SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME (2019) in SPOILERVISION

Most of the way, Jon Watts' sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming feels like an appropriately comic epilogue to the last two Avengers movies. It feels true to the spirit of Marvel Comics to treat with levity what so shortly before had seemed the ultimate disaster or tragedy. So here we get a lot of riffs on the the comical complications of the event now known as "the blip," the five-year absence of half the people of Earth, followed by their very abrupt return. It seems like almost everyone in Peter Parker's science school suffered this fate, so all the characters we met in the last film look no more than two years older now. Far From Home leans even more toward teen comedy than Homecoming did, using a class trip to Europe as its framework like a special episode of an old sitcom. Writers spend so much time developing the teen plot -- in short, Peter (Tom Holland) wants to declare his love for MJ (Zendaya) but best bud Ned (Jacob Batalon) wants them to be bachelor buddies in Europe until he almost accidentally falls for Betty Brant (Angourie Rice), while suddenly-grown Brad (Remy Hill) has his own eyes set on MJ and Flash Thompson (Tony Revolori) remains a conceited jerk. On top of that you have two comical chaperones, and on the side there's a budding romance between longtime Stark henchman Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) and Peter's frisky Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) There's so much of this early on, once we get past a prologue establishing the film's superhero credentials, that the standard supervillain plot feels secondary for quite a while. It doesn't help the supervillain plot that comics book already know what to expect from the beginning. The film, however, introduces Quentin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal), who acquires the nickname "Mysterio" from European TV, as a hero from an alternate universe who stands as Earth's only hope, in the apparently extended absence of most of the Avengers, against a quartet of rampaging elemental creatures appearing in different parts of the world. The only familiar hero Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) can lay hands on is Spidey, who finds this new crisis an unwelcome complication of his European plans but feels obliged to carry on Tony Stark's legacy. The comic book fans know Mysterio is a villain and are bound to grow impatient for the other shoe to drop as Beck befriends Peter and becomes a kind of new mentor for the young hero. The teen stuff is actually better written and definitely funnier, even if it makes Far From Home feel more like an Archie movie than a Marvel one.

The shoe finally drops once Peter is convinced that Beck is a worthier successor to Stark than he could be. He gives Beck the precious, all-powerful EDITH glasses bequeathed him by Stark, which is what Mysterio was after all along. Comics fans know the character as an illusionist and will have expected the elemental monsters to be fake. They are, in fact, a collective project, as Quentin Beck is but the leader of a clique of disgruntled former Stark Industries employees who have combined their talents to create illusions with teeth, holograms with drone air support adding up to genuine destructive power. The idea seems to be to make Mysterio Earth's greatest hero in a way that will allow all the clique to reap benefits in some corrupt way. To succeed, they need to kill the ever-suspicious Fury, but Beck is willing to let Peter live his life until Peter (and MJ) discover the truth about the elemental attacks. Now both of them, and Ned and Betty, are in mortal peril as well. While the idea of a gang of working stiffs, albeit in a higher pay grade, echoes the Vulture's gang in Homecoming, Far From Home raises the stakes from the previous film's admirably modest level as Mysterio orchestrates a mass-destruction attack on London, hoping to reinforce his heroic reputation by thwarting it after killing off anyone who may know too much. This adds up to an overlong, arguably incoherent climactic battle that has Spidey fighting drones, illusions and finally Beck himself while Happy Hogan and the primary school kids fight off drones in the Tower of London.

Gyllenhaal simply lacks the combo of charisma and gravitas Michael Keaton gave the vulture, and while the climactic fight is much busier than the climax of Homecoming it's not really an improvement. That Mysterio proves to be a one-and-done villain may also prove that neither the writers nor the actor were never very invested in the character, though he does get in a parting shot that will have ramifications for any further sequel. The weak villain condemns Far From Home to be an inferior film to Homecoming, unless you judge superhero films exclusively by the scale of action, but the ensemble of young actors remain likable enough to make their probable return still a welcome one. Holland is still a fine, easily-flustered Spidey and the other kids complement him well. Jackson is a more irascible Fury than we've seen in a while --  there's an explanation for this in the post-credits scene -- while Favreau, who goes back to the beginning of the MCU, makes a more plausible quasi-father figure for Peter. Overall, Far From Home isn't great, but thanks to most of the cast, it's hard to really dislike it.

DARK PHOENIX (2019) in SPOILERVISION

One problem with the modern superhero film cycle is that most superhero comics stories are deemed too small for the big screen. Only existential crises, ideally for both our heroes and the world, are thought to justify movies' big budgets. Films like Spider-Man: Homecoming, in which the hero thwarts a gang of thieves, are the exception. More typical was Zack Snyder's decision to get on with "The Death of Superman" in only his second film using the venerable character. So it is with the slightly less venerable Jean Grey, a charter member of the Uncanny X-Men dating back to 1963. To judge from the movies, the only reason to put the erstwhile Marvel Girl on film is to retell Chris Claremont's long story arc in which Jean survives a space disaster and becomes a being of godlike power. You wouldn't know from the movies, however, that Claremont took more than thirty issues of the X-Men comic to get Jean to the point where, having undergone mental and emotional manipulation while increasingly craving to manifest her power, she becomes Dark Phoenix and threatens the entire civilized universe. Filmmakers -- or to be specific, writer Simon Kinberg -- prefer to cut to the chase and get Jean from Phoenix to Dark Phoenix as soon as possible. Interestingly, though, Kinberg, making his second try with the material and now directing as well, tries to steer clear of the familiar "power corrupts" trope that has made the Dark Phoenix Saga a template for so many more comics over the last forty years. That's not to say that he steers clear of cliche entirely, however.

To review, we're in the new reality created by Days of Future Past, the second film with the current core cast of James McAvoy (as Charles Xavier), Michael Fassbender (as Magneto), Jennifer Lawrence (as Raven aka Mystique) and Nicholas Hoult (as Hank "Beast" McCoy). The new continuity has reached the year 1992, eight years prior to the events and release date of the original X-Men movie, but the four principal actors appear to have aged little over the decades. In the early scenes we get the best illustration yet of how reality has altered in mutants' favor. In a world where there are, to our knowledge, no non-mutant heroes (depending on how you classify Deadpool), the X-Men are the only game in town when a U.S. space shuttle gets in trouble in orbit. The President of the United States can call for help on the X-Phone, and Charles Xavier will answer. And when the X-Men return, their mission accomplished, they're acclaimed as world heroes. Xavier in particular is lionized and decorated by the government, and yet somehow the universe itself recognizes that there's something wrong with this picture. When Jean (Sophie Turner), almost sacrificing her life to save the shuttle crew, becomes possessed by primal cosmic energies she can hardly control, it's as if the cosmos has risen in rebellion against the historic anomaly and to punish Charles for some fundamental hubris.

The nature of Xavier's hubris will be familiar to any regular viewer of superhero TV shows. I really should have known what was coming when the film opened with a flashback to Jean as a little girl arguing with her parents over the car radio and unconsciously manifesting telekinesis moments before a fatal wreck. We cut to Charles taking Jean in at his mansion, but the rest of the film will fill in crucial gaps. In the present, Jean will discover that her father survived the accident. From him, she'll learn that Dad basically gave her up to Charles Xavier, wanting nothing more to do with her after his wife's death. The film seems unclear on which is the worse sin: the father's abandonment of his daughter or the surrogate father's lie. The fatal combination of the two puts poor Jean into a lethal rage that at long last liberates Jennifer Lawrence from a series that long ago had stopped offering her anything but money.

What would you do if you suddenly had immense but uncontrollable power and you killed somebody? Of course, you'd go look up Magneto, since it was long ago decided that you can't have an X-Men film without their on-again, off-again nemesis. Good ol' Eric has gathered a bunch of mutants in some shantytown, where he warily welcomes the wandering, bloodstained Jean. The girl won't answer when asked whose blood that is, but Magneto will find out soon enough. Both he and Hank McCoy had old, strong feelings for Raven, so when Beast spills the beans, after Jean has skedaddled, they decide to take revenge, while the rest of the X-Men resolve to stop them.

So far so meh, but at least it's easily better than the previous mutant movie, X-Men Apocalypse. Unfortunately, the new film promptly repeats the old film's fatal mistake by introducing an utterly boring big bad. To be accurate, this character first appears earlier in the picture, but it's not until she encounters an increasingly frightened and angry Jean that we realize how bad she's going to be. If you think Jennifer Lawrence had been phoning in her mutant performances recently, wait until you see how Jessica Chastain does it. She sends hers by snail-mail. Long story short, she's an evil alien who leads an expeditionary force of superpowered refugees from a world previously destroyed by the entity that now possesses Jean Grey. These aliens hope to harness the "Phoenix" power to build a new world -- ideally, as it develops, on the corpse of our world. If they can get the disgruntled Grey to help out, fine. If not, they have ways of taking her power for themselves. In a way, I suppose, Chastain aims for actorly authenticity. Tasked with playing an emotionless alien, she pretty much nails it. The problem is, you start to believe that the actress herself is an emotionless alien, and the suspicion is no tribute to her work. She and her apparently infinite supply of soldiers have no interesting characteristics whatsoever. Worse, her character botches the master plan by lapsing into blatant villain dialogue in Charles Xavier's hearing at the moment when she's convinced Jean to surrender her power. Feeling the need to tell Charles that she's going to kill all humans, so there, pretty much seals the aliens' fate, though we still have to sit through an initially exciting but ultimately interminable-seeming fight aboard a speeding train before the final scene between Jean and the alien queen....

