I just watched Luke Cage on Netflix, and it was awesome (no spoilers, don’t worry). One of the nicest surprises, though, was that there was no Stan Lee cameo. Instead, they had…
Method Man. Just blew me away.
From now on, in all the Marvel movies, I want to see the Wu-Tang Clan represented. I’ll settle for nothing less.
There was a Stan Lee on a poster moment. I definitely enjoyed it as well, but some occasional writing/plot mechanics problems did thrust you out of the story at times.
I loved it. I stayed up all night and watched the entire series. I particularly enjoyed the tie-ins with the other Netflix/Marvel series. I especially like the character, Claire, the nurse from Daredevil, but the frequent mentions and allusions to other Marvel characters were also nice.
Magic hammer.
Yeah, a photo of Stan as a police officer shows up in every series. On Daredevil and Jessica Jones, he was in a place of honor on the station wall, but since Luke has no reason to go into a police station, they put it on an NYPD PR poster.
I also liked the series, but one problem i had was an over reliance of tired story telling tropes. (Example below). What i really liked was the way the series tied into the MCU, very well done!
[light spoiler]
If a cop and an other person give a eye witness account against you attacking them, you will not be released. No matter how fancy your laywer is.
[/light spoiler]
The general social justice vibe of the show was fine isolation, good even but it doesn’t really fit in with the general libertarian ethos that the MCU has been building for nearly a decade.
So overall I was disappointed.
One of the best parts of the series was actually the villains – most definitely not the disposable and two dimensional fare that so often populate the rogues gallery of the MCU movies, pretty much all the villains of the series had their own motivations and story arcs that made sense and went some way to explaining why they acted in the way they did. After the incredible performance Vincent D’Onofrio put in as Wilson Fisk in the first season of Daredevil, and David’s Tennat’s truly creepy Kilgrave from Jessica Jones, we have come to expect excellent, layered villains from Netflix’s Marvel themes offerings, and it is great to see that characters like Mahershala Ali as Cottonmouth, Alfre Woodard as Mariah, Theo Rossi as Shades, and Erik LaRay Harvey as Diamondback can stand alongside these characters without ever descending into racial stereotyping or overblown gangster cliche.
Indeed, all the casting in the series was top drawer. Mike Colter is so perfect to play Luke Cage that he might have been born to the role, Simone Missick as Misty Knight is particularly gratifying to watch because she isn’t relegated to the role of love interest but instead has her own fully fleshed out story and character arc that touches on issues of post-traumatic stress and despair alongside dedication to the community her character serves. And Rosario Dawson’s Claire Temple seems to be established as the through-line character who is present as a constant factor in all of the Marvel Netflix series, and her character gets better and more interesting in each series she appears in. We even hear her called the Night Nurse at one point in this series, which is a nice nod to the source material for the character.
I look forward with interest to seeing what Netflix can do with the Iron Fist series that is on the horizon, and the Defender’s ensemble series after that.
Mike Smith @ 5;
I don’t know if you could claim that there is a general Libertarian ethos with regard to Marvel universe movies like Civil War (that is all about a clash of conflicting ideologies and worldviews with no easy ‘right’ answer given to the audience) , and in any case the Marvel Netflix series are distinct from the movie universe in terms of tone. After all, Daredevil is all about a crusading lawyer who seeks justice for the down-trodden of Hell’s Kitchen, regularly working pro-bono in his day job just to help those who nobody else cares about and donning his outfit at night to fight the battles on behalf of the poor and marginalized nobody else cares to wage. None of that is exactly libertarian in mindset, Ayn Rand would not approve (and a good thing too – anything that empathy-deficient pseudo-intellectual endorsed is to be avoided like the plague).
Equally, Jessica Jones is all about a former super hero living as PI while trying to process extreme personal trauma and deal with an overwhelming sense of guilt for actions she isn’t really responsible for but still can’t let go of. Again, not really a libertarian story.
Luke Cage is not a departure from the approach, style and tone of the earlier Netflix series, but rather a development of them. Besides, this is all part of shared cinematic universe, and part of the complexity and texture of that shared universe is that different characters are shaped by different experiences and so have different perspectives on the world around them – it is entirely reasonable that a character like Iron Man on the one hand, and Luke Cage on the other, would view their shared world through very different lenses.
@Gregory Greenwood
The libertarian vibe is stronger in some film than others; it’s strongest in both Iron Man 2 and Winter Soldier. But in general, the MCU movies have focused on state power going horribly wrong with individuals shucking off the constraints of the collective. Civil War is pretty easily read as an allegory for entangling international agreements which libertarians tend to shun.
