f13.net

Official Teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giWIr7U1deA

In theaters September 3rd, 2021 (year not specified).

The year is specified, it says "this autumn" doesn't it?

Yeah it has the year at the very end of the teaser but it's not included in the Description for some reason.

Love the tweet I saw, which was "at last as an Asian I feel represented by a Marvel film--a movie about a parent disappointed by his child."

This is the Way.

Trailer. WARNING: spoils the plot of the movie*.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YjFbMbfXaQ

* not that MCU plots are all the complex to begin with

Now I want to see the movie even more after that trailer.  Don't care if it spoils anything, that looked great.

Yeah, it's much more epic than the teaser.

Takes up a notch. Interesting to see who's in that cage match at the end.

Yes. That's why I said "interesting to see".

No mention of ?  I know Guardians came first but it just feels like both DC (with Gunn's SS) and Marvel are just going full comic book crazy and I love it.  :drill:

FIN FANG FOOM!

Oh, you cannot imagine how annoyed he is.

I guess that's him? Could be the dragon from Agents of Atlas, though. Or just a dragon.

I love the redesign on the Mandarin's rings, definitely.

We were rewatching Ragnarok last night and it just suddenly occurred to me that it was the movie where Marvel moved into full comic-book. e.g., they weren't worried any more about trying to do some kind of real-world grounding and to keep the color palette restrained etc. 

It's not, at least not as named and portrayed in the comic books.

https://screenrant.com/shang-chi-dragon-great-protector-fin-fang-foom/

https://screenrant.com/shang-chi-fin-fang-foom-rumors-debunked-simu-liu/

Still my favorite thus far, of the MCU stuff. I may like Into the Spider-verse a bit more, though. THAT was the single best integration of comic and movie I've seen, without seeming forced. Obviously easier with full animation, but definitely not easy to get right.

I'd have to nerd it up big time, but those Screen Rants are narrowly curating the many and various appearances of Fin Fang Foom in a particular direction and leaving a ton of shit, much of it hilarious or self-satirizing, out of the history, plus they're just ignoring all the other dragons and all the other attempts to make the Mandarin make not-racist sense (much as Agents of Atlas desperately tried to make the Yellow Claw something other than 'Fu Manchu lite', which of course brings us back to Shang-Chi, who was still fighting an unnamed version of his seriously racist-creator father as late as Secret Avengers in 2010 or so (renamed "Zheng Zhu").

Suffice it to say that the Marvel folks will take the good stuff and leave the dross behind, wherever it is they find the good stuff. They have really not blown it so far on that point with a few minor exceptions.

I guess you never watched Guardians of the Galaxy huh?

I think Guardians still felt as if it were safely "away" from the rest of the MCU at that point, though. Ragnarok moved it into the main text in a way that was "no going back now".

If they wanted to go full comic book they should have made the Collector and Grandmaster Elders instead of just dudes.

I don't think they're not Elders, if you know what I mean? It took a long time for the "Elders of the Universe" canon to cohere.

This was good. I don't know that I'd call it great, but it has a lot of Feige's typical pruning and reconceptualizing of Marvel source material. I wasn't wild about some of the big finale action--it had some of the usual issues that lots of the Marvel movies have when there's a desire to up the ante into a giant spectacular battle. Good wuxia fights--the bus one early on is maybe the best. Very strong cast and acting--I found Awkwafina more tolerable than in some things.

Post-credits scenes are interesting; one opens up a question for nerds to puzzle over.

I see Guardians as the pivotal point where the MCU realised you could have fun, cut loose from taking yourself seriously, AND tell a great story. Ragnorak turned that up to 100.

It shouldn't have worked, but damn it was a breath of fresh air in a franchise that could have gone stagnant very quickly. It set the tone that it was ok to go a bit nuts... which Ragnorak built on.

Yeah, Guardians + Ragnarok let some air into the room on multiple levels.

One thing I'm enjoying in the social media threads on the movie is that fluent speakers of Mandarin are all complaining about the subtitles on one key line. What the subtitles say:

"I'm thousands of years older than you!"

What the actual spoken language apparently says:

"I've eaten more salt than you have meals" (or "I've had more salt than you've eaten full meals of rice").

Which seems WAY more vivid.