Probably only long-form television could do justice to Claremont's original stories, though there, too, creative license would be inevitable. Jean Grey's power-drunkenness is a slow burn that only accelerates late in the game when she falls under the influence of the Hellfire Club -- who aren't available for the Dark Phoenix movie because they'd been used back in the Sixties-set X-Men: First Class. By no means do I argue that the Hellfire Club is essential to telling the story effectively, but a telling truer to the spirit of the original would allow time for storylines like theirs to play out. You really need the X-Men to be more regular presences in your entertainment life, instead of showing up every three years or so, for Jean's story to have anything like the impact the comics did. Doing the whole arc in two hours is hopeless, and the emotions and motivations Kinberg substitutes for the originals don't help matters. A collective failure of acting helps even less. Nobody here does their best work for the franchise with the arguable exception of Tye Sheridan's Cyclops, whose best moment is an unexpected but appreciated f-bomb threat to Magneto, proof of feelings for Jean that in comics had nearly forty years of publication time to develop by the time of the Dark Phoenix saga. As Jean, Sophie Turner seems more assured than in Apocalypse, but there's only so much she can do with the script's high-school psychoanalysis of her character, and there's nothing she can do with the void that Chastain becomes. In the film's favor, most of the characters are at least likable -- and I'll at least acknowledge that they want Magneto to be likable this time. While the main action scene goes on far too long, and the climactic confrontation includes way to many swirly lights, at times Kinberg and editor Lee Smith give the fight scenes a good punchy quality when speed is of the essence. Hans Zimmer's music is okay, I guess. That may not sound like much, but it's still better than Apocalypse, though early box-office reports indicate that that film turned people off a franchise that most now realize is moribund. Inevitably the X-Men will fall under the control of Marvel Studios following Disney's takeover of Twentieth Century-Fox. That probably means that somewhere down the line there will be more and better mutant films -- as long as Marvel can resist the very temptation their comics line planted in people's minds long ago.

AVENGERS: ENDGAME (2019) in SPOILERVISION

I laughed when the title of the sequel to Avengers: Infinity War was announced last year. "Endgame" is one of those cliche titles you see everywhere. Nearly every genre show has an "Endgame" episode. It seemed almost hilariously unimaginative of Marvel Studios to use it now. But while that made me laugh months ago, the surprising thing about the actual film is how consistently funny it is. I really shouldn't have been surprised, since humor has been crucial to the more-than-decade-long success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There seemed to be no room for comedy after the previous film, which saw half the life of the universe, if not 50% of all Marvel superheroes, snuffed out with a snap of Thanos' fingers. Yet there is such a thing as gallows humor, and there's always a new normal with room for jokes. That's how some people (or whatever Rocket is) cope with situations, after all. The really surprising thing about this is that the comedy star of the picture turns out to be Mark Ruffalo as The Incredible Hulk. In what may be his last turn in the role, Ruffalo gets to perform the popular variation of the character in which Ol' Greenskin has Bruce Banner's brain. It's alarming how at ease Ruffalo makes the mighty monster, compared to the pouty, childish Hulk of Thor: Ragnaraok and the default rage mode. This Hulk always has time to pose for selfies with fans -- for there are still fans in this traumatized world -- and, compared to normal, seems almost imperturbable, even when dealing with theoretical science over even Banner's head. There's a wonderful scene in which this new Hulk time-travels to 2012 New York during the climactic battle of the original Avengers film. In order to be inconspicuous on his mission (see below), he's advised to behave in his old self's smashing manner. The well-meaning yet hopelessly halfhearted way in which he goes about lazily growling and lackadaisically wrecking a car is, as of now, my favorite scene in the picture.

The Russo brothers and their writing partners, Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus, take an actually daring approach to the story, getting a much-anticipated catharsis out of the way about 30 minutes into the film when Thor (I shouldn't have to identify the actors by now) decapitates Thanos on the latter's retirement planet. The problem is, killing Thanos doesn't solve anything, since he'd already destroyed his Infinity Stones, making a reversal of his infamous snap impossible. From this empty bit of avenging, the film jumps forward five years to a world -- not to mention a universe, as new arrival Captain Marvel reminds us -- barely hanging on. Some of our heroes aren't even doing that. Thor has lapsed into drunken slackerdom, hanging out at New Asgard with some of his Ragnarok buddies while Valkyrie does most of the real work without anyone asking where she was when Thanos attacked the refugee ship in the last picture. Hawkeye, having lost his entire family, goes full vigilante on a global killing tour, less convinced than ever of some people's right to live. Only Tony Stark (along with the Hulk) seems better off, having given up and settled down to have a kid with Pepper Potts. Yet when Ant-Man gets randomly released from his post-credits predicament from last year, he intuits a solution from the fact that only a few hours passed by for him in the Quantum Realm while years went by outside. It takes a while to convince Stark, who worries that changing the recent past might wipe out his daughter, but once he's on board the film becomes Avengers: Timeheist -- an excuse for a valedictory tour of past MCU moments in search of Infinity Stones to preempt Thanos' seizure of them. While probably no one really wanted to revisit Thor: The Dark World, that mission gives Rene Russo an opportunity to make one of this film's many, many encore appearances by its supporting players. This middle act is more caper film than action picture, but comes to a dark climax as one team of heroes arrives at that planet where the Red Skull curates the Soul Gem, which as ever requires a love sacrifice. This results in a surprise exit from the franchise, but the sacrifice may be for naught. Thanks to a big gimme -- the idea that past evil Nebula can tap into the memories of her good future self, Thanos circa 2014 is tipped off to his future and endeavors to change some details. Thwarted then, he takes the battle to the present, only to be faced with an almost entirely replenished superhero army, plus the game-changing power of Captain Marvel. Ultimately, though, the only way to keep the Infinity Gauntlet away from Thanos is to use it against him, and as Hulk experienced using it to reverse the Snap, it would very likely prove fatal for a human to wield it.

Endgame is a fine film but lacks the relentless tension of Infinity War and barely makes it past the three-hour mark with more endings than The Return of the King, but its indulgent length feels earned. The battles aren't as ambitious or dramatic as in the previous picture, though yet again we have a strangely sexist moment when all the female heroes converge on one location for no special reason apart perhaps for the convenience of GIF makers. I suspect, however, that many people will like it more than its predecessor simply for the feels, both happy and sad. For the most part, the sequel exemplifies Marvel Studios' commitment to quality control in pursuit of a consistent defining tone. It quite self-consciously marks the end of an era, as half the original Avengers are exiting the franchise, but also takes time to point toward new directions: Thor teaming with the Guardians of the Galaxy, Sam Wilson as Captain America, etc. It is not the end some fatigued critics may have hoped for, but it does at least feel like the end of a chapter. The one-two punch of Infinity War and Endgame puts an exclamation point on what so far has been (with a handful of exceptions) an uncannily consistent run of epic entertainment.

SHAZAM! (2019) in SPOILERVISION

Pedantic genre fans probably have told you already about the convoluted publishing history of the protagonist of  David F. Sandberg's film and how another film's title should have been his. I'll limit myself to telling you that once upon a time, long long ago, the dude in the red costume with the lightning bolt was the most popular of all superheroes, but what to do with him in modern times has challenged DC Comics, his current publisher, for nearly half a century. There's been an effort to have it both ways with "the big red cheese," preserving him as an embodiment of a more innocent era of comics publishing and fandom, in part because co-creator C.C. Beck was a reactionary when it came to modernizing superheroes, but at the same time making him something of a laughingstock precisely for being the innocent among heroes. The occasional efforts to make him and his stories more complex generally haven't gone well. The default approach has been to treat him as a child in a super-adult body, sometimes emphasizing a seeming-inevitable naivete but more recently taking him in an arguably more sophomoric direction. Add to this Hollywood's preoccupation with the zero-to-hero paradigm and movie writers' own consensus on how a boy in a man's body would behave and Shazam! could have written itself with little significant input from credited screenwriter Henry Gayden.

Fortunately, the filmmakers gathered together a decent cast of child actors in support of a luckily likable Zachary Levi as the learning-on-the-fly (or learning-to-fly) hero who now takes the name of the old wizard (Djimon Honsou) who, as of old, empowers him. To be more exact, old Shazam empowers, as of old, Billy Batson (Asher Angel), the archetypal orphan who's just landed in a group home alongside his traditional playmates Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer) and Mary Bromfield (Grace Fulton) and a bunch of other kids recently introduced in the comics. We're given to understand that the old wizard has to be less choosy than he'd like, since one of the kids he rejected 45 years ago has grown up to be Mark Strong calling himself Dr. Sivana. Maybe twice the size of the hero's comics arch-enemy, the movie Sivana has used tremendous corporate resources, and presumably some mad scientist know-how, to find his way back to the old wizard's stop on the subway and claim the powers offered him long ago (i.e. at the start of the picture) by the monsters known as the Seven Deadly Sins. The old wizard has wanted a champion pure of heart but will settle for the sullen, rebellious Batson before breathing his last.

Barely conscious of his purpose, the magically-roided up Batson goes about discovering his powers, trying out different names and performing acts of petty heroism as the film becomes something like a cross between Chronicle and The Tick. In recent comics the hero has been somewhat successfully reimagined as a bit of a smartass dork, but Levi's performance leans heavily sometimes in the direction of the typical Hollywood infantile man. That's okay, though, because the point of the picture is for him, unlike the typical Hollywood infantile man, to grow out of that mode. He does this by learning to love his new extended family while leaving behind the ideal of his real mother that made every other option seem inadequate to him. It's ironic, once you actually see Shazam!, to see some people call it Spielbergian, since it actually refrains from idealizing its mother figure in favor of a "love the ones you're with" message. It's a practical message, too, since its corollary is that there's strength in numbers. The film follows current comics most closely in its conceit that all of Billy's surrogate siblings are eligible to partake of the Shazam power and thus help him fight off Sivana and the Deadly Sins. The kids are hit-or-miss as characters and their hero-forms get even less time to introduce themselves, but their innocent joy in getting superpowers -- please never let any of them go to the dark side, producers! -- is infectious. Unfortunately, they also make the climax a bit too busy and lengthy, and the action scenes here were never going to break new ground. The best super-stunt comes much earlier, when Billy has to figure out how to deal with a bus falling off an overpass, and then has to figure out how to put it down safely when there's a dog in the way. The filmmakers have a nice habit of throwing in little details like that or the increasingly frantic Santa Claus who keeps getting caught in the middle of the super-battles. Sandberg shows an admirable eye for the absurd that helps lighten the tone throughout; you have to like a film that will move into a crowd celebration for a close-up of a dancing gingerbread man. Overall, Shazam! is the sort of film that you can tell means well even when it doesn't always work, and it's hard to hold its misses against it when it hits often enough to be unpretentious fun.

