Shang-Chi: The Legend of the Ten Rings

Okay we have now been watching Shang-Chi for a month and a half. There has been a drinking game that has been crafted and played and we have assessed the film’s comic book accuracy. We are doing our best to keep this journey interesting for ourselves. We are now doing a companion podcast where we are watching (or rewatching) all of the MCU movies. We will also have a guest soon and we’ve got a few other ideas that are going to keep everyone entertained for a while.

In crafting this drinking game we have determined that Katy really only exists as a plot device, she has no personality, no actual character of her own. She is there to drive cars and she is there as an excuse for the characters to speak english when there is no actual reason for them to do so. To be thorough Trevor is also a plot device. He serves no other purpose than to translate the creature and get the main three to Ta Lo. Other than that he has no other purpose or character either.

The other thing that has really stuck with us is that the times that the characters speak english seems really arbitrary. Like obviously the scenes Katy is in kind of make sense because it was established that she isn’t fluent in Chinese. However there are so many moments throughout the movie where it makes absolutely no sense for the characters to be speaking english. Like when they are in Macaw speaking to a Chinese speaking audience…yet for some reason the announcer is speaking english. Using Katy for that just seems like a bad excuse to not have to make a mainstream foreign language film and that is some bullshit. If you don’t have the attention span or competence to read while you watch then that is a you problem. But as it is Marvel movies are not difficult to follow, even watching on silent should be pretty easy, so in a different language really shouldn’t throw you off that much.

Alright y'all I got so far past tipsy during this drinking game, this is the drunkest I’ve been for a while so if you want to see me so lit that multiple accents come out then please play along with this drinking game. It was super fun.

The next thing we did was analyze the comic book accuracy of this movie adaptation. Like I’ve always said, I never expect story beats to be super accurate. Working from serialized source material to feature adaptations require a lot of creative liberties when it comes to actual story. That said I DO expect characterizations and the general feel of the film to be accurate. Shang-Chi was the first Asian superhero and I think that kind of representation needs to be expressed with deliberate and intentional writing in both the story and the characters. And I do not feel like Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings accomplishes this.

We are almost 2 full months into this endeavor and it is most certainly not getting better. Rewatching the rest of the MCU right after watching Shang-Chi is definitely making it more bearable. But that said we are going to eventually hit a point where we have to watch Shang-Chi and then we are going to have to watch an equally bad or even worse movie right after that. Because, a friendly reminder to other MCU fans, bad movies did not magically begin in Phase 4. We have established that Iron Man 2 was truly terrible and that was back in phase 1. We are carefully chronicling this so you will be fully aware of just how many bad movies exist pre Phase 4.