The MCU is pretty same-y aesthetic wise, but honestly I don’t care because I love the dramatic shots of people flying in the air. Also WandaVision bucks some of the more recent superhero movie trends and gives us bright colours! Really bright colours! Hooray!
Two thoughts I had while making this:
a) I really wish there was more Claymation in the MCU, it can be used to such unsettling effect!
b) Every time Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda looks directly at the camera I feel like I’m about to die.
Over the past week or two I’ve been working on this!
It’s based on the 2015 “no strings” teaser trailer for Age of Ultron, as you can probably tell. I love that version of the song and how creepy it is, so it just seemed perfect to put together with footage from Wandavision.
I screencapped it over the last week or so and I discovered lots of fun things I missed while watching it first time round.
The Stark toaster light is the only splash of colour in the whole of episode one (until the stinger anyway) but it’s subtle enough that I didn’t actually notice it at first. Red for Scarlet Witch, red for Iron Man, and of course red for danger.
Hayward is almost certainly perving on this woman I think, which is 100% in character for him.
Norm’s real name, Abilash Tandon, is given in one of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it research scenes. And his driver’s licence is dated 2026, the year I’m pretty sure the MCU is at now taking the lost five years into account.
I love how both Wanda and Vision are looking at the camera at the end of episode four, especially since that’s the episode it’s revealed people in-universe are watching them.
Vision’s newspaper says, “More dramatic details about the lights in the sky.” That would’ve been the drones SHIELD were flying in, I think.
Wanda’s bedsheets are, of course, all hexagons…
I’ve pointed this one out before but I love this split-second message in the opening credits of episode 7. It’s a message from Agatha, perhaps, or from Wanda’s own subconcious.
The news screens at SWORD read “celebration for the returned” and “families reunited” i.e. the exact two things Wanda isn’t getting to do.
Vision’s body is being kept in room 101, appropriate seeing as his death and dissection was Wanda’s worst fear. (I put this one on Reddit, we’ll see how that works out.)
[EDIT: Not well. Despite how often it comes up in political discourse, turns out far fewer people than I thought have read 1984.]
I might have mentioned this before as well, but I love the little Wizard of Oz reference here.
“The power of mother earth” seems to sum up Agatha’s witchiness nicely. (Or what little we learned of it, I’m still not exactly sure how her magic works.)
Mr Hart’s choking foreshadows what’s to come, Wanda accidentally choking all the townspeople. Maybe she accidentally did it to Mr Hart too.
An interesting juxaposition here since essentially a “big red” thing “kidnapped” everyone in the town. And another Wizard of Oz reference… which doubles as a meta reference since Sam Raimi directed Oz the Great and Powerful and he’ll be directing the next movie Scarlet Witch appears in!
One of the other good things about Wandavision is that it seems to have unleashed a lot of creativity, so here’s some of my favourite artworks and the like that I’ve seen on Reddit!
The last one! I had a lot of fun watching that but I feel it was a little too MCU-by-the-numbers for me. You know… “hero cleverly defeats villain/touching goodbye/sequel hook” bit. Not that the goodbye wasn’t touching, of course. I’m so glad they kept Vision dead (well, more or less) otherwise it negates the whole point of the show, which is that you have to move on past your grief and you can’t bring back the dead.
I’ll miss him though. I loved his weird brand of superhero-mythology philosophising.
There’s a part of me that almost feels like Agatha didn’t need to be in this show. I’m very glad she was (heh, I loved the Wizard of Oz reference, man Katherine Hahn is a shoo-in for the Wicked Witch if they really are remaking that movie isn’t she) but… I dunno, towards the end she felt a bit suplus to requirements, like Marvel realised audiences were expecting a big-budget flying battle and threw a couple of them in. I do like that Wanda did something pretty much… geniunely terrible to defeat her though. That has implications that are really interesting for the character going forward. As does the loss or maybe “loss” of the twins. Losing her children was what triggered the original comics version of House of M if I remember rightly?
God I LOVE Wanda’s Scarlet Witch costume. It was just really, really well done. And not sexualised! Look:
As a big fan of superhero costume design WandaVision might have been worth it for that alone?
Moving on… the Pietro reveal was, uh… disappointing. So no X-Men universe after all, unless something’s going to happen in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. Which this last episode really felt more like a prequel to, not that that’s neccessarily a bad thing. It’s just… Weird. That was a weird choice. I’ve seen people online expressing A LOT of disappointment about that and I can’t really blame them.
Oooh I have other questions which I guess might be answered in future stories too – Was Monica’s Skrull friend the friend she made in Captain Marvel, all grown up now? And she was the aerospace engineer, right? I’m not quite sure. Is it Nick Fury who wants to see her?
Also WHAT HAPPENED TO THE BEEKEEPER?! We never found out. Justice for the beekeeper.
I might write a few more things later in other posts, but there’s a part of me that thinks, even accepting a few bits of this finale were quite disappointing… I’ve had SO MUCH FUN watching it. Not just the actual watching part either, the bit where everyone goes online afterwards and screams theories at each other and just gets excited like we’re all leaving a movie theater. Seeing as how, you know, no movie theatres and precious little human interaction right now that’s really been quite a big deal to me. So thank you, WandaVision makers.
