marvel-cinematic-universe

The Wakanda Files

Amazon’s description: 

An in-world book from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Wakanda Files—compiled by request of Shuri (Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War) as part of her quest to improve the future for all people—is a collection of papers, articles, blueprints, and notes amassed throughout history by Wakanda’s War Dogs.

The book contains pretty much all of the technology and enhancements covered in the movies up through the end of Avengers: End Game. It has reports and details as compiled and occasionally commented on by Shuri. It might be an interesting coffee table book, but I feel an avid MCU fan will not learn very much more from this book than they would have by being a keen observer of the movies. 

The most interesting part is on the closing page. 

“In less than five years, NASA went from “Little Joe II” to one giant leap for mankind and landed on the moon. In less than five years, Robert Noyce graduates from MIT, helped Kilby invent the integrated circuit, and revolutionized computing. In less than fives years, Einstein rewrote the laws of gravity, because he just didn’t think they were correct. 

And five years is the time I have missed while the world passed me by. They say that a curios mind is never still, but I have been at a complete halt. I am at a disadvantage. But I will make the most of it.” pg. 183

This observation that some breakthroughs are just five years away from making a massive change in our world using real-life examples can make a person hopeful for the advances just around the corner. 

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 review

After just under a decade of consistently producing some of the best blockbuster entertainment each year, you can be pretty sure that you’re in for a good time if you go to see a movie with the Marvel Studios title card in front of it, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 – the fifteenth(!) film in the ever expanding franchise experiment that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe – offers no exception to that. Fans of the first film are going to find a lot to enjoy here, and while this review may come across as very critical at times, it’s important to take that alongside the knowledge that despite being noticeably more flawed than its predecessor, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is still an entertaining, engaging film in its own right, and one that I personally enjoyed very much.

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Doctor Strange – A (mostly) spoiler-free review

The latest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Doctor Strange, has finally arrived worldwide. For me, this was the movie I was most looking forward to — Doctor Strange is one of my favorite Marvel characters, and I was really interested to see how Marvel handled the introduction of magic to their universe. Would they be able to put together a movie so different from their previous movies, and pull it off? Would they chicken out on the whole concept of magic, like they did with Scarlet Witch? Would we just get more of Thor‘s “its not magic, it’s science”?

In the end, I wasn’t disappointed, I was satisfied, but I wasn’t exactly blown away. Doctor Strange is a good, solid, entertaining movie, and it handles the subject matter very well. But when you stack this movie up against the rest of the MCU, it’s going to suffer a bit. I think that’s an unfortunate but inevitable comparison, because the movie is a great movie on its own merits, but Marvel’s raising our expectations pretty high lately, so it’s going to happen.

I give this movie a 8/10. To see why, and to see exactly how Doctor Strange stacks up against it’s siblings, and why you really should go see it, keep reading. (Warning: I’ll keep the spoilers to a minimum, but there’s a few things that will come up as we go along.)

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A Guide to the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse

In a previous blog post, we examined the history and future of the various DC Comics cinematic franchises that make up what I (apparently alone) am calling the DC Cinematic Multiverse. But DC isn’t the only company to have a massive tangle of cinematic universes under its belt. It’s long-time rival Marvel has been even more prolific when it comes to adapting their material for the large and small screen. Unlike DC, though, Marvel gave up control over much of it’s catalog during the dark times (the 1996 bankruptcy and subsequent reorganization), resulting it several different studios having access to bits and pieces of the Marvel world. To this day there is still a lot of confusion over who has what rights, who can be in which films, and on-screen with who else, and which films belong to which shared canon.

Note: As with the DC post, I am mostly ignoring the animated parts of the Marvel multi-verse. There have been 36 (to date) animated shows and about a dozen animated movies.  In general, with two notable exceptions, these shows all exist in their own separate universes, with their own separate designations in the Marvel reality catalog, and otherwise play no role in the live-action TV or movie worlds.

So, as we did with DC, lets see if we can make some sense of of the tangled mess that is the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse.

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