The boys get together to talk about various geeky topics, including video games, RPGS, MMOs, movies, comics, etc. In today’s episode, we mainly talk about various movies we’ve seen, and video games we’ve played over the course of the last 3 or 4 weeks.
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The boys get together to talk about various geeky topics, including video games, RPGS, MMOs, movies, comics, etc. In today’s episode, Patrick Ramsahoye makes a surprise return, and we mainly about the blockbuster movies that have come out over the past couple months. might be some spoiler warnings if you haven’t seen Guardians of the Galaxy yet, but we tried to keep them pretty vague.
The episode can be downloaded directly from the following link, or automatically downloaded if you have already subscribed to the RSS feed through iTunes or any other feed reader.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Guardians of the Galaxy opened this week. It is one of the most anticipated movies of the summer. Overall it lives up to its potential. It has humour, adventure and vast cosmic vistas. Each character brings something to the story.
When I first sat down to write this I was going to be critical of how Thanos is portrayed. He gets betrayed three times and is virtually insulted to his face by an ally and does nothing but sit in his chair and let it happen. This did not seem like the correct response for a character being developed to be such a big villain that it will take the entire cast of heroes from the marvel Cinematic Universe to stand up to him.
As I was going over each of those betrayals and how Thanos’ non-responses made him seem less and less like a serious threat, I realized that he was staying absolutely true to character.
My first encounter with Thanos was in Jim Starlin’s run on the Adam Warlock series. Warlock is facing a future version of himself called the Magus. The Magus is the despotic leader of the Universal Church of Truth. Warlock is horrified by what the Magus does and what his church represents. Shortly after Warlock begins his war with the Church Thanos and Gamora show up and offer their assistance.
With Thanos’ help, Warlock is able to defeat the Magus. Later Warlock discovers that the Magus was to be Life’s Champion against Death’s Champion, Thanos. Warlock’s life path was intentionally and subtly altered so that Thanos would have to face a much less powerful opponent. It took the combined efforts of the Avengers, The Thing, Spider-man, and the ghost of Adam Warlock to defeat Thanos.
Thanos came back in the Infinity Gauntlet saga. This time it took all of Earth’s heroes, Galactus, the Celestials, and most of the cosmic entities to defeat Thanos. This defeat convinced Thanos that he was his own worst enemy and he gave up trying to destroy creation.
However, as fate would have it, Thanos also served as the defender of the universe on several occasions. He never did it to be the hero. His motivations were always selfish: to preserve his own life or to prevent others from achieving what he could not.
Whether he was trying to destroy everything or save it, he always used the same strategies. He would manipulate others to arrange the playing field to best suit his strategies. He would only come out into the open once the situation was as much to his advantage as he could make it.
This is the Thanos we see in GotG. He is not one to get all emotional and egotistic when things don’t go his way. He would rather let a minion be killed in front of him than distract an ally from the objective. Each betrayal was a setback, but they never brought the final objective out of reach.
Thanos’ inaction was not a sign of weakness. Rather, it was a sign of his cunning, resolve, and determination to be victorious at all costs. It shows just how dangerous a villain Thanos really is.
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. aired its season finale. I enjoyed it, though I am with those who feel it didn’t live up to their expectations. It did, however, live up to its promises. The finale got me even more excited for Guardians of the Galaxy.
When the series was announced one its objectives was to open the Marvel Universe to only knew the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It had to show that what we saw on the big screen was part of a world that included secret organizations, weird occurrences, aliens, and super powers.
The show’s connection to the MCU goes all the way back to the first Iron Man movie in the form of Agent Phil Coulsen. The premier episode introduced us to Centipede which was a variation of Extremis, which we saw in Iron Man 3.
Thor: The Dark World had a more obvious presence on MAoS. The team was involved in the cleanup of the aftermath from the movie. They eventually encountered three different Asgardians, including Sif, played by Jamie Alexander. I’m happy to say her presence as a major player in an episode showed that Marvel won’t be afraid to bring people from the big screen onto the smaller one. By extension, we should also expect to see some of the small screen players jumping to the big screen.
As the season reached its climax we found out that the main story arc was tied to Captain America: The Winter Soldier. This was wonderfully done. No one needed to have seen either the TV show or the movie to understand the other, but events unfolded in such a way that both shows were that much more interesting when the connections were made.
This brings me to the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy. If you haven’t been keeping up with MAoS, be prepared for some *spoilers* if you keep reading.
The onscreen versions of the X-Men and mutantkind in general are firmly in the grasp of Fox. This severely limits not only what characters Marvel can include in the MCU, but what types of characters are available. Marvel’s solution is the Inhumans.
For anyone who doesn’t know who they are, the Inhumans are a branch of humanity that were genetically modified by the Kree, an alien race. At puberty an Inhuman is exposed to the Terragen Mists which activate their powers. All in all, the Inhumans are a simple, in-house solution to Marvel’s mutant problem.
Coulsen was brought back to life through a drug made from the bodily fluids of the corpse of a large, blue alien. The Kree were one of the races Sif listed as matching the alien’s description. This same drug kept Skye, one of Coulson’s team members, from dying. We have been told that Skye is more than she seems. Unravelling her mystery is likely going to be a major story arc for the second season.
Skye’s blood was used to synthesize a variant of the drug which was used to save Garrett, the major villain of the season. The drug obviously had more than a healing effect on Garrett. When he wasn’t fighting Coulson’s team or killing US Army generals, Garrett was gushing about his new-found understanding of humanity’s future. He even drew an odd diagram on a glass wall.
It should be noted that after Coulson took a close look at the diagram he started carving an even more elaborate version into a wall.
Guardians of the Galaxy has a strong Kree presence. We know that Ronan the Accuser plays a major role in the story. We saw Korath the Pursuer in the trailer. The modern comic book version of the Guardians started with some characters who had ties to Thanos, introduced at the end of The Avengers.
Everyone is assuming the Guardians movie will bring us that much further into an Infinity Gauntlet movie arc. That probably is its major goal. However, after seeing Garrett and Coulson’s diagrams in the MAoS finale, I think Guardians of the Galaxy is going to bring the Terragen Mists to Earth so that the population of supers in the MCU is going to grow dramatically.