DVR Diary: VENOM (2018)

For some time, Sony Pictures, clinging to the film rights to Spider-Man, has been struggling to create a cinematic universe capable of sustaining feature-film showcases for Spidey's supporting cast. Now that Spider-Man himself has been revived with help from Marvel Studios, the time seemed right to resume the larger project. The challenge presented to director Ruben Fleischer and his writers, however, was to make a movie about one of Spidey's relatively recent antagonists, only without Spider-Man. The challenge wasn't necessarily insurmountable, since Venom is one of those characters who's gone back and forth from villain to antihero since his introduction in the 1980s. Back then, disgraced journalist Eddie Brock sort of inherited the infamous black costume that Spidey acquired back in the equally infamous Secret Wars comic. The costume was, in fact, a malevolent symbiotic alien that Spider-Man, recognizing its malevolent nature, rejected. Brock, meanwhile, welcomed the opportunity to take revenge on Spidey, whom he blamed for his disgrace. The movie retains Brock (Tom Hardy) as disgraced journalist, but makes him a victim rather than an arrogant blunderer, crushed by an evil Elon Musk type (Riz Ahmed) rather than discredited for blaming the wrong man for murder. The corporate villain has acquired some gloppy aliens from one of his spacecraft and hopes to graft them onto humans in the hope of creating a hybrid spacefaring species. Nosy Brock, still sniffing a story, ends up acquiring a symbiote that encases him in an inky muscle suit and endows him with superhuman stength and speed as well as an obnoxious tongue. Much of the time, however, "Venom," as the alien critter calls itself -- is it translating to English or are those the actual syllables of its name? -- is a disembodied voice that taunts and torments Eddie by forcing him to conduct multiple conversations at the same time. Brock naturally resents this intrusion on his person, but he and the symbiote will have to work together to stop the inevitable corporate symbiote from facilitating a full-scale alien invasion of Earth.

Venom may be the ugliest superhero movie I've ever seen. The protagonist, fully costumed, is pretty much a spasmodic black blob whose activities have a certain ejaculatory quality that may help explain his/its long-term appeal. The climactic fight pits him against a slightly more silvery variation on the same basic design, and while the splattery conflict may inspire nostalgia among some for the over-rendered comics of Venom's heyday, it struck me as simply tedious. A character whose face gets covered in glop periodically seems tailor-made for Tom Hardy, who probably thought that going way over the top was only doing justice to the source material. Instead, his performance helped show that Sony, with less input from Marvel this time, lacks Marvel's knack for making its protagonists likable even when they act like jerks. Hardy is hardly helped by the uncinematic reduction of Venom to a mere voice in scenes that require Brock to act like a madman. The results are at least sometimes meant to be funny but usually fall flat. Meanwhile, as Eddie's ex, Michelle Williams collects a paycheck, while Woody Harrelson in a Raggedy Andy fright wig promises much fan service in the sequel this film somehow earned. I'd like to say that Venom's success was improbable, but it was probably the sort of superhero film many longtime comics fans had been waiting for. The best I can say about the thing is that I hope they enjoyed it.

CAPTAIN MARVEL (2019) in SPOILERVISION

By Marvel Studios standards Captain Marvel is relatively non-linear, which may be why it feels a little rough early on. We're immediately immersed in the adventures of some sort of space special-forces unit of the Kree empire, an entity moviegoers first encountered in Guardians of the Galaxy. The Kree are battling their traditional enemies, the shape-shifting Skrulls. One of the Kree team, a woman named "Veers" (Bree Larson) is the special protege of her commanding officer (Jude Law). Something about his team may give viewers pause, however; one of them is somebody (Djimon Hounsou) we've seen as a bad guy in Guardians. This is a minor detail compared to Veers' flashbacks, which focus on a middle-aged female (Annette Bening) who is also the form Veers sees when she communes with the Kree "Supreme Intelligence," which in comics is represented by a giant green blob-face. For each Kree, the Supreme Intelligence takes the form of someone familiar, but Veers has no idea who the woman is. Over the course of the film, she comes to realize there's a lot she doesn't know about herself. In fact, if I recall right, this is the first time Marvel has gone the "everything you thought you knew is wrong" route so familiar in genre fiction in general these days. The comics audience, of course, anticipates this, because they know that Veers is really Carol Danvers, the much-revamped heroine once known as Ms. Marvel, who was most recently upgraded into "Earth's Mightiest Hero. Watching the first half of Captain Marvel is a matter of waiting for Carol to rediscover the truth about herself, and that may explain why the early action has a somewhat perfunctory feel. There's nothing spectacularly original about the alien environment Veers works in; Hala, the Kree homeworld, looks pretty much like every other Marvel megalopolis, and there's little truly alien in a sci-fi sense about the Kree or the Skrulls, apart from the latters' morphing abilities. For a while, and maybe all the way through for some viewers, this film (directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck from a story and script from theirs and many other hands) feels like it might be the most generic, by-the-numbers Marvel movie of all apart from the title character's (who never uses that title) relatively nonlinear character arc.

It doesn't help that, when Veers goes crashing onto planet C-53 (i.e., Earth), it's the year of our lord 1995. In other words, cue the oldies soundtrack! Maybe I let this familiar marketing ploy bother me too much, since making movies out of Marvel Comics themselves is mere moneygrubbing from one point of view, but one might ask whether this film had to be set in the past at all, unless it's to market an oldies soundtrack. To be fair, also, this is far from the most cynical or implausible deployment of oldies (that would be Spider-Man: Homecoming). Still, there's something pandering about it that always leaves a bad taste in a killjoy mouth, but this will be just about my last complaint about Captain Marvel.

Anyway, it's 1995 and Veers crash-lands in a strip-mall Blockbuster Video, and who should be called onto the case but a young -- well, a younger Nicholas Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who was a much less serious person a quarter-century ago. He also, understandably, had much smoother skin, and the CGI wizards deserve some credit for the job they did on him, though their treatment of Clark (Agent Coulson) Gregg leaves a lot more to be desired. A nice detail about this film, which stands at the brink of the end-of-an-era Avengers: Endgame, is that it brings the Marvel Cinematic Universe just about to full circle by showing us that his encounter with Carol, the Kree and the Skrulls provoked Fury to launch what he initially calls the Protector Initiative before Danvers gives him one more inspiration. Nevertheless, it's an odd turn from Jackson, most memorable for Fury's misplaced affection for a precocious cat, though again you can argue that it's this experience that made him more serious about things. Anyway, with him as tag-along, Carol rediscovers her past by tracking down her best friend and fellow jet pilot (Lashana Lynch), whose daughter may turn up in a future, present-day film as yet another Captain Marvel. It's a long story and I'll save it for when I need it.

Meanwhile, as noted, Carol learns that a lot of what she thought she knew was wrong -- and one cute thing the film does to make some of this surprising is to exploit the recent typecasting of Ben Mendelsohn (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Ready Player One, Robin Hood ...). He plays a Skrull agent who's taken the form of a S.H.I.E.L.D. commander in order to get at Veers, who has subconscious knowledge of an important science project the Annette Bening mystery woman was working on. But everything you thought you knew about Ben Mendelsohn is wrong! In this particular variation on the Kree-Skrull conflict, the green, waffle-chinned shapeshifters are the good guys, while the Kree are exploiting Carol Danvers by suppressing her memories of Earth as well as her full potential as a superbeing -- which once unleashed could be limitless. Since last year, Marvel has teased that Captain Marvel is the hero who can tip Thanos' precious balance, and watching her pull off Superman-style stunts like blowing up starships by flying through them may make more people believers. The directing team aren't really the most visionary or even efficient storytellers, but they do succeed at making Carol's realization of her full power, intercut with her memories of a lifetime of rising from adversity, an exhilarating moment, an ultimate comic-book power fantasy brought to cinematic life. While overall Captain Marvel is at best a mid-level Marvel movie, if its main purpose is to get people even more interested in Endgame, it probably should count as an unqualified success.

AQUAMAN (2018) in SPOILERVISION

It's been a year since the disaster of Justice League and the fact that Aquaman is the only DC Comics movie of 2018 put tremendous pressure on director James Wan and star Jason Momoa to save the DC cinematic universe. Fortunately, Aquaman functions very well under extreme pressure. The new film is the latest stage in an effort to redeem one of the comics company's flagship characters, one of the very few not to disappear in the interval between the so-called Golden and Silver ages of comics and one of the most visible characters in animation thanks to his own show in the 1960s and the Super Friends show of the 1970s. Somewhere along the line Aquaman became a laughingstock because of his ability -- his primary attribute in many eyes -- to talk to fish. To correct that impression, DC Comics has often bent over backwards to portray the character as a badass, most notoriously when he sported a hook in place of one hand in the 1990s. Jason Momoa would seem an obvious choice to portray that sort of Aquaman, but his imposing physical presence allows him to get away with a more humorous take on the character. One of the few things Justice League got right was making the characters it introduced -- Cyborg and Flash as well as Aquaman -- likable in distinctive ways. Aquaman's way, in the movies, is to be the superhero you'd want to have a beer with. Momoa's ethnicity notwithstanding, Aquaman is the nearest thing we have to a white-trash superhero, albeit an amiable, non-alienating one. Some people have argued that Aquaman is little more than a variation on a formula set by Thor -- as if any superhero film set to any extent in a fantasy realm is ripping off that Marvel film. But if anything, Wan's picture is a reversal of the Thor formula. In his film, the hero is a fish out of water, so to speak, in his own kingdom, not in exile among us.

The new film is set some time after the events of Justice League. By now "the Aquaman" is more or less a known quantity, known or assumed to be an Atlantean, but not really a full-fledged public figure. He continues his low-key career of good deeds by rescuing a Russian submarine from some high-tech pirates but makes a long-term enemy of the son (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) of the pirate commander, whom Aquaman leaves to die for his bad choices, but who actually kills himself after tasking his son, soon to be known as Black Manta, with vengeance. Then it's back to hanging out with his dad (Temuera Morrison) who once upon a time had a fling with an Atlantean princess (Nicole Kidman) fleeing from an arranged marriage. This princess eventually was forced to return home, marry and birth a legitimate heir to the Altantean throne. When her affair and her terrestrial son became known, she was condemned to death. Her affair and her fate have embittered King Orm (Patrick Wilson) against the surface world, which has ages of pollution and depredation to answer for as well. Orm is trying to unite a number of undersea realms into a grand alliance that will confirm him as "Ocean Master" and enable him to wage war against the land. A clique of powerful insiders, including Orm's vizier (Willem Dafoe)  and his bride-to-be (Amber Heard, seen briefly in Justice League) hope to avert war and see Aquaman, the man who could be King Arthur, as the answer to all problems. Orm is secretly collaborating with Black Manta to create provocations to drive the kingdoms into his embrace, while Aquaman, resenting Atlantis for killing his mom, rebuffs entreaties from below. Only when Orm launches a tidal-wave attack that nearly kills Arthur's dad does the hero agree to assert his claim against the fanatic king.

