Orange is the New Black), Nebula (Guardians of the Galaxy/MCU), Erica Dundee (The Last Man on Earth), Kitty Winter (Sherlock Holmes), Rose Tyler (Doctor Who), Briony Tallis (Atonement)
Row 4: Meredith Quill (Guardians of the Galaxy/MCU), Missandei (Game of Thrones), Rey (Star Wars), Donna Noble (Doctor Who), Carol Pilbasian (The Last Man on Earth), Esmeralda (The Hunchback of Notre Dame/Disney)
Row 5: Sansa Stark (Game of Thrones), Ash Graven (Final Space), Tiana (The Princess and the Frog/Disney), Sophia Burset (Orange is the New Black), Misty (Pokemon), Clara Oswald (Doctor Who)
Row 6: Bill Potts (Doctor Who), Mary Brown (Paddington), Mako Mori (Pacific Rim), Gwen Stacy (Spider-Man), Jackie Tyler (Doctor Who), Ursula Ditkovich (Spider-Man)
Row 7: Yaz Khan (Doctor Who), Mary Jane Watson (Spider-Man), Marceline (Adventure Time), Michelle (10 Cloverfield Lane,), Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow/MCU), Mantis (Guardians of the Galaxy (MCU)
Trailers for Black Widow and the new Disney+ Marvel shows were highlights of the trailers at this year’s Super Bowl.
At some point we all have to choose, notes Scarlet Johannsen’s Natasha in the Black Widow trailer.
And there’s the first proper glimpse of the Falcon and Bucky in action, a new take on the Scarlet Witch and Vision – and a vengeful Loki in the Disney+ trailer
