Panel Vision - History of Hydra

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There’s been a lot of chatter in the online comic circles lately about the fictional organization Hydra.  A lot of this has come out of Marvel’s big, 2017 comic event Secret Empire, a follow-up to Nick Spencer’s Captain America work where it was revealed Captain America was secretly a member of Hydra all along.  Admittedly, the real mechanics of Secret Empire are shaping up to be a lot more complicated than that, with one of the biggest issues of contention being the comics’ emphasis on separating Hydra from the Nazis within the fictional universe.  

This is a distinction made all the more complicated by the fact Marvel has been pushing “Hydra as Nazis” in the films since Captain America: First Avenger and even more so as part of the current Agents of SHIELD storyline about a simulated world ruled by Hydra.  With the comics and superhero fan communities abuzz over the topic of fictional fascists and what we’re allowed to feel about them, I figured it was well past time to do a deep dive into the actual history of Hydra. 

Filmland - The Star Wars/Indiana Jones/E.T. Shared Movie-Verse

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And so May 4^th is upon us once again, the one day out of the year we choose to celebrate the multimedia mega-phenomenon that is Star Wars.  Admittedly you probably aren’t reading this on one of the 364 days that doesn’t sound vaguely like “may the force be with you” but given that this is the Internet celebrating Star Wars is pretty much always in fashion.  This is even truer in the wake of 2015’s franchise revitalizing film Force Awakens, and with the Last Jedi on the way and Rogue One a decent success in its own right it looks like we’re never going to run out of Star Wars to celebrate. 

It’s not just movies that've been good to the Disney era of Star Wars either but also comics, with Marvel’s excellent Darth Vader ongoing series and the fairly popular Rebels TV show making a significant impact.  Actually, Rebels is the bit of recent Star Wars material that I’ve elected to zero in on today as part of a look at an emerging shared-universe theory going all the way back to 1981 and stretching throughout some of the most popular films of the ‘80s.  Let’s talk about the Spielberg-verse. 

Call of Duty Shared Movie-Verse Announced

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As the 2010s dwindle down to their twilight years, the battles of culture and trend within the blockbuster landscape have all been pretty much decisively won.  Superheroes are here to stay, horror is a viable blockbuster source and also good again, ‘90s nostalgia wasn’t as big as we all thought it would be, Kaiju films are surprisingly popular, fantasy is now a succession of up-jumped Disney fairy tales, and shared universes are a bad idea that people just can’t get enough of.  

Now, as we enter the last three years of the decade, we prepare for the period where the culture of the 2020s will emerge, much the same way Facebook, Twitter, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe have defined the 2010s even though they started 3 years before the decade did. 

One of the emerging trends is a renewed interest in mining the world of video games for lucrative franchises in a Hollywood that’s still very much defined by pre-existing brands.  Now I could comment on how Hollywood always makes the same mistake of adapting video games that draw from movies for inspiration, so they end up the third part of an idea human centipede.  

Or I could talk about how the AAA games industry is so committed to crashing that they’ve more or less given up on pioneering new, lasting intellectual property, but both of those are arguments for another day.  Instead, we’re going to focus on how this new trend is hoping to blend with an old one thanks to the recent announcement that a Call of Duty cinematic universe is in the works. 

Defenders Trailer Breakdown

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You know, after nearly 10 years it’s possible the Marvel magic is wearing off.  I don’t mean that their films are getting objectively poorer or even that I’m enjoying them less, Civil War is a classic of the genre and Ant-Man, and Dr. Strange are two of my favorite Marvel movies.  No, what I’m talking about is the shock and awe of “I can’t believe they did that!” as a cornerstone of Marvel’s cultural capital.  

Where this is most evident is in the realm of Marvel TV, an arena in which they still struggle even though they’re making some serious gains.  I’m speaking, of course, about The Defenders, Marvel’s impending team-up show meant as the capstone to the past 2 years of Netflix endeavors. 

Earlier on the premise of Defenders felt like it could be a modern and daring new Marvel team but since the announcement that feeling has definitely faded.  First, we realized that the Netflix shows would be more or less divorced from the cinematic universe, then there was the slow realization there wouldn’t be any costumes.

Then Daredevil season 2 was a seriously mixed bag, and Luke Cage was a well-intentioned misfire, then finally Iron Fist came out and we realized this whole thing might’ve been a mistake.  Now, the series has its first full trailer and, brace yourselves, but it actually has me kind of excited for the show. 

Dark Tower Trailer Analysis

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The fantasy genre is one of the most unrewarding parts of blockbuster cinema in the 2010s.  Fantasy has always been a persnickety genre, with a lot of bizarre or subpar elements populating its history, but the 2000s were a better time for it.  Between Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, and Pirates of the Caribbean the 2000s were flush with cool, epic fantasy blockbusters.  

However, since 2011 the genre has undergone a bit of a stumbling block.  The kings of the genre have only managed disappointing prequels like The Hobbit and Fantastic Beasts, while the most continuously successful films on the block are all up-jumped Disney fairy tales. 

There’s something about that which just doesn’t feel right, even if Maleficent, Cinderella, and Jungle Book have all placed in the highest grossing films of the year they just haven’t stuck in the mind or the culture the way 2000s fantasy blockbusters did.  Even in the realms of TV, the influence of Game of Thrones has begun to wobble with nothing really to replace it.  

