The Punisher: One Last Kill

Although mercifully brief, writer-director Reinaldo Marcus Green's The Punisher: One Last Kill, co-written with bellowing lead Jon Bernthal, is an aggressively wrongheaded take on Marvel's vigilante character. Set in a mouldering New York straight out of a Michael Winner movie, Green and Bernthal's take on Frank Castle is, God help us, subject to the kind of Campbellian archetypes that demand that this Punisher be a hirsute shrieker who repeatedly denies the call to adventure (slaughter). Heaven knows which comic runs Green and Bernthal have immersed themselves in but it is utterly bizarre to see minutes on minutes of screentime revolve around a stooped, drunken Castle breezing round a burning neighbourhood in which stunt performers are freely terrorising elderly day players. Not to pretend to be any great expert in The Punisher (the sum total of my experience with the character would be a Marvel UK Autumn Special, several US issues published in the early 1990s - #34, #37 and #48 - as well as Garth Ennis' Welcome Back, Frank, the Richard Corben collaboration The End, and the first trade of The Punisher MAX ) but I haven't read any floppies in which Frank wasn't, at default, completely consumed with his mission. 

The self-pitying, self-flagellating superhero seen in One Last Kill - who will soon be seen playing second fiddle to Tom Holland in Spider-Man: Brand New Day - then plays like shallow, student short pretence when measured against such an obsessive, elemental character as his four colour equivalent. Hasn't The Punisher always been something of the American comic equivalent to Takao Saito (and Saito-Pro)'s Golgo 13? An expression of middle-aged wish fulfilment so finely curated that the doubts and painful introspection usually ascribed to such expert extermination are judged completely superfluous? Green and Bernthal are, plainly, far too fixated on the martyrdom complex inherent to their nation's violent law enforcement to fully grasp such concepts. So, in their picture, an incredibly damaged soldier is given free licence by the smiling, appreciative children of America to work out his demons by bloodily mauling a rampaging, multicultural underclass. Similarly, the Brutalist, high-rise architecture and Soviet era weaponry seen in this film's action scenes recall stints spent in Call of Duty: Warzone (rather than, say, The Raid or Dredd) and, while the extended takes of this well-drilled ultra-violence are where Bernthal seems most at home, the computer generated sparks and muzzle flashes work contrary to any implication that we're viewing a dangerous sequence that has been captured, rather than a safe stunt that has been finely orchestrated. 

The Fantastic Four by Peach Momoko

Venom #1 by Sam Kieth

Spider-Man by Sal Buscema

Red Sonja

Based on a Marvel comics character created by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith, director Richard Fleischer's Red Sonja is an odd adjunct to Arnold Schwarzenegger's barbarian films in which the Austrian oak does not even play everyone's favourite Cimmerian. Sold in the Italian market as Yado (a choice that, bizarrely, implores immediate comparison with Yoda, the amphibian guru from The Empire Strikes Back), complete with a ghostly poster image of Schwarzenegger swirling in the mists of time, Red Sonja is instead a star vehicle for Brigitte Nielsen, a model-turned-actress who is striking and statuesque but otherwise lacking in any of the kind of experience required to carry such a project. Since this is a production of the Dino De Laurentiis Corporation, Red Sonja is pretty lavishly appointed though. The costume and production design, courtesy of the Academy Award winning Danilo Donati, far outstrips every other aspect of the picture. Outfits are suitably baroque, seemingly drawing inspiration from Windsor-Smith's beautiful detailed pin-ups of these mythological characters. Sets are likewise well appointed, with the cavernous, steaming throne room of Sandahl Bergman's evil queen a particular highlight. Despite all this wonderful dressing Red Sonja is a lifeless trudge that often seems to be poking fun at its own limitations. A prolonged battle between Schwarzenegger's Lord Kalidor and a mechanical fish is so repetitive that it becomes clear that every scrap of coverage containing this nascent (and increasingly bankable) superstar is being used. And, not long after, a slow treacherous creep along what looks like a sheer rock face for the principal adventurers is suddenly revealed to be a few feet from the floor when Paul Smith's bodyguard rushes into the frame to help his bratty princeling hop off the hazard. 

