Pete Messum Reviews...

100 episodes later and Marvel's Agents of SHIELD is still going strong...just as a more niche ABC comic book show. In fact, the comic book show landscape seems to have really changed since SHIELD's debut, with even long-running series such as Arrow and The Flash losing their audiences. Shows like Legion and Agents of SHIELD, however, which have garnered a lot of support from a relatively small but encouraging audience seem to be garnering much more positive feedback. In fact, I think its the fans that have kept Agents of SHIELD going for 100 episodes, and that's thanks to the quality of the series itself. It hasn't "lost its mojo" - it's actually kind of gained it over the course of four and a half seasons. In this 100th episode special though - complete with a title-card compilation from each season - the show seems intent on rewarding fans as much as they can, resulting in an episode filled with lovely little bits of fan service, but nothing that re...

So here we are, back again with another set-up episode of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD as the team at long last return to present day at...the Lighthouse. Again. Yup, it seems that Agents of SHIELD spent too much money on that rather standard Lighthouse interior set to let it go to waste. Maybe it replaced the old SHIELD HQ set? Either way, it's not a bad location to set the rest of the season in, acting as a constant reminder of the imminent threat to the planet - a threat that the show is very keen to emphasise in this mid-season opener. There's a real sense throughout this eleventh episode that while the team appear to be temporarily safe, they have very little time left. So little, in fact, that they discover a Kree beacon mid-town that may be the cause of the Kree's arrival...or it may not, as the team discover that the US Government are hunting them down as "most wanted" criminals and have used the signal to lure them into capture - which, admittedl...

Flying through the skies of Corellia we're introduced to Alden Erenreich's younger Han Solo, with his rogue-ish charm enticing Qui'ra (Emilia Clarke) into a daring escape, shot with energy and raw enthusiasm from...well, either Phil Lord and Chris Miller or Ron Howard. Laurence Kasdan has also been reported to have acted as a "shadow director". What's distinctly more Lord and Miller is, however, a scene in which Han confronts a giant millipede, which exudes all the charm of Lucas' original Star Wars trilogy with a touch of humour that never quite manifests elsewhere in the film. Lord and Miller departed mere weeks before principal photography concluded, with Ron Howard taking over to re-shoot around 70% of the film to keep to an incredibly tight deadline. Howard's clearly done a terrific job, as the film doesn't feel nearly as patchy as one would expect, and the visual effects work is really top-notch - and I'd argue will age much better th...

What's interesting about Legends of Tomorrow's third season is that, despite having a decent arc, when all was said and done, the arc itself didn't really matter. When Mallus goes to confront the Legends in Salvation, there's a sense of "of course they're going to defeat him and save the day", but also that the writers are fully aware of this. The season isn't really about Mallus at all - probably why Mallus himself is such a mediocre villain when all is said and done. I mean, he looks pretty cool in his giant dragon form, but I do wonder if keeping his true form secret for the entire show would have been better in the long run (and probably more cost-effective). What is important in this season of Legends of Tomorrow has been the ensemble cast's own problems. Amaya is trying to deal with a catastrophic future for her family, and Nate trying to come to terms with their doomed love. Rory, in confronting his father, is able to overcome one of his...

With all the excitement surrounding Marvel Studios' Avengers: Infinity War, its easy to forget that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is still ongoing elsewhere with Marvel's Agents of SHIELD reaching its mid-season finale last night in the UK...about two months later than in the US. "Past Life" brings Season 5's first pod to a close as the team embark on a last-ditch effort to escape 2091. Its an episode very much designed to resolve key plot-threads from the previous nine episodes, resulting in a rather peculiar installment of the series that probably flows much better when watched immediately after the previous episode (and vice-versa). The plot's already in motion, meaning that we have little time to 'get in' to the episode before things start kicking off. However, due to the nature of the story, its not as 'epic' as some big episodes have been in the past. I recently discovered that ABC had actually slashed the budget for the show, hence w...

The phrase "I'm shook" springs to mind. Ten years after Marvel Studios released their first independent motion picture ' Iron Man ', the studio brings together (almost) all of their superhero characters into one enormous event film - ' Avengers: Infinity War '. Bursting at the seams with characters, ongoing arcs and a narrative sprawling across space, can the team behind ' Captain America: The Winter Soldier ' and ' Captain America: Civil War ' pull it off? Short answer: no, of course they can't. But they do a pretty great job trying. ' Avengers: Infinity War ' is a film perhaps lacking in character development all round, so much so that many characters feel like special guest stars in a film focused on bringing everything together. If there is a main character here, it's Thanos - played via motion-capture by Josh Brolin - on his journey to find all of the Infinity stones. The Russo brothers have compared this to a h...

"Embrace your inner anti-hero" is the tagline to Sony Pictures' ' Venom ', one that feels so unoriginal and corporate-mandated that I can just picture the guy in the suit sitting in the board room feeling quite chuffed with himself for that. I mean, film taglines are rarely great now, but...seriously? That's just lame. Not that we should necessarily expect some genius piece of creative story-telling here from ' Venom '. It's a movie mandated by the fact that the character sold some cool, and probably quite cheap toys back in the day...probably in the days when Toys R Us were still going, making the film seem somewhat irrelevant in 2018. This was a film made because Sony thought there was money in expanding the Spider-Man franchise into multiple installments with separate spin-off films. A cinematic universe, as it were. The problem with all bad cinematic universes though is that in order to gain peoples' investment, each film either needs ...