Superhero Media: The Falcon and The Winter Soldier

In what is hopefully the last change for a while, Lead Capes is moving to Tuesdays and Saturdays. 

I'll admit that I was a little apprehensive about the MCU moving to a streaming model for some projects, as Agents of SHIELD, the Nextlfix series and The Inhumans had all swung a great deal in quality. For all the criticisms that one can lay at the MCU, "looking cheap" isn't one of them, but television pretty much always looks cheaper than film, and the idea of Anthony Mackie hanging by an obvious harness in front of an obvious greenscreen just wasn't something I was ok with. What I got, however, was a seamless, engaging, exciting geopolitical adventure right in the vein of Winter Soldier and Civil War, essentially another Captain America film, just a little longer and something of a 'soft reboot' for the franchise. Feeling the weight of responsibility on having been handed the shield by Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson opts to remain the Falcon and donate the shield to the Smithsonian, not willing to be the new Captain America. Meanwhile, James 'Bucky' Barnes is working through his therapy and trying to put a life together post-Winter Soldier. Also there's a pseudo-anarchist, pseudo-terror group called the Flag-Smashers who want to return to the world as it was in-between Infinity War and Endgame.

I'm not going to get too much into the politics of Karli Morgenthau and the Flag-Smashers here, as I have another piece discussing that in the pipeline, but it is pretty cool that a form of anarchist movement aren't immediately demonised and have legitimate concerns the heroes engage with. As they aren't technically affiliated with the American government, Sam and Bucky can work in the grey areas, with Sharon Carter and even Baron Zemo alongside them for stretches as the new Captain America (John Walker) closes in on the Flag-Smashers. "Grey" is one of the best words to describe the tone of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, as every character's point of view, assumptions and personal politics are repeatedly challenged throughout the programme; which is where the real genius of the series lies. Zemo is right, uncontrolled super-soldiers are dangerous and cannot be allowed to proliferate, but he is also a murdering psychopath who uses his wealth as a weapon. Elijah Bradley is correct in that he was used as a commodity by the US military because of his race, but he makes the wrong call about Sam donning the Captain America mantle. Even Sam needs to be open to new ideas and to growth and change in order to get to the place where he can comfortably carry the shield.

The Falcon and The Winter Soldier may be, other than Wandavision, the thematically deepest of any MCU production to date. In a programme about super-soldiers chasing terrorists around the globe, we are introduced to basic tenants of contemporary Anarchism, the disgusting treatment of African Americans in the military that continued well into the twentieth century, the dangers of tribalism and partisan politics and even the limits on compassion that borders and capitalism impose. Although Karli and her team are dead by the closing credits, their ideas aren't, and even Sam Wilson, Captain America, is advocating for change to a global system that creates the displacement and massive wealth disparity that drove the Flag-Smashers to revolt in the first place. A truly cynical reading of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier may say that it only exists to set up a new status-quo for the next series of films, which it does, but that seems to willfully ignore all of the meat on those continuity bones. Yes, Sam is Captain America now for the next time the Avengers assemble, but he's a different Cap coming from his own unique place with his own agenda. If this is the quality we can expect moving forward, I'm keen for more MCU.

Miniatures Finished: Unmatched - Hell's Kitchen

I was a little iffy on picking up the Marvel Unmatched sets at first, not that they didn't look fun, but I already have so many games where I can play Marvel characters, you know? However, Hell's Kitchen is kind of perfect. Not only are these three characters kind of a match for each other, they have a reason to fight each other and the entire set evokes a classic Frank Miller Daredevil comic. If I was just going to get one Marvel Unmatched box, it was going to be Hell's Kitchen, for sure.

Daredevil, Elektra and Bullseye, unlike the regular Unmatched sets, the Marvel ones have sculpted detail on the bases.

Superhero Media: Glass

I hadn't heard much good about Glass, the finale of the Unbreakable/Split series, but I almost really enjoyed it myself. Almost. The issue I have with M. Knight Shaymalan's approach to cinema has always floated around my mind, but have never quite managed to articulate before now, is that he's trying too hard to be clever. In terms of construction, Glass is pretty solid, with all three "superpowered" characters (Overseer, The Beast and Mister Glass) bringing their supporting cast members with them and coming together in a fun crossover before it's all inverted and our protagonists end up in the clutches of Sarah Paulson's evil psychiatrist. When things turn out to have been manipulated by Mister Glass all along, well that's just nice work and brings everything back to the 'comics but dialed down just a little' feel of the best parts of Unbreakable and Split. Sadly, there's another layer of Shaymalan twist on top of all that which, yeah, kind of kills the emotion of the film and Glass just ends up playing a little flat. Real shame.

