Movie Review: Captain America: Civil War

So I decided to wait a few days after viewing the movie, because I left simply thinking:

AWESOME!!!!! OHMYGOD! OHMYGOD! OHMYGOD!

Which, although a good representation of my mind at the time, doesn't necessarily make for a good review.

So here we are, about half a week later, and it's time for me to dig in, which I'll do in five points:

1) Spider-Man is pretty much point-on.
Tom Holland (In the Heart of the Sea), was, for me, the breakout surprise of the film. Yes, he was shown in the second trailer, but the film (and the actor) does such a good job of bringing Spider-Man to life, that even though he only in the film for ten minutes or so. Seriously, Spider-Man was worth the ticket price alone.

2) The movie is two and a half hours long, but uses it all wisely. As compared to say Age of Ultron or perhaps more specifically Batman & Robin (1997), the movie has an even dozen superheroes, all of which have extensive backstories and motivations, and gives each of them good service. Obviously most of the focus goes to Captain America and Iron Man, but even the smaller players, like Vision and Ant-Man, have scenes which develop their characters while moving the story forward.

3) The de-aging effect introduced in Ant-Man is still blowing me away. Yes the film has some spectacular effects, things explode and the action is quite intense, but an early scene showing a teen aged Tony Stark interacting with his parents shocked me with how seamless it looked.

4) Yes, some of the sides chosen seemed to feel like a way to make sure the teams were even. A sort of "team A already has a flyer - let's move him to team b", did feel a little artificial, but the result had me overlooking the issue at the time.

5) The Black Panther gets a great introduction. Without going into spoilers, Chadwick Boseman's Black Panther is served quite well by the film, making a character, new to most of the audience, one in which they'd like to follow into a standalone film. A great addition to the film, and definitely helped to show more of an Avengers World.

The movie is well worth watching, and although I'll admit, in many ways I'm a cheap date when it comes to Marvel movies, I'm continually impressed by how much I, a Canadian, am enjoying the Captain America franchise.

First Impressions: Lego Marvel Super Heroes

Last week I managed to get the new PS3 video game Lego Marvel Super Heroes from my local library, and so far it's pretty fun!

Although the game itself is pretty simple - run around, smash things up, make new lego things out of them and run around some more, the game has a pretty great sense of humour, and offers me something I've never seen in any of the great Marvel Cinematic Universe films that have come out over the past few years; the Marvel Universe.

Yup, in this game Spider-Man can totally ignore the fact that he's owned by Columbia pictures and hang out with The Avengers (Disney), and even the X-Men (20th Century Fox) or any number of characters who haven't made it to the big screen yet.

Which is totally amazing; for the first few levels you pretty much play the Avengers (Hulk and Iron Man in level one, Captain America in level two, and Hawkeye and Black Widow in level three), but throughout you get to play as Spider-Man and even Mr. Fantastic for a while.

So far I'd say the game is pretty simple and aimed at young teens - most of the jokes are puns and the Lego theme keeps everything very family friendly, but as a guy in my late '30s, I'm still having a lot of fun playing the game and I get pretty excited every time a new playable character is added, because once you beat a level you can go back and do it again with any playable characters you have collected so far - and in the end the game includes dozens of characters (and yes Mike, that includes both She-Hulk and Squirrel Girl).

The game is pretty fun, and I think a lot of it comes down to exploring the Lego New York setting and just seeing all the neat ways in which these characters interact.

Definitely worth trying out.