Post-Endgame, the Marvel Cinematic Universe became something of an anomaly; a No Man’s Land for continual world building so impressively and satisfyingly tied off at the end of the last Avenger’s film, its dip in quality going forward was almost assured. The Multiverse Saga has been met with less favor and fervor than the MCU’s previous decade-ish of films and storylines connecting together for their tentpole team-up blockbusters. It’s also trying to cover much more ground than before. Given the MCU was much more contained at the jump, this isn’t surprising.
Back in 2012, the prospect of an Avengers movie being fully realized seemed like making the impossible possible. But Marvel, and namely Kevin Feige steering the ship, planted seeds for a foundation of these dream team comic-to-screen adaptations, with individual films establishing each character’s origins and bringing them together for a hurrah of superhero escapades. It’s easy to act like the Infinity Saga was all hits looking back now, but taking off the rose-tinted glasses reveals its fair share of ups and downs: Iron Man 3‘s fake out villain (Shane Black’s hilarious writing be damned), the unpolished VFX of Black Panther (a much wider industry problem than just in this film or the MCU as as whole), Captain America: Civil War operating less as a solo film and closer to a less colorful Avengers picture, and frankly all of Thor: The Dark World being just forgettable. Despite the dips in quality, their venn diagram of shared stories and characters continued to build, and the one-two Avengers punch of Infinity War and Endgame sealed the deal on a decade of storytelling to culminate in a finale worthy of all the audible gasps, riotous cheers, and stifled cries in theaters around the world. The impossible had been done once more, this time tenfold.
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It is in this newest era of Marvel, which we are now nearing the end of by next year, where it feels like things haven’t been quite as memorable, or perhaps an overload of content has stifled the standout entries and moments. Black Widow, a long overdue solo film and origin story for the character played by Scarlett Johansson in nine films, arrived after she had already been killed off in Endgame, now serving as more of a swan song sendoff while introducing us to more new characters who appear in this latest flick. Many of the Multiverse Saga films have in fact been some of the lowest earning films in the MCU at the box office, such as Eternals, the Marvels, the latest Captain America: Brave New World, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, of which the latter became one of many now post-credits scenes rendered moot with the exit of Jonathan Majors as the next big Avengers villain Kang, due to being accused and later found guilty of assault. Marvel and Feige would strategically pivot to their flagship star Robert Downey Jr., bringing him back into the fold to portray the more popular and widely known villain Doctor Doom. This hasn’t been the only change seen from their original outlines for the Multiverse Saga, as the tragic death of Chadwick Boseman left the role of Black Panther in future films up in the air once it was decided to (wisely) not recast the part.
Meanwhile, the addition of Marvel’s many streaming series, some being the introduction for new characters like Moon Knight and others bringing favorites like Loki to the front and center, brought the task of even more story to consume and take note for multiple seasons. The MCU is the biggest franchise in terms of films in its catalog, easily beating out Harry Potter, Star Wars, and even the James Bond franchise. 36 films, alongside 13 individual series (not including the 12 shows pre-Disney+ like the Netflix-era Marvel Television series), and that’s a lot of homework to catch up on. The trick then becomes making subsequent films able to be followed without alienating the audience and making them feel out of the loop of how characters ended up here, or at least not finding yourself questioning where they’re arriving at the start of the next film because you didn’t watch The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
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I mention all of this, four paragraphs in without a word on the actual film being reviewed here, because I think it’s important to point out the overall feeling of fatigue or disinterest from audiences toward the latest crop of Marvel movies are not due to any one singular thing. The unpredictability of these massive films, which still make hundreds of millions of dollars (but not the billions they’ve been accustomed to) were certainly handicapped by a worldwide pandemic and theaters on the brink of shutting their doors. It’s been much more of an uphill battle this decade for Marvel, while they continue to expand further and further in their storytelling possibilities. But ultimately, the more these stories begin to feel less heroic or grounded, and more ethereal, heady, or nonsensical to continually set up later installments, the less attractive these (previously) colorful blockbusters become. It’s no longer an event to be witnessed, the big summer Marvel movie. It has become routine mid-term and final exams of superhero escapades, and the test is not open book.
