Will we ever witness a superhero spectacle as grand as Avengers: Endgame?

My original article here.

6 May 2019

Last year, at pretty much exactly this time I sat down and wrote about how Avengers: Infinity War lives up to the 10 years and 18 Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movies worth of hype. And here I am doing it again for the spectacle that is Avengers: End Game.

Avengers: Infinity War lives up to high expectations

Ten years, 18 movies, a lot of hype and finally Avengers: Infinity War arrives. The question is, does the movie deliver?

BY CHARLES SIBOTO 2 MAY 2018

I say spectacle because this is what directors, Anthony and Joe Russo, have given us. They’ve made a film that surpasses ridiculously high expectations and services, now, 21 preceding MCU films with an insane amount of love and detail. This is by no means a perfect film in the sense that when YouTubers pick it apart and agonise over every detail that everything makes sense. We live in a time in which everyone’s a screenwriter and knows better than the people paid to do so – no film or series can meet those expectations.


This past weekend was huge for the geeky fandom. Avengers: Endgame was released to huge hype and the third episode of the last season of Game of Thrones promised us the biggest and longest night battle sequence since the battle of Helm’s Deep in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Social media was buzzing (and still is) with memes, spoilers and on Monday morning perhaps a sense of disappointment. I think both Endgame and Game of Thrones delivered and that emptiness that we now feel is that we won’t see such spectacle for a long time. Both Thanos and the Night King represent such a huge scale of threat and villainy that we just honestly don’t know where to go after this.

Picking up where we left off

I digress, though, we’re here for me to tell you about Endgame. I thought that after Avengers: Infinity War that all this movie could hope for is to be as good as that but, no, it goes and far surpasses that movie! The 181 minutes of runtime means that the movie pays attention to all the characters and give them all a bit of the spotlight. This also means that the movie can hit different thematic beats in its story. The movie opens with the remaining Avengers and the rest of the world recovering from and dealing with the repercussions of that finger snap from the last film that resulted in half of all life in the universe being wiped out. Everyone’s grieving and we spend time with the surviving characters, all of whom have lost people. The Avengers are not used to losing and Thanos has soundly defeated them so they’re at their lowest.

Avengers: Endgame is emotive and impactful

Avengers: Endgame has ensured that a 10-year journey has come to an end with a film so emotive and impactful that it will be spoken about, in reverence, for some time to come...

BY NATALIE LE CLUE 30 APR 2019

All the characters deal with their grief in their own way. Hawkeye is back and pretty much on a criminal murder spree after his family gets dusted. Tony Stark is angry at Captain America for not being there when he needed him and for the rift created between the team after the events of Captain America: Civil War. The Cap is running a survivor’s support group where he helps people move on from their grief but admits that he can’t move on.


Natasha tries to hold the rest of the Avengers team together because they’re the only family she has. Thor is in a state of self-loathing because he should have gone for the head. Everyone’s pretty much not having a great time. This part of the story also reveals a flaw in Thanos’ plan. He erased half of life in the universe but the remaining half hasn’t forgotten and instead of moving on people are stuck in their grief and the world goes through somewhat of an apocalypse because, well, half of the universe’s workforce is just gone.

Fan service and Easter eggs abound (*Spoiler alert*)

You can’t keep the Avengers down for too long, though, and the movie kicks it up a gear when Ant-Man escapes from the quantum realm and puts time travel on the table for the team. They come up with a plan they refer to as a time heist and go off to try and get back everything they lost. The time heist allows for many, many callbacks through the MCU’s past movies. This part is pure fan service and just a treasure trove of Easter eggs. The references to the MCU are just brilliant and the nods to other time travel movies make for a lot of laughs.

This part of the film is Marvel showing off their amazing ability to use humour whilst still making you feel like everything you love will be lost. It’s quite magical. The time heist itself is wibbly wobbly timey wimey and probably doesn’t make sense if you overthink it. Things obviously go wrong when you mess with time and the action kicks in on an epic scale from here on. It would be too much of a spoiler to tell you how huge everything becomes from here! Again, all I can say is that it’s a spectacle of astounding proportions! Thanos is still very much the main threat and he is still as menacing as ever.



