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joshuarslack
Reviews
Ms. Marvel: Generation Why (2022)
A Khan-vincing Start...
First off I'd like to say that I have never before seen a more accurate casting in my entire life throughout all the movies and shows I've seen. However, they seem to have... "yassified" Bruno. It put a damper on nearly all his scenes.
(Also, is it really pronounced "Zoey" and not "Zoh?" Josh slurs his words in the comics while drunk and calls her "Zoo" and it seemed to always line up with the latter.)
- I like how Aamir's stuck-up-ness has been dialed down in the show to start with to where it currently is in the comics, along with him being a mirror of Nakia instead of what is an exaggeration of her character to compliment.
Yusuf's direction is in the same vein as Aamir, being what is almost a foil of Muneeba instead of a less-extreme extension.
Bruno and Kamala's relationship feels very sibling-esque instead of a two-way friendship (the difference being that he seems to have taken an elder sibling role instead of the wingman/acquaintance position that I'm accustomed to) and I feel like that works in some places, and in others it doesn't.
- The visual references were not wasted in my eyes, especially with how self-aware they chose to be with the entire atmosphere of the episode, and I appreciate how respected the source material feels down to the pique similarity to some of the lines in the comics.
On the opposite side of this, I'm really just not feeling the powers, especially knowing the alleged reason why they were changed. Execs feared they would look too cartoonishly grotesque, but instead made the crystalline effects look nauseatingly organic and bordering onto full uncanny valley. Also, after the better part of a century, can we still really not make a car look like it isn't accelerating diagonally past a green screen when it's moving?
Final thing: Marvel. Please. Every single graphic in the credits (with the obvious exceptions of the live-action tie-ins and the simpler visual designs) is pulled directly from either A) a comic panel or B) a comic cover. And no credit whatsoever. Don't do what you did to Matt Fraction and David Aja with Hawkeye. I'll be watching in more ways than one...
What If...?: What If... Killmonger Rescued Tony Stark? (2021)
What If... 30 min. of my time wasn't wasted?
Pros:
* More content of Tony, T'Challa, Killmonger as Black Panther, and even Pepper
* Whoever wrote Tony's quips nailed it, feels just like Downey
* Incredible music, severely underused
* Rhodey gets a quotable line
Cons:
* Animation. I've heard countless people complain about it and I did too, at first. The trailers were off-sync simply due to the classic trope of dubbing over a characters mouth with a line from somewhere else in the product; but I've grown to love it. Here it was just atrocious and inexcusable. Puppet-like mouth movement, 3-D movement over 2-D environments, jagged pixels around mouths, blurred/bleeding colors almost as if they had an AI automatically rotoscope over every frame, just saddening
* Little to no plot direction
* Comedically nauseating pacing
* Laughable "serious scenes" that just give you whiplash due to the rushed storytelling (that still managed to seem like it dragged on)
* Wasted opportunities. What I love about What If...? Is the fact that they don't simply switch one thing and then make the same change to everything else after, it has an actual ripple effect, and sometimes some events even end up happening "again" just like in the main timeline. Here they just went in a completely blind direction and threw away an opportunity along with the line accompanying it, running amuck as Killmonger rapidly climbed the proverbial ladder to greatness with absolutely zero effort. Some lines even point out the lack of reasoning, and the minimal meta comments that hastily string together plot events (if you can even call them that) into a twisted and sagging web are the single thing saving this from certain and utter doom!
If you're looking to catch up on What If...? Before season-end then just skip this episode, there's genuinely zero of the plot that you'll be missing by just looking at the image gallery here on IMDb.
2/10 for plot and for pacing, 6/10 for fan service that becomes mindless beyond returning characters.
What If...?: What If... Zombies?! (2021)
What If... it could have been better?
Pros:
- Zombie genre is used to its full potential, and masterfully at that
- Stays "Marvel" in essence while still being a zombie piece
- Blew me away (again) with how they intertwine the actual precursor to the episode event in a way that makes plausible sense, instead of just switching something around and swapping everything that comes after without reason
- Fun seeing Danai Gurira in a zombie scenario, even in a different universe
- They actually made it gory... holy cow
- Great to see Chadwick again, some wise words from a great man to end the episode
Cons:
- Far too short to fully encompass the zombie thriller narrative
- Who the hell is Kurt? Just some guy? It's never actually mentioned
- Some cliches are shoehorned in or overused/drawn attention to and it makes the episode feel unsteady
- Episode ends on a cliffhanger, we don't get any sort of closure like the previous 4 episodes.
7/10 overall, 9/10 execution and 6/10 for structure/pacing.
The Walking Dead: Prey (2013)
One of the primary rules of storytelling:
"Every scene should move the plot forward."
This episode was a fun and enjoyable episode, but all it really did was create an issue to be solved later.
Andrea escapes, that causes tension in Woodbury, we get a really cool and new dynamic between her and the Governor, and we are back to square one immediately afterwards. Everything is reset and the only purpose this episode serves is to give some unimportant exposition and give us yet another reason to root against the Governor.
The previous episode was anything but a filler, despite various reviews, and this one was exactly that. Nothing learned, nothing gained.
Batwoman: Pilot (2019)
What..?
I don't write reviews unless I desperately feel the need to, and this is one of those cases, so I'll cut to the chase.
This is dogcrap at best. The acting is so horrendous that I feel physically ill after watching probably about five minutes of this. I won't waste my breath on this in any way so I'll just say that I have officially turned off the episode and am going to go do something worthwhile.
I always trudge through things, at least, before giving it a review, but I'm probably 5 minutes in and I'm giving this one star. I save my 1's and my 10's respectively and this is more than deserving. I started cackling at the acting and pacing of this s*** and, oh God, I refuse to believe that this is canon. Audio sounds like it was recorded in somebody's empty basement and filmed on a literal potato with HD specs. Barf...
Why was this greenlit..?