This has left a prolonged hole in the fantasy genre for new films to set the attitude, stuff like Dr. Strange and Warcraft.  Now, it looks like we’ll have a brand new blockbuster to try and put its stamp on the fantasy genre, the long-awaited adaptation of the classic Steven King dark fantasy series Dark Tower.

Panel Vision - Giant-Sized Man-Thing #4

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So, as I write this one of the big cultural deals of the moment is a new Netflix series called 13 Reasons Why.  It’s a teenage melodrama revolving around the suicide of a young woman and the collection of cassette tapes she left behind explaining her 13 reasons why.  It’s gotten quite a bit of controversy, mostly from groups of actual experts on suicide prevention who are mad that the show misrepresents the actual circumstances that can lead to suicide as well as prevents a graphic depiction of the act itself.  

However, being a massive geek, this format of gritty high school realism, post-mortem messages to the living, and deconstructing the performance grief mandated in the wake of a tragedy reminded me of one of the best forgotten comic stories of all time.  Coming to us from way back in 1975, it’s an extra-long comic story under the name of The Kid’s Night Out, courtesy of one of the greatest comic book authors of all time alongside his most underrated creation- Steve Gerber’s Man-Thing. 

Static Thoughts - Star Trek 'Patterns of Force'

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So, the current mega-event that’s set to dominate comic book stores from Marvel this summer is one Secret Empire.  I don’t want to get too bogged down in the details because the discussion surrounding this event is more toxic than a nuclear spill, largely because the core of the series is all about Nazis and Nazi collaborators.  There’s been a lot of back and forth about this from the top minds on the Internet, but the whole thing got me thinking about one of the stranger corners of the Star Trek universe. 

I’m speaking of course about ‘Patterns of Force,’ a season 2 episode of the original series that famously featured a planet of alien Nazis and when I say “alien Nazis” I mean that quite literally.  The episode set Spock and Kirk against a mysterious humanoid species out in space that sported a direct copy of the Nazi regime from Earth.  It’s a weird mystery episode that’s always held an odd place in Trek canon, with particular scenes coming to be definitive of the TOS era in our collective memory while the rest has become banished to obscurity. 

Kingsman: The Golden Circle Trailer Analysis

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The genre of “spy movie” has always been an awkward figure in the modern blockbuster pantheon.  The knee-jerk comparison point for this moribund stylistic genre might be Western, but that does a bit of a disservice to the Western.  Both Westerns and Spy movies were the dominant genres in the proto-blockbuster days of the ’50s and ‘60s but the Western has passed through a number of unique stylistic identities and found new life now as a genre for prestige dramas.  Meanwhile, the spy film still feels like the exclusive property of the ‘60s, with almost all modern franchises in the genre like James Bond and Mission Impossible tracing their origins back to that decade. 

Even stuff that’s of the modern era like Bourne or 24 have had a similar feeling of stasis to the ‘60s leftovers- it’s a genre unstuck in time and unstuck in context as a result.  The last time a spy thriller made any kind of grander point it was the private military contractors are amoral, which is up there with “the sky is blue” in terms of meaningful contribution to the broader cultural stew.  There is, however, a recent exception to this particular state of stagnation and hallelujah it’s getting a sequel; let’s talk about Kingsman 2: The Golden Circle. 

Filmland - How to Get Ahead in Advertising

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So, the talk of the Internet this week is an ad by Pepsi featuring Kendall Jenner, one of the extended Kardashian family members, de-escalating a protest by handing out Pepsi to the officers on duty.  It was an incredibly brain-dead commercial, handicapped even further by how incredibly smug and self-satisfied the production of it came off.  

The commercial is brimming with various young, protest-oriented artists all plying their craft and carrying poorly written signs about “joining the conversation,” all completely stopped in their tracks by the power of Pepsi and Kendall.  It’s been maligned from all sides and suddenly makes that Coca-Cola ad of America the Beautiful sung in various languages seem like an Oscar short. 

However, the intrusion of terrible advertising got me thinking about one of my favorite films of all time- How to Get Ahead in Advertising.  Advertising and PR have always been a weird and vexing subject for cinema and television.  I think it’s that these endeavors, though more artistic, are inherently aware of the fact they exist as symbiotes stuck to the side of marketing and media manipulation, all at once repulsed by the concept but also thoroughly aware their own existence depends on it.  

Sometimes that produces thoughtful and character driven meditations like Mad Men or the enjoyable irreverent Thank You for Smoking.  Other times it produces high-concept weirdness like The Stuff or They Live.  How to Get Ahead in Advertising is like some weird, curdled mixture of both sides of the spectrum mixed together with The Thing with Two Heads- let’s dive in. 

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Update

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Despite the vastness of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the concept of sequels is a strangely sparse and foreign one.  Where this becomes the clearest is that even though the common working knowledge is that Marvel sequels are mostly poor, the actual breakdown is exactly even.  Iron Man 2 was a rush job that did little more than jog in place and remind people of upcoming films, Thor: The Dark World was about on par with its predecessor only with slightly sloppier editing and a more derivative climax, and Age of Ultron had plenty of ambition but lost a good chunk of it in the editing. 

Meanwhile, Iron Man 3 is a thoughtful and well-made revisit of the series core themes in a new context, Winter Soldier complete shake-ups the genre and style of the franchise in an adventurous way, and Civil War stands as one of the best entries in the series.  Now it’s coming time for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and amid the slew of trailers, posters, TV spots, and advertising tie-ins I can’t shake the feeling the brown, drippy lightning that is the lackluster Marvel sequel is gearing up to strike for a fourth time.