Marvel has crafted a masterpiece with Endgame and I think whatever they do from here on out, it will remain as a highlight that will not be overshadowed anytime soon. You don’t need to have watched all the 21 preceding movies to enjoy this movie, but it sure as hell makes your experience so much better if you did. The MCU has taken what for the longest time could only be successfully done on the pages of comic books, showing off the sheer spectacle of a huge space villain like Thanos, that Mad Titan hell-bent on destroying half the universe on a massive scale. You don’t even understand, this movie is me reading Grant Morrison’s epic comic book, Final Crisis (DC, I know) and wondering how a comic book can be so massive in scale and emotion. Watching Endgame is like that and as the credits roll up you wonder if you’ll ever feel this way again.

Avengers: Infinity War lives up to high expectations

My original article here.

2 May 2018

Ten years, 18 movies, a lot of hype and finally Avengers: Infinity War arrives. The question is, does the movie deliver?

Especially when expectations are so high? When the Avengers first assembled in 2012 it was the sort of ambitious event that comic book fans never dreamed was possible for a film. When 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron landed the magic was still there but Joss Whedon, the man at the helm of both those Avengers films felt the strain and bowed out. After a great showing with Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), directors Antony and Joe Russo were hired to direct Infinity War and its 2019 sequel. 

One epic package

Over the last 10 years, Marvel Studios has managed to deliver blockbuster after blockbuster and the Russos were tasked with taking all of that material and putting it together in an epic package. I am happy to report that they deliver a movie that takes all the different tones and characters from all of the preceding movies and blends them together to produce something quite magical. There are a lot of moving parts in this movie and somehow it all comes together perfectly.

Infinity War is not the best movie Marvel Studios has produced if you look at it as a standalone and it was never meant to be. This is meant to be grand-scale spectacle following 10 years of build up and, yet, the movie manages to have pathos and carry itself with a sort of grace I did not expect. You know that the stakes are quite high coming into the film but you don't expect the movie to make you feel as deeply as it does. As a fan who knows that the movie draws heavily from Jim Starlin's 1991 comic book The Infinity Gauntlet, I knew what to expect coming in but somehow the events that take place managed to surprise and somewhat shock me. 


All the characters we know and love are all there but this is Thanos's story, for the most part, Thanos on his quest to collect all of the Infinity Stones. Josh Brolin's Thanos is larger than life, he has gravitas, commands respect and dominates all the scenes he is in. As soon as you first see him you feel that you are in the presence of a superior being. He is on a mission to wipe out half of life in the universe, balance the scales, as it were and he has an indomitable will to get it done. He is not just a generic big bad, there is a charm to him and a certain sadness. You almost want to take his side.

Character continuity

We have seen the Avengers assemble and have had a bunch of them onscreen at the same time, but not like this. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) did stand out for me among the good guys and his arc is quite strong and well done. All your other favourites are here and definitely not to be messed with. Events pretty much kick off straight after Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther. All the players in those movies are where we last saw them, in space and in Wakanda. 

The Guardians of the Galaxy show up (with all the humour they always bring to a party), as do Doctor Strange, Wong, Iron Man, Spider-man, Captain America, Black Widow, Falcon, Scarlett Witch, Vision, and War Machine. There are some surprise characters that are a nice touch as well. The story even takes time to throw in some Norse mythology Easter eggs with Thor's storyline. You can't be a self-respecting villain without some henchmen and Thanos has some zealous and pretty scary ones referred to as his Children. There is the hulking (pun intended) Cull Obsidian, the truly terrifying sorcerer Ebony Maw, Proxima Midnight, and Corvus Glaive.

The film is quite long at 149 minutes but the pacing is done so well that you don't get tired of watching or feel like scenes are merely there as padding, which was the case in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Like The Last Jedi, this movie does spend some time subverting fan theories and delivers some nice surprises as a result. Many people will find it annoying that issues aren't resolved and that is to be expected. The movie does all it can to be the spectacle that it is and that we wanted, it delivers a villain worthy of waiting 10 years for and it is a good story that manages to juggle a huge cast of characters and locations quite nicely. 



Avengers: Infinity War manages to live up to very high expectations and though it's quite self-contained it does leave you wanting more, which you will get in the 2019 sequel. As is tradition, stay for the end-credits scene and its Easter egg.

Avengers: Infinity War is upon us

We have waited 10 years to get to this point and it looks like Marvel Studios is going to deliver their most epic movie to date. When that first trailer dropped and I heard Thanos' menacing voice I was simultaneously excited and had chills running down my spine.

"In time, you will know what it's like to lose. To feel so desperately that you're right, yet to fail all the same. Dread it. Run from it. Destiny still arrives."
―Thanos

Marvel has just been going from strength to strength since first giving us Iron Man as an introduction to their shared universe. They have had some low points in their 17-movie run but they had a long-term vision and learned from their setbacks.

