Thunderbolts*

I haven't watched an MCU movie in a while. I missed... let's see... Quantumania, Eternals, Marvels, and Falcon & Winter Soldier at least. I suppose I've just been a bit burned out on them or something. But, I decided to catch Thunderbolts*. 

I worked pretty well. I wasn't taken out of it. I don't find anything that bothers me about it. I liked some of the characters and the interplay. But there wasn't anything that quite pushed it over to great either. The group had a sort of Guardians of the Galaxy vibe with anti-heroes coming together to support one another in a quasi-family. But they also kind of copied the "losers" speech from the original GotG movie, which feels a little cheap.

The team being made up of a bunch of people who "shoot and punch things" is a little lackluster for a superhero movie. They're not terribly super or heroic. We have three peak-human supersoldiers, a hyper-trained assassin (and Yelena carries the movie and provides a core for the group well), and Ghost is really the only person who has "powers" with her phasing abilities. And from there, I kind of have to get into spoiler territory...

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I'm not sure if Sentry qualifies as part of the team by the end. He's the big threat for most of the movie and is adopted in, but he's also... in RPG terms, sort of like someone spent all their character points to make a beefed-up superman, but they did it by taking every single mental disadvantage in the system. Accessing his ridiculous powers means running the risk of him annihilating friends and foes alike, which makes his presence in any situation in the future sort of a deus ex machina. He's either a non-factor or completely overshadows any teammate. I'm not a huge fan of that.

The focus on trauma and depression could be a bit rough to some watchers. I think I caught it at an okay time, myself, so it didn't bother me, but I can certainly see it.

And the whole New Avengers reveal is interesting in-setting, though the marketing reveal of that is sort of disappointing.

I kind of wanted to see more of Taskmaster, only to see her killed off early on. I've read that an earlier draft of the script included her and had scenes where her memory issues would lead to her resuming a fight with US Agent repeatedly before being convinced they all knew one another and got past that. Part of me wants to see that, but I think it would cause the movie to drag.

Seeing the Fantastic Four rocket in the post-credits scene strongly implies to me that the FF movie is from an alternate Earth and they'll join into the present MCU rather than they're being written into the history of MCU Earth. I sort of suspected that might be the case already, so that's no big shock.

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