Considering this week’s Finally Watched reviews this seemed a fitting post.
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So I didn’t get to watch the second movie yesterday, and at about four hours long for the TNT airing it took a while to watch. Originally titled Avengers: Infinity War part 2, the title Endgame may be more fitting for a number of reasons I’ll get into during the review. Yesterday I looked at the first movie and its downer ending. And don’t tell me it had to be a downer ending. A cliffhanger doesn’t force you to abandon all hope or come out of the theater depressed. Or at least it doesn’t have to and Infinity War (part 1) pretty much did that for me when I hit stop on the DVR.
I’m at a loss what else to add here that won’t come up in the review and I’m probably going to miss my usual posting deadline as it is, so let’s just jump into it already.
Yes, I used the short trailer on this one. The movie makes up for it by being really long. Also, spoilers from this one too because it’s really unavoidable, but it’s not like the internet isn’t already ruining the endings of movies for us, including this one.
RELEASE DATE: 2018
RELEASED BY: Disney and Marvel Studios
RUNTIME: 3 hours 1 minute
RATING: PG-13
STARRING: still way too many names to list here
SCREENWRITERS: Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely
DIRECTORS: Anthony and Joe Russo
BOX OFFICE: $2.798 billion USD, according to Google
ESTIMATED BUDGET: $356 million USD, also according to Google
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While famous actors working on DC animated properties have been unsurprising since at least the DCAU and the direct-to-video movies, even ones that don’t do a lot of voice acting, it wasn’t started at that time. Between Filmation’s various shows and Hanna-Barbera’s Superfriends a number of actors who were famous at the time, and some still known today, also did voice acting alongside being regulars or recurring actors on live-action TV shows. MeTV brings up a list of some of them. As a bonus here’s a focus article on Olan Soule, who voiced Batman for both animation studios.
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Well, all the good parts are already spoiled for me but this week I’m diving into the Avengers two-part movie that seems to have led to a huge change in how Marvel Studios approaches the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Trying to play friendly with the source material is a thing of the past, and this time you can’t blame Sony…but that’s a rant for another time. The thing about this movie is that everyone talks about the ending to Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, whether to praise or condemn it. So I can’t simply go in there blind. It’s one thing that the big reveal about The Empire Strikes Back or the original Planet Of The Apes movies are spoiled because they’re really old. These movies aren’t even a decade old. That’s both the strength of the internet…getting to talk about these films with more than your buddies at work or school, and the disadvantage for those of us who couldn’t go see them due to being broke and sick. In my case both.
So when they aired on TNT I managed to record them and tonight and tomorrow I can finally watch and review them. Tonight we begin with Infinity War, loosely based on the comic book story arc of the same name. I haven’t seen the Black Panther movie but nobody’s spoiling that movie for me so since there are so many other MCU films I’m not interested in (and thankfully didn’t fully need since I at least have some knowledge of these characters and what happened to Thor’s hammer) I’m going in with the same knowledge or lack thereof anyway. Since a lot of stuff has been spoiled already and I do have to talk about the ending (I’ll try to get through that quickly at the start of the review section so you can skip it if somehow you’ve pulled off a miracle), I’m going to be heavier on the spoilers than usual. At this point you can watch the two movies together, like I’ll finish doing tomorrow.
RELEASE DATE: 2018
RELEASED BY: Disney and Marvel Studios
RUNTIME: 2 hours 29 min
RATING: PG-13
STARRING: way too many names to list here
SCREENWRITERS: Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely
DIRECTOR: Anthony and Joe Russo
GROSS REVENUE: $2,048,359,754 Worldwide, $678,815,482 domestic, according to Box Office Mojo
ESTIMATED BUDGET: $316,000,000
IMDB is not as helpful as it used to be, with some of this info now behind their IMDB Pro paywall, so I’m going to need a new source for info rather than jumping all over the internet.
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That little data bit dropped over the weekend. Russell T. Davies, the man responsible for bringing Doctor Who back to television, would return to run the show in 2023, replacing exiting showrunner Chris Chibnall. Chibnall’s run on the show has been marked with more than a few controversies by Old and New Who fans alike…to the point someone needed a five hour video to collect them all plus jokes to keep the thing from getting boring. While I didn’t think Steven Moffatt’s run was terrible the show has never really had the same charm it had before. And by before I mean the classic series before Davies takes over.
While I found Chibnall’s run to be boring a few episodes in and then I heard of how it got worse right up to that Timeless Child nonsense (did the Doctor need to be the Timeless Child and the one responsible for regeneration?) (the answer is no), I wasn’t exactly a fan of Davies’ previous run. I’m still of the personal opinion that Davies only brought Doctor Who back in the hopes of the BBC restoring their worldwide science fiction hit would allow him to create the show he really wanted, Torchwood. I am not a fan of that show either. I did like the few episodes I managed to catch of The Sarah Jane Adventures but that’s the closest I’ve come to enjoying the Davies’ era. The thing is Davies made a lot of mistakes in his version as well, and it just ones the showrunners who followed also made in their own way. Granted, I don’t know who was responsible for increasing the show to an hour or dropping the serialized format in favor of a season long subplot, but that’s personal preference. Admittedly anything a critic comments on is based on personal preference but before we sing Davies praises let’s not forget stuff he did wrong.
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We’ve seen it in movies, long-running television, and even comics. Relationships have a nasty habit of ending, even if the characters were married. Author James Harrington writes about this trend of “happily never after”, and check out my own thoughts on why that’s the case in the article’s comments. I basically blame the studios (and for once a certain web slinger’s marriage issues aren’t part of the discussion, but other comic romances do), but Harrington raises a few good reasons and how it should actually be approached if you really need to end a relationship.
