Hello there and welcome to another episode
of the most popular thing in the world is bad actually.
Where I, or really any YouTuber who knows how to use
hand brake gets easy Internet points by criticizing the MCU.
Look, the thing with the MCU is that it will always be really easy to criticize.
When you homogenize the art of filmmaking to the point where you're able to
pump out for movies a year plus a handful of TV shows.
It will always be possible for someone like me to ask,
was this style the best choice for this story no matter what story you're making.
Because of course, there's going to be times when
different choices would be more suitable to the material at hand.
The cinematography and color grading of a spy movie
shouldn't be the same as what you use in a space at Beck.
Of course, each individual movie could be better,
but they couldn't make this number of
passively good movies if they didn't have some house style.
I guess the MCU is good at telling simple fun stories about
quippy relatable heroes and creating the desire to see those characters in future movies.
It's not interested in anything else.
However, I think a lot of the recent Marvel movies are doing something that doesn't
interfere with that main goal of getting audiences interested in new characters.
Marvel has started making movies that yada,
yada through their own first acts.
After my mom died, my dad started my training.
Let's take a look at the first half-hour-ish of Jiangxi.
In a prologue we meet Jiangxi father when Wu,
who is an ancient immortal warlord in possession of the magical 10 rings,
searching for an ancient city,
he meets its protector Yang Li.
They fall in love and have a child Jiangxi.
Fast-forward to the present day in Shong is now
Shawn and unambitious valet in San Francisco.
His best friend is Katie and she likes driving really fast.
Please get it. I'll go slow.
Seem to. At a bar,
Shawn and Katie tell the story of how they first met,
which we don't get to see.
Right before he's about to throw the first punch,
Katie, comes out of nowhere,
steps right between us and starts screaming the lyrics to Hotel California.
They're more successful friend points out
that they aren't making the best of their talents.
Maybe there's a point where you're supposed to stop going
on joyrides and start thinking about living up to your potential.
This establishes a core theme of
the movie and the lesson of both of their character arcs.
Both of them have to learn how to become
more responsible people and use their talents to help others.
But in the moment they shrug off her advice and go partying.
Scene 3, Shawn goes to Katie's place and has breakfast
with her family where he's accused of being a mooch.
The foundations of the films other major theme about how you relate to
your family's history in the past is laid here
with Katie's grandmother's still morning her husband.
We just know why it going would've wanted you to move on and enjoy your life?
Moving on is an American idea.
Scene 4 has the inciting incident where they are attacked by ninjas on the bus.
This scene absolutely rules, no notes.
At the end of it, he realizes the Ninjas have
something to do with his sister, therefore Scene 5.
Shawn makes the decision to try and help his sister.
Katie also makes a decision to help him.
This is the end of Act 1.
On the surface, there's nothing terribly wrong with that structure.
We meet our protagonists,
we learned what their major character flies.
The direction of the character arcs has been set up,
the themes have been established.
We have an inciting incident and the main characters
make an important decision to engage with the problem.
It's a pretty standard first act.
The problem for me is that this isn't actually the first act of Jiangxi story.
There's a whole series of flashbacks detailing
his background and how his father trained him to be an assassin.
Let's break them down.
Flashback 1, we learned that after his mother died,
his father started training him as an assassin.
His sister trained in secret when they were 14.
His father sent him on his first mission.
The montage actually contains all of the other flashbacks within it chronologically.
Flashback 2, right before he goes on his first mission,
he has a conversation with
his younger sister where they are mourning their mother's death.
She asks him not to leave her and he promises that he'll be back in three days.
Something we know doesn't happen.
Flashback 3, his father interrupts his training and tells
him he needs to train both his body and mind in order to
inherit the 10 rings showing us that Jiangxi did it
1.1 to inherit them and make his father proud more than anything else.
Flashback 4. When Wu tells us about how Yingli had
an effect on him and we see them falling in love and beginning of family.
Jiangxi, mother is killed by his father's old enemies.
He then witnesses his father take revenge and his
tasked by his father to kill the man most responsible.
Right after this Jiangxi confides in Katie that he did actually
kill that man and then didn't return to his father because he felt guilty.
