Armory

I agree, It was 90% wasp and just a tiny bit of Ant Man, whose only real moment came by him... not being Ant Man.
 
And I'm not super fond of this version of the Wasp either, but whatever, I guess they figured she should be waspy rather than fun and cute.  I mean, the Wasp in Earths Mightiest Heroes was very capable and independent and interesting but didn't have to be a nad crushing scold in the process.

Her personality has varied significantly over the years, depending on the writer.  She's been rebooted like 5 times over time from Ms Marvel onward.
 
I agree that the film did a decent job of potraying her like she is presently in the comics: dour unfriendly, almost tyrannical.  That's not really what I meant.
 
What I meant is that they sold the last two marvel movies as "BLACK superhero!  WOMAN superhero!" instead of just "hey, fun movie about superheroes!" and then the writing was just not great in Captain Marvel so she was never challenged and a whole serious of ridiculous crap happened instead of clever, well-written, interesting stories and plots like most of the previous movies.  I mean you can pick out ones that weren't great in the past (Thor 2, Iron Man 3) but that's not really what the MCU should be using as its baseline.

I hope so, but Captain Marvel felt like a step in the wrong direction tone wise.

Now I disagree with your premise wholeheartedly.   Aside from villains like the Joker who exist only to be monsters, the most memorable and compelling villains are those we can empathize with, because we can feel what drives them and appreciate that any one of us could have gone down their path and ended up like them. There's still something in them that's recognizable and admirable: Dr. Doom's code of honor, Magneto's mutant crusade, Norman Osborn's love for his son. Look how popular the MCU's Loki is.
 
Besides, Thanos in Infinity War is evil, but he's also the protagonist of the movie.

Guys, look at this objectively. This is a person who obsessively desires and believes he deserves a romantic relationship with the personification of DEATH! This is necrophilia and nihilism mixed with god complex and taken to the Nth degree. The only reason it makes sense to you is because you've grown accustomed to it over decades of the character's history. To any moviegoer without comic exposure (the majority of them), that idea would sound beyond insane. The movie Thanos's motivation at least has a relatable cause and logic, albeit flawed logic.

He's not Spanish. He's Egyptian. 
 
*Edit - I see Tjack beat me to it.*
 
 
But this is a hard no from me. The original is a classic and should be left alone. 

I’m not crazy about picking a fight with someone so much senior here, but you’re flat out wrong.  Highlander was and is a perfectly fine movie.  One that I happened to watch only a few days ago so it can’t be said that I’m remembering it thru rose colored glasses.
   The casting of a Frenchman to play a Scotsman and a Scotsman to play an Egyptian pretending to be Spanish was pretty shaky accent-wise, but both actors did a memorable job in their roles.  The script and concept were solid and nobody could have anything bad to say about that soundtrack.
   Sorry I may have gone a little overboard over a one sentence diss of a movie but this one has some good memories attached to it.  There are a lot of bad movies I love and freely admit are awful, but this isn’t one of them.
   You should see the fight I put up when somebody slams Buckaroo Banzai.  🤗

Well, and then you get stuff like Squirrel Girl where she spends 75% of the comic hanging out with her grrls and talking, then a few pages of her casually trashing some villain that is ridiculously powerful to show how great she is as the Mary Sue.  Marvel has tried to keep things fresh and interesting by hiring webcomic writers, but they don't quite grasp the format, the story types, or the concepts of superheroes and it shows.  And the editorial staff seems to have zero interest in helping them learn.

Yeah I feel like the state of comics now is by far the most open to wild, creative and innovative ideas in comic book history.  Why do I say this?  Because it does not need to make money.  Marvel Comics can totally lose money every month and still stay open because the movies make such ridiculous cash (or, at least, used to).  So why not go nuts, do new wild crazy things, why not try stuff that nobody thinks will work, why not give the creators total freedom?
 