So how does Thunderbolts* succeed where other MCU films recently have faltered? Well, it’s not a perfect film. There are story elements that might not add up without viewings of tie-in MCU material, it still falls into the monotone grey color category of modern action, and its worldwide box office was less than the more underwhelming Captain America released months prior. It hardly seems like a win. But despite this, the film is such a breath of fresh air because it feels like by the end we have seen what these movies are supposed to be about. As the real world continues to rear its ugly head with each rising day of chaotic news, troubling legislation, and no sooner slowing of unnecessary death of innocents, here’s a movie about people who are all remarkable, yet are struggling inside. Their abilities do not suddenly make them invulnerable to criticism or loneliness or guilt. Soldiers with haunted pasts, men made of their mistakes and unable to shed their failures, and a darkness inside that feels so powerful you have to work to keep it tucked away, despite it being a part of you.
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The cast of this picture really makes up for the missing dynamics of the old school Avenger’s team. In lieu of genius tech billionaires and Norse gods, we have mostly characters that punch and shoot guns. Strangely, this is not a detractor at all. A great scene occurs in the first half where the team needs to escape a bunker by shimmying up a long vertical shaft, as none of them can just fly straight up. An actual good bit of humor finds itself here, as we see the limits of their powers give space for their individual egos to clash, and while their teamwork is inherently flawed, they still manage to escape.
The latest bunch of A-holes (GOTG reference, anybody?) is led by Yelena, Black Widow’s sister first introduced in her standalone film. Florence Pugh carries much of the emotional weight of the film, and in many ways her arc of forging a new family in the wake of her sister’s death is a wider theme covering the entire team of misfits. David Harbour as the Red Guardian, essentially Yelena’s father figure, also yearns for a sense of belonging and usefulness, as he works as a limo driver while reminiscing his Russian glory days. Sebastian Stan returns as Bucky, this time arriving very much removed from superhero life at first, now working in the U.S. House of Representatives. Yet, there is a sort of wall he hits where he can’t shake the public image he has as an Avenger, while also being aware his position in government can only do so much. Other characters in the crew like John Walker (Wyatt Russell) and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) have similar feelings and desires.
But we don’t exactly learn every character’s backstory through the standard movie-team bonding. Even for a superhero flick, the trope of “group of characters can’t get along at first until events and tragedy bring them together and become a team/family” is pretty overdone. But Thunderbolts* throws a curveball in this formula with the addition of Bob, otherwise known as Sentry. Lewis Pullman as the seemingly normal, powerless, and even aloof one of the group is revealed to be an experiment of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). A super-powered test subject of the Sentry Program, the results have left him with amnesia, making it difficult to control his powers of flight (would’ve come in handy in the first act, Bob), super strength, and a slew of other abilities. This becomes a real backfire to de Fontaine’s plans when she takes him under her wing to train him (a little too quickly, frankly) to fight the Thunderbolts, with her ultimate goal to essentially eradicate the need for the Avengers, and have Sentry be a one man army for the U.S. (comic book fans will notice the familiarity of this to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, where Superman reports directly to the President and carries out his orders). Sentry handles the team with incredible ease, but once seeing what he’s capable of, de Fontaine loses control of him, and something else inside him takes over: the Void.
It is this other half of Sentry, and even more so the other half of Bob, that brings things to a nightmarish turn. He appears as a shadow, an empty figure silhouette with just the smallest glow of eyes peeking through the darkness, like a wolf stalking its prey under cover of a dense, thick forest. His powers are assumedly the same as Sentry’s, but he seems to mainly use one that’s even more devastating. A simple wave of the hand, and he is able to completely make someone disappear, with only a shadow stretched out on the pavement left of them. It’s an incredibly disturbing image of a terrifying power, akin to the disintegrating of the Avengers in Infinity War, but with a silent heaviness that speaks volumes (many fans online aptly compared the VFX to the haunting aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and how the intense heat burned victim’s shadows into buildings and sidewalks), especially when we’re still under the presumption that the people he makes disappear are actually dead and gone. They are in fact sent to a dimension of the Void’s own making, trapped in recreations of their past as they relive terrible, painful memories. It is a prison of trauma.
