Secret Invasion
While the memory of Secret Invasion will hopefully fade from our minds soon, continued quotes from director Ali Selim just keep rubbing salt in the wounds. If it seems like the show doesn’t really care much about its retconning or inconsistent logic or the seeming irrelevance of its overall plot, he doesn’t…really care about any of that.
Selim has a bunch of uh, interesting quotes about both the critical and audience reception to the show. In an interview with Variety he says a lot of things, some of which are nonsense, some of which are dismissive. Take your pick!
“I don’t feel bad about mixed reviews. If you had unanimously good reviews, every movie would gross $10 billion, trillion dollars, right? [Projects] resonate with different people at different times for different reasons, and Marvel has a very devoted – even rabid – fan base who have expectations and when their expectations aren’t fulfilled, they move in the other direction; they give it a thumbs down.”
This quote is just…wrong? There are loads of examples of movies that have sky-high critical scores that make little money. That’s even true within the superhero genre, as James Gunn’s Suicide Squad was considered a flop despite a 90% score from critics, one of DC’s highest-rated projects in recent years.
Secret Invasion
Calling the fanbase “rabid” is perhaps not inaccurate, but it’s been carved out of this quote to indicate his apparent disdain for the fans, which does come across as somewhat hostile and dismissive.
“Oh, I don’t read reviews. With all due respect. For me, I view all the storytelling work I do as a dialogue with an audience… “I don’t know – is it our job to fulfil their expectations? Or to tell the story that we’re telling? So, it’s a tricky thing. I would love it if everybody loved it, but I also don’t have that expectation myself, so I feel great about the response to it.”
In this case, I do think it’s somewhat the show’s job to fulfill expectations if the project is being sold as a grounded, Cold War-like Marvel series, yet it barely leans into that at all, with close to no intrigue and then pivoting to a traditional CG-slugfest in the final moments (Selim has said Kevin Feige asked for the Super Skrull fight). And if someone is revealed as a Skrull, like Rhodey was in the show, fans expect that to make some amount of sense with past projects featuring the character. Selim, meanwhile, doesn’t even seem to know when Rhodey was replaced, leaving that up to the fans, he said.
It’s just a bizarre project all around, and I do not think Selim was the right director for it. It’s one of Marvel’s biggest misses and shrugging about it feels like the wrong reaction.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