I haven’t seen Jessica Jones, but yeah the Daredevil series has focused on correcting state sanctioned injustice and corruption. The vibe is far weaker here than it is in other properties but it is still present. I don’t care if Rand would approve or not. She isn’t the be all end all of libertarianism.
Luke Cage being a #BLM wish fulfillment is quite different through. The show came across as a democratic social commentary piece. While I get that different properties will have different themes and complexity and whatever I just felt this one shifted to far from the rest. Maybe in time the MCU will shift in the this direction as a whole but at the moment, it doesn’t feel like the MCU to me.
In Iron Man 2 you have the hero claiming to have privatized world peace for example
I do not know about the libertarian slant to Marvel but there is a bias in-favor of the “Hero” in there stories so much so they characterize an entire sub-genera, Supper Hero.
Western literature the only kind I am most familiar with is filled with heroes as are movies and we even extend that to our politics looking for the hero to save the day.
The lone hero who stands against the bad guy’s. We are encouraged to emulate that image.
In some sense that is how libertarians see themselves to be that is the ideal of our striving for the highest good to be that one hero.
Seldom is the collective mentioned or shown to have any power except the angry mob bent of lynching some one or destroying the hero and his charge.
“If we do not hang together we will all hang separately”
I liked the one episode I saw but 1 hour at a time is enough for me. This thing of choice in watching how much you want at the time you want is one of the nicest things to happen to this form of entertainment / literature in a very long time.
uncle frogy
Mike Smith wrote:
You might want to watch the rest of that movie… That was foreshadowing to display that he would not be the only one capable of making such a weapon. It was Tony bragging, and the rest of the movie was tearing down that bragging with Ivan Vanko producing an armoured suit in short order that easily rivalled Tony’s.
Not to mention, he actually let James Rhodes walk away with one of his suits for the U.S. government to own and operate, and the movie made it very clear that it wouldn’t have happened without Tony allowing it.
+Mike Smith: You appear to not have watched all of Iron Man 2 or Winter Soldier. Or any of the rest of the MCU, really, if you think “Libertarian ethos” matches anything involving Captain America.
Maybe the Red Skull. But if you thought he was a hero, again, you should watch the REST of the film, not just the parts where he expresses the Libertarian Ethos.
@John
The enemy in winter soldier is a curropt state so Byzantine in scope, structure and power that a Nazi death cult was able to hide in plain sight and further the state was involved in systematic destruction of civil liberties and a creeping fascistic control of the populace.
Captain America was literally any enemy of the state in that film.
@ck
If the US govt has the plans to make Iron Men why is it we don’t see any nonstark ones in later films?
Yes the scene is hubris but the state still isn’t the savior in the film.
Oh and the (prinlmary?) secondary villian is a weasel who tries to use the state to crush a competitor and Vanko is literally funded by the USA.
The movie ends with Stark humiliating a senator by winning a award. We later learn that senator is a Nazi.
Yeah, you’re confusing “there is a corrupt authority figure in this work of fiction” with “fuck minorities, fuck authorities who insist I treat minorities like people, RAHOWA. Fuck you, I got mine.”
FYI: Captain America 2 is the first. the “Libertarian Ethos” is the second one. And the fact that you have trouble telling the difference means you need to go watch The First Avenger again, and this time, try to remember that the Red Skull, despite his perfect Libertarian Ethos, is the VILLAIN. Not the hero. the VILLAIN.
Try to remember that.
Or hell, take Avengers 2: Age of Ultron, where Tony’s “Libertarian ethos” of “I’ll do what I want and the wishes of the others be damned” leads to his creation of the omnicidal AI Ultron. Does that sound like an endorsement of libertarian principals? In the aftermath of that movie, Captain America: Civil War basically rejected this libertarian black-and-white thinking out-of-hand with two sides of the movie’s conflict (pro-governmental oversight or anti-oversight), neither of which were dismissed as wrong (which the movie makers could’ve easily done if they wanted to).
As unclefroggy points out, you’re mistaking the movie format for an endorsement of your political position.
Mike Smith wrote:
Because two Iron Man films about “Tony Stark fights another Iron Man” was more than enough? Or how about the fact that if these things were common as dirt in the MCU, there’d be no point making movies starring Tony’s version?
Howard Stark created that particular monster, and Tony’s bragging was the catalyst for it emerging. I’m not sure you can say that is a rejection of the state either. Vanko nearly defeats Stark near the beginning of the movie without the help of Justin Hammer, and without funding. Also, Rhodes is an air force Lieutenant Colonel, so he’s your representative of the evil State in the final battle.
