fantastic_four

I liked it a lot. Not sold on Riddler, but I'm not turned off either, just can't tell yet. I didn't think much of Batman Begins from the trailers, and even from a first viewing. I enjoyed it, but didn't see just how great it was until after several viewings. Begins came out in 2005, and by 2007 I realized Begins was a top ten superhero film and I was all in on The Dark Knight which proved to be transcendent. I may have to see this more than once to know what to think, but not fully appreciating everything in a film is the mark of a great film anyway.

I'm seeing the review embargo lifts October 24th.

If you look at the Watchers shown at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 shown below they look VERY much like the Uatu shown on FF 48. When I first saw Uatu in What If I wondered why he looked so different than the ones previously shown, but eventually it occurred to me that I'm pretty sure they did the same thing with Uatu that they did with Thanos--they made him look like a mix of the classic character and the actor providing his voice, Jeffrey Wright. His skin tone is darker like Jeffrey Wright's is, and Uatu's face looks like a mix of Jeffrey Wright and the Watchers in the pic below.

In those other MCU works that aren't about Celestials genetically engineering life around the galaxy--sure. It's the same basic explanation for why space movies have so many humanoids when in reality it's unlikely humanoids would evolve on any other planet--it's because stories are created for humans, so yea, there are a bunch of humanoids in them because that's what humans want to see. It doesn't make sense, but I'm willing to suspend disbelief because we know why writers put so many humanoids on other planets. In this one I can't BEGIN to imagine being at all interested in this story without thinking about the genetics of the Celestials' creations.

It just occurred to me that the racial and ethnic variety is easy to explain. In the comics the Celestials simply released the Eternals together as a group millions of years ago, but perhaps in the MCU the Celestials engineered the Eternals much later, i.e. 7000 years ago, and they specifically engineered them to be deployed in a geographically distributed way, so Nezzar the Calculator may have specifically engineered each one to match the genetic characteristics of the people in the region they were to be deployed to. My main problem is I don't fully understand the motivation of the Celestials to begin with. I get why the Deviants exist, but why did the Celestials release them? Seems like Ziran the Tester would just destroy the Deviants as evolutionary dead ends as opposed to allowing them to exist at all. Why did they set up this fight between the Deviants and Eternals?

The skin color makes sense for any planet. On Earth that evolved relative to the climate in the region they lived in, so the idea of other planets having varied climates on different parts of the planet seems likely. What doesn't make as much sense is every other genetic adaptation that mirrors Terran races, i.e. Sersi being Chinese, Phastos being African-American, Ajak being Mexican, Ikaris being Scottish, etc. Even each actor's natural accents are intact in the trailers, so these characters seem VERY tied to Earth's specific geographical distribution of genetic and cultural characteristics.

So why is every one of them representative of such obviously-varied Terran human races? In a film that wasn't specifically about a group of aliens who travel around the universe genetically engineering life you could easily assume that the diversity is due to Marvel trying to represent multiple ethnicities for the audience's sake, but here it can't be that simple--their races have to explicitly relate to the story in some way.

One thing I find confusing about the MCU Eternals is why they look like the different Earth races. In the comics the Eternals on Earth were derived millions of years ago from humanity's ancestor erectus as shown in the page below from What If? #23. This artificial DNA acceleration would be very unlikely to follow the same evolutionary path that humanity did with the various races from different regions that evolved on Earth, so why are they all so representative of different regions? They must have monkeyed with the comic origins of the Eternals in some way we'll see in a few weeks, I suppose. In the trailer one of the Eternals says they came to Earth 7000 years ago. Does that mean the MCU Eternals aren't even derived from the DNA of humanity's ancestors on Earth?

Looks really, really good.

Which characters were worthy of making it to the main MCU? The only one I liked enough for that to happen was Captain Carter, but she'd be tough for them since they'd have to use CGI to make her super soldier sized. She looked to be a bit over six feet and around 180 to 200 pounds, which I was reminded of again in this last episode when she towered over Black Widow.

Yep good movie. Not spectacular, but well worth the watch for Sopranos fans. I didn't know anything about it other than what's in the trailer plus the fact that Tony was being portrayed by James Gandolfini's son going in, and I was surprised the movie centered on Dickie Moltisanti. He really carried the film though, great performance. And yea Junior killing him just for laughing when he fell in the rain was a really great match for how petty they showed him being throughout the series. I thought every actor did a great job of acting like their parallel older actor. The only one I thought was a bit off was the guy playing Steve Van Zandt's character. He did a decent job of mimicking Van Zandt's unique voice and behavior affects, but they were a bit more exaggerated than even Van Zandt did them. He got about 60% to 70% there but he just felt off the whole time. At first I assumed that he was supposed to be a different guy because of the exaggerated way he was doing it, but eventually I realized nope, that's supposed to be Silvio. VERY minor quibble though, I still enjoyed the Silvio actor's performance anyway and the film as a whole.

