Great concept with a somewhat interesting execution and a good performance from Nicholas Cage, but the last 10 minutes were a disappointment.
I know Marvel has a tendency of doing mediocre final episodes, but all of those were masterpieces compared to how awful this episode was.
Not only is this a bad episode, but it also completely ruins the whole point of the Stranger Supreme story, which was the best episode in season one.
I hope I never see Captain Carter ever again, I’m getting extremely tired of her. So many opportunities to show us cool “What If” scenarios and instead they just keep forcing her into every story.
I though this was supposed to be one of the good episodes?
Hella is just constantly quipping and dropping one-liners to the point where she doesn’t even feel like a real character anymore and is more like a bad parody of Joss Whedon’s writing. They could replace Hella with almost any other person and, with a few exceptions, most of the episode would still be the same. None of the characters have any depth or personality, they’re just cliched cartboars cutouts who quip way too much.
The Werner Hertzog joke was the only decent thing about this episode.
The editing on this show is absolutely awful. So far, on a technical standpoint, this feels like it might be the most amateurish project Marvel has ever made.
The story is somewhat interesting, but the acting overall feels amateurish and both the directing and cinematography feel very cheap. The weird editing and pacing trying to recap her whole story so far also doesn’t help. Overall it feels like watching a canceled TV Show made 15 years ago.
That fight scene was like watching people do coordinated dancing but missing half the timings and had one of the laziest fake “oners” (one take) I’ve ever seen. They couldn’t even properly hide the transitions between each camera cut to make it feel seamless.
Previous episodes were great, but suddenly this one is more focused on a random woman who wanted to write for the Simpsons than about the actual history of the Simpsons. They barely cover the development of the movie and decide to just force some fabricated drama into the documentary’s narrative for no reason.
The first episode that was actually enjoyable
Really disappointed with this so far. The pacing is atrocious. Almost every action, every conversation, feels like we’re watching at half speed and there’s a 5 second delay after each character finishes speaking. But while everything feels way too slow, the story itself also feels so fast to the point where people have to be fans of the comics or the movie to get what’s going on due to how much they’re skipping and mushing together.
Voice acting is also extremely poor, most of the lines feel like the actors are reading the text for the first time alone in their bedrooms, without ever interacting with each other. I was very happy they got the whole original cast of the movie but almost none of them are doing a decent job.
I’m also not sure how I feel about how they changed the story. I’m curious to see where it goes, but I highly doubt they’ll manage to do something better than the original.
Possibly the best final episode of any MCU show until now. This might even be the best they’ve done in all of Phase 5 so far.
It's good, but it's not perfect. The comedy is there and, as in the series, it has excellent moments of humor. However, in some parts, it fails by forcefully trying to fit as many characters from the series as possible into the film, with certain situations (mainly towards the end) spoiling the development of some characters and stories in the series.
I also felt that, sometimes, this film missed a great opportunity to take the satire of soap opera clichés, which it did perfectly in the first season of the series, and create something similar but satirizing the clichés of cinema. Something more in the vein of the famous Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker films (which clearly inspired the first season). There were one or two moments in this style, but maybe they weren't enough. The movie also gave the feeling that certain parts of the film were more a collection of funny moments than a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end.
Slight spoilers: the final twist could've been developed better and revealed in a better way, which would help to strengthen this apparent lack of narrative.
However, credit must be given to the quality of the cast, which is still as good or maybe even better than we're used to. There was also an acceptable transition from the small to the big screen, taking advantage of cinematographic language in various situations, mainly from a technical point of view. It didn't present anything extraordinary or innovative in the visual field, but it was undoubtedly much better than what is common in Portugal for films of this style. I hope that other Portuguese directors and cinematographers look at this film and realize that it is possible to make a comedy movie without filming everything as if it were a 2008 soap opera.
The actual Mandalorian parts were good, but the rest was just a poor attempt on trying to be like Andor but failing miserably. The Doctor is a very interesting character and so much more could’ve been done with him, too bad they didn’t explore him properly.
They should really go back to focusing on their own self-contained stories, like in earlier seasons, instead of constantly parodying real-world events. Things move so fast nowadays to the point where this episode already felt dated by the time it was released.
Still a funny show, but this was definitely the weakest season so far. They really need to stop giving separate stories to each character and have them do more things together like in the first two seasons.
It was maybe one of the weakest episodes in regards to story and voice-acting, but visually it was easily the one that looked the most like something from a full-length animated movie. The cinematography was great and the color, lighting, and grain made it feel very organic and beautiful like something shot on film instead of digital.
It’s cool to learn more about the Muslim and Pakistani cultures and see how much care they had for such representation, but it feels like this show is more worried about those aspects than about developing any of its characters or giving us a compelling story.
I'm clearly not the show's target audience as it feels like this one was made with a teenager audience in mind, but I'll give them credit for at least injecting some personality to this show by coming up with interesting use of motion graphics blended in with the live-action footage to show things like text messages, etc.
From a technical standpoint, this is possibly one of the most impressive pieces of work in the recent years in the history of animation.
A complete disappointment, especially when compared to the episode with these characters in the first season. This new episode feels extremely preachy and the comedy is often way too forced with no satisfying payoff or punchline. It gives the feeling that whoever wrote this spends way too much time on Twitter.
I know that ending was supposed to show us the anger between Marty and Wendy, how on the edge Marty is, and how dark he has become, but it felt so good to finally see him snap and release all that stress he had accumulated. I'm so glad he won that fight!
This is the first episode of this show that was actually good instead of aggressively ok.
Easily the best episode of the show so far. Even the most mundane aspects of Din Djarin’s story are more interesting than whatever Boba Fett is doing.
This isn't just the worst episode on a show already filled with a ton of bad episodes, this is also one of the worst things done for the MCU. Some of the fan's least favorite movies in the Marvel Universe look and feel like award-winning masterpieces when compared to this incredibly awful episode. It baffles me that this episode went through so many people and no one during the entire production considered how atrocious this was.
This episode was the first time Marvel’s What If delivered something worth watching. Turns out they can actually make a good and compelling story when the characters are complex as they were here and behave as the source material, instead of having everyone on the screen act the same and constantly quipping lazy jokes all the time like in previous episodes.
Visually, this was also the most appealing offering from What If so far, with interesting concepts and effects clearly inspired by Jack Kirby's visuals often known as Kirby Krackle or Kirby Dots.
This was the first episode that felt like watching something straight out of a comic book and I hope the rest of the show is more like this episode and less like the previous three.
It’s like going to watch a basketball game on the TV but first you have to sit through a really long and bad Warner Bros commercial until the boring CGI game starts.
Remember that scene on the original Space Jam when Daffy kisses the Warner Brothers logo on his ass? Now imagine that scene on a loop for an hour and you’ll get a movie called Space Jam: A New Legacy.
What an absolute waste of time. Guests show up as fast as they leave, often with less than a minute of screen time. There’s a bunch of long and uninteresting interviews done to random celebs who never had anything to do with the show. James Corden’s interview is so edited down to the point where he speaks more by himself than all of the Friends’ cast combined. The only good moments were the archive footage from the shooting of the show and the very few times when the cast actually had some time to breathe and reminisce about their path on Friends. Sadly, those good bits were few and far between.