@John
Oh good you literally have no idea what libertarian means.
@CK
My politics are far more aligned with Luke Cage’s and I far perfer when the libertarian vibe is minimized as it is in GotG. I just appreciate coherent tone and theme, regardless of the content.
And in Civil War the audience is expected to sympathize with Captain America and you know he wins. So yeah, ultimately, the film comes out against international oversight.
Stark senior’s relationship with Vanko is derived from his govt research work. It’s very easy to read IM2 has a parable about unintended consequences and blowback of foriegn interventions.
Like I said the vibe is stronger in some films than others. I think it’s the weakest in Age of Ultron.
Oh BTW several people involved with the MCU have engaged in anti democrat action, including giving money to Trump, and Whedon has a history of making products that display strong streaks of cynicism of collective and trumpeting the virtue of individualism.
Firefly, for example, is profoundly distrustful of the state.
@ Mike Smith;
I think that there may be some confusion on the thread. @ 17 you said;
But in your first post @ 5 you wrote;
Unfortunately, we tend to get a lot of socially Libertarian persons (atheist and otherwise) popping up in this site complaining bitterly about what they term ‘social justice warriors’ (since apparently caring about the well being of your fellow humans is somehow morally reprehensible in their eyes) and how much they hate them. They use socially Libertarian philosophy to attempt to justify a vision of the world that rejects all altruism or social provision for the less fortunate as anathema and seeks to reinforce existing social inequality in order to preserve either their own privilege or that of the societal group to which they aspire; hence John’s reasonable reference @ 14 to the well known expression of the libertarian mindset when faced with calls that social justice issues be properly addressed of ‘Fuck you, I got mine’.
Such people are also typically fairly dripping with bigotry, almost invariably being deeply racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic and ableist at the minimum. Suffice to say, they don’t come here with any honest intent to discuss anything in good faith or even to put forward their position in a spirit of an earnest exchange of ideas, but instead just want to troll progressives for their own amusement and take shots at marginalized groups, and as a result they get the kind of welcome they deserve.
Unfortunately, you entered the thread using exactly the kind of language such a person would employ (they usually start off fairly mildly and only ramp up the really offensive stuff as time goes on), and so many people (myself included if I am to be honest) were suspicious of your motives on that basis. If you are not such a person, then all I can say is that an unfortunate sequence of events lead to a misunderstanding, and I apologize for the part I played in it, but there are good reasons why such a form of words elicited the response it did here.
Mike Smith @ 17;
I didn’t read the film that way. At the end of the day, Captain America still flagrantly ignored the due process of law to take the part of Bucky, who while he was brainwashed was still responsible for scores of assassinations and terrorist acts. Cap didn’t bring Bucky in and trust in the system he claims to defend, but instead arbitrarily decided that Bucky shouldn’t stand trial because Cap assumed he knew better than a court of 12 of his peers and decided Bucky could not receive a fair trail.
Critically, he didn’t think that Bucky should be acquitted, but rather that he should essentially be above the law by virtue of… what? Being Steve’s childhood buddy seventy plus years earlier? That blows a huge hole in Cap’s core argument that the Avengers don’t need any oversight since they are ‘still the best pair of hands’ to control the power they represent – you can’t easily square that with a man who uses his power to subvert the courts and the integrity of law on the basis of nothing more than how he assumes, without any evidence for that assumption, a trial would go.
Sure, Tony made all kinds of mistakes and stupid decisions too, but that doesn’t mean that Cap’s ideology was vindicated. As for ‘winning’, the whole point is that both Tony and Cap lost; unusually in a comic book movie, it was the villain, Zemo, who really won the day. He set out to destroy the unity of the Avengers from within, and he succeeded, with the team now splintered and half of them on the run. The only Avenger who saw the true threat and tried to avoid this split was actually Black Widow. She consistently argued that the ideological posturing of Cap and Tony was less important than the team staying together, and acted accordingly to minimize the consequences of the growing threat of violence between the two factions, even swapping sides to stop Black Panther killing Bucky at the airport (and paid for it by now being left a fugitive in her own right, considered to be aligned to Cap’s ideological position even though she never really agreed with either him or Tony).
The film neither came out in favour or against oversight, but rather pointed out the strengths and weaknesses of both positions, and argued against political differences driving wedges between people who would otherwise be natural friends and allies, and highlighted the perils of infighting blinding one to other threats. Again, none of that really amounts to a Libertarian sentiment.