The MCU Omnibus ThreadFollow

Pretty much this. Waiting for other stuff to come out, so may as well watch. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. The commercials made it look like pure farce/slapstick humor, which would be funny for a short time, and then boring. What we got was "some" of that humor, but set in what was a seemingly "straight" setting. Production value was higher than one would expect for a pure humor show, which just added to the oddness actually.

Does seem like it's just off balance though. I think if they tone down the silliness a bit, and make it more about character humor (playing off character traits and interactions) than situational (silly setups and slapstick actions/resolutions), it might just work. It's just hard to tell what direction they intended to go, much less how they'll move from the pilot. And at this point, it's hard to know if they'll get enough episodes to find that balance.

I finally got around to watching Logan. Good enough as a movie, but the ending made no sense to me. Probably everyone else has seen it but I'll spoiler it anyway:
SpoilerLogan has an adamantium bullet he plans to kill himself with. Laura uses the bullet to kill Clone-verine in the end. But, uh, there's no special reason why that would work. Logan has healed from adamantium inflicted wounds before such as Lady Deathstrike in X2 and his own claws going in and out through his flesh on a daily basis. He's also recovered from severe head/brain trauma before -- the first movie has him getting shot in the head. But it's just tossed out there as a given that an adamantium bullet to the head would kill Logan and does kill the Clone guy (who is also hale and hearty and not suffering from a mixture of adamantium poisoning and ennui)

Yeah, SpoilerI'd get that if it was Logan who was killed by the bullet. More damage than his weakened, poisoned body could handle. But the clone guy wasn't halfway to death's door like Logan was.
...not asking you to defend it though since you agree it was dumb.

I don't think he HAD to get injections; I think they just kept him 'roided up at go time.

But, yeah, nothing about the bullet made a lot of sense.

I thought the same about the stump but was already annoyed at the bullet.

Speaking of, in X-2, Logan gets shot in the head and drops and everyone is like "Gasp!", then he heals and the bullet pops out and he's okay. But how did the bullet get through his adamantium skull rather than ricocheting off and hitting Pyro in the face or something?

OMG superhero movies

If I remember that scene correctly (SpoilerThat was around the scene with Singer's subtle "Why can't you just stop being a gay mutant?" scene, right?), the bullet didn't really penetrate his skull, it just kind of stopped in his forehead meats and then was pushed out. I just kind of assumed it didn't ricochet because it was a cruddy 9mm round. Now, how it knocked him out for a few minutes in the first place I don't know. Mild concussion?

Looks like standard police issue, so definitely 9mm. And the 9mm isn't that big. The projectile itself is about a fingernail. Then you have it flattened after hitting Logan's metal noggin. I'm not saying it's probably or realistic or anything, but I wouldn't discount it as a possibility. A very very very unlikely one at that. Lining up of perfect conditions comic book logic etc etc.

Why it knocks him out at all or takes so long to heal from it I'm at a loss.

I chalk it up to the usual "film makers don't know how firearms, and well, physics works" issue. Yes, in theory, if you had a skull made of (ok. "laced with" ) an indestructible metal, and were hit by a bullet, the bullet should either ricochet off, leaving a small flesh wound (which he should heal in moments given other scenes of him healing in the films), or perhaps, if it hits just right, at a perfectly straight angle, just deform flat and sit there, stuck to the side of the skull. We could even accept that the action of his flesh healing might push the flattened bullet out.

In the scene, the bullet that pops out looks pretty much like an undamaged bullet, clearly much longer than the presumed thickness of the flesh around that part of the skull. But that's probably a combination of the film makers not thinking about the bullet deforming, and the more reasonable need to make sure the audience recognizes it as a bullet. So show something that looks like a normal bullet being pushed out of the side of his head via some cool cgi effect, and everyone is happy. Yay!



Needs of the plot. The primary point of that scene was to show/lampshade Pyro's shift towards villainy, so that his decision to join Magneto later in the film makes sense. If Logan isn't knocked out, then it becomes a scene about Logan beating up some cops (presumably with his fists and not his claws), while they fruitlessly shoot at him. Given that we'd just seen a scene with him slicing through a bunch of far more heavily armed mercs, it would not work (same basic fight, absent claws and machine guns). Knock him out and you get to have a different action scene with fire and exploding cars. They could have done that same stuff with Logan up and fighting as well, but it wouldn't have had the same story impact as having Pyro doing it all by himself.

Of course, having Logan up and fighting the cops in melee while Pyro blasted at cop cars and otherwise kept the rest of the folks at bay (with Iceman using his powers to prevent accidental deaths, just as he did in the film), would have actually made more sense, since it would explain away the other questionable bit in the scene (why didn't the cops just shoot Pyro?). But again, the needs of the character development outweighed the need of having a sensible scene in the first place. Sadly, there's far too much of this in modern film making.