Captain America - Albert Pyun's Director's Cut

If nothing else, this posthumously released Director's Cut of Albert Pyun's famously disappointing, straight-to-video Captain America demonstrates that a conceptual boldness, when assembling lower budget material, can paper over many of the more obvious cracks in the overall piece. This isn't the first release of Pyun's film to present itself as the director's preferred edit though. During the 2010s Pyun himself sold DVDs and Blu-Rays through his website of an 'Unreleased Director's Edition' that took the theatrical (or, maybe more accurately, rental tape) cut and embellished it with dupe-level reproductions of one or two of the elided sequences seen here. This newly released assembly though - recently unearthed by his wife Cynthia Curnan and the Yippee Ki-Yay Mother Video label - was scanned directly from a celluloid print that Pyun owned but did not have the facilities to review and represents a massive reorganisation of the material that the director was able to get away with before the film's financial backers stepped in and locked him out of the production. 

When compiling their preferred version of the film, producer Menahem Golan's 21st Century Film Corporation opted for a literal, chronological procession of filmed events, beginning their release with scenes set during the Second World War before the viewer and Steve Rogers are catapulted into the modern day for some clipped, low-cost soul-searching. Pyun's approach is wildly different in both tone and execution, deliberately withholding the comparatively expensive, period-bound setpieces that detail the origin of Scott Paulin's Italian Red Skull or the rocket-bound adventures of Matt Salinger's Captain America. These moments, bold as they are, are hampered by the kind of obvious corner cutting deployed when struggling to impart scale in cash strapped productions. Massive environments that are intended to read as frightening or impressive are instead airy and poorly dressed; performances are hampered by a harried flatness or some other, unconvincing tonal note born of expedience. Plainly, when viewed in their video tape entirety, there just isn't enough of the kind of striking, propulsive coverage required to cleanly navigate scenes designed (and failing) to be exciting. Pyun's Director's Cut solution is to break these moments up into arresting blips of information that are then deployed throughout a much more sombre film. 

We explore the simmering interior landscapes of the film's principle characters as they pick apart the lives that have trapped them in their current predicaments. Both Salinger's Steve Rogers and Paulin's Red Skull are fixated upon ideas of childhood or an innocence that they have subsequently lost. A heartbroken Rogers maintains an upbeat, gee-whizz facade but fails to reconnect with his former allies and worries incessantly about how he has contributed to the fallen world he now inhabits. This Red Skull, rather than the fanatical adherent of Adolf Hitler seen in the comics of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, is explicitly a kidnapped child. One who was mutated into a violent criminal to work in service of a power hungry, fascist state (in the modern era he counts American generals amongst his clients). Skull yearns to return to a parlour room within his childhood home, to play an uninterrupted arpeggio for his murdered family. Similarly, the rearranged sequences that turn over in the minds of super-soldiers are, fittingly, built with the storytelling language of serial cinema. Binary morals and motivation - not to mention super-powered rockets - are able to, momentarily, intrude upon a particularly downbeat interpretation of a 1980s struggling to free itself from an insidious and all-encompassing take on the military-industrial complex. Previously, viewers were asked to endure several minutes spent in a glaringly lit concrete bunker, complete with gleaming swastika, as resource poor filmmaking visibly strained to wring out something, anything, entertaining. Now we experience the same alarming iconography as the haunting, eidetic memory of an unnaturally strong man who believes himself to be a complete failure. 

Patch and Joe Fixit by Alexye

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

The best use yet of the multiverse crutch that big screen Marvel has deployed to prop up waning interest in their main timeline, director Matt Shakman's The Fantastic Four: First Steps could, perhaps, be understood as a period piece - one firmly located in the 1960s, the decade in which Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's creation was first published. There are deeper wrinkles to this kind of framing though. Most obviously, there exists technology completely out of step with even our current reality: faster than light space travel (tuned in such a way that it handily avoids any issues associated with time dilation), sentient robot friends that run on massive cassette tapes, and transforming vehicles that defy gravity. The alternative twentieth century of First Steps diverts from our own in seismic, socio-political ways as well. This version of retro-futurism skews utopian with, seemingly, very little poverty or racism in evidence. The Cold War appears especially cool as well, with all countries happy to work together when global threats rear their head. The entire planet, apparently, having united under the flag of Mister Fantastic's Future Foundation then. Nobody even smokes. 

