Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, which is why I went
forth and watched what else but ‘Ocean’s 8’. Why? Because I already re-watched ‘Charlie’s
Angels 2000’ once, and don’t want to do it again – somehow, whenever I watched
CA2000 it feels exhausted as shite, as if an experienced hooker tried to be an
innocent virgin instead; the movie did it very convincingly, but it was still
only an act; CA2003 was… a template that Elizabeth Banks built her own CA2019
movie; no one has called her out on it officially, but it can be noted that she
very quickly turned tail and stopped bitching after the initial salvo. So,
where does ‘Ocean’s 8’ fit into this?
Very much right there next to CA2019. Just as CA2019 has borrowed
heavily from its’ 2003 predecessor, so O8 was very much a rip-off of the
original O11 film, though out of the two, O8 was more derived than CA2019,
because of the gender flip. There is no gender flip in CA2019 because of
reasons, but that just makes its’ similarity to O8 more evident. Both films featured
strong female characters who were superior to their male counterparts, with the
latter relegated to more supporting roles, if any; both had various action
sequences, though O8 was more high-brow and less fisticuffs’ than CA2019; both
had their female leads dress in very revealing, sexy clothing, because you know
what? Their audiences might be ‘woke’, but not that woke apparently; and both movies are so slick that they
entered through one ear and exited through another without making much an
impact on the audience’s hearts and minds; there are fan works about the characters of the CA2019-verse, but you
know? There usually are fan works; you will need to be especially stodgy and
stiff, such as the ‘Ad Astra’ film, to not have any. CA2019 is not anything
like ‘Ad Astra’; it is a derived variant reboot of CA2003 film, and even though
most of their target audience had not seen
this movie, it tells.
Reboots are among the less successful films to begin with –
CA2019, O8, the latest Terminator film, any recent ‘King Arthur’ movies, the
latest Robin Hood movie, and so on. Regardless if they are woke or not, if
their leads are male or female, they usually fail, justly or unjustly, because
the latest Terminator film was quite good, and Gabriel Luna was a very
impressive villain.
…Does this steer us away from the movies and onto TV series
and comics? (Luna’s version of the Ghost Rider appeared in both). Yeah,
probably. Maybe. Some of the current ‘Avengers’ comics do a better job of helping
to escape reality… only not. In those comics, our titular heroes got replaced
as America’s number-one superhero team by the latest incarnation of Squadron
Supreme, which seems to embody Trump’s current foreign policies, and who are
revealed as false puppets of the false Phil Coulson, who is probably the Red
Skull (the comics’ version) or some similar villain.
…Yeah, I must admit that I kind of enjoy this story arc – I never
stopped disliking Phil Coulson as a character since AoS’ S2 for reasons that I
talked about regularly in the past… so here I want to point out that this
strategy – Trojan horse of false S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, or in this case, false
Avengers, has been used on TV before – and not just in MCU, but also in an
Avengers’ cartoon series, where the Red Skull had imitated some U.S. senator
and tried to poison the Avengers; in particular, he turned the Hulk into an
evil version of the Red Hulk, and did other mischief before captain America
exposed him. Yay, but it also means that again, Marvel is reworking its’ old
material, however masterfully, rather than making something genuinely new…
under the guise of old and tested, as Disney is doing with the ‘Frozen’
franchise, (maybe with ‘Moana’ as well). Next?
…As for the real-life connections of Marvel comics… this
happened in the past too, for example, when Copperhead used the word ‘hombres’
in an indirect dig at Trump. ‘Indirect’ is the key word here, because…
Well, let us look at the ‘Avengers’ again. In this
incarnation, everyone is getting into a team – the Avengers, their Russian
counterparts, the Squadron Supreme, Namor of Atlantis and his people, Dracula
and his, and so forth. In the previous plot arcs, it was Avengers vs. the
Russian counterparts…until it was revealed that Dracula played them all, so now
Major Ursa is reaching out to the Black Panther and his Agents of Wakanda because
reasons, the fake Coulson and his best friend Mephisto, (Marvel’s
Mephistopheles, whose name got abbreviated because… copyright infringement,
maybe?), talk about ‘red’ as opposed to ‘red, blue and white’. Hence my
suspicion that it’s the Red Skull who’s behind the fake Squadron Supreme…and
then there’s also the Red Widow, a new member of the Russian not-Avengers;
maybe it will be revealed that it’s a latest version of Hydra who is trying to
keep Russia (well, the Russian Federation) and the U.S. at loggerheads. Does it
remind you of something?