The story devolves into a Raiders-style treasure hunt for the sort of artifact that automatically confers legitimacy on he who wields it. The pursuit of this macguffin allows Aquaman to become a globetrotting James Bond style adventure and an all-out CGI explosion at the same time as Arthur and Mera follow clues above and below the surface in prickly partnership. All Atlanteans have superhuman strength and speed on land, so Mera is already a formidable heroine, but on top of that she has a special ability to manipulate water, pulling off stunts from drawing water out of Aquaman's scalp to attacking Atlantean goons with daggers of Sicilian wine. She's one of those longtime comics characters who's been upgraded in recent years from damsel-in-distress to kickass co-star, and whatever you think of Amber Heard's performance, the character certainly gets over. This film doesn't ask to be judged on its acting, however -- and that, given Wilson's vapid villainy, is probably a good thing. Aquaman is above all a pure spectacle, and you can believe while watching it that Justice League looked so cheap so often because most of Warner Bros' money was going into this film. It isn't that impressive at first, but kicks into super high gear in its relentless second half. It overwhelms you with imaginative battles between armies of shark-riding undersea cavalry and giant sentient crustaceans, among other things, filling the screen almost to overflowing with detail, and it also pulls off a tremendous extended parallel chase scene in Sicily as Mera fights off Atlantean pursuers across the rooftops while Aquaman deals with an upgraded Black Manta. There are times when throwing everything but the kitchen sink (though I may have missed that) at the audience is a good thing, and Aquaman is one of those occasions. For all that the future of a movie "universe" was riding on this film, it has an admirable nothing-to-lose recklessness to it, exemplified when at the end of his quest our hero encounters an immense sea monster, half kraken and half kaiju, and it talks to him -- in what must have been meant as a flagant F.U. to Disney, whose Mary Poppins reboot premiered the same week -- in the gravelly tones of Julie Andrews. If Justice League at nearly all points seemed cautious and stunted, Aquaman has the sort of creative insanity that when done right can justify a comic-book movie's existence. At the same time, Momoa clearly has more of a grip on the title character than he's ever had before as an actor, and may be able to take credit for molding Aquaman into his own self-image. If this was a make-or-break moment for the DC movie franchise, then Momoa should be a made man in Hollywood for literally saving a universe.

A note on Stan Lee

Historians and older comics fans continue to debate Stan Lee's contributions to the Marvel Comics universe. The debates were initially fueled by the perception that Lee, who died today at age 95, tended for a long time to downplay if not minimize the contributions of artists Steve Ditko, who died earlier this year, and especially Jack Kirby. If the question is who created characters or came up with specific concepts, then the credit often and rightly goes to Ditko, who created Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, and Kirby, who created nearly everything else until 1970. Lee's distinctive and crucial contribution was twofold, one part of it becoming only more obvious as the Marvel Cinematic Universe conquered multiplexes in the Stan the Man's last decade.

What was more obvious early on was that Lee gave all the comics, whether drawn by Kirby, Ditko or others, a specific authorial voice that helped set Marvel Comics apart from DC Comics, home of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. That voice took the idea of a narrator character from earlier crime and horror comics and applied it to superheroes. Lee wasn't an "onscreen" narrator like Mr. Crime or the Crypt Keeper, but established his authorial, brand through his constant explanatory  footnoting and a narrative tone that could be several things at once: bombastic and bufoonish, bardic yet self-mocking. It gave a wide range of readers leeway to take Marvel as seriously as each one chose, or to appreciate it at multiple levels simultaneously, and it allowed Lee to be campy and sincere at the same time. His narration probably strikes most people as corny today -- it's even worse when he speaks it aloud on bad cartoons of the 70s and 80s -- but in those formative years it didn't keep readers from feeling genuine emotions about the Marvel heroes.

In the long run, Lee really laid the groundwork for the 21st century success of Marvel movies by giving Marvel Comics a "universal" vision that neither Kirby nor Ditko might have given them on their own. In his later career especially, Kirby preferred to isolate his creations from the rest of his employers' product, balking at crossovers when they were suggested, while Ditko arguably never got along with others that well. Of course, the heroes of any given comics company had been joining forces since DC's Justice Society of America in the early 1940s, but outside the designated team books they rarely if ever interacted with each other. At Marvel the constant crossing over of characters was an essential part of Lee's world-building, and for all that Marvel heroes tended to fight each other on their first meetings, they were inherently more compatible as components of a shared universe, once someone actually tried to do that in movies, than DC's iconic  characters have proven to be so far. One could argue that Kirby and Ditko could have come up with all their great creations with no input from Lee, yet could not have come up with the Marvel Universe as either comics or movie fans understand it today without Stan Lee's vision, however self-indulgent or self-aggrandizing it seems to his critics. This note certainly won't end the Marvel debates, but it should make it more clear that however clownish or crass he was at times, Lee was one of the great pop-culture geniuses of the 20th century, with a legacy sure to last well beyond his lifetime.

ANT-MAN AND THE WASP (2018) in SPOILERVISION

Director Peyton Reed, star and co-writer Paul Rudd and the supporting cast for 2015's Ant-Man return for the inevitable sequel, and if you've seen the first one, you've pretty much seen this one. Last seen on the losing side of Captain America: Civil War, Scott Lang (Rudd) was sentenced to house arrest and is days away from completing his sentence when a strange vision brings him back into contact with his estranged mentor, Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), and Pym's daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly), still fugitives held responsible for Lang's use of Pym's shrinking-growing suit during the 2016 conflict. Coincident with the Pyms' attempt to contact the quantum realm, where Janet Van Dyne was lost thirty years earlier, Lang has a vision suggesting that during his short time in the quantum realm he had somehow made contact with the original Wasp (Michelle Pfeiffer, returning to superhero cinema after more than a quarter-century). Much as they resent Lang for forcing them into a fugitive life, the Pyms realize that he's essential to their plan to rescue Janet through all manner of quantum-this, quantum-that technology. Not only must Lang risk a longer sentence for breaking house arrest, and not only must the Pyms perform delicate science on the run, but all three have to deal with people muscling in on their work. A gangster (Walton Goggins) who'd provided the Pyms with crucial components for their projects now wants commercial control over their work, while a super-powered interloper who comes to be called Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) wants access to the quantum realm to cure her chronic intangibility, the by-product of an accident that killed her father, a former Pym colleague. Meanwhile, the audience expects the Infinity War to break out at any moment, and when it does in mid-credits, the consequences are dire.

That necessary business aside, has any film ever been more about fathers and daughters than this one? Not only do we continue the daughter-surpassing-the-father storyline of the first film, as Hope gets a shrinking costume of her own, and not only are we reminded of Scott's bond with his young daughter (Abby Ryder Fortson), but even Ghost has a father figure in yet another of Pym's old partners, rival scientist and long-ago "Black Goliath" Bill Foster (Laurence Fishburne). Resentment of Pym conflicts with humanitarian instincts as Foster initially strives to help Ghost but ultimately recoils from the selfish ruthlessness of the former SHIELD assassin, who has a mad notion of leeching quantum energy from Janet Van Dyne, should the good guys reach her, in order to save herself. I'm not sure what the point of this triplication is, unless the point is that these storylines are increasingly common as we insist on female empowerment in genre cinema. Whatever the point, Ghost is an entertaining enough villain but suffers from having to share the screen with Goggins and his gangsters, while everyone suffers from the involvement of a bunch of FBI idiots and especially from the return of Scott Lang's ex-con buddies (Michael Pena, Tip Harris and David Dastmalchian), who are now his partners in a budding security business. Those three were just about insufferable in the first film, and there's no question of their insufferability in the sequel. The film, really a Marvel B-movie, is bloated by comedy relief, including a reprise of the storytelling gimmick from the first film in which Pena's character recaps previous events, putting his words in the other actors' mouths. It was interesting the first time, but never since. At least Pena has some natural likability and his character has something of a personality. Dastmalchian's personality boils down to superstition, and Harris doesn't even have that. Nor is Rudd himself particularly hilarious in his comic showcases; Scott Lang often seems more like a shtick than a character, and it's hard to know what more can be done with him, even as we're promised that he'll return in another sequel if not sooner.

For all that the comedy was tiresome, the action kept me interested. While the fight choreography itself is nothing special, the idea of people who can shrink and grow (though the Wasp never becomes giant like Lang can) fighting someone who can turn insubstantial gives an inventive quality to the battles between Ghost and the title characters. I was also amused by the chase scenes with shrunken cars racing through San Francisco, which seem partly an homage to the toy-car chase scene in the SF-set The Dead Pool. These bits are good enough for me to spare Ant-Man and the Wasp a thumbs-down, though the stale comedy parts make it slightly worse than the original film. Both are definitely lower-tier Marvel films, but that seems to be understood by all going in. It also seemed to be understood that something light and possibly funny was needed after the sturm und drang of Infinity War and before the heavy lifting of its sequel next year. That the Ant-Man films are mere programmers by Marvel standards shouldn't be held against them, but I think we have a right to expect a third film to escape the rut the filmmakers seem determined to drive the series into. More of the same next time will be more difficult to forgive.

