The Marvel Cinematic Universe has become a phenomenon unseen before. Linking together movies across years and years of storytelling was a stunt only Marvel could have pulled, and only Marvel could have succeeded. The blockbuster hits of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame were a satisfying and complete end to the saga fans had witnessed. With the excitement dying down Marvel chose to continue pumping projects out at a rate that was, frankly, too fast. Quantity over quality became the mantra of the MCU as disappointment after disappointment hit the silver screen, and it seemed like all hope was lost for the MCU aside from a few standout features. I and many others looked at Thunderbolts* and saw another disappointment waiting to happen. It is with great surprise, and joy, that I can say that Thunderbolts* could be the jumpstart the MCU needed.
The first thing that truly impressed me about Marvel’s latest film is how much I enjoyed the characters. The writing in Thunderbolts* is so good that you could have no background on any of these delinquents and be invested nonetheless. The only big face of the MCU that stars in this movie is The Winter Soldier, and he has one of the smaller roles compared to the rest of the team. It was truly impressive seeing a cast of characters I’ve seen described as boring and meaningless become a team that I was so invested in I didn’t want the film to end. Along with bringing back characters that were thrown aside and giving them new life, Thunderbolts* introduces new characters that are just as good. The introduction of Sentry was done beautifully and I was immediately captured by Lewis Pullman’s incredible performance. Character development was tackled better than any Marvel project I’ve seen in a long time, and it was done with an entire new team of super heroes.
Something that was even more impressive was the plot and writing of the story as a whole. While there is an antagonist that the team needs to take down, there is not a “final battle” with them. Thunderbolts* throws away the formulaque idea of the heroes pooling their physical strength together to take down one big bad. Instead, the story has these characters showing friendship and love to one another, defeating the darkness that would have consumed them. The themes of found family and battling trauma and mental illness was done exceptionally well, and there were times I teared up from the sincerity of these scenes.
The score was also impressive to me. The soundtrack takes a step away from the generic orchestral movie score and experiments with other ways of showing intensity, and it does so very well. There were several times I found myself noticing the score’s uniqueness and how well it meshed with the action on screen. It wasn’t uncommon to hear the score revert to the climbing set of string instruments for climactic moments, and at moments I wished there was more of the diversity I heard throughout the score.
Overall, Thunderbolts* has brought back hope into the MCU going forward. We can only hope the creativity and writing quality within Thunderbolts* isn’t lightning in a bottle. If Marvel continues producing films at this level of quality, I believe there could be a massive resurgence to the studio’s reputation and fans around the world will tune in once again to see what Marvel has in store for them.