The first Iron Man movie has stood the test of time and remains a classic and many still consider it to be the best movie in the MCU. The sequel is less than memorable and then they made up for it again with a solid third installment, post-Avengers. The first Captain America was so-so and then the sequel, the Winter Soldier was so good that the directors, the Russo brothers were bumped up to direct Avengers: Infinity War. The third entry, Civil War served a bit like Avengers 2.5 movie. The first two Thor movies struggled to find their feet but with last year's Thor: Ragnarok they made a gem. The Incredible Hulk is probably their lowest point and one that I always skip when I have a Marvel marathon.

Guardians of the Galaxy came out of nowhere with James Gunn at the helm. It was another Iron Man situation with Marvel taking a risk on fairly unknown characters and making a space opera. The risk paid off because both Guardians of the Galaxy movies are a lot of fun and fan favourites. This opened the door for movies like Ant-Man and Doctor Strange. Marvel also had a big win when they managed to get the rights to Spider-Man from Sony as he is quite critical to the Infinity Gauntlet in the comics and just a great character. Black Panther deserves a post all of its own. I expected it to be good but it exceeded all expectations and is a phenomenon.

We have seen the Avengers assemble 2.5 times now and the Guardians team up twice but on April 27 we see the whole MCU come together to face the Mad Titan, Thanos! It looks like it's going to be a great day at the movies.

Mine by Sally Partridge, Book Review

Sally Partridge’s YA novel, Mine hits harder than Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir. Reading Mine feels like you’re on a runaway train that is threatening to derail at any moment. By the end, you need to catch your breath and check for any injuries that you might have sustained. Yes, it’s that good. Mine is the story of two Capetonian teenagers, Kayla and Fin struggling to make sense of life and love. It’s a story that’s as tragic as it’s beautiful. The story’s gritty and doesn’t treat difficult issues like sex and alcohol with kid gloves. If you live in Cape Town and are familiar with the surrounding areas you’re sure to get even more of a kick out of this novel because the manner in which Sally Partridge writes about the city is like it’s also a character in the story. You’re also in for some great music and comic book references. Music and pop culture play a huge part in the life of most teenagers and Mine is told through that lens.

Kayla Murphy is 16 and totally cool but she doesn’t know it. She doesn’t believe in love because she has been hurt too many times. She has learned time and time again that guys are asshats and only want you for one thing. What she doesn’t realise is that although she might feel broken she is beautiful, with her blue hair, ripped jeans, Vans sneakers and Led Zeppelin t-shirts. She is also an amazing skater, knows more about comic books than most guys and she is a total classical music nerd, with the flute being her instrument of choice. Finlay September is enthralled with her from the first day he sees her zooming by on her skateboard and giving him the finger. He is 19 and has a host of his own issues. He is repeating matric and it looks like he is well on his way to failing again. His situation at home is quite bad, what with his dad who beats him when he is not neglecting him. He has his music going for him, though. He is the frontman of a popular band on the Cape Town circuit, Dark Father. When he gets on stage and spits his hard-hitting lyrics he transforms from Fin to Thor and he is a god. These two characters collide and a love affair like no other ensues. Their love affair is beautiful, intense and tragic because of meddling from outside, miscommunication and trust issues. Both these characters are emotionally intense and have deep-seated issues with loving and being loved.

Sally Partridge excels at portraying characters that you can relate to and whose emotional state mirrors that of many teenagers. Navigating love is difficult and Kayla and Fin deal with many obstacles as they try to stay together and be each other’s mine. Kayla’s character is the most complex and intriguing. She has to deal with bullying, slut-shaming and not knowing when to say no when guys are just using her for sex. Mine takes you on an emotionally intense ride but tells an important story of how difficult life and love is for teenagers these days. Some people might be put off by the swearing, alcohol, drugs and sex in a YA novel but the reality is that this is what teenagers are dealing with and shying away from those themes doesn’t help anyone. Kayla and Fin’s story is worth the bumpy ride.

The Plan

In this life one needs a Plan, a towel, a tie and a hammer to make it big. If you’re lacking any of these tools be assured that your name will never go down in the annals of history as a person who was legend. The last three items on the list are easily acquired by anyone 21st Century-savvy enough to walk into a store or two and fork out some cash (which can be acquired through begging, stealing or by being employed). The Plan, though, is the nut-kicker. Without a solid Plan things will not fall into place for you.