Notably, this scene is not shown as a flashback,
only talked about in contrast to the rest of the backstory.
Now, if we rearrange these scenes chronologically,
including the prologue with his parents and
adding the scenes that are talked about but not shown,
we can instead have a first act in change that looks something like this.
Wen Wu is an ancient warlord,
he gives that up when he falls in love.
For a time, the family lives happily,
but then some mobsters kill his wife.
Shang-Chi witnesses his father violently take revenge for the death of his mother.
His father trains him to be an assassin and
Shang-Chi aspires to inherit the 10 rings himself.
While Wen Wu would we trained Jiangxi,
his sister practices in secret.
His sister begs him not to leave her alone and promise that he'll return in three days.
Shang-Chi is sent on his first mission.
On the first mission, Jiangxi kills the man responsible for his mother's death.
That would be the end of the first act in a chronological version of the story.
First acts typically end when the main character makes
a significant choice and this would be that.
After this, the rest of the film could proceed as before.
I think if you tell the story chronologically,
you get more immediate reasons to care about Jiangxi.
You see right up front the effect the death of
his mother has on him and the rest of the family.
You see what his relationship is like with his sister,
which emotionally invest the audience and finding her later on,
and as you can see at the beginning of his relationship with Katie.
Though, the dynamic of that relationship does
already work and is one of the stronger parts of the story.
Most importantly, though we're centering the idea of Shang-Chi having to wrestle with
the good and bad parts of his heritage
rather than the story of him just being unambitious.
I think the former is where the story and character are stronger.
It also means showing the most critical scene of his character development,
which the film only alludes to the fact that Shang-Chi was
in fact an assassin who did in fact actually kill someone.
This is the biggest hole in the story for me.
We miss out on actually seeing this crucial moment of
change in Shang-Chi and how that weighs on him over the rest of the story.
His guilt over this moment is established and
resolved in the same scene in the current film,
rather than being explored over the course of the film.
There's very little about the earlier parts of the movie that make it feel like
Shang-Chi was actually an assassin and grappling with guilt.
I just don't buy that that's who he is.
He reads this too normal and two,
well adjusted for that to be the case.
When I think of his character arc,
I think this is the story of an average guy from San Fran who becomes a level 20 monk.
Rather than, this is the story of someone who trained to kill from a young age,
learning to use his skills for the better.
The movie wants to be both things,
but I only know the second one because
this scene is here to tell me that piece of information,
not because I actually feel it on an emotional level.
Giving the audience adhesive information is not the same as dramatizing a story.
Also, I don't think this arrangement and extension of the story would
add too much to the runtime because there's a lot you could cut from this movie.
The final battle with the big monster is completely unnecessary when
the actual emotional conclusion to the story is Shang-Chi defeating his father.
Trava flattery doesn't need to be here.
Much of the second act as the characters running from place to place,
which could easily be pared down.
What I'm trying to get at is the difference between
character-focused storytelling and plot-focused storytelling.
Character-focused story follows the character's emotional journey,
the decisions they make,
and how that changes who they are.
A plot-focused story pushes the character from
location to location to justify action scenes.
In short, while the first act of Shang-Chi isn't bad by any means,
I think it's the wrong first act if the goal is to
build an audience's investment in his character.
Captain Marvel has a similar problem.
Now, in fairness, this movie has
a better justification for its flashback structure than Shang-Chi does.
The fact that Shang-Chi grew up as an assassin is not a mystery in that movie.
Whereas Captain Marvel's history as an Air Force pilot on Earth is.
For most of the film,
she suffers from amnesia and is slowly putting together
her memories of her life on Earth before she became an intergalactic space cop.
These memories are delivered to the audience,
mostly in fragments, quick snippets of scenes,
and they're not really fleshed out.
Only the memory that shows us how she lost her memories qualifies as a full scene.
The rest is in a hazy fog.
The audience receives the information that Carol was a pilot,
that she experienced sexism throughout her life,
and that she succeeded despite this.
But these scenes are so short that they don't tell the full story.
They are not dramatized, only hinted at.
All of those valuable empathy building classic first act scenes are skipped through.
