Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors

This is a surprisingly decent film. I'm equally surprised by the number of downvotes here. What, not enough sex, language and gore for the mainstream? Or were some folks totally unaware they were dialing into a cartoon-based movie?

This has a good story, good characters, an actual lesson, and was an enjoyable watch. Yes parts of it jumped the shark a bit; welcome to the realm of super-heroes. That tends to happen a lot in this field.

After the recent plethora of cringe-worthy superhero movies full of ultra-violence and character assassination (Batman, Superman, X-Men, etc etc) it was refreshing to watch a film that brought this genre back to its basic values: ordinary people that suddenly have power and aren't sure what to do with it.

The storyline never slumps. It's never "totally ridiculous". Basic plot holds up. The individual characters are actually well-formed and thought out. I would have liked to see Squirrel Girl given a little more "awesome" (since she at one time managed to take out THANOS) but she's just getting started in this one.

The writers very well got the ideas across of: Don't abuse your powers just because you can... don't judge a book by its cover... don't judge too hastily... give people a chance to redeem themselves. I'll take that kind of content over hyper-action and violence any day. Not that there wasn't plenty of action and violence in this; it was just subdued compared to the general media these days.

I am not a big fan of "Saturday morning cartoon" type fare. But this one did well enough to earn a solid 6 stars in my book (would have been 7 if the animation had been a bit better). Well worth the watch, and a good morality flick. Brought back the days when comics were less gratuitous, less violent, and had far better stories. Overall I think a decent effort.

I'm showing my age here, but I'm also coming from a long history of loving Marvel toons. Synthetic music with digital instruments gives me headaches. It's so much commercialized content that 'Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors' becomes a perverbial shaking of the keys in front of a baby's face. It's flashy bright colors set to excess noise; if this were Japan you'd expect to read about the hundreds of cases of children going into seizures (Much like California's theater warning for 'The Incredibles 2'). It was as uncomfortable to watch as a ShamWow commercial, "HEY I'M YELLING REALLY LOUDLY SO YOU'LL LOOK UP AT THE TV!!!"

Secondly, just at a glimpse I couldn't help but notice the body transformation of Squirrel Girl. What was the point of giving her birthing hips? The Squirrel Girl I remember had a tiny frame which gave her action scenes against bigger villains a lop-sided battle that you couldn't help but cheer for her to win. People tend to root for the underdog, not the guy big enough to lift grown men off their feet. It came across like she was the bully in at least one scenario.

There wasn't much of a story here. It's basically hero-worship of older Marvel characters and living up to be just like them. It takes away from the individuality of the new characters origin stories. I saw this as one long movie edited from the shorts that wemade available. Maybe the idea was to get all of this information in small doses? I don't know. My experience was tiring. I didn't finish watching because there wasn't much there for me to care about. No mystery, no central element, and all commercial.

Apparently Secret Warriors is now a thing and likely to spawn a spew of new movies and a television series. Essentially it's Marvels answer to Teen Titans and I'm not impressed.

To be fair I'm not exactly the demographic, but it's not who you'd expect either.

The main problem is that it's so kiddish, and as Marvel/Superheroes have evolved so far and gone beyond Saturday morning cartoons I feel this is a step backwards. It doesn't need to be R rated, but a happy medium would have made considerably more sense.

Here we see the most modern version of Ms.Marvel teaming with Squirrel Girl to take on the bad guys and form the titular team. The animation is lazy, the plot is generic and it's all so damn childish.

To its credit it is bringing some lesser to known characters into the spotlight and pushing Captain Marvel further in as she'll be an integral part of the MCU. Also the voice talent though not great is at least consistent as we have several people playing characters they've played before such as Agent of Shields own Chloe Bennet playing Quake again.

I see what they're doing here, I just don't think they've done it very well. It's full of moral messages and that's great, it has it's heart in the right place. But as a franchise? I'm unimpressed.

The Good:

Strong morale code and messages

Some of the logic behind this makes sense

The Bad:

Some horrid animation

That soundtrack, really?

Too much silliness

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

Squirrel Girl is approximately 50% adorable and 50% annoying

Pro-:kamala khan stuff is solid cons-:1) how are inhumans different than xmen 2)voice acting is mixed but mostly bad 2.1)kamala khan's mom sounds likes 1960's not early 2000's in accent 2.2) squirrel girls voice acting is annoying 3)animation is neither distinct or memorable 4)story is a mess and keeps trowing terms 5)teenager's dialog is terrible and written by someone in there 40's

Like if it was just about Squirrel Girl and Ms Marvel it would've been great. Seems like all of the male characters lacked character or dimension. The confrontation that happens in the story feels like it's written by a couple of teenagers with no veteran experience. But beginning was great!