Just a quick post to discuss briefly two movies I've watched. Gaming is going well, and work on the GM guide for TS&R is going really slow (too much real work to do), so not much directly game related to blog about at the moment. So we get this instead.
And yes, today I'm going to give my quick capsule reviews, spoiler free, for Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse from Sony/Marvel, and The Flash from Warner/DC.
For parents worried about cursing: I don't remember any horrible swears in Spider-Man. The Flash had the one allowed F-bomb for a PG13 film, right at the end, and not a lot of other swearing.
Across the Spiderverse (AtSV) is of course the sequel to Into the Spiderverse from a few years back. As with the first movie, I really love the mixing and unconventional use of animation styles in this movie. It's just a pleasure to watch from a visual arts perspective. It uses colors, art styles, meta details like art direction notes, and even frame rates to make each world and each version of Spider-Man distinct and interesting. I really enjoyed watching this up until the ending. The story is good, but not as tight as ItSV. It's got that "middle of the trilogy" problem that we saw in The Matrix or the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, where the first movie was a solid standalone story with potential for more, but the second and third installments are really one big story so you need to wait for the conclusion. That said, it was a solid film otherwise, and it has me excited for the conclusion.
The Flash is the possibly final entry to the current DCEU movie line (I think there's some TV shows left as well) before James Gunn takes over and relaunches things. I've never been as big of a DC fan as I am a Marvel fan from my comics reading days, but the Flash has always been my favorite DC character. This movie actually does something I found really cool, in that while telling its own self-contained story, it also sets up the possibility of multiversal rebooting, which would allow the upcoming Gunn line of DCU movies/shows to take what they like from the Snyderverse and ditch the rest. As a story on its own merits, it was entertaining, and I don't want to spoil things, but it was a bit refreshing that the main conflict for Barry Allen/The Flash Prime in the end was internal, and the external challenges are really resolved by all the other characters. It seems like they learned from the mistakes of Wonder Woman, which should have had internal conflict front and center in the end, but was just a big punch-out instead.
Both of these movies, by their multiversal nature, spend a lot of time referencing previous media involving their main characters, which is always a lot of fun. I think both of these films handle multiverse concepts better than either Spider-Man: No Way Home or Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness did. Of the two, AtSV is the better movie, but The Flash wasn't bad.
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