#I find it funny that my sis can't remember most of the characters names...

[nagalias-mindscape]

Might contain spoilers? It's just things my sister has said while watching me run through the Fontain story line. I want to mock her if even one of these comments comes to pass, even slightly.

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"You know what'd be messed up? This Skirk that Childe keeps talking about, and Dain? They're related in some compacity."

"It'd be real funny if Furina and Neuvillette were pulling a bait-and-switch. I bet the Hydro Gnosis isn't even with either of them. Be even more hilarious if it wasn't even in Fontain to begin with."

"Oooh... So the magic judge-y device used for all trials also pulls emotions from people to make said judgements... It's like Sumeru all over again! People blindly taking the advice of a machine as gospel and not fact-checking for themselves. It can't even be reliable- if it makes judgements based on the faith of the people, then what about cases where an innocent is convicted and found guilty because all current evident points in that direction?"

"... Those Magic Trick Bags Lyney has us pass out are going to be used to steal from people later, aren't they? Wait- will that be one of the causes of trouble we run into? People accusing us of stealing from them because we handed them out instead of Lyney? Heh- magicians and thieves, he said, yeah? Talk about foreshadowing."

"... I swear to god, if HYV kills off Childe, I'm demanding a refund from this game (never mind that the only thing I've paid them with is my time watching you fall to your death)."

"They already pulled off the whole 'ascends to godhood' thing on us in Sumeru- but wait. That was artificial. Will Childe become that whale thing he dreamed of while in the Abyss? Does the Abyss have its own version of Celestia or something? The Gods and all that, I mean."

"Oh no. Don't tell me Childe's going to loose his marbles. I was actually kind of liking him!"

"You know, when I gave you that story idea and all the little plot points I'd like to see, I hadn't realize that there might be legit canon roots to it aside from Chide being in jail. Now I really want you to write it."

"You know... at the end of the road... and this is about that Caribert quest you finished a little while ago... I have some questions. Loom of Fate, not being in that knowledge tree's database despite that opening cutscene having both Travelers side-by-side... Would HYV try to pull the whole 'it's just a dream' sort of card? That there never was a twin?"

"Oh! Just had a thought. What if- and hear me out- what if the Traveler we play as is like the weird lightning-air puppet guy from those japan-alike islands. Or like, uh, what's his face. The weird alchemy guy from Mond... Watches over Bomb-Girl?"

"Wait. Childe is many things, but I don't think he's that big an idiot, and his Vision thing is acting up, right? Hasn't something similar happened before? Vision acts up and stops working for a bit? Something about lost resolve? Did something happen to Childe, or is it just the Abyss thing that's becoming really prevalent?"

[thewadapan]

Deadpool & Wolverine Venturing Up the MCU's Arse

I'm swearing off Marvel movies, and I'm swearing off Shawn Levy movies, and I'm swearing off anything with Ryan Reynolds in it, and I'm swearing off multiverse movies, and I'm swearing off superhero movies, and I'm swearing off movies.

If you're following me, you're probably wise enough to have already sworn off most of these things yourself, but if for some godforsaken reason you feel like wasting your time reading my review of this waste of time, then fire your gold-plated Desert Eagle at the "Keep reading" button below.

Deadpool & Wolverine is a lot like a comedy script reading written to be performed by whichever random group of voice actors happen to be attending a particular convention. The plot is a thin excuse to bring together the characters they played, taking pains not to meddle with the stories they appeared in. The script takes for granted that the audience consists entirely of the diehard fans that would make the trip out to the convention, and is full of little zingers that you have to be a wiki editor to get. There's not really any sense of a physical environment aside from a narrator periodically chiming in with scene transitions. In fact, there's really no thought given to anything except the dialogue. Unlike most convention script readings, Deadpool & Wolverine is a $200 million tentpole blockbuster with over a thousand names in the credits, and also isn't funny.

That's really what it boils down to, isn't it? Do you find this film funny? I remember finding the first Deadpool pretty funny, when I watched it as a 16 year old. I remember not really liking Deadpool 2, as an 18 year old, but begrudgingly admitting it made me laugh a few times. Now my best friend and I, 25 years old, figured we'd go see Deadpool & Wolverine on a lark, and sat stone-faced through the whole fucking thing.

Where's the joke, guys? No, go on, tell me. Is it that it sounds like they're talking about gay sex, but actually they're talking about senseless violence? Is it that Deadpool calls your big glowy CGI beam machine a "mcguffin"? Is it that someone is fat, or bald, or ugly, or a woman? Is it gay sex again?

Ah, well. Maybe this time the movie isn't funny per se, but at least it'll have good fight scenes, right?