Again, I'm not super happy about the whole "evil yet somehow incredibly gullible" pysch trope, even if I've been a big fan of Paulson since Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, but given that Shaymalan seems to really hate mental health workers for some reason, I was willing to let that slide before the second-to-last reveal of Glass. You see, she's not just some Psych, but a member of an ancient secret society that has, somehow, kept the existence of superhumans secret since the dawn of time or some shit. Now, that's not ostensibly dumber than the Court of Owls or any similar in comics, but it really jars with the tone of the film, especially when the entire organisation is undermined by Mister Glass, from beyond the grave, in the closing minutes of the film. It's a baffling decision, and Glass would have honestly been just as interesting with a more 'traditional' superhero fight ending and dropping the whole Secret Society nonsense.

Oddly, I would say that Glass does demonstrate that Shaymalan is a talented filmmaker, as the script is solid, the cinematography is amazing and everything just looks great, except maybe the big throwdown at the end. Glass just needs a heavier edit and maybe it could be pretty damn great. For as much as I want superhero cinema to branch out of the MCU space, I would also really like those films to be, you know, good? As homogeneous as they can be (though I'd argue that), the MCU films have a degree of oversight that means stuff like a pointless secret society who exist only to pad out another fifteen minutes would never come to be. I'm not saying that Glass needed to be the start of an entirely new cinematic universe, but if the ending is going to be left so wide open, why not have Mister Glass, Overseer and The Beast, who are the reason butts are in the cinema in the first place, vanish into the aether of the credits to hang sinisterly in the minds of fans? Almost great, a shame the studio didn't have the guts to force it into shape.

Super Something Dragon Ball Pun - Part ?

Recently (sometime June 2023 due to how long these take to come out), the people in charge of the Dragon Ball Z Collectable Card Game FuZion Format changed. When the new crew came in, they made a series of sweeping changes, new bans and floated the idea of shifting deck building back towards how it had been in the Score era. Naturally the community reacted to these changes with calm consideration and polite feedback. Anyway, when the shitstorm died down, some changes stayed, others were dropped and a few were tabled pending the outcome of the big event at Gencon. Faced with having to go through my decks and change them again, for all of a couple of games a year, I kind of backed away and seriously considered selling my decks and leaving the game forever. Thankfully, a friend finally took me up on trying the game out and now it looks like I may have a small play group growing.

Those who actually read these articles, rather than skimming over them because they're not about movies or wargames, will know that I've tried a bunch of Collectable Card games, I currently play Magic The Gathering Commander format most often, but have a Vampire The Eternal Struggle deck and have some Alpha Clash on the way to try out. Whilst card games will never be my favourite kind of table top game, they're fun to break out occasionally and play quickly in a way miniature wargames can never really be. Even back in the RetroDBZ days, I never had a game go over an hour and yes, Commander and VtES can be very long, but there is a lot of interaction that wargames don't tend to have. Also, I'm still waiting on that Jasco DBZ minis game that was promised back in the 2010s, so for the moment, the cards are the best way I have of living out all those fantasy superhero battles I have rattling around my head.

So what I'm doing now is going through the official virtual card sets to see where my current decks can be improved and also looking to see if I can get Trunks Sword and Goku Freeballs back up and running again. I have a Tao Pi-Pi MP stack that is languishing because I already have two Black Style decks and Majin Dabura always felt like something that was worth trying if I could just find enough Red Style cards that get around all the control in the format. Then again, my Sayian Gohan has always felt under-powered, so I should probably get the power level up on that before I go around making more decks that I won't use that often. Thankfully, any changes shouldn't bother me all that much, because I'll take long enough do all this that said changes will have been long-since rolled into the game and a new meta will have emerged.

Superhero Media: The Punisher - Season 2

Ok, I get it now, this is neither Frank Castle nor The Punisher, this is some original character the writers came up with and slapped a skull shirt on to make their contract. Seriously, there is maybe, one or two scenes in the entire series where I was like, "oh hey, that's the Punisher, neat", but the rest of the time I felt like I was watching something else. Once again, far too many episodes are drawn-out conversations about ethics or psychology, which are fine, and some are even well-written, but I'm tuning in to see Frank shoot people, not, yet another, manipulative psych antagonist. Seriously, I may be a Psychotherapist, not a Psychologist or Psychiatrist, but I still find that trope pretty damn offensive, all the more so because it's so common. I think The Punisher wants me to read it as Jigsaw manipulating his psych, Harley Quinn/Joker style, not that that's really at all "better", but the framing is that she falls for her client and forsakes all ethics and training to pursue a relationship with him, even attempting to murder a federal agent for him. Fuck off with this shit. It's not clever, it just increases the distrust people have for therapy and makes my job harder.