Typically, these kind of corrections in blockbuster entertainment reek of bowdlerisation, with the past - no matter how turbulent - transformed into the equivalent of an amusement park attraction; scenery that allows the props and wardrobe departments licence to play around with otherwise untouchable aesthetics. In Shakman's film though this unabashed idealism, for an America that has never existed, plays well specifically because First Steps' closest Marvel stablemates are so mired in the circuitous machinations required to account for dozens of characters and prior instalments. This fresh break allows the film a science fiction-presenting identity of its own, an advantage not often available in these increasingly complicated phases. In comic terms, First Steps then is the miniseries printed on glossy paper to the main continuity's well-thumbed ballast. The film also displays atypical gender roles - that extend beyond Shalla-Bal (rather than Norrin Radd) hanging ten - that feel rooted in the wider work of The Fantastic Four co-creator Jack Kirby, if not specifically the writer-illustrator's original run with these characters. So, Pedro Pascal's Reed Richards is less forthright and more absentminded than expected while Vanessa Kirby's Sue Storm is positioned as the better leader in peacetime before proving herself to be a great physical threat when the group finds themselves battling a cosmic juggernaut. 

While not necessarily reflective of Sue Storm's shyer, sixties characterisation, there are notes here that feel more in step with Kirby's seventies work for DC, specifically the quick-thinking but vulnerable Mister Miracle and his powerhouse partner Big Barda. A central couple that compliment rather than contradict each other then. Where Kirby feels less represented though is the the grinding technologies of Ralph Ineson's towering Galactus. Rather than the crackling, psychedelic machinery that Kirby dreamt up, or even the massive gaseous cloud seen in 2007's Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, this comic accurate world eater sits at the centre of massive, whirring engines that physically pulverise the planets marked by Julia Garner's gleaming herald. It's difficult then (for this writer at least) not to think of other, predominantly animated, over-industrialised landscapes: the enormous, clattering underworld that ensured that the punishment of Sisyphus was eternal in DIC Audiovisuel and Tokyo Movie Shinsha's Ulysses 31 or the abstract, apocalyptic physiology of the planet Unicron from The Transformers: The Movie. All examples feature mechanisms so gigantic and all-encompassing as to be maddening. This mind-warping scale is also present in more rapid sequences of First Steps, the best of which intercuts the birth of Sue and Reed's child on a crumbling rocket with The Silver Surfer giving chase through the chop and churn generated by a black hole. 

Thunderbolts*

Director Jack Schreier's Thunderbolts*, the film's screenplay credited to Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, briefly hits its stride when the team of discarded henchmen find themselves trapped in the memories of Lewis Pullman's Bob, a depressive amnesiac who has been experimented on by whichever secret society is currently propping up the Marvel universe's version of the United States. Rather than the conscious vivisection haunting Wolverine over in Fox's defunct X-Men series, Bob's hang-ups centre around a family home so abusive that the decorum demanded by a PG-13 rating means the film is compelled to interrupt Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Valentina before she can describe something truly horrid when debriefing her shadow-casting creation. Once the title troupe have trespassed on these intrusive thoughts though, stray elbows are allowed to be thrown at and connect with the rotten paterfamilias battering his wife and child with fists and invective. Perhaps this moment sings because the presence of Florence Pugh's Yelena instantly organises Thunderbolts* as something of a sequel to Black Widow, a film packed with morally destitute fathers? A shame then that Yelena's own deadbeat Dad, David Harbour's Red Guardian, hangs around proceedings like a bad stink. Any lingering goodwill for this swollen super-soldier, presumably, having more to do with Harbour's overprotective turn on Netflix's Stranger Things than the character abandoning his adoptive daughters to a child trafficking ring in a previous instalment.

Captain America: Brave New World

Instantly a relic of a bygone era, thanks to the despotic churn of Washington politics, Captain America: Brave New World not only features a president who has managed to win his seat thanks to tenuous connections to in-world celebrities (in this instance, The Avengers) but a commander-in-chief who takes his responsibilities as a steward for the world's sole superpower seriously whilst also suffering enormous pain when estranged from his child. Pure fantasy in other words. Dogged by reshoot rumours, as well as whispers regarding the curmudgeonly nature of actor Harrison Ford, Brave New World arrives as a pretty great illustration of how older stars are, seemingly, far better armed to advocate for themselves and their own personal persona. 

As President Thunderbolt Ross, Ford enjoys a layer of expertise and attention that is absolutely not extended to his counterpart, Anthony Mackie's Captain America. Mackie makes do with a re-heated character incline that traps his airborne superhero inside further doubts regarding his suitability for such an incredible role. There is very little personal dimension given to any of his actions (certainly nothing romantic or sexual), beyond him thanklessly performing a series of tasks that facilitate pleasant outcomes for third-parties. And that's really it. Presumably, Disney have decided that a black actor at the forefront of one of their most prestigious properties is a difficult enough sell in today's socio-political landscape and that providing him with any interiority, other than the firmly held worry that he cannot possibly measure up to his white predecessor, would therefore be a step too far. 