Have you ever see Ocean’s Eleven? Yes? Good. George Clooney and his gang are people with a rock solid Plan in that movie. So much so that they went and carried out their Plan in two more movies. That’s the sort of thing you should be aiming for with your Plan.

Everyone wants to win at life and keep on winning till the day they die. Some people are so good at winning that they do so even after they’re dead. These are the people who have their names spoken in hushed tones of reverence. They are legend and had a solid Plan.

What constitutes a solid Plan though?

First things first: a list.

Ask yourself what you want in life and jot it down, every little thing you want. A lightsaber, super powers, Wonder Woman as your girlfriend, to become a surgeon, 2.5 kids, a bat mobile, jot everything down. If you’re going to make a list, you might as well make a proper list. It’s no use messing around.

With that out of the way you have to ask yourself how much effort you will need to invest into getting the ridiculous stuff on your list. This, alas, is the part where you have to be realistic. The best way to go about attaining your desires is to get hold of money, loads of it. The more money you can get the easier it will be to get people who are much more intelligent than you are to spend all their time finding a way to get you super powers.

The coolest way of making loads of money is to rob a bank and use that money to start a lucrative crime syndicate that allows you to have your grubby paws in every cookie jar on the shelf. It is recommended that you spend a few years on this part of the Plan. Also, try avoiding going to jail if you can. If you do get caught spend your time behind bars getting a business degree of some sort and doing push-ups. Use every step in the Plan as a learning experience. The only thing that can stop you is death – avoid it at all costs.

You will know you’ve made it to the top when you find yourself at the head of a boardroom table at the top floor of a skyscraper, surrounded by shady crime bosses clad in Armani suits and whose faces are wreathed in Cuban cigar smoke. Also, you’ll be donning a very snazzy tie and own several comfortable towels. It’s at this point in your life that you can get everything on your list by means of bribery and/or intimidation by way of hammer-wielding thugs (dressed as Thor if you like). Patience, that most admirable of virtues, would be a great addition to your repertoire at this stage (if the years of working on the Plan failed to bestow it upon you – you slow learner, you) but if you do get a little impatient once in a while torture a henchman or two – it’s such a great way to release all your pent-up emotions.

That, furry friends, is how you win at life.


Disclaimer: George Clooney gives this Plan his approval as being rock solid. Also, he is Batman with nipples. That is all. As you were.

The Nerds Have Taken Over

‘Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.’
- Bill Gates

Not that long ago, in a galaxy known as the Milky Way, on a planet called Earth by its inhabitants, I read the words ‘Save A Non-Geek Today’ in a computer magazine’s Editor’s note and was amused by the seemingly farfetched concept. Little did I know that those words foretold of the tech revolution that has silently swept over the world and converted the masses into geeks without them even realising it.

A short decade ago people who spent hours playing video games, reading fantasy, sci-fi and comic books were thought to be weird and had chairs thrown at them wherever they went by their intellectually inferior peers. These people went under ‘derogatory’ labels such as nerd and geek and were generally frowned upon for their silliness and were told that they should grow up.

What people don’t know, though, is that you can’t keep a nerd down for long because he will go back to his secret lair (because we all have one of those) and hatch a plan, so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel, to take over the world! Which is exactly what happened, the nerds took over the Hollywood machine and with it the world. The message being sent out to the masses was (and I guess still is), ‘Don’t fuck with us! We know how to build guns that shoot lasers.’

There was a time when you had only a handful of television shows and movies to pick from if you had a craving for super heroes, space or medieval settings, especially if you were an adult and wanted something fantastic yet mature. Movie studios were reluctant to touch such material because they feared that they couldn’t sell it to a wide enough audience. Steven Erikson, Canadian writer of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series of fantasy novels, spent nearly a decade trying to sell his script for Gardens of the Moon and nobody wanted it because it was too ambitious! He’d walk out of studio meetings with his friend, and co-writer, Ian C. Esslemont with words such as: ‘Try something . . . simpler. Something like everything else out there. Something less . . . ambitious.’ Studios didn’t want to invest in material that audiences might find to be too complicated, which makes sense to a large extent but in the process they were grossly underestimating the intellectual capacity of audiences. People wanted something that would challenge them, hence the success of ventures such as The Matrix. People wanted to go to the cinema and be sold a fantastic story that is intelligent enough to actually buy into. People wanted, as Erikson puts it, ‘sophisticated shit’.