DEADPOOL 2 (2018) in SPOILERVISION

Tim Miller's Deadpool was one of the surprise hits of 2016 and the first proof that an R-rated brand-name superhero movie could succeed at the box office. Miller is gone but the star and writers remain; in fact, Ryan Reynolds, who plays Deadpool, has joined the writing team for the sequel, and the greater creative control granted him reportedly helped drive Miller from the franchise. So what's different? In some respects Deadpool 2 is a more conventional superhero movie thematically, despite the continued in-joking and fourth wall-breaking Reynolds indulges in, extending here to assassinating himself a couple of times to prevent bad career decisions. Even in the relatively irreverent first film, you get a standard origin story and you're meant to sympathize with Wade Wilson through his formative ordeals even as you laugh at his ultraviolence and raunchy jokes. In the sequel, you're not only expected to empathize with Deadpool even more, but you're supposed to follow him through a storyline sometimes more typical of a CW show. Recovering with the X-Men as a trainee after the death of his beloved (Morena Baccarin) makes him ineffectively suicidal -- he can't even blow himself to pieces as long as someone picks them up -- he gradually befriends a troubled young mutant (Julian Dennison) who literally burns for vengeance against his tormentors at a private school dedicated to suppressing mutant abilities. Naturally, a man comes from the future to kill the kid, for should history run its course the kid will graduate from revenge to gratuitous mass murder. Deadpool is determined to keep Cable (Josh "Thanos" Brolin) from killing the kid, but eventually realizes that the real solution is to keep the kid from taking his revenge. Let that sink in: Deadpool is going to tell someone not to kill someone. I understand that Reynolds et al are self-conscious and somewhat tounge-in-cheek about taking up this trope, but it still bogs the film down a bit. Why does it need to be conscientious about anything, after all?

The answer is probably that no matter how wacky or trangressive the films are meant to be, their success is still presumed to depend on the hero being likable in a very conventional way. It makes Deadpool 2 a somewhat"X-hausting" picture not unlike some classic comedies in which the story is something you must endure between the more inspired bits of grand guignol comedy or meta joking. It leaves Josh Brolin in the flesh an inferior antagonist to the CGI-enhanced Brolin of Avengers: Infinity War, but that was probably inevitable once it became clear, as it was all along to comics fans, that Cable isn't really a villain. No one really rises to the level of "big bad," despite the appearance of the Juggernaut (voiced and mo-capped by "himself," i.e. Reynolds), a major X-Men villain who provides the returning, long-suffering Colossus someone to have a CGI fight with. To be fair, a largely comic film like this might not need an epic villain, but the lack of one adds to the impression that Deadpool 2 is often simply spinning its wheels. It doesn't help that new director David Leitch (fresh from Atomic Blonde) doesn't do much to make the action fresh, though individual fight gags are often quite entertaining in the expected outrageous way. And make no mistake: the funniest parts of this film are wildly hilarious, and there are plenty of funny moments. There are easily enough to recommend the sequel to fans of the original, but don't fall for the hype that says the second film surpasses the first. If anything, Deadpool 2 proves that there's a plateau for this sort of film, and this franchise already got there. It's still hanging around there and may do so for some time and some films yet, but I don't think it's ever going to get much better than the first time.

AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR (2018) in SPOILERVISION

The other day I rewatched Justice League and liked it even less than the first time. As a result, I watched Avengers: Infinity War under the most favorable conditions. I'm sorry, as a DC Comics fan, to report that the Russo brothers' film, the first part of two despite Marvel Studios' desperate efforts to deny this, makes last fall's DC extravaganza look cheesy and cheap in almost every way. But I had trepidations going in just the same, because I was afraid that Marvel would repeat one of Warner Bros.' crucial mistakes. My worry was that, despite his occasional appearances going back to an Avengers post-credits scene, Thanos the Titan would leave everyone cold the way Justice League's Steppenwolf did, that he'd have no personality but his power. I've always wanted to see a mega-powerful supervillain in action on film. but Justice League taught everyone that power without personality is dead on arrival. You can sort of get away with having a mega-powerful villain without much personality in comic books because a great artist can make that power visually attractive in a way Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon largely failed to manage with Steppenwolf, while old-school writers like Stan Lee could give villains personality with bombastic rodomontade that no movie writer could get away with. A movie mega-villain simply has to be more rounded; he can't be a mere combination of powers and taunts.

Fortunately, Infinity War writers Christopher Markus and Sean McFeely, picking up hints from James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy films, largely rose to the challenge. The most important of those hints is the fraught relationship between Thanos and his daughters Gamora and Nebula, which gets fleshed out considerably here. It was still up to Markus and McFeely themselves, however, to give us the why of Thanos, and it was especially up to Brolin to make the why plausible in practice. They came up with something different from the comic-book Thanos, or at least the character as Jim Starlin created him, who's usually out to exterminate all life because of his infatuation with a personified Death. The movie Thanos is a comparatively familiar type, perhaps especially to the comics-reading audience. He's ultimately a utilitarian, seeking the greatest good for the greatest number but rigging his calculation to reduce the greatest number to only half of all currently living things. There's an air of arrogant self-pity to him, the resentment of all those who fail to appreciate how eminently reasonable his semi-annihilation scheme is, or the willpower it all takes, who can't look past the cost to the benefits. In his own mind he's humane but he lacks any humanism, any regard for each individual life as an end unto itself. It genuinely hurts him especially that his favorite adopted daughter Gamora has never appreciated what he's trying to do. But in short he's like what any number of people living today might be like with an Infinity Gauntlet and godlike power. What Brolin does exceptionally well is recognize that Thanos, even at his worst, isn't really alien to us. There's a weary weight to the Titan that becomes most obvious when he plays the role of father, and a sort of resigned attitude toward inevitable resistance. You get the sense that it's all been hard work for him, and of course it only gets harder as his work comes to the attention first of Thor and the Hulk, picking up from Ragnarok, then Dr. Strange, and eventually the whole crew, some of whom eventually join forces uneasily with the Guardians, for one can join forces with that bunch in no other way, to try to stop our villain from finishing his Infinity Stone collection.

Infinity War has an understandably choppy start, made more difficult by the introduction of Thanos's four henchmen, who really do exemplify power without personality. The Guardians threaten to grow increasingly insufferable, though they have their funny moments, but the actors adapt well to the story's inexorably darkening tone. Brolin gives the best performance almost by default because there are simply too many heroes for any to give a standout performance, but there are some good ensemble acting moments, especially when Robert Downey's Tony Stark clashes with Benedict Cumberbatch's Dr. Strange, an alpha male in the same mode, or with Chris Pratt's Star-Lord, who wishes he were one. The action scenes are inevitably too busy to match the near-perfection of the set pieces in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Captain America: Civil War, but as the story gains momentum the action gains an intensity arguably unseen anywhere but in the final Doomsday fight in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. As the end near it's hard to suppress the impulse to root for someone, anyone, to take Thanos down, and for that reason the mega-downer cliffhanger ending may be hard for some to take. For them I can only prescribe patience -- and it's not like most people haven't had to deal with drastic cliffhangers on TV. We comic-book readers are especially used to this sort of thing, but if the ending of Infinity War affects people strongly or perhaps even offensively, it's still proof that Marvel Studios has succeeded massively at what they've tried to do. Unlike their competition, and despite my doubts, they simply know what they're doing better than anyone else making comic book movies. Of course, that may only mean that Avengers 4, or whatever they end up calling it, will prove a massive disappointment. For now, however, Marvel deserves the benefit of the doubt.

JUSTICE LEAGUE (2017) in SPOILERVISION

It's not that bad as a whole, but to be honest, the first half-hour of Zack Snyder's new film, with credited co-writing and uncredited reshoots by Joss Whedon, is awful: a jumble of scenes attempting to establish an important trait of parademons (the bug-winged creatures Batman [Ben Affleck] saw in his Dawn of Justice nightmare); remind us urgently that Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) exists; and remind us more clumsily that the world is worse for the death of Superman (Henry Cavill) in the aforementioned Snyder production. Nothing really flows together and you might believe that several films, not just the Snyder and Whedon footage, had been awkwardly spliced into something crudely approximating a feature film. Nor are things helped much by the introduction of the film's villain. Steppenwolf, here embarking on his second stab at world conquest after millennia of dormancy, is a relatively minor character in Jack Kirby's "Fourth World" mythos, which few at DC Comics have really known what to do with since the King laid down his pencil. His presence here looks like a hedging of bets, as if Snyder, co-writer Chris Terrio and DC producer Geoff Johns didn't want to waste Kirby's actual big bad, the oft-misused Darkseid, on this particular movie and chose Steppenwolf as his proxy. No effort was made to give this substitute villain any personality beyond his generic lust for conquest, but I suppose you could argue that the villain of this piece was never meant to be anything more than a Macguffin, since the real story of Justice League is the formation of DC's in-print precursor and cinematic answer to Marvel's Avengers. Picking up the hints dropped like anchors in the last film, Batman and Wonder Woman set out to recruit the three supposed superbeings discovered by Lex Luthor's researchers: Arthur "The Aquaman" Curry (Jason Momoa), the bastard child of Atlantean royalty and quite the strongman on land; Barry "Flash" Allen (Ezra Miller), the young Central City speedster; and Victor "Cyborg" Stone (Ray Fisher), a man now more than half machine desperately trying to keep up with his evolving alien technology. The real purpose of this movie is to get you interested enough in these three to seek out their solo films as they appear, beginning with next year's Aquaman.

The results are mixed. All three actors succeeded in making their characters interesting, and they establish decent chemistry with each other and the established heroes. But I still question whether any of them can carry a feature film by today's standard of what such films should be. The future of the DC movie franchise now rests on the shoulders of Jason Momoa, and I'm glad to report that, liberated from his grim typecasting, the actor gives easily the best performance I've ever seen from him. But I still doubt whether whatever good will he's earned will make people interested in exploring DC's Atlantis, all too little of which was shown here apart from introducing Aquaman's eventual love interest Mera (Amber Heard). As Cyborg, Ray Fisher does probably as good as anyone could do with Marv Wolfman's character, making him sardonically bitter rather than self-pitying and adding a certain coldness that inclines the character to agree with Batman much of the time. But Cyborg has always been a hard sell as the black face of the DC Comics universe since Geoff Johns gave him that role by putting the character in his "New 52" era Justice League. Popular though he may be as one of Wolfman and George Perez's Teen Titans, Cyborg never seems to have clicked as a solo character despite Johns and other writers' stubborn efforts, and he has so little personal mythos that I find myself wondering what on earth a Cyborg movie would be about. Meanwhile, the development of a Flash movie is an ongoing nightmare for Warner Bros. Laboring in the shadow of the popular CW TV series, which automatically begs that question of what a feature film can do differently other than spend more money, the project can't hold on to a director as everyone struggles to fine-tune the property. The one thing different about Miller's Flash so far is his relative youth and his jittery Spider-Manic personality that makes him Justice League's comedy relief character. I thought Miller was likable enough to get away with it here, but I don't know if he can carry his own movie doing the same stuff. I'd be happy to see all of these guys again in another Justice League film, but despite this film's post-credit scene there are no immediate plans for another that I know of, and the drubbing the film is getting from Snyderphobic reviewers is unlikely to speed the day of their return.

