general thunderbolts thoughts:
taskmaster was done dirty, but at the same time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ imo she's supposed to represent the worst outcome possible for yelena. dying without redemption, discarded and tossed away.
i think the first time bob's eyes start glowing yellow is when john slams him against the wall after bob calls him an asshole. john backs off and just stares at him for a bit.
bob's void vision compels people into suicide, i think. when john snaps out of his vision, he's staring straight down at the hole they just came up from. yelena's alarmed "what the hell are you doing" makes him do a double take and look back down the hole. his mind was stuck reliving his bad memories - his body was getting ready to jump.
speaking of void shenanigans, bob banishing the little girl to the shadow realm was wild.
i feel like the movie could have been 10 to 15 minutes longer to flesh out john and especially ava a little bit more. i feel like bob mostly bonded with yelena and john. we could have at least had a moment where bob touched ava in the vault and had her relive something.
valentina's actually a fascinating villain imo and this movie did a great job flesh her out. the necklace she was wearing as a child when her dad died, she's still wearing as an adult throughout the movie.
you could tell that mel's part was written specifically ayo edebiri and it was distracting lmao. geraldine did a good job too tho.
alexei's speech to yelena about how when he looks at her he sees all the good actually made me tear up lmfao.
i actually liked bucky's role in the movie. i've been seeing people divided on it. he's mentally in a better place than the rest of the characters - he's further along in his recovery journey. so it makes sense to me that he's the one herding them around.
when bob and yelena are in bob's safe room and she sits down next to him, it's framed in a way where he's in the shadows and she's in front of the window, her head bathed in light. really good way to symbolically show us how she makes him feel better.
i actually like that bob's mental illness wasn't magically cured with the power of friendship, and while his memory loss is played up as silly at the end (at least a few of the audience members i was with giggled at that), it's actually one of the symptoms he mentions experiencing in the beginning of the film.
the film doesn't really explain bob's powers, but in the comics he's a reality warper like wanda. his powers are whatever he wants them to be/whatever he believes them to be. so with that in mind, i thought it was really clever to tie the sentry persona to his manic episodes and the void personality to his depressive episodes.
and also kudos to the movie of not holding back on all the highs and lows of being an addict with severe mental illness while never demonizing bob at any point. there's never a discussion about potentially needing to kill bob. the team is deadset on saving him.
anyways. 10/10 movie absolute cinema.
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