Anyway, Tony Leung is great--like, Killmonger great--as an antagonist. His last act motivation is not what I was expecting and it has some pathos to it.

Also: it's not Fin Fang Foom. Or if it is, it's unannounced.

I saw this last night and really enjoyed it.  Fights were cool.  Cast had good chemistry.  Loved the visuals in the last act.  The magical critters could have come off as totally goofy and fakey but I bought them.  I really liked the gradual transition from things initially feeling very grounded in reality (especially from a personal perspective -- see bottom of post) and getting increasingly fantastical.  The last few scenes (no spoilers) were a really fun way to bring that hero's journey full circle.

Morris plushes are gonna sell like hotcakes.

Spoilery stuff:

Curious to see what the new Big Bad (?) they're setting up in that first credits scene is.  I assume that it ties into the multiverse stuff they've been setting up everywhere else.

Nobody else will care about this, but the locations used in the first act make me impossibly biased toward this movie.  Spoilering gushy wall of text.

Overall, very glad I went and saw it opening weekend instead of waiting.  Already looking forward to the sequel because I want to see where these characters go from here.

It's something "I've eaten more grains of salt than you have grains of rice".  The translation just called him a "young man". Loved the movie, the cast was great together, the action was probably the best choreographed in all the MCU and the funny bits all hit. The post credit scene describing the final battle to their incredulous friend was great.

Yeah, these are engaging characters. I think rather like Black Panther, they've built a new room in the house of the MCU that's durable and extensible--you can very much see these characters showing up elsewhere and developing dynamically within the universe.

As for the first post-credits scene, the possibilities would be:


On another front,

Was being picky about how many people I was ok being around in order to watch this, so I found a theater and showtime where there were only a handful of tickets and it all worked out.

I thought it was pretty great. Liked the cast a lot. Yeah, there's the usual overuse of CGI at the end but from the trailers I was actually expecting it to be even worse in that respect so it ultimately didn't bother me too much.

I haven't seen this yet but Killmonger was like, maybe the worst antagonist so what does this mean

The exposition on the Ten Rings also confirmed that


You also have to wonder if


On the other hand


I was also trying to figure out if Shang Chi and Katy and his sister were all blipped; they don't seem to have a feeling of aimless lost time from those five weird years, and Katy + Shang Chi seem to have their lives still aligned from being kids.

Yeah. Which is just kinda dumb, because folks are forgetting the scenario here:

The Black Order shows up only a very short time after Bruce Banner is flung to Dr. Strange's Sanctum. Nobody has any warning besides Strange, Stark, Banner and Wong that this is going to go down. Only Banner really knows the power levels and threat involved.

Stark and Parker get taken off-world. Banner calls Steve Rogers; tells him the Vision is the next target. That fight happens a very short time afterwards.

That group goes off to Wakanda. Thor is rescued; takes Rocket and Groot to forge a new weapon. Rest of the Guardians show up for the fight on Thanos' former home planet--there's not a ton of time there either. A few days? Nobody on Earth knows what might be coming except Wakanda and the Avengers. There's no global alert, etc. Then the Snap. Nobody else can get involved.

In the "Portals" scene? Strange and his pals summon only who they know about that they're already allied with. They don't know about Wenwu (or if they do they're not on speaking terms), they don't know about Ta Lo (or if they do, they can't just teleport in and out of there and they're as subject as anybody else to the maze). They don't (obviously) know about the Eternals. etc, or they know that summoning the Eternals breaks their rules.

Shang-Chi... watching this movie I gave it a C-. Thinking about this movie makes this drift toward a D. This is ranked third beside Iron Man 2 and Thor 2 as worst marvel movie of all time. The movie tries very hard to get us to care about the fight scenes, which are great, but also forget to have them matter to the overall narrative. So out of like 5-6 action set pieces only 2 of them actually needed to happen and only 1 of them star Shang-Chi...the main character...of the movie.

Like this movies tone is literally all over the place... Shang-Chi has the backstory of Natasha Romanoff but the side characters you find in Spiderman Homecoming and no one thought to themselves that those two things don't mix... And the funniest part is, maybe they could have worked it out if it wasn't for the fact that the most interesting point in Shang-Chi life was when he was 14 not 29... Literally just change the movie to a 14 year old Shang-Chi instead of the late 20s early 30s dude and the character and the movie would have made way more sense and also would have been much better for it.

