1.) Once again, I failed to see this movie on opening weekend, which is when the studios would prefer we go see their movies. Hopefully the fact that I am about to talk about it so many weeks after its original release means that any of you who were interested in seeing it have already done so, and I can therefore talk freely about its content and its couple of big surprises. If not, well, consider this a spoiler warning for the movie (and for a 28-year-old comic book!) for the rest of the post.
2.) As I feel like I have noted many times before (including just a few months ago), Marvel Studios has long since perfected their formula for producing quite decent, wholly unobjectionable superhero movies. They generally all share a very similar aesthetic, the actors are all usually pleasant ones a viewer enjoys spending some time with, the action choreography is competent if never thrilling and they tend to have a healthy sense of humor, with quippy dialogue and a degree of self-deprecation about their content. For the most part, they've become perfectly mediocre...which means they usually don't offer much in the way of surprise anymore, but that little "Marvel Studios" logo is a sort of stamp of "good enough" quality.
Thunderbolts* is different. Much of what I said above holds true, of course, but I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that this film is actually about something in a way that many of their previous films I've seen haven't been (and not just IP management or advancing the now rather confused Marvel Cinematic Universe mega-plot).
Rather, the film tackles mental illness and trauma by presenting us with about a half-dozen thoroughly broken people, and it does so in a way that makes it feel universal. Early in the film, new Black Widow Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) mentions "the void" (lowercase "v", one assumes) and a bit later, discusses it with the mysterious Bob (Lewis Pullman). The way they talk about the void, it sounds like it can be something serious from the DSM-V, or it can be the low-level anxiety or depression that so many of us live with, or it could simply be the feeling of a lack of purpose, or a sense of emptiness or loneliness.
In other words, "the void" is something everyone can relate to, and amid all the superhero business, the film both explores this, and offers the solution to it: Human connection.
In this sense, it's the best kind of superhero narrative, especially of the classic Marvel superhero sort, in which basic elements of universal human nature are exploded into big, broad metaphors that take the shape of monsters and villains for our heroes to struggle against (Here, of course, it is The Void, with a capital "V"...I suspect his/its presence in the film was meant to be a surprise of sorts, but I feel like I knew The Sentry was going to be in this movie ever since it was first announced; it's hard to be too surprised by such big, well-covered movies in the age of the Internet).
The more I think about it, the more impressed I am with what Thunderbolts* does. I guess director Jake Schreier and writers Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo know what they're doing.
3.) Has anyone said the name "USAgent" out loud yet...? I didn't hear it during the course of this movie at all (just "dime-store Captain America" once), but then, I didn't watch The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
4.) I thought Wyatt Russell was pretty perfectly cast as John Walker. He's very handsome, but, at the same time, there's something...punchable about his face? Like, not just in the film. Looking at the credits on IMDb and seeing his headshot, I have two simultaneous visceral reactions: "Say, that's a handsome guy" and "That guy looks like such an asshole." (Sorry Mr. Russell! Nothing personal!).
With USAgent in Thunderbolts* and Guy Gardner in the upcoming Superman, it's a great summer for fans of a-hole legacy characters from the '80s...!
5.) Giving The Sentry telekinesis seemed a bit much. I mean, he's already Superman with some vague extra energy powers, does he really need another superpower? I suspect it was included just so they could have a scene of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) training him and the pair of them realizing that he has great powers he can control, but, in the fight scene where he takes on the Thunderbolts in Avengers Tower, it felt a bit like overkill, as the filmmakers seemed to hurry through a checklist of The Sentry's various powers (And why block bullets in mid-air with telekinesis if they just bounce off your body anyway? Why use it to throw someone across the wall when a slap would do the same?)
6.) I thought they did a great job of making The Void version of The Sentry and Bob scary as hell; I think it was the tiny little white dots of eyes staring blankly out of the all-black figures that did it.
7.) I thought the use of Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) in the film was an incredible waste. It was a little surprising that she was killed off so quickly, given her prominent placement in the marketing (see the poster above, for example), to the extent that I thought she might not really be dead at first.
I guess, if I'm being charitable, the reason they included her at all was as an example of something Yelena articulates about the grim arc of such characters' lives, that they lead lonely existences in which they kill people over and over until someday someone kills them.