Tomatometer really dropping like a rock, down from 72% this morning to 59% now. It'll probably end in the high 40% to low 50% range, so reviews are evenly mixed.

Early reviews are better than I was expecting. Odds are in favor of it being at minimum mixed, hopefully a bit above that in the end. So why'd they wait so long to lift the review embargo? I was in the market yesterday to buy tickets for Sunday so we could get good seats, but we skipped it assuming Venom probably sucked. Might've gone for Venom if we knew it wasn't completely terrible, so if they knew this from screenings why didn't they lift the embargo earlier?

I've read exactly the opposite--that Kirby had a better origin for the X-Men in mind before he started writing the Eternals, and that the Eternals came later in his development of the concept. I've also heard he was originally going to call his series "The Celestials" to focus on the source for mutant powers, but then later decided to focus on one of their other creations instead and would later delve into the Celestials and mutant back story from there. But I haven't done any deep dive to know who's right and who's just guessing about what Kirby did or didn't want to do and what evidence exists of his motives with the Eternals. I've seen many claims about what Kirby did or didn't want to do over the years that were difficult if not impossible to verify. I know that in the 1990s I used to hear that Kirby originally wanted Galactus to be a giant space monster because he thought that was more realistic and that Lee insisted that he be humanoid, but in later trying to trace that back I couldn't find solid evidence of it. I have a memory of Stan Lee saying that in a video interview, but I couldn't remember which one, and even if he did say it sometimes Stan's memory has been proven not to be great either, which he has repeatedly admitted himself. When Eternals is closer to coming out I'll probably try to deep dive Kirby's original ideas, or I'll definitely do it if the movie has some hint that the Celestials will be identified as the source of the X-Men in the MCU. I don't know the source of anything Kirby may or may not have meant other than what's in the comics and what I've read in random places on the Internet so far. He didn't do many interviews and didn't write his thoughts a lot like Stan Lee did, so much of what he did or didn't intend is hearsay at this point.

While I agree that the What If panel you're referring to--that are also linked below along with the full page that follows it--aren't entirely clear, I've repeatedly heard that Kirby did intend to imply that Oneg implanted the X-gene into homoerectus (had to edit this and make that term one word because the forum software kept erasing the first four letters ). Just going by what's on the pages below you could assume that Oneg is who guided homoerectus to become humanity as you suggest, or you could also assume that homoerectus was already destined to become humanity and what Oneg did to their DNA was to add latent potential for superpowers, i.e. what later authors called the X-gene. Though every source I've ever seen says Oneg implanted the X-gene, I don't know if something later established that or if people are assuming it from these pages below. If you've seen any further clarifying material please do share.

Bo Katan was double-packed in her wave, and she's been highly available online--often at a discount. I drove around to 12 Walgreens over the past two weeks looking for their Marvel Legends Nova exclusive and surprisingly saw Bo at three of them.

Looks like the review embargo lifted today, reviews so far are decent.

I don't know what happened either, but you're right about the timeframe where it became more acute.

Yea, Oscars? No. The ONLY reason Heath Ledger or Joaquin Phoenix were ever nominated is because they were playing characters within the realm of possibility. The idea that an actor playing a fictional symbiote host would ever get Oscar consideration is bizarre and seemingly naive to how the Academy operates.

I'm seeing that the review embargo lifts September 30th, i.e. the day before it opens. RARELY is that a good sign.

Is it safe to say that the pretty-good performance of Shang-Chi means no more delays for this movie? Hope so, I'm looking forward to it.

Definite meh/fine. Right in line with the competent but not outstanding level of quality I've come to expect from the Disney Plus shows relative to the films.

I enjoy several of the Romero zombie movies and enjoy how Kirkman revived the zombie genre, but yea, I mostly agree that I don't need zombie versions of other stuff I already like. Wasn't looking forward to the episode, and while it held my attention it's my least favorite episode so far.

I can't believe they released that teaser a few days ago that was terrible, and then this trailer that was comparatively fantastic. I went from skeptical to optimistic.

If that was supposed to get me excited for the trailer in two days...they should have just waited and released the trailer in two days.