Unforgiven was a critical and popular sensation that relaunched Clint Eastwood’s career, so his next project was bound to attract a lot of attention.  It turned out to be this, in which Eastwood plays a sixty-something Secret Service agent, ticking off a lot of the same “hey, this guy is genuinely old” beats as Unforgiven: he has trouble running alongside the president’s limousine, and gets so disoriented working a rally while sick that he mistakes a popped balloon for a gunshot.  So I guess teenage me was like, “Wow, it’s like Unforgiven, plus it has a creepy performance by John Malkovich as the would-be assassin! What a great movie!”  But this time around… I mean, it’s a completely standard thriller.  It really could not be more formulaic.  Not only is it not panthe­on-level⁠—I wouldn’t even call it good.

Also, why did the designers of the title sequence capitalize the word “the”?  If they were going to capitalize the word “the”, why not go whole hog and also capitalize the word “of?  I mean, I guess that technically every letter is capitalized, but treating the small caps as the equivalent of lower case, this doesn’t follow any style guide I’ve ever heard of.  Did the designers think the title looked lopsided if the word “the” wasn’t capitalized?  This in and of itself is enough to boot this movie out of the pantheon, I tell ya whut.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (season 5)
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, [Jim Steranko, Brian Bendis, Jim Shooter,] Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed Whedon, and Joss Whedon, 2017–2018

Well, after a bunch of movies that were a chore to sit through, it was nice to return to something that, while not particularly deep, was watchable enough that I could inhale a whole season in less than a week.  I said that about the previous season, too.  I also said that the previous season was an interesting exercise in bricolage, weaving together storylines from 1940s war comics, 1970s horror comics, and 2000s sci-fi comics.  This season is not.  I kept scratching my head at characters and scenarios I didn’t recognize, only to do some research and discover that they weren’t drawn from the comics at all.  Rather, it’s a season-long story in which our heroes are thrust into the future, where they find that the world has literally shattered into pieces (including one gigantic crescent containing maybe a quarter of the planet’s original surface area, which makes for a striking visual but seems to violate the laws of physics); midway through the season, they are able to return to their own time, but then have to spend the remaining episodes trying to avert the future they have visited.  This does not strike me as a very S.H.I.E.L.D.‑y sort of plot.  S.H.I.E.L.D. has stood for a variety of things over the years, but classically, it was Supreme Headquarters International Espionage Law-enforcement Division: basically, a sort of super-CIA with global reach that we were (usually) supposed to view as heroic, with Nick Fury as Marvel’s answer to James Bond.  For it to be reduced to a team of seven people, operating largely under­ground, jumping around in space-time and dealing with alien confederacies and whatnot?  That seemed more… Fantastic Four?  Thunderbolts?  And then it hit me.  Duh!  A story about a team led by a former S.H.I.E.L.D. bigwig, with Daisy Johnson and Yo‑Yo Rodriguez as members?  This is a Secret Warriors series!  They’re not calling it that, because I guess the S.H.I.E.L.D. name has more cachet, but when I imagined the title screen reading Secret Warriors the season suddenly made so much more sense to me.

Anyway⁠—overall I give the season a thumbs-up, but I do have a number of criticisms.  One is a problem I have with all these shows and movies: you have all this hand-to-hand combat invol­ving superhumans who, when their punches and kicks miss, leave craters in concrete walls, but when those punches and kicks land on normal humans, those humans just go “oof!” and maybe fall down, but a moment later they’re fine.  These fights should last half a second and end with someone as a red splotch.  Another, as I’ve said before in relation to Heroes, is that I am not a fan of stories that work by setting forth signposts from the future⁠—we even have a character here who draws the future, like Heroes’s Isaac Mendez!⁠—and then build all their suspense around how those signposts will be confirmed or averted.  I am also very much not a fan of the God-botherer among the crew being put forward as the team’s “moral center”.  And I felt like the one recognizable character from the comics who was introduced this season, Graviton, was a bit of a missed opportunity, as the cre­ators assigned his look and powers to someone who made for a less interesting character study than the guy in the comics.  In the comics, Graviton is Franklin Hall, possessed of enough power to be a mover and shaker on a cosmic level, but stuck as a B‑lister due to a limited imagination.  As Moonstone taunts him on multiple occasions, he could do anything, but all he ever really does is pull an island up into the sky and recruit a bunch of low­lifes to fawn over him.  “I am a king!” he crows in one issue, “I sleep on satin cushions, eat the finest foods, command my sub­jects’ every act⁠—I am virtually a god!”  Moonstone’s reply: “I knew you were pathetic, but this is too much. I stung your ego before⁠—so now you want validation? You want me to say you’re a big, scary, powerful man? Well, you’re not⁠—you’re still floun­dering⁠—which is why you’ve assembled this collection of cliches, with losers and hooligans to worship you⁠—” (bursting into laughter) “⁠—it’s all you could think of⁠—!”  So the next time he comes back, he tries to think of something better, and comes up with a slightly more ambitious plan than to live as a hedonistic god-king: to remake the Earth to take on the shape of his own head.

In the show, Graviton is Glenn Talbot, a military officer from the Hulk comics who in past seasons of this show was portrayed as a buffoon; he still is, but he is psychologically broken under torture by the Nazi-adjacent organization Hydra, which lends him some pathos.  Having given Hydra all the secrets he knows, and having been turned into a Hydra sleeper agent, he has a lot to atone for, so when malevolent aliens have the good guys on the ropes, he jumps into a machine to be infused with (ahem) “gravitonium”, which powers him up but drives him even crazier.  On a psychotic ego trip, intent on getting the upper hand against the aliens even if it means shattering the Earth in the process, he snarls, “I alone can fix it!”, echoing a political figure of some relevance in 2018.  I guess we’ll see whether he returns to relevance in 2025.  If so, I wouldn’t put it past him to try the head thing.

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