Matt Shakman Is The Director

Underwhelmed. Looks like the FF are once again getting saddled by a relatively low experienced director. I hope he proves me wrong, but as of right now, I ain’t feeling it….

 

Well, he’s certainly the best director who has ever been attached to an FF film…

… Though if we were looking at Trank post-Chronicle and before he opened his mouth and Shakman I might have argued that point…

 

Low experienced?
He directed this episode 5 years ago…this is almost epic as the battle on Pelennor Fields in LotR

 

Yay for him. Hope he knocks FF out of the ballpark. But my expectations remain low.

 

That was a cool scene.

 

I think it's an inspired choice, he did a lot of good stuff on TV beyond Wandavision and seems to be way less grounded than Watts when it comes to ideas and concepts. I've heard his pitch was for the F4 to be explorers first and foremost, and judging by his previous works he'll nail the family dynamics. I also believe Feige will extensively oversee production on this movie as he knows F4 needs to be done right. I never believed he wanted to be hands-off on this movie as he did with Strange 2 or others.

 

That sounds good, at least.

 

Peter Jackson, Zack Snyder have cinematic eyes. This just looked like a TV show

 

if it can be like Galaxy Quest

 

Pretty meh on this. Shakman's okay, but he's no Raimi. I was really hoping for an out-of-the-box pick.

 

This seems like a very "Phase Four" type of pick.

 

Maybe I’m just biased because I really loved WandaVision, but I actually kind of like this choice.

Like what was said, he really gets family dynamics, like what we get in those later episodes, especially in the final episode where we get that Incredibles moment with all of the family members working together stop the villains. Maybe I’m just a sucker for that kind of stuff, but I really like that.

I also think he’s really good at capturing casual power usage. Basically, how would super powered people use powers and what would they do with them when they’re not out superheroing? Again, the last few episodes did a really good job of showing that, especially the moments of Tommy and “Pietro” just doing casual stuff and messing around with their powers, like chasing each other around the house and quickly leaving the house and immediately coming back all dressed up for Halloween. Or just anytime Wanda use them in any casual capacity just to do mundane tasks or chores or whatever throughout the show, Like like her cooking in the very first episode, salvaging the magic show in episode two, and episode four with her trying and failing to take care of the babies and making a collar for the twins new dog. You can’t just see them doing that stuff when they’re out saving people or exploring other dimensions. You also need to see how they would still go about day-to-day life just casually using them to make their own personal lives easier or fix some random, every day problem.

I think another thing to think about is the possibility of this film being a period piece. If that’s the case, then WandaVision definitely showed that he can pull that off wonderfully. Yes, it was his take on sitcoms of that era, not actual real life, but he did such a great job of capturing the feel of how people would look, talk and behave in a show that would’ve been made during that time period. If this is going to be set during the 60s, at least for a large portion of the film, that’s a pretty important thing to get right.

I don’t know, I actually feel good about this choice, just from what I have heard him say about the Fantastic Four being explorers and what he was able to do on WandaVision. I guess we’ll just have to see how and if that translates to the big screen.

 

Raimi was not good for Dr Strange, Scott's Dr Strange was better. Shakman might surprise us and Wandavision was good.

 

Oh didn’t know that. At least he has some experience of large scale then.

 

Different strokes, I guess. Raimi's Strange has been the only real bright spot in the MCU since BP; Derrickson's was aggressively mediocre & cookie cutter. Wandavision had a nice atheistic and likable actors, but there was a lot of repetition and not much "there" there.

Do we know who's writing FF? That'll make all the difference. Hopefully at least that person will be new blood.

 

Multiverse of Madness was a great summer, action, soft-horror film, a great Sam Raimi film and pretty entertaining Doctor Strange film and was shot wonderfully, but it wasn’t a great Wanda film and the script and pace let her down quite a bit. If it had been paced and written better and allowed a different writer to pen the script, preferably someone with a female voice and perspective, then it would have been a great film about a woman dealing with loss and how they healthily overcome that.

Raimi’s usual bag of horror film tricks ala Evil Dead, in regards to shots and editing, and his history of not being good at writing female characters really did not suit the character of Wanda as she was previously depicted in WandaVision. I was worried that she would fall into the typical “crazy powerful woman suffers great loss and goes crazy”, and those fears were mostly confirmed. Elizabeth Olsen, god bless her, gave such a great performance, but the script really let her character down. If and when her character comes back, they really need to get a director and writer who really gets that character.

If they do a Doctor Strange sequel, they need to get someone who can do all of the crazy ****e and good shot composition and all that stuff, but also someone who is really good at exploring characters, like a Leigh Wannell, Jordan Peele or someone of the like. I am still open to Sam Raimi directing another property within the MCU, one that is more suited to his style, just not another Doctor Strange film.

But, I digress. Back to the regular discussion.

 

I’m really anxious to hear Shakman’s take on how he sees the FF.

If he “gets it” and is enthusiastic, I could be a big fan.

I thought Trank seemed to be a talented director, but his vision was all wrong.

Shakman has shown an ability to put cool things on screen, so it’s a matter of him doing the right things.