This listlessness that has been applied to Sam Wilson is compounded by a style of action that leans so heavily on incredible displays of invulnerability that the audience has to be repeatedly coaxed and reassured with asides about magical super-soldier equipment that has been gifted to Wilson by Wakanda. There are deeper layers of disconnection though: Mackie's Cap is a human bird, able to whizz around sixth generation fighter jets without experiencing any of the intense nauseas that usually enact themselves upon our fragile bodies. That may be fine in a Summer cross-over (or their big screen equivalent) when this Captain America is one voice in an enormous chorus of zipping digital bodies but jarring in a piece that otherwise strains to frame itself as some version of a political thriller. Strangely enough Carl Lumbly's Isaiah Bradley, the forgotten Korean war era super soldier, enjoys a more considered framing when he finds himself cornered. 

Bradley, already a comparatively complicated approach to the idea that there have been multiple, successive Captain Americas (thanks to his trepidation when engaging with the rulers of his home country) gets to play a thoughtless The Manchurian Candidate-style assassin within an inciting incident then, almost immediately, the much older, frailer man that he actually is when he snaps back to reality as the full power of the state descends upon him. Of course, this compromised human perspective is immediately tidied away from Sam Wilson's wider adventure, lest it confuse the action figure roil. According to the misfiring The Falcon and The Winter Soldier TV mini-series, Bradley spent decades in prison being experimented upon by, essentially, Nazis. His return to unjust incarceration should feel a little more heartbreaking then than the temporary time out depicted here. Which brings us back to Harrison Ford. 

Ford's President Ross feels largely out of step with the rest of his film, as if the actor is delivering the performance he prefers to give rather than what was specifically, structurally, on the page. The way he's talked about within the piece - his abruptness or his alarming swings in temper - do not match up with what Ford is actually doing. Even away from scenes that depict extremely unconvincing statecraft (in decades gone by the studios financing these projects would fork out so hotshot political drama writers could take passes at these screenplays, injecting some hint of credibility into them), Ross is a man enacting personal change on a titanic scale. Not just to steward the country he's been elected to lead but as a way to attract the favour of the daughter he has pushed away. Ross has human failings then. Naked, emotional needs further complicated by a body that isn't up to the task of shouldering such relentless physical stress. 

Ford, as his character teeters on the edge of giving into his explosive anger, does something that really only Michael B. Jordan in Black Panther has managed to do in the Marvel features: he seizes control of the camera. He is no longer a passive, observed player within a hastily blocked superhero feature. The tidal wave of emotions that his President Ross is experiencing actually enact themselves upon the frame. Aboard a battleship that was itself very nearly breached, the screen begins to tip to one side as Ross seethes through another of his episodes. Director Julius Onah and cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau's film literally upends, standing almost vertical to sink into some unseen abyss while the biggest star in the piece claws at his throat, gasping for air. The transformations experienced by Ross in Brave New World are becoming unexpectedly exciting. 

Although pre-release material couldn't wait to trumpet the debut of a new Hulk, the circumstances of the monster's arrival are communicated in dramatically apprehensive terms, rather than just another excuse for a climactic special effects riot. The involuntary anxieties enacting themselves upon the failing Ross recall the shaking tremors experienced by his television ancestor: Bill Bixby's lonely David Banner from CBS' The Incredible Hulk. Another older man utterly appalled at what could become of him. Our familiarity with Mark Ruffalo's increasingly tame and psychologically well-adjusted Hulk, not to mention the demands of always escalating digital filmmaking, have completely dulled one of the core appeals of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's original comic character, that of an educated person who cannot contain an awful, uncontrollable violence within themselves. 

Perhaps then, with this in mind, Captain America: Brave New World's climax plays differently outside of its birthplace? Presumably we, as viewers, are supposed to be struck aghast that The White House is aflame during the finale; withered by helicopter gunfire and trampled beneath the feet of a boiling, blood-red ogre? However, and this is largely thanks to Ford's uncooperative portrayal of a Thunderbolt Ross who is essentially Jack Ryan with angina, it is actually supremely satisfying to see an American head-of-state rendered in this way: a thoughtless monster who has completely given in to the bilious rages that bubble inside him. Excusing this Hulk's recently extinguished political career, it's supremely entertaining to watch a creature that instantly sets to tearing down facile, faux-Grecian architecture with its bare, bleeding hands. Borderline therapeutic in its honesty even, given the lopsided reality we're all currently being battered through. 