As to the whole adamantium bullet issue (and bullets in general). I can actually see Logan getting knocked out, since having fast healing doesn't prevent concussion from what would be a very significant blow to the head. We saw Logan get knocked out in the first film when he got whacked with a tree by Sabertooth and knocked into the front of his truck. So the idea that he could be knocked out by a blow to the head is there. The problem comes in with the adamantium bullet though.

In Origins: Wolverine, he's shot in the head with an adamantium bullet by Striker. This is supposedly what causes his amnesia, and is the setup for his condition in the previous films. This raises a ton of questions though. If the adamantium bullet can't penetrate his adamantium skull, then it should do no more damage to him than a regular bullet of the same mass fired by the same gun. There's nothing special at all about the bullet in this case. So the fact that it causes him such brain trauma is presumably because it does penetrate his skull. But then the question is: What happened to the hole in his skull? The adamantium doesn't heal. It's just there. He should have a rather large hole in the front of his skull that can't be healed, and isn't protecting him in any way. Ok. Maybe his regular non-laced skull heals in place and covers the hole, but still (and let's just ignore that skulls don't just open up in neat round holes when something penetrates them). You'd think someone might have noticed that, perhaps when they were doing a scan of him, in the X Mansion, in the first film, and were specifically looking at his abilities, his bones, and his loss of memory. They had a whole scene where they talked about him, including his memory loss. A big gaping part of his skull missing adamantium might have been a good starting point.

Yeah, I get that they were filmed in different order, yadda yadda. Got it. Um... But then why not come up with something a bit less continuity breaking in the later film? They could have come up with almost anything to explain his memory loss. Instead what we got was... an adamantium bullet.

And then, as though they couldn't think of anything new and original, they bring in the same thing again in Logan. Cause... it's a bullet. And it's made out of adamantium! Checkov's bullet! Yay...


To be fair though, at least these are all just side issues, and not core plot elements themselves. In the grand scheme of things that annoy me about films, minor fails with regards to physics are well down the list most of the time. It's not remotely at the same level of Star Trek 7s "Why can't he just fly into the ribbon in a ship? You can't get there in a ship" bit, where every single character ever shown to have entered the nexus prior to that point in the film did so on a ship including the antagonist himself. Yeah. That's still numero uno for me, since literally the entire motivation for the antagonist, everything he does, and the fact that he's an antagonist at all instead of just "crazy guy who bought an old shuttle, flew off mumbling something about returning somewhere, and was never seen again" rests on that massive gaping plot hole.

So yeah, while it bugs me when I see stuff like this, it's unfortunately something you just have to ignore and move on from. I've accepted that very very few films, especially sci fi films, will manage to avoid these kinds of things. There's just too many people involved in those projects who think that once you put the word "fiction" after the word "science", that's a license to do anything you want and just hand wave it away, no matter how nonsensical it is.

Well, it wouldn't really be that big a hole. Entry wounds are rarely bigger than the round used (it's the exit wounds that are big and nasty), and we know there was no exit wound since they make it a point to tell us the bullet bounced around inside his skull shredding his memory meats, unless it was a hollow point but the one in Origins specifically wasn't and I still feel the need to rage at the idea of an adamentium projectile being able to expand on contact with a solid surface that they used in Logan. I think their not examining the x-ray as closely as they could isn't anywhere near as continuity breaking that is pretty much every movie after the first. Xavier died in X3, but was around for Days of Future Past before the continuity was altered. But my favorite is Emma Frost. She's an adult in the 60s during First Class, dead adult near the beginning of Days of Future Past in the 70s, and then a teenager also in the 90s that was Origins near the end. Cyclops is 8~10 in First Class when Xavier was first using Cerebro, then a young teen in Origins but he was an older teen in Apocalypse which was in the 80s.

I was thinking more of the idea of inward facing shards of mostly indestructible adamantium around the edge of said hole, and more shards floating around in his brain (although maybe they got pushed out?). Bone is pretty brittle, but I'd assume that adamantium laced bone would not be.

Although honestly, the idea that you can shoot through adamantium with an adamantium bullet is itself completely absurd. Cause.. you know... physics. F=MA doesn't change based on what the mass is made of. Which gets even more absurd when you realize that the mass itself doesn't actually matter, since the acceleration (the "A" in the formula) of the bullet is itself the result of the same equation and is ultimately based on the force applied to the bullet when fired. The M actually cancels out of the equation, and technically the A as well (except to what degree it's affected by resistance of the medium it's fired in, thus reducing the velocity, which reduces the decelleration when it hits). Higher mass bullet with same powder load will result in a heavier bullet traveling at a slower speed. The force applied to Logan's adamantium laced skull can't be greater than the force applied to the bullet, which has absolutely nothing at all to do with the material the bullet itself is made of.