But given how cool the character's powers and look are, it was sort of a shame to put her in the movie just to kill her off; more than most of the others, she could have used a redemptive arc, and her character some spotlight and a found family echoing the one that it was suggested she had found at the end of Black Widow. (There wasn't really room in the movie for another character, I understand—The Ghost Hannah John-Kamen gets hardly anything to do relative to the other characters as is—but I think it would have been better not to include Taskmaster at all than to use her as they did.)
8.) I thought the joke about where the name "Thunderbolts" came from in the film was effective, especially given the several callbacks to it throughout, like those involving the argument over which local business had sponsored Yelena's childhood soccer team.
That said, I thought it somewhat emblematic of the lingering embarrassment of the source material still evident in Marvel Studios movies. That is, someone somewhere along the line thought that a superhero team named "The Thunderbolts" was kinda silly and thus needed a more realistic in-story explanation, and if it could also turn on a joke, well, all the better. (You can sense this embarrassment in how time the characters spend out of their masks and costumes—although part of that is likely also due to wanting to get the stars' good-looking faces on the screen as often as possible—and the toned-down designs of the costumes. For example, while I think movie Taskmaster looks cool and scary, the design certainly leans into realism, and away from a billowing cape, pirate boots and a face that looks exactly like a human skull, for instance. Oh, and also in their reluctance to use codenames, with Walker always being referred to as "Walker" and Yelena as "Yelena", for example).
I think the filmmakers could have just as easily come to the name another way, with Red Guardian (David Harbour) excitingly, spontaneously declaring the team assembled before him "The mighty Thunderbolts, delivering justice like lightning...!" or suchlike.
Sure, they would have lost a running gang, but I'm sure they could have found a half-dozen or so other little jokes to take the place of those about the soccer team.
(And yes, I understand that they're not really the Thunderbolts anyway, hence the asterisk, and that they ultimately get a completely different—and more marketable!—team name, which is reserved for a late in the film surprise.)
9.) It's kind of too bad that Marvel Studios couldn't have attempted something along the lines of a filmic equivalent to the big twist at the end of Kurt Busiek, Mark Bagley and company's original Thunderbolts, wherein the reader has already bought and read most of an issue before they realize that what at first seemed to be a team of brand-new heroes are actually a bunch of familiar villains attempting an ambitious new scheme).
There are, of course, plenty of reasons why they couldn't. Of the original Thunderbolts line-up, I think only Zemo actually already exists in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Therefore, they would have needed to round up a team worth of other villains to use in the line-up (and, with Ghost, Taskmaster and Walker, they kind of did a bit of that here, although they don't seem to have actually been villain-villains) but, of course, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is awfully light on actual supervillains, given how they are generally killed off at the end of the movies in which they appear and are never really heard from again (Tom Hiddleston's Loki being the example that proves the rule).
And even if they did assemble a handful of pre-existent supervillains from throughout the MCU to take on new superhero roles in a Thunderbolts movie, keeping them under wraps in a big Hollywood film like this is a lot harder than, say, Screaming Mimi reinventing herself as Songbird in a comic book; surely if word got out that, say, Michael Keaton was cast in a new Thunderbolts movie, one would suspect he would be reprising his role as The Vulture, wouldn't they...?
Finally, I don't think Marvel Studios could currently sell a team of five or six brand-new heroes with no immediately apparent ties to the previous films at this time. Maybe they could have years back, when the Marvel brand was enough to get a Guardians of the Galaxy film off the ground (surely no one who didn't already read Marvel comics knew who the hell they were) or sell an Ant-Man movie. But if they tried to pitch seemingly brand-new characters now? I don't think it would work, as some of the popularity has rubbed off the MCU (I have an idea why this might be the case, besides, of course, simple exhaustion, but there's no sense in getting into all that here).
10.) I don't like Walker's little beret.
11.) I hope all of the comics writers and artists responsible for creating (and/or, in Winter Soldier's case, recreating) the various characters used in the movie were well compensated. Looking at a list I made of the 23 writers and artists involved in producing these characters (which I'll post tomorrow), it looks like 17 of them are still alive; I feel like that isn't always the case with the characters in the earlier Marvel movies, given that so many of the primary Marvel characters were created by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and the men of their generation.
And by "compensated" I mean not just that they have their names listed under "Special Thanks" or whatever near the end of the credits, but that they got some movie money. Being comics creators, I assume some of them can really use it.
![How To Read The Animorphs Graphic Novels [Guide + Reading Order]](https://www.howtolovecomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/animorphs-guide-feature.webp)
English (US) · 