Venom: The Last Dance

Venom: The Last Dance represents filmmaking as a rolling, observable contract negotiation. As with many other superhero sequels, although there is still money to be mined from this slime saga the most valuable parties to the property, in this case Tom Hardy and Tom Hardy doing a funny voice, have either come to the end of their original deal or are otherwise desperate to go off and do something else. As such Last Dance strains to accommodate a dishevelled and disengaged-looking lead actor, who has scored himself a story credit alongside writer-director Kelly Marcel, while erecting some sort of scaffolding that can be returned to later, should Venom 3 buck the trend of recent Sony branded Marvel sinkholes. So, somewhere in a pitch black pocket universe, the symbiote progenitor plots alongside ravenous horrors that can be instantly transmitted anywhere in space and time. Knull, as played by Andy Serkis, is a belatedly deployed Thanos figure for this drain-circling spin-off cycle that, quite apparently, was being cued up to battle the likes of Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter before their feature debuts went down in flames. Elsewhere there's Hardy's Eddie Brock who, having been rudely deposited in an alternative reality pending a cross-over event in Venom: Let There Be Carnage, finds himself just as impolitely dumped back in his original realm, having never actually teamed up with anybody. All of which is to say that Venom 3 runs in circles to put out fires started elsewhere, all while struggling to make space for Juno Temple's one-dimensional scientist and, in Hardy's Brock, a principle character who seems to be exiting their own franchise. 

Deadpool & Wolverine

Ryan Reynolds, who is already plastered all over Disney+ with his Welcome to Wrexham documentary series, finally makes his presence known in the big screen Marvel universe with Deadpool & Wolverine, a long-promised meet-up that keeps some plates spinning for a cinematic slate that is, we are repeatedly told here, no longer in the rudest of health. Rather than immediately have Reynolds' talkative (or annoying, if you prefer) avatar brushing shoulders with what remains of The Avengers, director Shaun Levy and his co-writers, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells, and Reynolds again have concocted a slightly more metatextual premise for their crossover event, one that uses the Whovian claptrap present in cancelled streaming serial Loki to draw in characters from films that were either made when Marvel was happily licensing off any property it could to stay solvent or released under regimes now obliterated by enormous, monopoly-flouting mergers. 

So, as well as an eternally reliable Hugh Jackman essaying a particularly grumpy take on The Wolverine, Jennifer Garner's Elektra is wished back into being, along with Dafne Keen's X-23 (from Logan) and Channing Tatum as a version of Gambit that never quite made it out of development hell. All are welcome distractions from the relentless motor-mouthing - particularly Tatum who ably demonstrates the difference between genuine, comedic irreverence and a strain of humour, otherwise omnipresent in this film, in which the audience often feels like they've been taken hostage by a brand ambassador - but it's the film's use of Wesley Snipes as an older, grouchier Blade that turns out to be the biggest double-edged sword. Of course, in the week that Kris Kristofferson has passed away, it's wonderful to see Snipes back in his tacti-Goth get up, now with a fine line of grey creeping up the knife-edge of his hairline, but the brief machete-twirling seen here is not an adequate resolution for a performance and persona that has cast such a massive, sun darkening shadow. 

As Deadpool & Wolverine rattles ever closer to a resolution, the false expectations engendered by its premise become more apparent, even glaring. The fourth-wall breaking muddies the conceptual water: are these heroes refugees from their own, individual franchises or orphaned ideas tossed off from our higher, indifferent reality? Is the plane of existence that we, the viewer, inhabit something that can be accessed by the onscreen characters? If Deadpool can directly address the audience, shouldn't his allies harbour some resentment for, if not the cinemagoer that did not turn up for each of their individual instalments, then perhaps the executive regimes that so mishandled their incredible destinies? The crumbling edifice of the 20th Century Fox logo is frequent background flavour in a topographical realisation of a desktop recycle bin but is that really enough to sate our collective bloodlust? Basically, is The Daywalker cleaving David S. Goyer, the writer-director of New Line's Blade: Trinity, in twaine a realistic expectation for post-modern, early-2000s nostalgia bait or is it merely the delusional desire of this terminally chippy weirdo? 

