Avengers End Game (2019) Review

Possible spoilers

The remaining Avengers must figure out a way to bring back their vanquished allies to destroy Thanos.

A finely produced Marvel film, directors Anthony Russo and Joe Russo deliver on the mammoth task of concluding this phase of the MCU. End Game is packed with emotion, thrills and a number great action scenes. There’s some interesting ideas – a washed up Thor, a vengeful Hawkeye, Gamora’s ‘return’, Hulk’s Bannerisms, fighting duplicates, revisiting past films, forgotten characters and much more.

The Russo’s instalment is no doubt entertaining but after the credits roll and tears are shed for two of your favourite characters (many more, if you like root for the bad guys) ‘fridge logic’ creeps in.

Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely and other writers grapple with time travel concept and shrug it off, wiping their hands of their responsibilities seemingly walking away by throwing in some one-liners and diagrams. Maybe they threw the time kitchen sink in by design so that fans will debate for many years. And that’s the major issue with End Game, it doesn’t work within its own logic with the writers moving their own goal posts. Sadly, even Doctors Strange’s 1 in 14 million outcome is flawed. It’s difficult enough to do films based solely on time travel, like Back to the Future, Timecrimes, Predestination to name a few and End Game just doesn’t wrap it up neatly. You really do have to leave you brain at the door to buy into it.

Overall, a great film, with hard hitting emotional closure moments but unfortunately they’ve left it to 14 million fan theories to tie up the lose ends and as just you make sense of it – annoyingly it throws up another paradox issue or question.

Captain Marvel (2019) Review

Possible spoilers ahead

Captain Marvel, finds herself caught in the middle of an intergalactic battle which takes her to Earth in 1995 which opens up her mind to her past.

As fan of classic Marvel comics, I must be honest and say (Thor Ragnarok aside) I haven’t been a great admirer of the arguably padded out borderline pretentious film outings. Thankfully, directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Captain Marvel is one of the better more enjoyable instalments introducing shapeshifting aliens Skrulls and the Kree, powerful humanoid warriors.

With great acting, smouldering likeable blonde Brie Larson is fantastic as Captain Marvel which expands the Marvel Cinematic Universe and ties into a past story thread, namely the Tesseract cube and future threads, including Fury’s pager. There’s a great performance with plenty of screen time from Samuel L Jackson as de-aged Nick Fury, oozing screen presence Jude Law and mostly prosthetic makeup Ben Mendelsohn are particularly note worthy with their characters offering some story twists. There’s fantastic action, effects and music throughout – it’s one of the better stories of any MCU with an interesting 90s setting and top pacing as Fury and Marvel team up.

As expected there’s some end credit scenes The first will connects to Avengers: Endgame and the humorous second bookends the film.

Overall, a solid superhero actioner, you can’t go wrong.

Free Novel Celebration

This year is a really big year. I’ve had novels out for 10 years. So for the next few days (April 2nd-) Darkest Moons will be FREE! https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darkest-Moons-M-Esmonde/dp/1508567700

If you’ve not been ‘following’ I have so many writing inspirations but I was mainly inspired to write due to legendary horror author James Herbert and his kind correspondences I had over a screenplay that languished at the time in development hell. As well meeting Mr Herbert, I was lucky enough to meet my other horror hero – filmmaker and writer, horror legend George A. Romero.

Specifically, I wanted to write horror, yes, sub-genre horror, but with a twist, my take on at the time a worn genre of classic monsters.

Fast forward 10 years, zombies went mainstream, Frankenstein, Dracula and the kitchen sink have had remakes/reboots/ reimagining and so on. Sadly, Herbert and Romero have both passed away leaving their horror legacies forever on the world.

I have many people to thank. Some of which are no longer with us.
But to the many readers who provided constructive feedback on the books to help me understand what they wanted and how I could give it to them. Thank you.

Anyhow enough waffling!
What a journey it’s been! I am grateful.

So from tomorrow to celebrate Darkest Moons (I think one of my best) will be totally free on Kindle. Not just Kindle Unlimited but to everyone.