Thunderbolts* on the surface is an anti-hero movie comparing the bad people to the worst people. The justification for doing bad things to avoid the worst things.
However, in reality, it is a movie about dealing with mental health issues, which for me is extremely refreshing when it comes to the superhero genre movies.
The movie made it very clear from the first scene when you noticed all the colours in the movie were washed out, dull and grey, setting up the mood with Yelena Belova’s (the brilliant Florence Pugh) monologue about the emptiness and void inside her after finding out that her sister died in the middle of her mission given by her sister to save other mind controlled Widows around the world. As with a lot of other similar cases, she drowned herself in work that no longer give her fulfilment, and she was lost.
This is not the first time a Marvel project deals with grief and mental health issues. Wanda Maximoff unintentionally created the Hex enslaving a whole town of people to live out her ideal life, preferred to drown in a falsehood than facing the reality in the continuous waves of grief in her life. Bucky Barnes, aka the Winter Soldier, could not live with his guilt and couldn’t find a purpose in the modern world even with countless counselling sessions in the Falcon and the Winter Soldier, until he found his purpose for the path to redemption later in the season.
However, Thunderbolts* is the first project attempting to address different mental issues collectively from different characters in one go. From the Red Guardian’s depression sparked from the loss of the glorious days to Ava Starr’s Ghosts’ extended loneliness after started her run from the FBI since her last appearance on Antman and the Wasp. The guilt and disappointment that John Walker aka the US Agent he brought on to his falling apart family and marriage since we last saw him all brought us to a group of anti-heroes in dire mental state – and the common theme – being manipulated by someone else who took advantage of their broken mental state giving them false hope of fulfilment.
From the start of the movie, it is obvious that all Ghost, US Agent, Yelena Belova and Task Master (whom I strongly felt was extremely short changed) were being manipulated and taken advantage of by Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (another excellent outing from Julia Louis-Dreyfus). For Val, they were nothing but disposable assets when the time comes, but from her to them, she acted like they were important assets whom she made glorious purposes for them. That kind of manipulation extended to and were thrown completely into the spotlight in her interactions with Lewis Pullman’s excellently portrayed Bob aka Sentry. When she applied the same tactics on him trying to control him. The only difference this time is Bob saw through that because of his magnified innate ability caused by the Sentry Serum.
What I loved about Thunderbolts* is not the actions, but the exploration of the characters themselves. There wasn’t a moment I would hope that they could fast forward certain narratives. On the contrary, I think there were moments I thought – Ah! Lost Opportunity! They should have dived deeper into this character or tell more stories about that character. I was invested in those characters so much that I wish the run time of the movie could be longer to give certain storylines and characters more weight and flash out the stories.
There are new characters introduced but none of them were too memorable from a character or story perspective. Yes they have potentials if we are building them with their comic counterparts but what directions is Marvel taking these characters are pretty up in the air even after the post credit scene rolled.
Sentry introduced in this movie is a pretty powerful character so with Doomsday looming, I was always wondering how are they going to position this character in the future? And I must admit that I am happy in how they dealt with the character’s power position by the time the movie finished. Not only that they placed him in the appropriate position, but they also opened up new doors for the character to grow in the future with his new team.
I think Marvel did a brilliant job with Thunderbolts* in a way that it is not about punching their ways to victory but about addressing their issues to find the light from the void, and fulfilment in this emptiness. There were comedic moments as we all expected from the Red Guardian, but then they also managed to redeem unpopular MCU characters like the US Agent by being a bit more empathetic than the originally one-dimension depiction of the character in The Falco and the Winter Soldier.
The only complaints I have with Thunderbolts* were how they short changed some characters in favour of other characters, when in reality it should be more of an ensemble piece than magnifying one or two of the characters, no matter how good those actors are playing those characters. I wish Marvel could pay more attention to that in the future, as continuing this path of short changing characters like this (yes I am still not over with Maria Hill back in the Secret Invasion series) will just undermine other narratives in the ever expanding cinematic universe.