Regardless, Ryan Reynolds' latest charm offensive absolutely peters out, content to build for itself yet another world-destroying machine then have it be destroyed. Like a great many Marvel films then, Deadpool & Wolverine peaks while the credits are rolling. Although, unusually, the entertainment being extracted here isn't premised on even more completely unrealistic (or, in their more recent instances, unlikely to be referred to again) expectations. Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) by Green Day plays over interlaced B-roll footage from the Fox era and, for once, it feels like the shattering of motion picture kayfabe is being leveraged in a genuinely affectionate, rather than cynically advantageous, way. As a device, these behind-the-scenes glimpses are typically limited to comedies, deployed as a way to reassure anyone watching that of course the crew were absolutely delighted to be on set that day when the highest paid actor decided to waste everybody's time by ad-libbing. Here though, the effect is sincere and cumulative, tracking through a couple of decades worth of both success and failure; most of which hinge upon the unfailing likeability being broadcast by one Hugh Jackman. A superhero actor who, at this point, is surely second only to Christopher Reeve in terms of being able to remain dignified, even immune, when surrounded by hare-brained nonsense.

The Marvels

The Marvels has every opportunity to (literally) sing: not only is the film premised on the surprisingly high stakes-presenting idea that each of the three central heroes (Brie Larson's Captain Marvel, Teyonah Parris' Monica Rambeau, and Iman Vellani's Ms. Marvel) can switch places, instantly, if they happen to use their light-bending powers at the same time but a significant stop along the way takes place on a planet where it is customary to serenade rather than converse. Unfortunately for Nia DaCosta's salmagundi sequel, and really the vast majority of the Marvel cinematic universe at this point, the tease of these ideas is more important than following them through to any of the terrifying (or even just satisfying) conclusions they seem to guarantee. The situational vice versa that should see each of the Marvels constantly swapping in and out of perils explicitly tuned to a completely different power scale does make itself known in the film's early action sequences: the relatively underpowered, street-level Kamala Khan is thrown into much higher stakes scenarios than she is equipped to deal with but her presence there is quickly nixed before a genuine sense of life-threatening danger can be generated. 

The Marvels does even (briefly) toy with the idea that Larson's superhero can have her powers leeched away by Zawe Ashton's strangely hesitant Kree warlord but, as is expected, this neutering is so brief that it barely registers in the grand scheme of the overall piece. As for the singing planet, well, before any of these interlopers are forced to awkwardly trill and warble their way through the basics of communication they have already been placed in the company of a handsome alien prince who is happy to talk to these humans in their own, non-musical language. Post-Downey Jr., Disney's Marvel films seem to be premised on a pointed overindulgence that has recently tipped into complete wastefulness, one that denies characters any opportunity to really suffer or be put into positions where they are forced to transform themselves, either physically or emotionally. Although entire planets blink in and out of existence, the stakes have never seemed so low or so easily resolved. In one of the sequel stings, drip-fed as the credits roll, the displaced Rambeau finds herself in an entirely different superhero universe, one that allows her the instant opportunity to meet an alternative version of the mother she lost to cancer. These kind of interactional possibilities, which, at a minimum, should deal with hesitance if not outright horror, present as misshapen and repulsively unreal when the dead are not only returned to life but, in this instance, given exciting superpowers as well.

Spider-Man / Kraven by Corey Lewis

Inescapable by Peach Momoko

Doctor Doom by Mike Becker

Wolverine by Frank Miller (with Matt Battaglia)

The Transformers #1 (UK) by Geoff Senior

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Disney's Marvel films no longer need to introduce or describe their heroes. We're so deep into the never-ending machinations of the various phases that the idea of a central character has become outmoded or even useless. Rather than just focus on either of the title heroes, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania also has to find space and axis for Michelle Pfeiffer's quantum cast away Janet Van Dyne, Michael Douglas' ant enthusiast Hank Pym, and Kathryn Newton as Cassandra Lang, Ant-Man's ebullient daughter. This overabundance of gallantry can't help but affect the basic language of Peyton Reed's film: shots and assembly must account for several distinct and constantly evolving perspectives, often in the same scene. Take this group-based coverage and add to it a fantastical sub-atomic realm that must be created with purely digital tools and you have a film that often feels unduly synthetic and theatrical in its presentation. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being directed at a mise-en-scène that feels innately disconnected from human view and touch. We're seeing a foreground space of abandoned actors having to imagine their immediate surroundings while a cauldron of background information swirls behind them. Quantumania is built to be fantastical but it's not a psychedelia any one of the onscreen people seem to be actively experiencing. 

Star Wars by Peach Momoko