I probably should talk about the story some more. The plot is right out of a serial: an artifact hunt. If Steppenwolf gets all the artifacts he can activate "the Unity," which won't be a good thing for anybody. Despite their being salted away on Atlantis, Themyscira and ... somewhere Cyborg knows about, he gets them. Fortunately, the good guys had just used that last one to resurrect their old pal Superman who, acting true to comic-book form, starts fighting them until Lois Lane (Amy Adams) shows up and tells him that the sun's getting real low, or something along those lines. Honestly, though, even in comics if Superman is messed up and not behaving right, mind-controlled, amnesiac or whatever, Lois is your best antidote. There was this one comic where to snap Superman out of Poison Ivy's mind-control, Batman has Catwoman throw Lois off a building, or at least that's how I remember it. But I digress. Anyway, Supes still needs some work in the shop so Lois takes him back for (ahem) debriefing in Smallville while the rest of the gang goes to some Sokovia-like place where Steppenwolf, his Unity and his army of parademons make life miserable for one humble family -- to, you know, make the situation more real for us, I guess. Determined that this shall not stand, the as-yet-unnamed Justice League -- I think the only person who actually describes them as a "league" is Lex Luthor (our old friend Jesse Eisenberg) in a post-credits secene -- go about delaying the bad guy until Superman is cleared for action, after which point there's really no contest.

Sounds stupid, right? Well, it kind of is, but while this is regrettably one of those films where the whole is less than the sum of its parts, a lot of those parts are quite entertaining. While Fisher, Miller and Momoa held up their end of the deal, Affleck, Cavill and Gadot were once more their reliable selves, though our Batman is much more mild-mannered than in his last appearance, to a degree that's left some again questioning his commitment to the franchise. I actually liked the change of pace and the way some things (like Bruce Wayne's whiskey-swilling) remained the same. So the acting was fine, apart from the helpless Ciaran Hinds, tasked with voicing Steppenwolf. As one might expect from Zack Snyder, some of the action is spectacular. The highlights include an extended battle on Themyscira as the Amazons run a desperate relay race to keep their artifact from Steppenwolf; a flashback establishing Steppenwolf's backstory featuring a super-epic battle pitting Amazons, Atlanteans, Olympian gods, Green Lanterns, etc. against old-timey parademons; and the guilty pleasure of the JL's brawl with the reawakened Superman, who seems capable of matching the Flash's speed (Miller sells this wonderfully) and trading head-butts with Wonder Woman all day. For all its many flaws, the film ultimately entertains. I'd reverse the conventional reviewer consensus and contend that Justice League is marginally worse than Dawn of Justice, and almost the weakest of this year's good crop of superhero movies -- after a second viewing of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, I'm inclined to leave that at the bottom. Snyder and Whedon have done Warner Bros. no great favors as far as Friday morning reviewers are concerned, but I close with the observation that at my half-full multiplex screening the audience applauded the film.

THOR: RAGNAROK in SPOILERVISION

Taika Waititi is a cinematic miracle worker. His What We Do in the Shadows is not only the funniest vampire comedy ever made, which isn't much of an achievement in itself, but one of the funniest movies I've seen recently. His portrayal of vampires as almost childishly narcissistic apparently persuaded Kevin Feige and the folks at Marvel Studios that Waititi could be entrusted with the next chapter of their absurd Asgardian soap opera after the disaster of Thor: The Dark World. That Waititi could work wonders on a limited budget didn't hurt either, though now, by comparison, he would have money thrown at him. Working from a screenplay by three other people, he's made the most imaginative and funniest Marvel movie since Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) while demonstrating an aptitude for epic action on a colossal scale -- though as always with Marvel movies, one must wonder exactly how much of the set-piece action was planned out and rendered on computers before Waititi first called "Action!"

For all the spectacle, Ragnarok is character-centered, reiterating more strongly the premise implicit since the beginning that Thor (Chris Helmsworth) and his half-brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) are a couple of spoiled brats of frighteningly immense power. This is re-established early as Thor, after thwarting the demon Surtur's scheme to initiate Ragnarok, the foredoomed fall of Asgard, quickly clears up the one dangling plot thread from Dark World, exposing Loki's impersonation of All-father Odin (Anthony Hopkins finally has some fun imitating Hiddleston) and overthrowing the self-indulgent trickster, who had placed the old man in a since-demolished retirement facility in New York City. Their arrival in Manhattan to claim Odin sets up the encounter with Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) previewed in the epilogue to Strange's own origin film. The Strange scene shows Waititi's hand most plainly in the disorienting way the Master of the Mystic Arts teleports Thor all over his sanctum in a succession of jump cuts. The good doctor sends them off to some cliff where Odin has been waiting, before dying, to tell his boys that their elder sister Hela, goddess of death (Cate Blanchett), will be released from her prison upon his imminent demise. In other words, the grown-ups are taking over, as Hela, who grows an antler-like crest in combat mode, breaks Thor's favorite toy, his Uru hammer, and boots both him and Loki off Bifrost bridge en route to Asgard, where she promptly slaughters the Warriors Three (Tadanobu Asano, Ray Stevenson and the other guy) on her way to the throne, while the boys tumble to parts unknown. I'm sure this perfunctory dispatching of three favorite supporting characters from the comics will annoy some people, but it really was a waste of time having Asano and Stevenson keep showing up for how little the films have used them. As for the other supporting players, Sif is AWOL (the actress has a regular gig elsewhere) while Heimdall (Idris Elba) conveniently went underground when "Odin" started acting weird, forcing the king to appoint the mediocrity Skurge (Karl Urban) as guardian of Bifrost. Skurge survives Hela's initial onslaught to give the villainess someone to whom she can tell the secret history of Asgard and offer the job she held under her father as Executioner of the ruler's will and enemies.

A film within the film now begins as Thor crash-lands on Sakaar, better known to comics fans as "Planet Hulk" but ruled here by the self-styled Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum) on bread-and-circus principles, with emphasis on circus. Big G relies on slave hunters like Scrapper 142 (Tessa Thompson) to recruit talent for his gladiatorial games. He agrees with her assessment that Thor, rendered tractable by a classic sci-fi pain device, will make a good contender for his "incredible champion," whose identity was revealed in trailers long ago. Loki has ended up here as well, but is content to make money betting on Thor to lose. For his part, Thor has recognized Scrapper 142 as a Valkyrie -- for all intents and purposes, the Valkyrie or just plain "Valkyrie" -- one of a long-gone cohort of Asgardian women warriors, and apparently the sole survivor of an attack by Hela during her uprising against Odin. There's no hope of Thor pulling rank, however, since Scrapper/Valkyrie has grown cynical and alcoholic in her attempt to forget the loss of many close comrades-in-arms. But the situation isn't as hopeless as it looks, since Thor's powers over thunder and lightning prove innate rather than hammer-based, though it takes the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) nearly beating him to death to realize his potential. Ol' Greenskin has been on Sakaar since we last saw him in Avengers: Age of Ultron and has come both to like it here and to express his liking. Waititi and the writers give us a classically stupid Hulk (he had one of his increasingly common intelligent periods in the original Planet Hulk comics) with an almost-Trumpian insistence on taunting and "winning" regardless of appearances. Fans of the character will regret the wasting of one of Hulk's best-regarded storylines as a subplot to a Thor movie, but as Ruffalo himself has conceded that we'll probably never see another Hulk solo movie this is probably as good as it'll get for Marvel's Hulkamaniacs.

Thor's challenge now is to rally his three most likely collaborators into teaming with him on a breakout and reconquest of Asgard. Valkyrie would rather drink and forget, Loki is still out for himself and Hulk actually likes it on a planet where he's beloved by fight fans and hasn't had to turn back to Bruce Banner for ages. Those of you who found the buildup of a Hulk-Black Widow ship in Age of Ultron icky will be annoyed to learn that that's still a thing and key to Banner finally reappearing after Thor's own efforts to use Natasha's calming spiel fail miserably. The other pieces soon fall into place and we're finally on our way to a spectacular showdown in Asgard, assisted by Heimdall and, eventually, Skurge, whose machine-gun fetish allows him to recreate the comics character's classic last stand in Walt Simonson's 1980s comics, which are acknowledged in the end credits and regarded by fans as the best Thor stories since Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's time. A lot of undead minions are wasted, Hulk fights a big dog, and Thor hits Hela with "the biggest bolt of lightning in the history of lightning," but the film still hasn't hit 11 yet....

While most of Ragnarok is generic Marvel spectacle on paper, on screen it benefits from Waititi putting a fresh set of eyes on it. As the Doctor Strange sequence shows, the style he developed collaborating on What We Do in the Shadows was not entirely homogenized into the Marvel machine, and that helps make the new Thor feel fresher than, say, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Both films may share a retro sensibility in their soundtracks -- as do most recent Marvel movies, it seems -- but Ragnarok creatively enhances that retro feel with original music with hints of video-game soundtracks from Mark Mothersbaugh and a pictorial sensibility, assisted by cinematographer Javie Aguirresarobe, reminiscent of vintage van murals or Heavy Metal magazine covers come to life. The acting is a mixed bag, and a lot of it may disappoint people who expect something more like, as Tony Stark would say, Shakespeare in the Park from a Thor movie. Helmsworth and Hiddleston are fine, but as Hela Cate Blanchett arguably doesn't chew the scenery enough, or as much as one might expect from a barnstormer like her. You might have expected Galadriel with the Ring on, but she sometimes sinks to the overall glib level of the dialogue, referring to Odin as "Daddy," for instance. By now, of course, we should be reconciled to not getting authentic Stan Lee-style rodomontade from Marvel movie villains, but if you were going to get away with it in any Marvel movie, this was probably it. These are action movies anyway, and Hela's actions (both Blanchett's and uber-stuntwoman Zoe Bell's) speak louder than her words. As for the other villain, Jeff Goldblum gives, to no legitimate surprise, a Jeff Goldblum performance as the Grandmaster that makes that Elder of the Universe more capricious than truly threatening, but his participation in the interlude doesn't require him to be truly evil or scary. For all Waititi's efforts to maximize the comedy in the story, Ragnarok was only ever going to be an action spectacle, and the fact that he succeeds on that level gives us more cause to look forward to whatever he does next, for Marvel or on his own.

SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING (2017) in SPOILERVISION

The official beginning, after a high-profile cameo appearance in Captain America: Civil War, of the third Spider-Man movie cycle of the still-young century brings with it a huge risk of reboot fatigue. Who needs, much less wants, to see the origin story yet again? Not I and not you, presumably, and neither, fortunately, do director Jon Watts and his five co-writers. You never see or hear of poor Uncle Ben, whose tragic fate is only implicit in a reference to everything that's happened to Peter Parker's Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) in recent times. Homecoming is the sort of superhero movie we need at this point, less concerned with beginnings or becoming, though it's still all about Peter (Tom Holland) proving himself as a hero, than with the everyday business of fighting crime and helping people. The stakes are lower here than in any other Marvel movie except Ant-Man: the climactic battle has Spidey thwarting a mid-air robbery rather than saving the city or the world. Yet they don't feel insignificant, and Homecoming feels less like an "ordinary" superhero movie than, say, Age of Ultron does. This reboot isn't just a do-over for its own sake to indulge a new generation of creators, but an effort by Sony Pictures to get Spider-Man right, with the help of Marvel Studios, after the retrospective debacle of the now-underrated Marc Webb/Andrew Garfield films. The new film is a more successful effort to translate many of the tropes of the earliest Stan Lee/Steve Ditko comics to the 21st century.

Peter is back in high school, on this time he and his usual supporting cast of age-peers, many of them racially diversified with little fuss, all attend an intellectually elite science-and-technology school. That includes archetypal jock-bully Flash Thompson (Tony Revolori), who here becomes an underachieving asshole, while Peter remains the archetypal outcast, for the ironic reason that he's always bailing out on school activities to seek out crime as "the Spider Man from You Tube" while awaiting a summons from Tony Stark (must I say?) to join the Avengers. He's chafing at the bit, his superheroism kept on a tight leash but also largely ignored by Stark henchman Happy Hogan (as usual, Jon Favreau) and various infantilizing protocols built into his Stark-designed deluxe costume. Peter sees a chance to impress Stark when he stumbles upon bank robbers using exotic high-tech weapons that nearly devastate Parker's neighborhood. Thanks to a prologue, we know that these are the handiwork of Adriam Toomes (Michael Keaton), a disgruntled blue-collar entrepreneur who has his salvage contract for sites wrecked by the alien invasion from The Avengers abruptly snatched away by a federal government collaborating with Stark. Toomes and his inventive techies decide to keep what they've gleaned, retooling the alien tech into weapons, and in Toomes' case, a flying costume that earns him the nickname "Vulture," for stealing more alien tech to sell on the black market. Spider-Man's skirmishes with Toomes' gang escalate, with neither side fully appreciating the destructive power in play, until the Washington Monument and the Staten Island Ferry are nearly wrecked -- at which point Tony Stark grounds Peter. Like the typical parent who doesn't get it, and with a great irony that the man himself partly appreciates, Stark only sees his young protege behaving irresponsibly and dangerously, blaming him rather than the bad guys (who should be left to the authorities to deal with, Stark says hypocritically) for all the destruction. Stripped of his high-tech suit, which he'd hacked with the help of best buddy Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon) in order to access extra features, Peter now must really prove himself by continuing his war against Toomes, even after he learns that Toomes is the father of Liz (Laura Harrier), Peter's current crush, and after Toomes quickly deduces that the awkward kid taking his daughter to the homecoming dance, who looks at him with a constant expression of horror, is more than he lets on...

Like Civil War, Homecoming is sort of a generic "Marvel Universe" movie, or at least an Iron Man 3.25 thanks to the participation of Downey, Favreau and Gwyneth Paltrow, as well as Captain America himself (a shameless Chris Evans) in a private hell of mind-numbing PSAs. It cleverly calls back to Civil War by showing us the buildup to that film's famous airport fight from the vantage of Peter's cellphone and teases the hero's graduation to the Avengers, only to have Peter keep his distance, as Marvel and Sony presumably will keep their distance hereafter, in order to remain, in Stark's own words, a friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man. That's a good call, because Homecoming leaves us ready to explore Peter Parker's milieu more. Like Sam Raimi's cycle, if not more so, Watts gives Spidey's world a real-life feel as Peter scrambles to keep up with schoolwork, struggles to have a social life, and patrols his inner-city neighborhood. Tom Holland and the other kids all seem to have the right amount of charisma, the standouts being Batalon as a kid living out his sidekick dream of being "the man in the chair" and Zendaya as the sardonic school rebel who may yet end up the love of Peter's life. The villain role doesn't demand much of Michael Keaton at a time when he's become one of our leading character actors, but he lends the part authoritative menace and the overall idea of a working-class villain is in keeping with the early comics. In some ways, and not just because of Stan Lee's dependable presence, this new film is more faithful to those earliest comics than even the Raimi films, down to a recreation of Spidey's most famous inspirational feat of strength from the Ditko era. I'm not prepared to say that Homecoming is the best Spider-Man movie, but I definitely liked it better than the Webb films and was happily surprised to find it not imitating the Raimis very much. In short, Homecoming amply justified its existence as a new take on Spider-Man, but one thing about it really annoyed me. This is a film set in the present day, either 2017 or 2020 depending on when you think The Avengers took place, yet its high-school students sure listen to a lot of oldies music, mainly from the Eighties.Really? I don't even consider myself a fan of modern pop music, but I find this preposterous and clueless, even as I can guess why Marvel does this. All this tells us is that we've yet to see a superhero movie fully integrated with modern youth culture, but until we see such a thing -- if we really want to, that is -- Homecoming will do.

Too Much TV: IRON FIST (2017 - ?)

Word of mouth was already toxic by the time Netflix released the thirteen episodes of Iron Fist in March. The consensus among those who'd had an advance look was that it was easily, by far, the worst of the Marvel Studios Netflix productions. It was troubled before the reviews started coming in, thanks to a stunning bit of "p.c." overreach that saw people demand that the protagonist, Danny Rand, be played by an Asian man. The idea that a blonde white man would become the world's greatest martial artist, offended many who decried a "white savior" trope, as well as some who no doubt simply wanted an Asian actor to get a big payday. Once people finally saw it for themselves, Iron Fist seemed to add injury to insult. Not only was a white man the world's greatest martial artist, at least theoretically, but the martial arts themselves, to many observers, were lame. People simply expected a very different sort of show -- something more like Into the Badlands in modern dress, perhaps -- from what Marvel and Netflix delivered.

Iron Fist stands apart from its sibling shows in the Defenders cycle by abandoning the grungy inner-city milieux of Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage for the corporate heights of Marvel's Manhattan. Danny Rand (Finn Jones) is super-rich in the comics and is supposed to be on television, but the show introduces him as an Oliver Queen-like castaway reintroducing himself to 21st century America, albeit without the publicity attending the TV Ollie's rescue. A disheveled, barefoot Danny returns home after growing up, having survived the plane crash that killed his parents, in the magical land of Kun-L'un, where he was taught to be The Iron Fist, a living weapon of defense against The Hand, the yellow peril last referenced in Daredevil's second season. As Iron Fist, Danny can channel his chi to make his punching hand like unto a thing of iron, as they used to say in the funnybooks. It glows white-hot and can punch through walls with devastating force. Despite the responsibility placed upon him, Danny's in New York to reclaim his heritage as heir to Rand Enterprises, which has been maintained since the Rand family's disappearance by the children of Harold Meachum, the partner of Danny's dad. The kids, Ward (Tom Pelphrey) and Joy (Jessica Stroup) don't know what to make of this hairy hobo beating up guards in the lobby of corporate headquarters. Ward, an addict who bullied Danny when they were kids, distrusts the stranger whether he's Danny or not, while Joy more quickly comes to believe our hero's odd story. While he struggles to sort things out with the corporation, Danny hangs out at a more Netflix-typical inner-city dojo run by part-time cage fighter Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick). It's so typically Netflix a setting that Defenders mascot-in-advance Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson) is one of Colleen's students.

The corporate shenanigans continue as we learn Harold Meachum himself (David Wenham), believed long dead by the general public, is alive and in hiding from The Hand, represented by Mme. Gao (Wai Ching Ho) from the Daredevil show. Harold is Ward's puppetmaster but finds himself at odds with his boy, who'd like to get rid of Danny while Dad thinks the kung-fu kid could be useful to him. Publicly acknowledged, Danny has a tumultuous stint on the Rand board of directors that leads to he and the Meachums getting sacked by the board majority, while he, Colleen and Claire battle drug smugglers in New York and China. Things get still more complicated as we discover that The Hand has contending factions, one of which has Colleen as a member, while Ward decides to free himself from his father but finds him very difficult to get rid of, and Danny's old Kun-L'un schoolmate (Sacha Dhawan) arrives in Manhattan to convince our hero to resume his duties at the alma mater.

I actually appreciated the change of pace and setting Iron Fist provided, and one of the show's most pleasant surprises is Ward Meachum's character arc. Ward starts out as the show's number-one scumbag, but as he sobers up and recoils from his dad's unnatural antics he gradually becomes one of the good guys. Tom Pelphrey gives the best performance of the series so far, except maybe for David Wenham's unpredictably devious Harold. Finn Jones has come in for a lot of criticism for a perceived lack of charisma, acting talent and martial arts skills, but those are the limitations of a generic fish-out-of-water character, not necessarily those of an actor who proves himself likable enough. More likable still is Jessica Henwick, if only because Colleen Wing brings more obvious passion to her fight scenes, and is likely to inspire more passion in the male audience. As for the fighting, it is plainly less dynamic, though often better lit, than the standard-setting scenes on Daredevil or the superhuman stunts of Jessica Jones and Luke Cage. You can't help thinking that Danny will be the weakest member of The Defenders later this summer, but if Iron Fist disappoints as a martial-arts show it's mainly because the writers had a lot of story to tell and not so much time for fighting as fans would have liked. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt, however, I found myself in later episodes marking time impatiently before something (violent) happened. In a way, there was both too much and not enough going on much of the time, and I also suspect that Iron Fist had the lowest budget of any of the Marvel shows so far. It's hard to dispute that it's the weakest of the four shows, but the others set a high enough standard that this one can fall short and still be at least okay. In any event, let's reserve judgment until Defenders on whether we want to see more of Danny Rand after that.