Sadly, a certain rigid political viewpoint seems to be dominating the entire industry, which greatly limits the possibilities, and likely annoys a great deal of their customer base as well.  Stan Lee and Steve Ditko both had very strong political viewpoints (diametrically opposed) but they were able to restrain that in most of their work and make sure it was more broadly acceptable to the overall audience.

I think many of the problems are a bad mix of corporate culture and artistic creativity. 
 
Some of the more farfetched and edgy ideas in current comics could be good ones if they were done with original characters. But the industry either is currently incapable of unwilling to launch new titles to serve as a platform for the new stories.
 
And the new authors should have to come up with their own creations. You should have to be creative and innovative enough to tell your own original story with your own creations for at least two years before you're given  access to the company's pillars. Perhaps the thought of another newb hack being free reign over their babies would give them some pause before they launch an icon into stories bordering on dystopian fan fiction. 

It seems too many comics today are written by people who want to write for a genre other than superheroes.

Honestly, I've seen bigger plot holes in other critically-acclaimed movies. But the mechanics of these exercises in cosmic power were never the crux of this story. The crux was the human drama, how our protagonists, and the rest of our kind, reacted to these monumental events. At bottom those events were created to stimulate and enhance the internal conflicts.

Well, I’m inclined to think Feige thought that Thanos loving the personification of Death would not be groked by most of the audience. 
 
edit:
Why Thanos Doesn’t Woo a Sexy Skeleton in Avengers: Infinity War
https://www.vulture.com/2018/04/why-thanos-doesnt-woo-death-in-avengers-infinity-war.html
 

I see your point.  But at the same time, I don't really expect a high degree of consistency in either comic book superheroes or Hollywood action films, and I don't allow it to ruin otherwise good movies for me.

I am actually okay with that in a superhero movie. I will trade looks cool over physics in that type of movie most times, and the times he teamed up with Thor and IM to cause a cool effect and teamwork looked cool enough to warrant it.

I would say there are other factors that influence whether these events count as displays of heroism. One is the context surrounding the fall. For example, in Superman II with Chris Reeve, Superman gives up his powers for love, only to discover he's left his world unprotected. He has to experience pain and humiliation before he could become Superman again. That paragon of never giving up, Captain America, lost faith in his country in the comics 'way back in the 1970s, and became Nomad to travel America and rediscover his idealism. In the comics Tony Stark had his first bout with alcoholism in 1979, which crept up on him subtly at first as he dealt with mounting pressures. It was resolved less dramatically than his second fall, which turned him into a derelict and which most fans felt went too far. But I think that example highlights another factor that can make a difference: repetition. Heroes can be excused losing their conviction under extraordinary circumstances, as long as those circumstances don't become the norm.
 
What happened to Thor in the MCU was the culmination of almost unimaginable tragedy. I don't look at it as making him as flawed as any normal person. Almost anyone else would have broken under that weight long before Thor did. It speaks to his heroism and strength of will that he kept going as long as he did.
 
 
Starlord in the MCU was never a hero. He's an opportunistic rogue who found people he cares enough about to fight to protect. But he's always been shown to be a cocky, undisciplined hothead. I don't know how he's depicted in comics, but his action in Endgame was predictable under the circumstances.
 
Oh, just to respond to slikmar's point re the Hulk: I made a point of asserting that Hulk's raw power is in the same class as the other MCU big leaguers. Hulk and Thanos are close in strength (Thanos might be a shade stronger), but this Hulk always fought like a brute, relying on overwhelming force to defeat his opponents; although even when childlike he often displayed clever improvised tactics as needed. Thanos was clearly far superior in hand-to-hand training and experience, which is how he could maul Hulk. That deficiency in the Hulk's combat prowess has been exploited by Thor and Abomination, as well.

Does anyone actually need to make that case?  Are there actually people out there who look back at the last 12 years of the MCU and think Kevin Feige doesn't know how to portray heroes??
 
 Ok.
 
