Marvel Cinematic Universe

  • 🇵🇦 Nuestro primer dominio localizado está en español en kiwifarms.pa. Our first localized domain is on Spanish on kiwifarms.pa.
  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
@Overly Serious
To be fair, Black Widow and Hawkeye have been around forever and are nominally “not super powered” despite displaying obviously superhuman feats, so magic Kung-fu isn’t that far out of line.

Have you seen the film because I'm going to disagree. Do Black Widow and Hawkeye perform unrealistic feats? Yes. Are they portrayed as something more than physical? No. In this, we see Shang Li appearing to hover in the air. He (and his aunt) make Tai Chi moves that cause the wind to flip people around.

It's not about realism. There's a lot that isn't realistic in the MCU including Iron Man's armour. It's about the ways of being unrealistic. Before now, I don't think I'd ever seen the trope of so good at martial arts he can float, direct the wind, etc.
 
@Overly Serious

I can at least accept Shang-Li's aunt (Michelle Yeoh) teaching him things. It fits in with the plot in that Shang-Li's mother was the only one who could ever beat his father. His sister I actually could also agree with as he's been living in America doing sweet F.A. for a decade whilst she's been continuing to practice and has been running underground fight clubs for that decade.

That may be sound and all, but when the point of your film is to prop up a character to be prodigal Avenger stuff, showing them being beaten by their contemporaries is an easy way to make them look pathetic and uninteresting, doubly so if the point was to fellate China. Most people remember the original Avengers cast and their character's names, and they all went through individual Hero's Journeys and weren't physically humbled by their own supporting cast.

You may be able to get around that with good writing and a charismatic main actor, but neither of those things are on display here.
 
@That Chris Guy That's as maybe but if they don't want him upstaged by his supporting cast they need to solve that with better writing. The normal complaint of a strong wahmen showing up the male character is that it's contrived. I'm simply pointing out that if you take natural physical advantage off the table (which is a convention in the genre and if you don't you're also going to have to disallow male characters from a tonne of things that would result in instant dislocated shoulders, ruptured knees and well, having the crap beaten out of them by bigger opponents), then frankly his sister and his aunt should be better than him. I mean his aunt is conceivably centuries old and his sister, as pointed out, has a lot more real world fighting experience than he does. And I mean a LOT. She's apparently the star fighter of an underground cage fighting organization to begin with. He... has been parking cars for ten years and living in America. I mean, maybe there's a lot of off-screen nightly training and vigilante work he does but there's no hint of it in the film.

So basically, I don't disagree with you but it's missing my point. This isn't one of those "strong wahmen" arbitrarily beat the male character 'cause he's male. Frankly, HE should have stayed behind to fight the soldiers and his aunt and sister should have gone to get the ten rings and defeat the big bads. As written, he's gone soft in America (his sister's words) and his aunt somehow teaches him in 1hr how to unlock magic mystic Tai Chi skills she's been practicing all her life. They need to make fundamental plot changes to the script to solve the problem you lay out.

It's just hit me that this film is essentially Kung Fu Panda when he discovers the scroll. You have other characters that have been training from childhood and have every reason to be better than him, who have themselves all demonstrated they are better than he is. Against a oncoming threat that is better than all of them. But in the space of a few moments the main character suddenly learns some insight that makes him better than everyone else and able to save the day.

Except in Shang-Li it's less earned.

I honestly feel my dislike for this film is growing.
 
@Dom Cruise
*I wonder if that movie came out today there would be butthurt over the fact that they cast Chinese actresses to play Japanese Geishas? And to be fair, that was kind of silly, Chinese and Japanese people do not look exactly alike

The movie when it was announced until its released had pissed off the Japanese, American weebos & historians and Chinese for the studio not giving a single fuck on who hired for the role. Except back then the hostility was displayed more diplomatically as opposed to the unconstructive REEEing done in the past several years.
 
we see Shang Li appearing to hover in the air. He (and his aunt) make Tai Chi moves that cause the wind to flip people around.
It's not about realism. There's a lot that isn't realistic in the MCU including Iron Man's armour. It's about the ways of being unrealistic. Before now, I don't think I'd ever seen the trope of so good at martial arts he can float, direct the wind, etc.
I think this is Hollywood once again misunderstanding chink culture, in chink Kung Fu movies, the Ip man film saga is a good example the character will sometimes do this weird floating jump like things, check the video out:
From what I can tell its meant to represent this two are super badass martial artists that are borderline superhuman due to mastering their craft, the few Chink Kung Fu movies I've seen tend to do this, its basically a way to make them look cool, and their stunts are "semi plausible" by that I mean is that these stunts will cause the average Redditor to just tell you something like "This people train all day, they have THAT much balance/agility etc."
Now Disney in their desire to appeal to the chink market has been trying to replicate this and cranking it up to 11 an example is the Mulan film having a scene where the emperor grabs a banner and flings it and the banner somehow smashes a dude who is at the other end of it, and from what you are telling they seem to be doing the same here.

tl:dr Chinese films portray martial arts as making you almost superhuman, and Disney interpreted this as "martial arts are super powers"
 
I'm not going to see this movie. And it's because I simply don't care.

