Easter Marvels

Good Easter?  Mine was pretty good.  Not because of the (mostly) fine weather and milder temperatures, (although those helped), nor the chocolate, (thanks to Diabetes, I'm not allowed that anymore), but because I spent a bank holiday weekend doing what I haven't in a long time: watching mindless, over long films.  Being part of that not-working-regularly-semi-retired cohort that the government is apparently desperate to get back into the workplace, things like bank holidays don't hold the significance they once did for me.  They no longer represent the temporary oasis of calm away from a tiresome and stressful job that they once did.  But  I used to enjoy those bank holiday weekends, so I thought that I'd try to go back to the old format this Easter: breaking all of my normal routines completely and instead spending quality time on the sofa with the TV and some movies.  I'm afraid that I went all mainstream, though, rather than indulging in an orgy of schlock.  (I do the latter most of the time, so watching big budget studio pictures actually represents a novelty for me).  Anyway, thanks to one of those highly suspect streaming channels I get via my Roku box, I was able to catch up with a trio of Marvel superhero movies that I'd never pay to watch at the cinema, let alone to rent or buy on DVD.  So I found myself watching Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, followed by Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, (yeah, I know that I should have watched that one first as it precedes the other two chronologically, but I didn't realise the channel had it until after I'd sat through all five and a half hours of the two Avengers films).

As always, the most obvious takeaway from this experience was that I'm clearly not the target audience for these films - I don't read enough comic books and when I do, I'm not really a Marvel fan, so my grasp on exactly who all the characters are (beyond the obvious ones like Captain America and the Hulk), is tenuous, to say the least.  My teenaged Great Nieces, I think, are more their intended audience, (they seem to have watched every one of them, plus all the DC movies and I give them enough graphic novels as Christmas and Birthday presents).  That said, I always admire the sheer spectacle of these films, the obvious technical proficiency of those who make them and the way in which they all interlock with each other.  While, as far as Hollywood studios are concerned, films have always been 'product', something carefully manufactured to be sold to consumers, the Marvel movies surely represent the ultimate in this 'commodification', with none of them being truly individual entities.  Each individual film exists primarily, (so far as I can see), to either lead into another instalment (increasingly instalments of multiple threads of the overall franchise), or to encourage viewers to watch earlier imstalments in order to understand fully the current one.  On top of that are all the tie-ins to the various pay TV series which, increasingly, provide the links between the films as they provide developmental arcs for existing characters or introduce new characters.  The narratives behind them exists to drive sales of the wider franchise and its merchandising, rather than actually tell a story.

In the case of the films I watched over Easter, the two Avengers films not only served as sequels to the first two films in that series, but also to the two Guardians of the Galaxy films, Dr Strange, the Spiderman films, the Captain America series and the Thor series, not to forget Ironman (and probably several more that passed me by).  Simultaneously, it set up sequels either on TV or in film form, for all of these (except Ironman, who pretty definitively died).  Not having seen all (or even most) of the preceding films, I was consequently left having to refer to Wikipedia at some points in order to ensure that I had a firmer grasp of exactly who everyone was, how they related to each other and how they got to this point in the story.  I have to say that Guardians of the Galaxy Volume Two was a far more accessible and self-contained film for the casual viewer., with its main reference points being the first film of the series, (which I had seen, but even if I hadn't, there was sufficient exposition in this sequel to establish characters and their relationships).  Which underlines one of the problems with this kind of franchise, that, while initially this interlocking approach might drive sales, over time it makes the films less accessible as individual stories, making it increasingly difficult for the casual viewer to find an entry point.  Not everybody welcomes the prospect of having to watch at least half a dozen other films and TV series to understand the film they are currently considering paying money to watch.  To be fair, so far the Marvel franchise doesn't seem to have reached this point, helped, perhaps, by the fact that several of the better known characters (Captain America, Spiderman, Thor for instance, have name recognition beyond the films and bring their own audiences from their comic book incarnations).  

While the Marvel films I watched this bank holiday weekend were, in their own way, entertaining (their sheer scale, if nothing else, is impressive), I punctuated them with a couple of visits to other, lower budgeted, non-Marvel, comic book adaptations.  I'm pretty sure that I hadn't seen The Crow since its original cinema release, but it still impresses with its visuals and frenzied action sequences.  Made on a lower budget than any of the Marvel films, it it probably more enjoyable and tells a self-contained story that doesn't leave you waiting for a sequel to tie up loose ends.  Of course, it will always have the pall of its star's on-set death hanging over it, but if you can get past that, it is still worth watching, (especially for Goths).  Wes Craven's Swamp Thing, made on a miniscule budget showed that you don't need expensive CGI to breath life into a popular comic book character: with a sympathetic director guys in rubber suits can be surprisingly entertaining.  Craven had a clear affection for the source material and serves up a film that, while never taking itself too seriously, also never mocks its source material (and, by extension, its audience).  Besides, any film that features Louis Jourdan and David Hess as bad guys can't be bad.