Lol. Lmao. Every fight is the same, which is to say boring, pointless, repetitive, uninspired, meaningless, repetitive. From the very opening scene, in which Deadpool massacres a bunch of identical mooks by stabbing (?) them with the blunt (?) adamantium bones of Logan's corpse, it's obvious that Shawn Levy simply cannot fucking muster an ounce of the creativity Deadpool director Tim Miller applied to the equivalent opening titles of that film. You can't even pretend it's shocking if it's the same thing every single god damn time.

And I honestly just refuse to believe I've changed that much. I still like lots of things I liked when I was 16! I think this film is just atrocious. The filmmakers had access to two of the biggest personalities Marvel's ever had, with superpowers that have some of the biggest potential for creative storytelling, and pretty much carte fucking blanche to do whatever the fuck they wanted in the Marvel multiverse. And this is was the best they could do?!

I'm not going to pretend nothing that happens in this film matters because it's a multiverse story, or any weaselly little canon-minded brain-rotted complaint like that. Nothing in this film matters because there's just no fucking reason to care for any of it; it fails to conjure an emotional reality for any of the characters. You're watching action figures being smashed together. Deadpool is trying to redeem himself to his girlfriend for some reason, whatever, it doesn't really matter. Wolverine is trying to redeem himself over having killed a bunch of nameless people offscreen, or something, who cares. And the film really wants you to care, because it's filled with these moments where they suddenly go silent, and the music swells, and then Deadpool will give a pseudoironic little monologue about how important this all is to him.

Much of the film takes place in the Void, a non-place dumping ground for multiversal detritus. It's here where the film has its greatest opportunity to show a little flair, create a compelling setting. And sure enough, the post-apocalyptic settlement built in Ant-Man's supersized corpse is a fun idea. But that's really all they were able to come up with. The problem ends up being that there isn't actually enough Marvel iconography to fill a trashpile with, even if that's where most of it belongs; all Marvel has is its characters, and even they are mostly a game of musical-chairs with the same basic costumes and concepts. So you end up with this barren CGI wasteland dotted with what few recognizable objects this franchise has. They've all slipped my mind now. The ship from Guardians of the Galaxy was in there somewhere. Remember Guardians of the Galaxy? That was a funny movie. God, I wish I was watching Guardians of the Galaxy instead of this.

At a time where the MCU's cultural cachet is really at its lowest point ever, it feels like the last thing anyone was asking for is a movie about how much of a fanboy Deadpool is for the MCU. At least on some level, Deadpool is intended to be countercultural—right? But the MCU is the culture. Okay, so maybe not countercultural—irreverent, then? Here, he does little but revere the MCU.

I'm struggling to work out how I was ever tricked into viewing Deadpool as a subversive character. As depicted in these films, he's typically written as having... "good taste" is the wrong phrase. He has opinions on which fast food chain is better than the other. Deadpool has things which he likes, and things which he doesn't like. When he's doing a referential joke that boils down to the referent being "good" or "bad", it's taken as given that his opinion would widely be viewed as true on some level. If he doesn't like something, like Green Lantern, it's because it's obviously bad. If he likes something he shouldn't, like his Adventure Time watch, it's because it's ironic. And if he unironically likes something, like dogs—or "good boys" as he calls them—then it's probably something which most people can broadly agree on liking. 70% of people prefer the taste of Pepsi Max, apparently, according to the pre-roll ads. So was the producer's goal here just to show Deadpool as a guy who loves the MCU, in the hopes that this would trick the Core Demographic into remembering that, hey, they love the MCU too! Deadpool is just like them, for real, for real. Was that it?

None of this stuff needed celebrating. None of this stuff needed eulogising. It will all end up there, half-buried, and we will look at the IP landfill and think, ehn.

And the thing is obviously I knew what this movie would be like going in. I only went because it was that made-up "national cinema day", which meant all the tickets were half-price; and out of all the titles being screened on that particular day, this was the only one I could imagine myself wanting to watch for any reason. And that certainly wasn't because I thought I'd enjoy it. I figured I'd go in, kill a couple of hours, laugh a few times, then write a mean little review for my internet friends. But deep down, the 16 year old in me was hoping that maybe I'd be wrong, that maybe it would surprise me, and that it would be good, somehow. That it would have something to express, anything, something kind of like a soul. But I guess it doesn't matter how little money you pay to see the film; you still pay.

Rating: 2/10

If you enjoyed this review... sorry, but I'm actually swearing off reviewing films for the time being! Like, why do I waste my breath on things which are bad? Particularly things which countless other people are watching and agreeing are bad? I enjoy writing these reviews, but they're really getting me nowhere fast. I'm hoping to devote more of my time to writing fiction which more people will enjoy in the future. Still, if you want to see previous reviews of mine, you can find them all on my Letterboxd.