Man, I can't even talk about The Punisher now, I just hate that trope so much and it's a major narrative in the programme. I call the character Jigsaw, but fans of the comics will barely reconise what is presented, with minimal scars and a simmering hatred for Frank Castle that barely causes anything to happen in the story. In fact, Jigsaw is already dying when Frank Kills him, having been shot by the female agent he was sleeping with in the first season and I can't believe she's even in this season as well, seriously, she has nothing to do other than KEEP FUCKING TALKING WHEN FRANK COULD BE SHOOTING PEOPLE! What's worse than that is that Jigsaw's arc, involving turning disillusioned veterans into a fearsome organised crime syndicate, is actually really interesting and would have been great in any other programme, but here is just an excuse to have someone who's not Frank shoot people. Oh, remember back in my Garth Ennis Punisher review how Frank had to be clever to work around his own moral code to fight Delta Force tasked with his capture? Well, here Frank just shoots and kills fellow veterans, because heaven forefend we actually have something engaging and clever happen.

Oh wait, Frank's friend who runs group therapy for veterans, something I have done myself, by the way, is also ok with killing his former clients, except for this one scene which just kind of derails the shoot-out Frank is in at the time. Look, as I've said before, I'm not a violent person, I'm all for complicated narratives with superheroes and some of my favourite Punisher comics confront the reality of the mass-murder Frank Castle commits, however, this series does none of that well. The writers have plenty of clever ideas, but they come too thick and fast for any of them to really land and the result is a blur of bland scenes and too few gunfights for a series about a character known for gun-play more so than just about any other in comics. The veteran mafia, Pilgrim and his mission to protect the homosexual secrets of a Republican Senator, Frank trying to protect one young woman as a form of redemption, all of these are great ideas that would work with The Punisher as a protagonist, but none of them coalesce, leaving an unsatisfying ending that thankfully will never lead into another season. I really hope Frank Castle comes back to the MCU, but I also hope it looks nothing like this series, as there is so much that can be done with the Punisher that has yet to be explored in this medium.

Miniatures Finished: Unmatched - Cobble & Fog

Cobble & Fog was the first Unmatched set I bought, as it was available at work and the characters looked like a fun combination of Victorian Literary figures. All of them play quite well too, which means the box is a fun stand-alone as well as good to mix with the others. As discussed before, I'd be very happy to have another in this series from Unmatched.

The Invisible Man, Doctor Jekyll, Dracula and Sherlock Holmes.

Superhero Media: Super

"From the twisted mind of James Gunn"; man, do you remember when James Gunn was a Troma alum known for shock horror and penis monsters? I mean in terms of his film work, instead of being known for an infamous Twitter dogpile attack orchestrated by internet Nazis as a dry-run before they targeted the head of Lucasfilm, just in case you forgot that's why Gunn was taken off Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 for a few months. Anyway, calling Super a deconstruction of the Superhero genre would be reasonably fair, but also misses quite a lot. I imagine that there are almost as many takes on Super as there are those who have really written about it, as it is the kind of film which allows interpretation of the themes and message, if there is really one there. Is Super and indictment of violence, white male rage and/or cinema culture? Perhaps. Is it a reaction to the proliferation of overly sanitised and homogenised superhero cinema in Hollywood? Probably not, but I could see someone making that argument. Or is Super a commentary on drugs, mental health and the failings of policing? Well, that's more in my lane, isn't it?

Frank Darbo is a put-upon everyman who has caught precisely one break in his life, meeting and falling in love with is wife, Sarah. Despite being unattractive, put upon and having a rubbish job, Frank isn't actually all that angry, as far as this kind of film goes, certainly not to the absurd levels of Joker or Taxi Driver, when Sarah falls into the sway of a local drug kingpin, his initial response is despair, not rage. Frank's drift towards being the Crimson Bolt is framed as being divinely inspired, quite literally, as a godlike being speaks to him and tells him that some are chosen. As I progress further in my career as a Psychotherapist, I'm finding more and more that depictions of mental health issues in media are getting to me. Frank clearly needs help and has never gotten it, same with Libby, aka Bolty, and whilst there are plenty of people with delusions who live happy lives, both Frank and Libby are led to shockingly extreme behaviour by their untreated issues. I have to admit, I almost stopped the film after watching Elliot Page having to act mounting and sexually assaulting Frank.

Thankfully, Super comes back around in the conclusion. After the expected, and somewhat cathartic, orgy of violence in the third act, where Frank rescues Sarah and has his hero moment, the tone changes and something really interesting happens. In a voiceover and montage, we see that Sarah leaves Frank, finds someone new and raises a happy family. Rather than be angry, Frank is accepting, seeing that Sarah is the chosen one, not him, and he learns to accept the good in his life for what it is. I'm not going to lie, if not for that last segment, my review of Super would be pretty harsh, as the film it pretty easy to read in the same alt-Right vein as Joker or the like. "If your wife leaves you for another man, shag a teenager and buy a lot of guns" is equivocally NOT the message of Super, in fact, it makes a strong point against violence. It's still a little "Liberal" for my radical tastes, but the idea of not doing harm because it harms people as the central ideology for a superhero certainly has potential. I don't know, my friend who loaned me his copy of Super certainly didn't get the same reads as I did from it, so maybe there's not all that much to it and all I'm seeing is my own reflection.