Btw, here's an excerpt from a Stan Lee interview around the time the first Thor movie came out:
 
Lee’s literary approach — and his desire to depict his heroes’ private lives — profoundly altered comics. Spider-Man suffers a teen’s social travails. Iron Man battles his demon addiction. Lee says he was guided by intimate questions: “What did they do when they weren’t fighting supervillains? Where did they live? . . . What were their hopes, dreams, aspirations, as well as their frustrations?”
He believes passionately that many people like their superheroes to have depth, to have vulnerability, to have flaws — to be vexed beneath the spandex.
“For a long time, there was no personal involvement with some of the super­heroes,” Lee says. “I’d read books and Dickens always had interesting characters. Mark Twain had interesting characters — so did Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Arthur Conan Doyle, who created the greatest fictional character of all in Sherlock Holmes.
“I wanted to write the kind of dialogue that would give the character personality."

MCU Hela isn't the most relevant example, as Thor wasn't even aware she existed until Odin's deathbed confession that he deliberately concealed that part of his past. And I have no doubt that Thor had experienced loss over his lifetime, but it couldn't have been deeply personal, because it's clear from his attitude in his first movie that he had never failed before, at least to his way of thinking.
 
Every one of Tony Stark's movie appearances had involved some action of his that drove the plot, and led to character growth, whether it's accepting consequences for his past actions and trying to make amends, or embracing self-sacrifice, or facing his own mortality, or coping with PTSD, or reconciling in his heart with his late father, or learning to be part of something greater than himself. But I do agree that his whining can get annoying at times. It's mostly Stark/Downey's wit and charm that lead most of the audience to let him get away with it.

Also, I think the whole "change expectations and expand the genre" thing has to be done years later, when the genre has become too predictable and standardized, not right at its beginnings.

I actually feel that Evans and Chiklis pulled this off pretty well. But then, Chiklis was a fan of the Thing before the movie and wanted to play him and Evans seems to be very good at embracing whatever characters he plays. I know that move gets panned a lot, but really, its not for the portrayals of the 4, but for Doom since they cannot seem to get him right. I actually liked the 4.

That's exactly the comparison that DC has to overcome. Marvel Studios has developed a reputation for consistent entertainment. They've had very few outright clunkers, and at this point the audience assumes that a new Marvel movie will at minimum be fun, and may even be exceptional. But the DC theater audience has been burned more often than satisfied, and they've grown wary of spending their movie budget on new releases.

I think it is a bit disingenuous for people to call the theatrical version of the movie "Joss-tice League", as if Whedon was the visionary mastermind behind what we got. The real culprits were WB execs who couldn't keep their meddling fingers out of the pie, even when Snyder was in charge. Whedon was merely the knife with which they butchered what Snyder had begun. Geoff Johns gleefully engineered Snyder's removal and convinced Whedon to take the reins for a nice, fat paycheck. Whedon was never going to have the time or resources to make what anyone would truly call "his Justice League". His greatest failure, in my view, was in agreeing to the job in the first place, and putting himself in a position to take all the blame for what ended up on screen.
 
The fact that the "Snyder Cut" is, by many accounts, merely different--but not necessarily better--is testament to the fact that the movie was flawed at its foundations, and that no amount of re-working was ever going to save it and make it great. It seems to me that any glowing praise for it is coming primarily from DC fanboys who are desperate for a win here. I would not be surprised if the Snyder Cut fades from memory and is forgotten in a few years as WB moves on to the next series of disconnected movies of inconsistent quality.

As far as I'm concerned, that's Themyscira's ass!
 
 
 

As the executive producer, I can assure everyone that Zach Snyder had considerable input on the WW84 movie and its writing.  The author of that essay on Heroes though, he has it right: Jenkin is great at getting best performances out of women in her movies (the men are kind of bleh but fair enough, most women in other movies are bleh.  You're supposed to like the love interest because she's pretty and that's about it) but she's not much of a writer.
 
Zach Snyder can do good work but he needs to stay far the hell away from anything involving superheroes or good guys, because his view of the world is Sucker Punch.  He should have no power or input whatsoever with making DC comic movies.  None.