I suppose we could argue that since the bullet is itself made out of adamantium, that it wont consume any of that energy flattening itself, and thus more will efficiently transfer the force to his skull (and keep that force focused on a very small area, which is basically how depleted uranium rounds work). But still. I can't see how an otherwise normal pistol, firing a round that's normal other than the material in the slug, could possibly carry enough force to break something that is considered "indestructible". We're not talking about "need just a bit more force applied to the target area to break through" here.

But yeah. Probably more thinking than one should spend on a film based on a comic book. Where does the energy for Cyclop's eye beams come from? It's a comic book. I can actually deal with that.



Inconsistent and/or nonexistent aging is a pretty common feature of comic books though. But yeah. There's a few glaring ones. Emma Frost is a big example. But so is Shaw. It's a "blink and you'll miss it" moment, but in X2, during the bar scene where Mystique injects the guard with iron liquid/whatever (let's ignore the science on that too!), there's a TV in the background with a debate between Hank McCoy and Sebastian Shaw discussing the "Mutant Problem".

The Xavier is still alive in DoFP bit didn't bother me as much though. In the after credits scene in X3 (for those who watched it), it's strongly suggested that Xavier somehow transferred his mind into the comatose body that Moira was treating. Of course, that wouldn't explain why he's in his own body, but maybe that body was a clone all along (I don't believe they ever showed it). I kinda chalked this up to them intending to have an X4 where his return would be included as part of the story, but then scrapped that (for obvious reasons), and when First Class actually did well, decided to tie into that in DoFP, and just hand waved it away, not wanting to waste time and momentum on what would be complete filler that the were about to wipe out from the continuity with DoFP anyway. We're to assume that those events did happen, even if they never made a film showing them.

Eh. Again. I'm not quite as bothered by that kind of side stuff. There's tons of inconsistencies though. Don't even have to look that hard. I'd love it if the folks writing this stuff made more of an effort to avoid such things, but I get that "rule of cool" is more important for putting butts in seats, so if it's a choice between getting perfect consistency, and getting fun films about comic characters that I've read about since I was a kid? I'll take the latter choice.

Edited, Sep 19th 2017 7:47pm by gbaji

Speaking of energy, does Logan eat a lot in the comics? I'd imagine that his healing factor would consume a tremendous amount of calories. Michael Phelps famously ate a trillion eggs and bacon to fuel his swimming workouts -- picture the amount of bio-energy needed to heal grievous wounds in seconds.

Sure. I meant "normal" as in "something that actually exists and operates on known principles in the real world". As opposed to say some comic book created/handwaved super weapon Cable has from the future, or something Forge cooked up this morning before breakfast.




Yup. Comic book magic. If the gun in question was powered by some extra dimensional force, allowing it to project adamantium at a super high rate of speed, or sheath it in some kind of special adamantium piercing effect, or somehow weaken the structure of the target the bullet is fired at, or even just "it's a super weapon that can blast adamantium" (handwave), that would be one thing. I've just never bought the whole "we'll just cool adamantium into a bullet, slap a standard high power casing with powder load, put it in a conventional pistol (ok, admittedly hand cannon), and now it'll penetrate adamantium!

If adamantium had some special property that allowed it to penetrate/damage adamantium, then there would have been no need for the whole "super heated/powered/whatever" katana in Wolverine. Lady Deathstrike's claws could have damaged Logan's skeleton (and vice versa). So if it doesn't, then it's purely about the physics of a bullet that doesn't deform (well, much, it's also hitting adamantium right?). And I just don't see something that's otherwise indestructible being damaged by that little force. We're talking about a substance that you can heat to super levels and not melt, put into the strongest industrial manufacturing tools and not bend or scratch, and otherwise just ignores anything you hit it with. Drop it from 10 miles up? Not a scratch.

There's just not enough energy in the cartridge to damage adamantium, no matter what the bullet is made of. But again, comic book physics, so it doesn't matter.

I'll also note that I'm pretty sure that the entire cartridge looked to be made of adamantium, not just the bullet/slug part. Which is somewhat humorous as well. Does the casing need to be adamantium too? Heck. Maybe there is some super propellant in there? That would at least actually make it make sense (but is never mentioned, so whatever).

Last night's South Park discussed the dangers of Tweeting While President. And Tweak's fears of North Korea.

Channel Zero returned with a new season on Sci Fi. The seasons are independent of each other. Also only 6 episodes long, about 40 minutes per. So binging Season 1 wouldn't take long. I'm not up on the "creepypasta" that these seasons are based on. Season 1 seemed creepy enough with the Pirate-Puppet TV Show. Season 2 is about some Horror House with 6 rooms that get progressively scarier. And a group of friends that enter.

Edited, Sep 21st 2017 9:46am by TirithRR