So I'm lost, is this film supposed to be in English or Chinese - 5 min in on Disney plus and it's all subtitled and not spoken in English, making it hard to do work and watch at the same time.

That was the intro scenes. It switches up to American style once it moves to Shang as an adult.

Many of the Chinese characters speak in Chinese, so they are subtitled, but most of the movie is English.

I watched this last night on Disney +. Thought it was a solid, mid-tier MCU flick. I liked the humor and Awkafina's character being more than just comic relief was refreshing. She's up there with Michael Pena from the Ant-Man movies for comedic relief character that I looked forward to seeing. The movie looked amazing in 4k, shittons of high contrast color especially in the Ta Lo scenes. I would have loved to have seen some connection to the Iron Fist character (just not that one from the Netflix series) but overall, well done. Really good fight choreography especially the bus scene.

Bus scene and the fight on the building scaffolding were memorable, if not quite the top ten wuxia scenes ever or anything.

Fine movie, but there was so much CGI during some of the fights that it was basically a cartoon.  Which is alright for a comic book movie, I guess, but I thought a lot of the big fights looked pretty bad.  The smaller, more intimate fights were well done however.

I enjoyed it, but it didn't feel like a MCU film. Felt like a Disney film. They even killed off the mom!

This is funny, but also now I'm cutting together a montage in my head of all the MCU mom deaths.  Starlord, Iron Man, Thor... who am I missing?  Feels like they've fridged a few moms.

If references count, the list is endless. We even know about Gamora's.

Cap's Mom, Black Widow's biological mom, Monica Rambeau's mom, both Scarlet Witch's parents (and brother), presumably both Spider-man's parents (and uncle), both of Falcon's parents I think... probably some others.

Black Panther's dad

Some of these only got fridged retrospectively--I mean, I don't think of a middle-aged adult having dead parents as any particular trauma, so all we knew about Tony Stark at first was that his mom and dad were gone and he loved them but ok; really wasn't until Civil War that they got actively fridged.

Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver's parents didn't get fridged until Wandavision, etc.

Actually, they've AVOIDED the ultimate primal Marvel fridging, which is Uncle Ben, let alone Peter's birth parents. (Who even in the comics didn't matter worth a fuck for years until some desperate writer decided to make them SHIELD agents or some useless shit like that.)

But it does seem like as the formula has evolved, it's moved towards "let's kill the heroes' parents to give them some emotional baggage/depth". Though they've also given people some families who don't get offed, leaving out the Blip--Falcon's sister, Black Panther's sister, etc. 

Tony had some clear daddy issues from the start and it was explicit that Howard's death was unexpected and when Tony was still fairly young. The death of Wanda and Pietro's parents (and blaming Stark for it) IIRC was their motivation for hooking up with Hydra in the first place in Age of Ultron.

I wouldn't be surprised to see more mention of Peter's parents or especially Uncle Ben in that Spider-man Freshman year animated thing that got announced on Disney+ day (don't think we discussed all those announcements and clips here yet, mostly just on f13 Discord).

So, there were bits of this I enjoyed.

The bus, the side of the building, any time Katy or Ben Kingsley were speaking, and whenever Wong showed up.

Then there were bits where I was waiting for it to start being good again. And they were most of the rest of the bits.

It was fine I guess.

Main character seemed really nondescript though. I can't think of any meaningful way to describe him.

And the village at the end was a bit rubbish.

It was OK though.

Not sure why this movie happened, why someone wanted to bring out some bit character I can't even remember from the comics, with nothing but the slightest mentions that this is indeed in the MCU.

High points were the not-Mandarin and Wong.

Low point was probably the lead, what a vacant box of actor. When Akwafina is out-acting you in a scene (actually in almost every scene), you a shit actor. The little critter the Mandarin was hanging out with was a better actor than Sean Chi. The Ten Rings might be the laziest nemesis organization ever hand-waved into existence.

This is my current low for the MCU, really not looking forward to Eternals continuing the slide.

please

Criticising the actor might be unfair.

I'm not convinced there was much material for him to work with here.