 

Wanda making bad decisions doesn't make the writing for her poor. People do terrible things in movies all the time, it doesn't mean the filmmakers screwed up. All of the seeds for her fall were planted in WandaVision; one could argue her turn in MoM could've happened more onscreen, but I also like how the film handled it and she just got to be evil for the entire runtime.

My biggest pet peeve with the MCU is a lack of stakes and consequences, so it was nice to see someone finally have to pay for their mistakes. Now of course my newfound interest will completely evaporate if at some point she gets resurrected & redeemed, but this is Feige after all, and he never wants to allow the audience to feel uncomfortable for long. Tony was only allowed to die because Downey was ready to move on (or had grown too expensive), so I was honestly shocked that Raimi was allowed to get away with what he did.

And agree to disagree on Leigh Wannell; I thought Invisible Man was a mess.

 

On principle, I don’t disagree about characters having to make mistakes. It’s what I love about a lot of the characters that I like. The problem is that her character makes a huge leap between the two things.

In WandaVision, she gives up her pretend family in order to free the town of thousands of people, which she immediately admittedly terribly imprisoned for a week but ultimately felt remorse for, and decides to go off on her own to do some soul-searching. In Doctor Strange 2, she insanely decides to go on a mission to get her children back, and remorselessly and psychotically ends up taking so many innocent peoples lives, and decides she’s going to sacrifice A young girl to get her power to achieve her goal, all in the name of her being a mother and that her children need her. Yes, there was that post credit scene in WandaVision with her reading the Darkhold, and there was some possibility of her going a little bit dark, but going as far as actually killing people? I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t track logically.

Look, I love it when directors really get to stretch their creative muscles and really show what they can do with an already existing property. But, if it comes at the expense of putting aside established continuity with story and character progression, then, it’s not worth it. Granted, it’s part of a framework that, if messed with or disrupted by another directors creative vision, will fall apart. That’s fine if it doesn’t bother you, because it’s part of something that you don’t care for, but a lot of people do care about that stuff.

Now, if it’s done right, I don’t mind that. I just didn’t think Multiverse of Madness did that very successfully.

Also, I thought Invisible Man was great. Agree to disagree.

 

To be honest this whole conversation in regards to Wanda in WV vs MoM reminds me of Luke in TFA vs TLJ. People get mad at what the characters do in the latter films when they're simply continuations of what was started in the former.

Wanda's selfish assaults on people started in WV, and even when she "reformed" she still did it again to Agatha. Just because the ending paid lip-service to her reform doesn't mean it was earned or supported by her actions over the course of the show. And even the post-credit showed she hadn't really changed. The Darkhold tempted her, sure, but I didn't see any evidence of direct mind control. You could say her lingering grief was a retread of WV, but that was what the show built up as her next step.

I was fine with her killing people as the escalation made sense to me (otherwise it'd just be a blatant rehash of her show), but if you had an issue with it that's totally fair.

 

See, with Luke, even though we don’t get to see all of it, all of the events between the Original Trilogy and TLJ, that progression still tracks for me based on stuff we’ve been shown in those movies. Wanda from her series to DS2 just doesn’t track or feel like an organic, natural progression. Luke feels like a gradual march from where we last left him. Wanda feels like she just jumped the Grand Canyon, Evel Knievel style, from one side to another.

We’ll just have to agree to disagree on this.

 

its simply poor writing. Writers who don’t understand the character at the core of who they are. It is a mischaracterization to portray someone who is intrinsically a motherly figure to all of a sudden revert backwards and ignore their character progression and devolve into what amounted to the Alien in Aliens, simply to treat beloved characters as disposable space marines for the purpose of gratuitous shock value (as the writer fully admitted to). It was poor writing done in poor judgment by a writer that does not value the source material and does not care about characters the audience does.

 

Sure, no biggie. I love TLJ (probably the only Star Wars I've liked from the Disney era), so I agree that Luke's arc makes a lot more sense than Wanda's. I suppose I'm also just not as invested in Wanda as you and others are. It's never sat right with me that the MCU version has no ties to mutants or Magneto, and the fast tracking of her relationship with Vision never made sense to me. I just liked seeing her let loose in MoM, doing crazy things that beloved Marvel characters simply aren't allowed to usually.

I've no issue with calling the writing less than stellar, it's mostly Raimi's stylish directing and the acting the elevates the film for me.

 

I don’t entirely disagree with you on Wanda. How they’ve handled and written her character has a lot to do with the fact that Marvel Studios at the time didn’t have the rights to the X-Men or any related properties pertaining pertaining to or mentioning anything to do with mutants. Also, her casting and the fact that her Jewish background from the comics hasn’t been once mentioned or utilized in any way being a carryover from when Ike Perlmutter was in charge of the creative committee and didn’t allow women or people of color any major roles or their own films in the larger MCU, which is why we got a bunch of white actors playing the roles, even ones like the Scarlet Witch, who is supposed to be played by a Romani actress or someone close to that. So, they had to work and write around that, to varying degrees of success.

And I won’t disagree with you on Sam Raimi directing that film being one of the big reasons why I still have a fun time watching it.

Who knows, maybe by the time Secret Wars rolls around, they can rectify a lot of these issues when mutants and the X-Men are fully integrated into the MCU and explore avenues they weren’t able to before. Fingers crossed.