WONDER WOMAN (2017) in SPOILERVISION

Let's get the pedantry out of the way. Erich Ludendorff survived World War I with evil yet to do. In 1923 he marched alongside Adolf Hitler during the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, though the old general is thought to have later regretted his early sponsorship of the young Nazi leader. I don't like it when movies kill historical characters before their time for crowd-pleasing purposes or, in the case of Patty Jenkins' new film, shock value, when screenwriter Allan Heinberg could just as easily have invented an entirely fictional German general to be a villain. That being said, the filmmakers' Ludendorff scans relatively well, apart from his murder of most of the General Staff and his imbibing a super-soldier serum invented on the fly by his personal mad scientist, with the historical general, who by 1918 had become a virtual dictator of Germany and something of a madman in the eyes of his peers. As Ludendorff, Danny Huston has it both ways, at once a genuine villain in his own right and a red herring, and he's definitely better utilized than his sidekick, the disfigured Isabel "Dr. Poison" Maru (Elena Araya), who left me wondering why she never considered taking her own strength potion. Wonder Woman could have used a big brawl between the title character and a super-powered female villain, but most reviewers seem to be happy with the picture as it is -- and it's hard to blame them.

Critically reviled despite the popularity of its first three pictures, the DC Comics Extended Universe is now fully in business, and has stolen a march on the Marvel Cinematic Universe in classic tortoise-vs-hare fashion. Marvel has had since roughly 2010 to make a movie with a female lead, but hasn't done so despite already having one of the most popular actresses on Earth identified with a role she's now played five times as an ensemble character. There are many theories as to why, in their infinite wisdom, the Marvel people have not yet made a Black Widow movie, but in the end I suppose it's appropriate that Wonder Woman take her bow first. She's not the first female superhero but she's stood the test of time better than any other, being one of the few superheroes of either sex to be published without interruption from the 1940s until the 1980s, when a brief hiatus allowed for a reboot that's kept the character in business to the present day.Thanks to the 1970s TV show Wonder Woman remains the best known female superhero, and while her 2017 showcase has made Marvel suddenly look flat-footed many fans have been asking why it took so long for a character who in comics is considered the equal of the much-filmed Superman and Batman. I have neither an answer nor a theory, but once Warner Bros. decided to exploit its DC property on Marvel's "universe" model we were going to get a Wonder Woman movie sooner rather than later. It must be gratifying to her fans that she was given the heroic task of rescuing the DC franchise and met the challenge. That success is credited to the new film's stark contrast with the grimdark preoccupations of Zack Snyder's films, and it tells you something about the widespread hostility to Snyder's vision that a World War I movie in which the heroine murders someone in a case of mistaken identity and her love interest kills himself is welcomed as a ray of sunshine and a breath of fresh air.

For a moment, Wonder Woman is arguably more grim and dark than either of Snyder's doom-and-gloom exercises, but let's step back and set up the moment. Most people know the Wonder Woman origin story, I think, and Heinberg and Jenkins don't deviate from the folk version any more than DC Comics themselves have in recent years. Suffice it to say that on an island paradise live the Amazons, an all-female race apparently drawn from the sea to spread love to mankind, but driven to learn combat to protect themselves and humanity as a whole from the Ares, the rebel son of Zeus who drives men to make war on one another. Perhaps to avoid resemblances to Marvel's Thor movies, just as the time of the main story has been moved back to World War I from World War II to avoid resemblances to Captain America, all the Olympian gods sacrificed themselves to subdue Ares, against whose return the Amazons are to be ever-vigilant despite their isolation from the rest of the world. They are entrusted with a god-killing weapon to deal with Ares and have kept in training for the last few millennia until the average Amazon is a superhuman warrior. Princess Diana grows up as the only child on an island of immortal woman, apparently a sort of Pygmalion clay sculpture -- or a golem, if you prefer -- given life to satisfy the craving of Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen) for a daughter to nurture. This daughter grows up into Gal Gadot, the Israeli actress from Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, and by then has developed into a super-Amazon. A nice feature of the film as a whole is the way Diana spends the whole film discovering just how powerful she is; there are times when she literally doesn't know her own strength. Inevitably the American pilot Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) shows up in his crashing plane. Unlike other versions of this story, in this one Steve is pursued by German marines who storm the forbidden island only to be massacred, despite their firearms -- which do take a toll -- by a band of mounted archers. Steve explains -- thankfully, this comic book movie lets everyone from Amazons to Germans speak English instead of forcing subtitles on us -- that he, flying for British Intelligence, has to deliver proof that General Ludendorff and "Dr. Poison" have developed a new, more lethal poison gas for a major offensive the general plans to launch despite ongoing armistice negotiations. From this evidence it's apparent to Diana that Ares must be backing the Germans in the war, and she'll later deduce that Ludendorff himself is Ares in human form. To her it's a matter of Amazon duty to go back to Europe with Trevor and confront the war god, despite her mother's very strong reluctance to have her meet, much less fight Ares.

During all the crowd-pleasing fish-out-of-water bits set in London, Diana believes that she can end the Great War with a decapitation strike. As she and Steve return to the mainland, having acquired the motley band of helpers shown in an old photograph in Dawn of Justice, you begin to believe that she could well win the war singlehandedly. In an instantly iconic sequence, made more epic by the incongruity of a colorfully but scantily clad woman striding alone into the killing ground of All Quiet on the Western Front or Paths of Glory, she charges through No Man's Land and liberates a town, punctuating her victory with an overkill attack on a German sniper in a church tower. Inexorably she closes in on Ludendorff and finally confronts him. The general's super-soldier formula only buys him a few minutes; he is fatally out of his league, but Diana credits her victory to her god-killing sword. Here's where things go grimdark, if only in contrast to Diana's naivete. She is genuinely stunned, horrified even, not to mention disgusted, to see war preparations continue around her as Steve's buddies. fight to stop a plane from delivering Dr. Poison's gas. Here, also, is where Heinberg's script transcends the pre-knowledge people are likely to have about the story. I doubt I was the only person in the audience who knew, from having read about the casting of Ares, that Diana had killed the wrong man. Working from that knowledge, you might think that the movie is saying that Diana just needs to kill the right man, who conveniently shows up a few minutes later. Steve Trevor knows better, however. Still sort of skeptical about the whole Ares thing despite everything he's seen, he tries to set the princess straight about human nature. The brutal truth the film tells -- and which Ares himself confirms -- is that men don't need a god to make them fight and kill each other. Ares sees himself as only a facilitator of that self-destructive, vicious nature that led him, Iblis style, to deny respect to humanity in his primal act of rebellion against Zeus. Diana is tempted to share Ares' misanthropy, almost persuaded that mankind is unworthy of her protection, but Steve persuades her, by words and example, that men are just as capable of redemptive love as of war and destruction. It may be corny but it comes with a sincere earnestness in its philosophical commitment to heroism that we haven't really seen in any of the modern superhero films up to this point. Wonder Woman promises a light at the end of the grimdark tunnel that arguably justifies the trip.

People seem to like Wonder Woman for supposedly old-fashioned qualities, comparing it more often to Richard Donner's Superman than to more recent superhero movies. It has that enigmatic element of "fun" that people require of superhero movies, Snyder's films being resented for its perceived absence. Thankfully, Wonder Woman is fun without the increasingly forced glibness of the most recent Marvel productions. It isn't self-conscious about being "fun," but just happens to have a tremendously likable, guileless performance by Gal Gadot, who achieves the small miracle of sentencing Ludendorff to death "in the name of all that is good" with a straight face without making the audience snicker. Gadot is not a true unknown, but she is unfamiliar enough to be accepted entirely as Wonder Woman, rather than as a performance of Wonder Woman. In support, Chris Pine at last becomes more than "that fool who thinks he's Kirk." While the advertising threatened to make Steve Trevor look snarky by emphasizing some of his comic lines, the actual character comes across as a genuine good guy with something of the modesty and reticence we might expect from a man of 1918. I especially liked his byplay with Gadot over their sleeping arrangements on a sailboat, which segues into a surprisingly tasteful exploration of Amazon sexuality, at least as taught in books. Going further, if, despite the relocation of the story to an earlier war, Wonder Woman bears an inescapable resemblance to Captain America; The First Avenger, one respect in which it easily surpasses its predecessor is the attention given to its whole supporting cast. One of the few gripes I have about the Cap movies is that the first film didn't really do enough with Bucky Barnes to make his reappearance in Winter Soldier feel as important as Marvel wanted, while First Avenger's introduction of a version of the Howling Commandos was little more than perfunctory. By comparison, the three original characters who tag along with Diana and Steve, played by Eugene Brave Rock, Ewen Bremner and Said Taghmaoui are much more developed and interesting, while Steve Trevor, of course, is sort of Bucky Barnes and Peggy Carter combined in one person -- he even gets something like Bucky's traditional death scene. Finally, the more I think about it the more I think the World War I setting is a stroke of genius. The Great War may still be the most cinematic of wars, perhaps because it took place as cinema came of age and discovered its full narrative and expressive power. World War I movies like All Quiet arguably still have the purest renditions of combat on screen, and it was a truly inspired move to have a superheroine run rampant in the midst of it without really trivializing the particular horrors of that conflict. Cinematographer Matthew Jensen deserves a lot of credit for those war scenes, while Jenkins, as the director of Monster, clearly has a knack for showcasing womanly wrath. I have to agree with those who found the final fight with a scrap-metal Ares somewhat wanting, but it's not really as bad or anticlimactic as those say who for some reason dislike superhero movies ending with superpowered combat. Jenkins has done a great job, not as a woman achieving any number of milestones, but as a filmmaker overcoming heavy odds, not to mention reviewers with knives practically drawn, to make a modern superhero movie that all audiences may enjoy.