Eternals was better but also shouldn't have been made. More mediocrity for mediocrity sake.

Yeah, it'd be like someone making a movie out of one of the characters from that old Tomb of Dracula comic, or that group of space characters that included a talking racoon.

Ugh

https://deadline.com/2021/12/destin-daniel-cretton-marvel-hulu-onyx-collective-deal-shang-chi-sequel-1234885502/

What’s the problem?

there's nothing even worth commenting on in that article

It was a shit movie and shit director and getting a sequel.

It was a decent middle of the pack MCU movie, a sequel was absolutely guaranteed and should not surprise anyone. Not sure what problem people have with this movie, it was fun and entertaining like most MCU fare.

This is like your Brie Larson thing again, isn't it?

I thought it was fine; I think they generally seem smart about recognizing what wasn't working and fixing it. Iron Man is the only one where they didn't eventually figure out how to keep getting better and just got worse.

This. There wasn't anything egregious about the movie - it was a fun, martial arts inspired movie with some decent visuals and fight choreography.

I think if they find a way to double-up the martial arts with a keener sense of practical (or at least wire-fu) staging, that would be really great. I almost wonder if they could steal the Seven Cities of Heaven story arc from Iron Fist (and use that to darken or complicate the place that his mother came from).

Honestly half the problem with Iron Fist was the shitty quality fight choreography, I think Shang-Chi worked fine as low-tier Marvel movie. It was a bit uninspired but the plotting was reasonably tight if formulaic, it was no Thor 2 or Iron Man 2 quality wise.

Shang Chi was fine, as "Martial Arts Epic in the MCU" the same way that Ant-Man was "Heist movie in the MCU". It wasn't a great martial arts epic, but it wasn't bad. It hit the right beats, had the right visuals. I don't want my two hours back.

--Dave

MCU has generally been bad at sequels though. I can't say I'm looking forward to the second of these.

Off the top of my head I think Thor 3 is the only example of an MCU film being better than its prequels.

Winter Soldier is better than Cap 1, though Cap 1 is good.

Guardians 2 I think is at least as good as Guardians.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is at least as good as Ant-Man.

I'm not sure Infinity War and Endgame count as pure sequels, but they're better in many ways than Avengers.

(https://i.ibb.co/VLSW4TX/RmLACs9.gif)

Ok. I finally watched this. It was fucking great. Leung is one of the best baddies in MCU one-off history. Now I can respond to things.


You're both idiots.

-

Now getting to other comments:

MCU sequels have a history of being better than the first ones, and I think that's because characters learn how to lean into their characters way way harder.

Thor 2 really stands out as being the only one like, hilariously worse.

Anyway, this movie was great and expanded the universe in extremely relevant ways. We know Bruce has reverted and healed his arm, somehow. We know the 10 rings have called at the very least, one of the upcoming big baddies. Along with Zendaya and a few other notable characters (much to my chagrin, Kat Dennings), we now have another relevant human in the mix. Also, Tim Roth on the same side as Wong which implies Bruce has kept tabs on Abomination.

8/10. Not S-tier, but certainly A-tier.

The first 5 minutes are Disney trash though.

His arm is still injured.

It's not swiss cheese, it's just in a sling

Hate to break it to you but the movie was trash. Only buoyed by a pandemic and people literally having nothing to watch. At best its mediocre garbage that will get a sequel because Disney doesn't know any better. The sequel will bomb, people will blame all kinds of shit, and the franchise and character will be forgotten. I'm sorry but it takes more than fight scenes that are bastardizations of Jackie Chan movies to impress me, especially when 3/5 of those fight scenes didn't need to actually happen per the plot of the movie.

Man complains about fight scenes not needing to happen in the kung fu movie.  Do you watch Fast & Furious movies and complain about all the car chases, too?

I bet he hates all the unnecessary singing in musicals.

I just can't imagine what is going through the head of someone who looks at a bog standard MCU movie and goes "this one is trash". There are a few stand out movies in there, there are a couple below average ones, the other 20 or so are all the same quality. It's fucking ridiculous to single out.

A good kung fu movie has a plot that ties the action together. Hell any good action movie has a reason for any of the conflict to actually happen. Otherwise why doesn't everyone fawn over Michael Bay movies?