Now at this point, we could do the same thing we did with
Shang-Chi and reorder the events chronologically,
but I think that would also mean removing the amnesia plot point.
But that rewrite is far more radical than just rearranging Shang-Chi.
Also thematically, I think the amnesia idea is important to this film's idea of
power structures telling you who you are
and what your limitations are and I wouldn't want to mess with that.
Not every character needs to have their entire history
chronologically laid out before they get to do the superhero stuff.
When I first watched this movie,
I actually loved that it started with her being a superhero
without having to do a full typical origins story for her.
I don't need to see them as a kid to empathize with them. That's not what I'm saying.
But if we're going to hint at important scenes from her childhood that have informed
her character and then try to cash in on those scenes emotionally at the climax,
then the audience should get to experience those scenes
in full so that they can resonate with them at the end.
Because otherwise the end is just going to feel hollow and that's the thing.
A first act problem isn't really a first act problem,
it's a third act problem.
Let's explain that more with another movie, Black Widow.
This movie has one of
the most perplexing climactic scenes in a blockbuster film in recent memory.
There is so much going on in this scene that is only being
established during the scene that needed to be established beforehand.
Here's the context.
You've got this family of super spies.
Mom, dad, black widow, and her sister.
Mom works for the bad guy who is going to capture them all.
With some face changing technology,
Black Widow disguises herself as her mom so that she can infiltrate Dreykov base.
Dreykov is the head of the secret organization
that brutally trained Natalie to be an assassin,
a group she later defected from.
Nat thought she killed him and his daughter back then
and has felt guilty about the collateral damage of that.
But of course, he's prepared for this saying that.
When you look into the eyes of a child you have
raised no mask in the world can hide that.
Interspersed with this are brief flashbacks explaining
what black widow's plan was, which is fine.
It's a spy genre staple to get your characters
in trouble and then reveal that they actually plan things out.
It's fine. But then there's more.
Dreykov reveals that the masked soldier that Nat's been fighting
this whole time is actually his own daughter who Nat thought she killed.
Wow, what a reveal.
Wish I knew who that character was beforehand, but whatever.
He tells her to leave, so it doesn't matter anymore to the scene.
Nat tries to kill him,
but can't because of pheromones.
How are you controlling me?
I'm not controlling you Natasha, well,
not yet because I do use a pheromonal
[inaudible] smelling my pheromones prevents you from committing [inaudible] it's me.
Oh, but wait, there's more.
She knew about the pheromones and her mom told her how to combat them.
You just got to bang your head on a table a couple of times.
It feels like this guy would be prepared for that.
But all of this is actually a ploy to get him to
reveal his entire evil plan, which he does,
but the pheromone thing ultimately doesn't matter because Nat fails to kill him,
and Yelena, her sister,
just kill some later without having to overcome the pheromones.
The only reason it's here as a plot point is
to justify the two characters talking for a whole long while.
But the only reason they need to talk for a whole long while is because there are
so many plot points this scenes needs to touch on that weren't established earlier.
In this one scene,
we're covering Nat and Dreykov relationship.
We've got to retell the audience that break-off basically raised Nat to
the point that he can see through her face disguising technology, two,
we've got to go over Nat and her mom's plan,
three, we've got the taskmaster review,
four, we've got the pheromones reveal and five,
we've got the whole evil plan explanation.
Now other than Nat and Melina's plan,
all of these plot points are ideas that could have
conceivably been handled in the first act of this film.
The real problem here is that this is the first scene in the movie where
Scarlett Johannson and Dreykov get to actually talk with one another.
Let's do a quick recap.
The movie opens with a very effective scene.
Natalie is living a good life with a good family in Ohio,
but they are all actually Russian spies and
her father having completed his mission, needs to escape.
They do and fly off to Cuba.
In Cuba, we get the one establishing scene
with Dreykov where he has gnats family broken up,
The title card hits,
and then so much happens,
like more happens in the title card sequence for
this movie then happens in the entire rest of the film.
You've got this extremely phonetic and confusing sequence
that I can't help but feel left most viewer scratching their heads.