…What it does not
remind you of is real life, wherein on one hand we have president Putin, who,
apparently, is genuinely interested in bringing the American way of life and
democracy down for purely ideological reasons with not a whit of common sense
and right now? He is unstoppable, both within and without his country, because
on the other hand we got the Donald, whose take on ‘making America great again’
seems to be smelling strongly of isolationism. In real life, America had had
bouts of isolationism before; the most notorious is the 1920s-30s, where at
first everything in America was great and wonderful and constantly improving
and glorious – the Roaring Twenties.
And then it all fell apart and collapsed
into the Great Depression – the Depressing Thirties. These days, the Western
mass media does not really talk about those decades anymore and would rather have
the American masses forget about it. Why? Because the man who pulled the
American society out of the Great Depression is the same man who got them to
win in WWII – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the greatest U.S. presidents.
The twist here is that he used decidedly semi-socialist methods and means to
achieve that success, by dismantling the U.S. Capitalistic utopia of that time,
something that Bernie Sanders, and AOC and her squad, and some other people,
are trying to implement… and they are being opposed by the current generation
of political American utopists, most of whom are also in the Democratic party,
whereas the Republicans-
-the Republicans are keeping it together. While the
Democrats are fighting between each other like a horde of angry bears that are
stuck in a single cavern, the Republicans remain solid. Oh sure, they have
their own problems, starting with the Donald who is marching to his own drum
and ignoring everyone else, but they intend to stay in power for as long as
they can, and God-damn everyone else – and this brings us back to Russia.
Alternatively, if you would like it, this brings us to the
Roman Republic – the very first one. In the older history books it was
proclaimed a democracy, but in reality? Before long, it became a reign of
oligarchy very much in the same sense that the modern Russian Federation is. In
the ancient times, the Roman Oligarchical Republic became a Roman Empire and it
was nowhere as bad, especially at first, as George Lucas depicted this process
in the original SW trilogy; in the modern times, the fate that will befall the
oligarchical political style of the modern Russian Federation is still undefined,
but keep in mind that history showed that went the temper of the Russian plebeians
(aka the proletariat) ends, it does so explosively;
and the U.S.?
…And in the U.S. we got the Republican oligarchs facing-off
the Democrats who are divided between utopists and pragmatists, (with the
latter having a strong socialist tinge, true), while there’s a swarm of third
parties and other people who want a chance to steer the ship of the American
state. The results are unpredictable, and possibly a part of the reason as to
why Ms. Nancy Pelosi did initiate the impeachment process was to prevent the
Democrats from splitting into several factions that wouldn’t, or don’t, get
along with each other: if that had happened, that would’ve been the true end of
the American society as we know it, that started with the 13 colonies that
faced-off with Great Britain and led to the modern American culture &
society. Therefore, instead, we got the impeachment that is going nowhere fast,
but at least the Democrats have stopped their infighting instead. Sometimes the
only choice is between a pair of evils, and hopefully Ms. Pelosi chose the
right/the lesser one after all.
And does the mention of evils bring us back to Marvel and
Mephisto? Kind of sort of, because the Avengers’ last completed plot arc has
Robbie Reyes face-off with Johnny Blaze in a Ghost Rider showdown, which takes
the Avengers in a different direction entirely – it belonged to a time period
where it seemed that Gabriel Luna’s Robbie Reyes would become a part of MCU for
good – instead he followed the paths of Hunter and Morse for example and is
fully out of it, at least for now. Consequently, now the Avengers’ comic puts
them into space, a very different medium from Hell – but this is neither time
nor place to discuss it; for now, let’s just admit that when it comes to
real-life political savvy, Marvel’s comics isn’t any better than CA or
O-franchise movies, and leave it at that.
…This is it for now; see you all soon!
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