Even before Bob gains his abilities, he unknowingly uses this power of the Void to see into the memories of the Thunderbolts, understanding their pain and regret. What results is an intriguing way to present the audience with backstory and character building without it being exposition, while also tie-ing it into a much larger theme around abuse and mental health. In the climax of the film, Bob is found by the team in the Void’s dimension, trapped like everyone else, reliving a memory of his father’s abuse and hiding away in his childhood room. To escape, he leads them through his most painful memory, the day he first underwent being experimented on. He confronts the Void, fighting him and beating him senselessly, to the Void’s pleasure, trying to have the darkness overtake him again. It is only from Yelena and the rest of the Thunderbolts holding him back, and embracing him, that he truly defeats the Void. The darkness wishes to isolate him, but it is with this group of friends and found family where he has been given real strength.
Bob is not the first character in the MCU to undergo being experimented on, nor is he the first character in the franchise to be suffering on the inside. Bucky’s time as the Winter Soldier made him a shell of his former self, and Tony Stark has had a number of internal bouts that certainly pushed outward, having panic attacks from almost dying during the Battle of New York in The Avengers, and their defeat by Thanos hit him particularly hard. And there’s a slew of other characters who have experienced their own level of trauma and tragedy (it’s kinda par for the course for superheroes to have lost someone close to them). But Bob is a singular case of a character who doesn’t operate as everyone else. His powers don’t return at the end of the film, and he didn’t exactly have a grasp on them at the beginning either. He’s a guy who grew up in an abusive household, coupled with a drug addiction, who became a lab rat in an attempt to turn his life around. His defeat of the Void doesn’t come from violence, but from the love of those around him. Not destroying the darkness, but rather containing it. An interesting note on the idea of the dark parts we all have inside, how unshakable they can be, but how they do not fully define who we are.
Other films have tried the “beat bad guy with love” approach to cringeworthy results, including Wonder Woman or Star Wars: The Last Jedi (both arguably good films overall, though the latter is a matter of debate amongst keyboard warriors across the globe). But it genuinely works here. While de Fontaine is technically the bad guy of this story, the real villain the Thunderbolts defeat is their own demons. Their fear, their doubt, their guilt; they come together to have control over the darkness that can creep up over all of us and consume us, clouding our judgement and masking our personality and character. It’s honestly kind of incredible it was pulled off so effectively.
Some MCU fans may notice the play on words of this review’s title. Flashback briefly to 2008: The Great Recession had hit, Barack Obama had been elected President, and Halo 3, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock were zipping kids attention spans. But the year was also the start of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, before it was even called that, with the release of Iron Man. Big success, it saved RDJ’s career, we know all that. But I want to touch on a quick scene from it. Midway through the film, Tony has Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) assist him in replacing his initial arc reactor he constructed in the cave “with a box of scraps” (Jeff Bridges, you’re still a top ten MCU villain to me) when captured to power his suit with a newer, upgraded one. Once finished, he thanks her, saying he has no one else, and instructs her to throw it out. Instead, she regifts it to him in a glass case, with the words “Proof That Tony Stark Has A Heart” engraved around its ring. There’s something to say about heroes (not just fictional ones) who time and time again are shown to overcome insurmountable odds by leaning on the love and kindness of their friends and family. It is the idea of hope in one another, and the enduring nature of one’s heart, that manifests as real strength.
For a movie that would later be reported to have a wild and unorganized production, with scenes being written hours before shooting and actors coming up with dialogue and plot points themselves, they could not have lead with a better first step with Iron Man. More than 15 years have passed, and now it feels like Marvel is finally getting back to something akin to their origins, as they look towards a new “first step” with their adaptation of the Fantastic Four. With an impressive trailer and cast including Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, I might just be starting to have hope in Marvel again.
I just needed Bob to show me some light.
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