This, my furry friends, is where we are at, the space-age of television, cinema and literature in general. Admittedly it’s not the high-tech world envisioned by great minds like Isaac Asimov, in which the human race has conquered the stars, but strides have been made. The nerds are in charge of a large slice of the Hollywood pie and, like the gay community, we (me not so much actually, which is an outright travesty!) have the buying power to sustain that hold. Since the release of movies like The Lord of the Rings, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, 300, Sin City and others beside sci-fi and fantasy have had a ubiquitous presence in the box-office. This year has been great! Seeing releases like Thor, Priest and the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean and there are still upcoming titles like The Green Lantern and Captain America.

The masses love these movies and don’t even notice that they’re buying into the worlds of the kids they made fun of in school. Nerds have taken over almost every aspect of people’s lives. Just take a look around you at the wide-eyed uninitiated masses toting laptops, Blackberries, PSPs, DSs and hanging out on Facebook and Twitter – slavish devotees of the wonder that is technology with the nerds at the head of the revolution.

Heaven's Magic Machine

This is the magical scene that will play out in Heaven as I awake from death, as though it were a dream:

‘“Well, Master Samwise, how do you feel?’ [Gandalf] said.
But Sam lay back, and stared with open mouth, and for a moment, between bewilderment and great joy, he could not answer. At last he gasped: “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?”

“A great Shadow has departed,” said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then, as a sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tears ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from his bed.’
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

I’m sitting here pretending to be marking first year English assignments but because I suffer from ADD (or whatever they call it these days) I can’t pay attention to another string of words that make no sense to anyone in the universe or any of the infinite ones parallel to ours – not even the person who wrote them. Unlike J.R.R. Tolkien my mind does not conjure up hobbits when faced with the deadly dull task of marking, mine wanders to random things instead, like whether or not there will be magic in Heaven. The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings have me convinced that there will be tonnes of it.

What sort of magic will it be though?

To use Terry Goodkind’s terms, will it be additive or subtractive? Will it be the sort of magic worked not by our souls but worked on our souls as Peter Kreeft puts it? Will it be the charming magic of animated Disney movies that sees dishes washing themselves and beautiful Princesses aroused from eternal slumber by true love’s kiss? I’m secretly hoping for dragons and centaurs. I’d love to have tea with a majestic dragon, assuming dragons care for tea that is. Imagine how big a dragon’s tea cup must be!

I went to see Thor some time back and if Heaven’s anything like Branagh’s vision of Asgard I’d be quite chuffed; all the best parts of a fantasy medieval setting merged with futuristic technology that has no side effects like pollution. It would have to be bigger than Asgard though, so as to accommodate my dragons. I’m a big fan of flashy and destructive sorcery I must say: Wizard’s fire, the fiery tempests in Dragon Age, crazy chain lightning and such. I doubt there’s place for destructive magic in Heaven though, especially since I’m referring to post-apocalyptic Heaven, when Satan and all his crazy minions have been smote down by Heaven’s awesome Secret Fire-wielding host and the Flame Imperishable has been sent to burn at the centre of the universe(s) forever and ever. Amen.

I should expect a behind-the-scenes sort of magic then I guess, only a little more overt than can be glimpsed in Nature. God is a big fan of espionage after all, what with Him always working His magic from the least likely of places and in a most covert manner. Take for an example in The Lord of the Rings He doesn’t make so much as a peeping sound but in which His presence makes all the difference.

Heaven’s magic is, no doubt, rooted in beauty – the lofty beauty of an Elvish Princess like Lúthien that captures the hearts of admirers the world over but can only be won by the most noble of beings, and yet it is a beauty as humble and accessible as a Samwise Gamgee of the Shire. Beauty alone is not enough though, for it to be truly magical it must be accompanied by truth, wisdom and all that good stuff.

Arcane arts like necromancy are out of the picture then; zombies, as cool as they may seem, are only a mockery of real life after all. Such arts are of a lower type of magic, not that of creation (or sub-creation).

I would venture to say that the purpose of magic is not to be seen but to be experienced. Real magic feeds a deep human need for wonder. It speaks to us as though we are children exploring the world and looking at everything in it with awe. Scientists experience the universe’s magic as they set out to unravel its mysteries and theists (the real ones) encounter this magic in their unshakable faith.

In the Middle-Ages it was said that God wrote two books, the Bible and Nature. The world in which we live is a magic making machine and many of us don’t even notice it. Nature is God speaking to us of love, beauty, perfection, imperfection, death and many other such lessons beside. The universe, as such, is a picture of what the magic of Heaven will be like, the sort of magic whose presence is never noted but whose absence is immediately apparent.