The problem is that the narrative and tone is all over the place. The Mandarin, who oscillates between being a ruthless mob boss , loving dad, and a GI-Joe villain, stages much of the conflict around the resurrection/retrieval of his dead wife. He opens the moving by sending thugs after his son, a guy who he admits he may need to bring back his wife. A guy you just forced out of cozy situation at gunpoint. Way to go. Then he decides to double down and almost kill his daughter, who he also requests assistance from and actually would have helped you...if you actually talked to her before you sent men to kill her... ok...so your their Dad, your family estranged but they don't hate you... so why not just meet them in person?? Why not fly to sons apartment and wait to *gasp* have a conversation with him?

So essentially any fight scenes before they meet The Mandarin serve zero narrative purpose. Just there because the movie needed action scenes, which is a thing that usually happens in bad movies.

Compare this to like Black Widow where there is arguably one unnecessary fight scene between Natasha and Yelena, which is forgivable since the movie only does that once and it doesn't contradict the plot too much those characters differing views on their relationship. Fuck even Captain Marvel didn't have some nonsense where Nick Fury fights Carol Danvers because the movie had too many talking scenes and not enough punchy ones.

But all this wouldn't be a problem, the actions scenes were cool in insolation, if it wasn't for the third act being a garble of cgi nonsense and nonsensical chose one crap. The problem is, from an enjoyment aspect, you have a first act that is meaningless, a 2nd act that has the inklings of an actual movie, and a third act that does absolutely nothing but crash the train cars together. Some people that's fine, mindless action movies are enjoyable for most people, but not me.

Can't even respond to that post. Reading it just wants to make me go over it with a red pen.

psycho

You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become SirBruce.

MCU sequels have a history of being better than originals? What about iron man, thor, captain America, spider-man, ant man, avengers?

There are few where the sequel is about as good, GotG comes to mind. But I can't think of any where the sequel is markedly better.

I'm not saying the sequels are bad (except thor), but just can't think of examples that are better.

This franchise quietly dies by movie 2. Just using this as a time stamped i told you so.

I would amend that to say that it's more that the characters themselves often get better written after their debut movies. Dr. Strange is probably one of the best examples. A little bland in his own movie and then vastly better written in Infinity War. The first Cap movie was good, but I don't think it was until Winter Soldier that he really became the Cap we know through the rest of the Infinity Saga. Thor obviously took a few movies to get right. Hulk of course had to deal with an actor change, but Avengers ended up really establishing the character after a shaky debut movie. Even someone like Hawkeye eventually finds his niche.

I think the general point is that Shang Chi himself will likely be improved as a character over time.

Yeah, that's fair.

Winter Soldier was VASTLY superior to the first Captain America movie, Thor: Ragnarok was better than either of its prequels, and both Spider-Man movies are about on par. I actually rate Avengers: Age of Ultron on par with the first Avengers movie - it's got some points that are weaker, some that are stronger.

In fairness many many people are wrong about winter soldier being better than first Avenger I guess.

I think winter soldier might have been the last one we saw in a theatre. It was the one where the template became so blindingly clear that it actually started to get in the way of suspension of disbelief.

But I do agree with the point about the character getting better even as his films got worse.

Part of the issue is that some of these characters have huge "core templates" that help give directors and screenwriters some good ideas about making them better if they're a bit off-brand or dull. Some don't. Shang-Chi really doesn't: he's got a forgettable body of back-stories where some of it has to be thrown overboard because they were ripping off Sax Roemer as if his (racist) stuff was public domain as if it wasn't, and otherwise were just trying to cash in on Bruce Lee etc.

If you look at Shang-Chi after they started to slough off the "I must stop my insane father", he's mostly a side character and in everything he's still a pretty stereotypical "wise Asian" (the contrast to Danny Rand's Iron Fist is often striking) who speaks rarely and knows what to do.

So in that sense, they did a lot to clean up the character and make him viable for contemporary storytelling, but they're not going to have much to draw upon otherwise, unlike most of the other Marvel characters they're using. So if they're smart in Shang-Chi 2 they'll look for someone who is the martial arts equivalent of James Gunn--who really upsets the applecart and does something completely unexpected aesthetically and otherwise but that strongly invokes Hong Kong cinema's history.