It whips through Natalie's training as a black widow as well as Dreykov rise and
political influence but inter-cuts so much imagery that is, well, it's just a mess.
My question is, why isn't what happens in the credit sequence part of the actual movie.
If she's going to face off against Dreykov at the end,
why not show scenes where she is being trained as a black widow,
a sequence that could have shown us the abuse she endured under Dreykov.
It got us emotionally invested in his ultimate defeat.
If we want to end this movie with Natalie
feeling guilty about hurting Dreykov's daughter.
Why not have scenes at the beginning that showed
what her relationship was like with Dreykov's daughter.
If Dreykov has a special smell that stops people from attacking him and act 3,
why not have a scene where someone tries to attack him but
fails because of the smell tech in act 1.
That way you don't have to do the whole explanation while it's happening.
The movie repeatedly tries to tell us that Dreykov is
really important and that Natalie has a long-standing grudge against him,
but emotionally it all falls flat because we
didn't see it in their one major scene together.
Both of them have to keep saying things to re-establish their basic relationship.
When you look into the eye of a child you've raised,
no mask in the world can hide them.
He took my choices, tried to break me.
But you're never going to do that to anybody ever again.
I feel like these lines exist because the film knows it did not succeed in
investing the audience in Natalie defeating Dreykov or even what their basic dynamic was.
It has to keep reminding us in the moment to justify what's happening.
This is not how you want
the climactic scene between your protagonist and your antagonist to go.
When you have a scene like this where the two finally face off,
that's the time you want the characters to be able to
focus on what's really at stake in the movie,
the theme, you want to see a clash of ideas.
You want the audience salivating for the hero to wind
slick little flashbacks showing that the hero actually has a plan when we
thought they were the ones being surprised are
fine but grinding everything to a halt to deliver
exposition on almost every major plot point in the film is really not.
For better examples of this.
You need only look at the other movies I've mentioned in this video
because even though I think those movies can also be improved,
at least you know how to feel by the end when
the hero and the villain are fighting at the climax.
I think part of the reason that we don't see some of
these scenes is because this movie has to pull off
a ridiculous juggling act in order to keep
the continuity of itself straight within the MCU.
A problem so complicated,
I'm not even going to attempt to unspool it.
But the other reason we don't see, for instance,
any of Nat's early life as a black widow is because that would involve showing
tough scenes that include things like human trafficking, torture, mutilation.
This is a movie made by the Disney Corporation.
I get why for real-world practical reasons,
this movie can't be that,
that it can't focus on those things for longer than an introductory credit sequence.
But, I didn't choose the subject matter for the story. They did.
They chose to avert the camera away from
the nastier parts of the story that they were telling,
which created all screenwriting problems for them in the third act,
I think it's a similar reason why we don't see
Shang-Chi actually kill someone in his movie.
Disney wants to make safe family friendly movies,
and they are not going to show their characters doing bad things to
that degree because they need to sell action figures and maintain their brand reputation.
But I think these were mistakes or
at least missed opportunities from a storytelling perspective.
All of this is quite a shame because
solid act ones used to be the MCU's bread and butter.
I would argue that a ton of the MCU's initial success is
because the early movies had solid first acts,
Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk,
even the Thor movie had
well-structured introductions to their characters
that showed what kind of person they were,
what their flaws were,
what their strengths were,
what they wanted out of life,
who was important to them all while involving them in the main plot that needs solving.
Imagine if an Iron Man,
we just watched him being Iron Man.
Then a flashback at the end told us he got
captured by the ten rings and had to escape from a cave.
None of those movies held information back just so they can have a reveal later.
They are upfront with who their characters are.
I think that makes a better foundation for the rest of their stories.
In fairness, marvelous TV shows are getting this right.
In Hawkeye, we got a seven minute introductory sequence to echo,
who is a secondary character on that show.
But I know more about her and connect more to her as
a result of those seven minutes than I do to any of the characters mentioned here.
These movies have runtimes pushing 2.5 hours.
They definitely have the time for more patiently paste character introductions.
People often come to these kinds of movies for the big action set pieces and X3.
But all of that is meaningless sizzle if he can't make the audience care in act 1.