I would bet that it's probably a better film than Black Widow, though. lol. Black Widow was an absolute trainwreck and hands-down the worst MCU movie to date (much to my utmost dismay, as I'm a big fan of Black Widow and had wanted a solo movie ever since I saw the first Avengers flick). Shang-Chi, if I had to predict, is probably more competently made ... But is also boring as fuck.

I read this on Twitter the other day, and I thought it hit the nail on the head:

"The same white girl you dated in college who refused to watch John Woo movies with you is now telling the world how important it is to watch movies with Asian leads ... All because Mickey Mouse told her to."

I'd say Shang-Chi was worse than Black Widow. Buck Tooth Chink Sidehoe is lower than any of the lows in that movie, Ben Kingsly is not as good comic relief as David Harbour, and despite being a male lead move(actually probably very much IN SPITE OF) the girl power shit is way worse in Shang-Chi than Black Widow.
 
I considered Black Widow more flawed than bad. The end is stupid, the Task Master villain is done badly (and I'd love to find out how much the stunt man who was behind the mask for 96% of the movie got paid compared to the actress who stands motionless for five minutes then says a line at the end got paid). But Florence Pugh's character mocking her big sister was fun, David Harbour got a lot of laughs, strong opening. A flawed movie is better than a bad movie.
 
Get woke? Go br
eak box office records for labor day!

>Break labor day records
Man that's like getting gold in the paralympics even though you have two functioning legs. Labor day is a deadzone, profits wise. It's the exact opposite of summer blockbusters and big Christmas vacation releases.
 
I considered Black Widow more flawed than bad. The end is stupid, the Task Master villain is done badly (and I'd love to find out how much the stunt man who was behind the mask for 96% of the movie got paid compared to the actress who stands motionless for five minutes then says a line at the end got paid). But Florence Pugh's character mocking her big sister was fun, David Harbour got a lot of laughs, strong opening. A flawed movie is better than a bad movie.
There are several things that I absolutely despised about the movie ... But the movie falls apart solely on this one thing for me:

The fact that Natasha survives all of the ridiculous and flat-out implausible shit that happens throughout the movie. I'm sorry, but it makes her death in Endgame very, very unbelievable at this point. lol. When I watched the movie, I was just sitting there thinking, "What in the hell am I even watching?!"

Black Widow felt like a gender-bent remake of Die Hard 5 more than it felt like a comic book movie to me. All that was missing was her walking around in Chernobyl without protective gear.
 
@StarkRavingMad I interpreted the soul stone cliff in Endgame as not the fall that kills you, but the metaphysical force of the exchange itself, where even the Hulk (who is obviously durable enough to survive a way bigger drop) would die if he were if he were dropped off it.
I disagree.

When Gamora dies in Infinity War, the emphasis is on the fall and the impact of the fall, given Thanos' reaction and given that there's blood on the ground when Gamora's body is shown after the fall.

And in Endgame, the scene plays out very similarly with Natasha and Clint. Clint reacts to the impact, and then blood is shown near Natasha's head after the fall. If it were just a "symbolic" fall, then I don't think that the emphasis would be on the impact, nor do I think there would be blood afterwards.

If this is what the MCU intended, then they could have made the sacrifices in Vormir more mystical. They could have had a pool of dead people floating around, a la the Disney Hercules movie ... Or something.

I really enjoy Avengers: Endgame, don't get me wrong ... I think that there's a lot that the movie gets right, but there are also quite a few things that I would undoubtedly change. Black Widow's death scene in Endgame always felt "off" to me, especially considering it lead to Black Widow not being a part of the end battle when literally every other hero was included. That said, two years ago, I at least conceded over the fact that Black Widow's sacrifice was important and that she died a hero. Now? After her own solo movie, I kind of view her death as a joke now. lol.
 
9D5B1A32-19FD-42B8-91B0-FDBE50F23D82.jpeg
 
>Break labor day records
Man that's like getting gold in the paralympics even though you have two functioning legs. Labor day is a deadzone, profits wise. It's the exact opposite of summer blockbusters and big Christmas vacation releases.
Makes sense. Let's try a different metric.

lol, didn’t even beat Black Widow.
BWBox.PNG

Now's the part where you scream you didn't even say it was gonna be woke!
 
Atrás
Top Abajo