Conversely, being a bit of a blank slate maybe offers a little more freedom to find a fresh angle with the character. I mean, there's over a century of film history of people creating compelling characters without using Marvel comics as guide rails so it could probably be done.

The blank slate didn't stop the other characters in the film being written well enough.

The writers just didn't do great.

Maybe they were just willing to stick their necks out further with not-main characters.

I really don't see the issues that some of you see. The only thing about Shang-Chi himself that I think is a valid complaint is just the actor plays him in a rather bland way; the script creates some room to make him feel a bit edgier. Fundamentally he comes off like a nice guy who is not haunted by his past as much as he might be. With his father gone, he's lost a significant amount of his motivating drive, so that's really what the second film is going to need to do--build up his character and give him a strong drive of some kind.

Personally I thought he was ok. In a universe full of quippy heroes it can maybe be a bit hard to make the more serious ones stand out, Cap aside. You got characters like Iron Man, the Guardians, Spidey, Ant-man, etc... that started off funny, and then a big part of the solution to making Thor, Hulk, and Dr. Strange better was to make them more humorous also. It's not too surprising that Shang Chi himself is going to get overshadowed a bit when he's partnered up with Awkwafina and Trevor.

Moon Knight and Daredevil are going to up the number of more serious characters, though the Marvel formula will doubtless demand making them a bit lighter than they might otherwise be played. It's hard to imagine any version of Moon Knight who is light and quippy; Charlie Cox's Daredevil could get some comic relief from a recast Foggy Nelson and from playing the straight man to She-Hulk, maybe, but he's still going to be fairly grim. Right now the only character who doesn't really get to be funny 95% of the time is the Winter Soldier.

Shang-Chi in the comics isn't serious in that way--he's just one of those very serene, controlled, wisdom-of-the-Orient types (kind of blatantly riffing off the protagonist of the Kung Fu TV series in the US). I don't think that's going to work as an ongoing persona so they really will need to give him some distinguishing personality.

Fair enough.

Not enough to overcome all the issues, but when at its core you have a movie about The Master of Kung Fu and you cast a himbo who can't act and doesn't know kung fu... Are there literally no good options in kung fu cinema anymore? It could've been a golden opportunity to actually include the kung fu theater community in this. If somehow they did and still ended up with this steamer, my apologies. But it seems weird in this fad of inclusivity and representation to not use people who, you know, do this thing already.

Almost any kung fu flick that pops up on tv is better than this movie. I miss whatever channel was doing regular kung fu cinema.

I thought Moon Knight was basically Deadpool Batman

No, he's Weird Psychotic Batman/Shadow, but not particularly funny. Warren Ellis did a take on him a while back that upped the weirdness even more but that was also kind of stylish.

The core is that he's a mercenary who gets betrayed by a partner and "dies" of his injuries while in an Egyptian tomb. He wakes, surprised to be alive, and he sees that he's been lying in the shadow of a statue of the Egyptian god Khonshu. He comes to believe that Khonshu raised him from the dead to serve as his avenging agent on Earth. Then he ends up adopting three separate civilian identities that he genuinely seems to inhabit as his "real self" whenever he's not Moon Knight, and his version of Alfred and his lover sort of indulge him while also thinking he's right at the edge of going nuts. Generally not played for laughs and sometimes is super grimdark, depending on which iteration.

Ya, Moon Knight can be a serious study of Mental Illness, whereas Deadpool is "Nyuk Nyuk crazy people are annoying/funny!" The comparisons of "rich guy dresses up as a winged thing at night" to Batman are obvious, but Moon Knight takes that trope and moves it in a different direction.

Most people don't bother to look deeper and dismiss him out of hand as a Batman copy, however.

All my comic book knowledge came from Marvel Heroes.

At this point I think Moon Knight is more like Dr. Fate (basically a human given powers by a god of order, and they communicate with each other with the god occasionally inhabiting his body) than Batman.

Just realized Hack Snyder got that carving symbols into criminals bit from Moon Knight.

The following page is a bit misleading but it shows what I mean about MK being like Dr. Fate.

https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Moon-Knight-2006/Issue-13?id=7465#29 (https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Moon-Knight-2006/Issue-13?id=7465#29)