Movies with Mikey

**Movies with Mikey** is a series run by **Mikey Neumann** on his channel **Filmjoy**, where Mikey, as the name suggests, takes a look at movies. Mikey had previously written the game *Aliens: Colonial Marines*.

## History

### On *Infinity War's* Abuse Apologetics

> "*The Empire Strikes Back* ruined everything. We learned the wrong lessons from it."
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MauLer, Rags, and Wolf first encountered Movies with Mikey on EFAP 3, where they took a look at his video "**Let's Talk about Thanos - Movies with Mikey.**" Mikey established that his channel is about celebrating movies, and that he has celebrated Marvel movies several times before, but this time was going to be different, and that this video is going to be divisive but that's only because *Infinity War* was unapologetically divisive. He claimed that the MCU used to have one powerful throughline since those movies were made for everyone, not just kids or adults or comic fans, but that the one thing you can take from Infinity War is that it is not made for everyone, because characters get hurt a lot. He assures that he is not trying to take away anyone's enjoyment of the movie or sway anyone's opinion, as if swaying someone's opinion is bad, but then repeated throughout the video that he was directly taking the filmmakers to task for choosing to ever make a movie like this and later called people who liked Thanos' plan in the movie "poopooheads." He said that Infinity War both worked and didn't work for him personally, and that that was a common perspective, calling the decisions in the movie "depressingly baffling," and wanted to explain why this allegedly large number of people felt "left out in the cold" like him.

After a long, chipmunk-music-filled intro that spent more time on a joke about Buncha Crunch than on the actual title of the video, Mikey said that he liked the movie a lot and spent two minutes rapid-firing things he liked about it, which the gang pretty much agreed with. He then expressed disgust at how brutal Thanos' actions were, and countered the explanation for those actions that Thanos is meant to be the bad guy by saying that while that is true, Thanos is the protagonist of the movie, which makes him doing bad things bad. Mikey explained that he had had a rough 2017, and that the movie made him uncomfortable as a result because it reminded him of some real-world stuff, and while wanting to raise the stakes over the course of eighteen minutes is understandable, this movie "wields trauma like a circus act" because according to him it used that trauma for entertainment. He also claimed the stakes rose arbitrarily with no explanation because Thanos was very large, and therefore could have simply eaten less, as if it was his species' fault that they were as large as they were. Mikey then began to criticize not only the movie, but the filmmakers responsible for it, for sending the message that "abuse = love," and showed a clip from a video by someone named Maggie May Fish makin a similar argument, which means it's correct. Fish argued that children suffering from abuse who see the movie will think that their abusers love them and only abuse them out of love, to which MauLer countered that by that same metric a child could see the candy people from *Adventure Time* eating each other and think that that means you should eat your friends.

Mikey took a break from Thanos in his Thanos video to talk about how he felt *Infinity* *War*, which had James Gunn consulting on it, didn't understand the tone or the point of the *Guardians of the Galaxy* movies, using Nebula being tortured as an example despite the fact that the previous two movies had established that Thanos had tortured and mutilated her. He argued that the point of the two movies were Peter Quill learning what it means to be an adult (rather than him gaining a new family), and that it was an allegory for James Gunn having learned it was wrong of him to make dark jokes on Twitter and becoming a better person, then argued that him hitting Thanos was his character regressing after having shown him shooting his invincible dad as a sign of growth. Mikey also claimed that Gamora died because of Quill's mistakes (which she didn't), described him as only thinking he "might be in love with" Gamora, apparently having forgotten the past two movies building up their relationship, and said that him being mad about her death was him showing ownership over her, further punctuating that point by showing him referring to her as "my girl."

Mikey found the confirmation that Thanos loved Gamora to be "revolting," as if bad people can't love, and also found it hard to believe that Gamora would cry after thinking she killed Thanos because he was cruel to her. He claimed that *The Empire Strikes Back* ruined everything, because it sent us the message that the penultimate movie in a series should be the darkest, then agreed that the penultimate movie is supposed to be the darkest before the dawn, like in The Dark Knight, but argued that *Infinity War* went too far with its darkness, despite having liked movies like John Wick which were far darker. He said there's no way to call *Infinity War* a bad movie, but that he still took issue with them choosing to have Thanos "aggressively" murder half the universe (he intentionally made the deaths painless) without listening to logic or reason against his terrible ideas, and countered the explanation that Thanos could be insane by saying that that is not how mental illness works, as if there is only one type of mental illness, and it is detrimental to us as a species to think a mentally ill person would ever do something like that. He extends this criticism to comic book properties in general by criticizing Batman for never making an effort to rehabilitate the people (he does) he sends to Arkham Asylym (a literal mental hospital), and that the message is that people with mental illness are not worthy of saving, despite Batman himself being mentally ill. Mikey assumed that the filmmakers think Thanos is right because they describe him as "empathetic," despite having just said we should be more empathetic towards Batman's villains.

Mikey then said he was willing to accept all of this, but now had the question of where these movies will go from here, since he had never seen stakes this big in a movie before, apparently having never seen stories where all life or all of reality was at stake. He couldn't see how the characters could go back to fighting smaller things now that they've dealt with a universal threat, despite having praised *Civil* *War* for having a more interpersonal conflict that dealt with the fallout of the last two city-destroying threats. Mikey worried that Marvel would undo all of the deaths that occurred in this movie, deaths that he previously argued were too out of place for Marvel, which would make those deaths cheap and further minimize real trauma. He also threw in that he didn't understand how Thanos was able to have four people areeing with him, for some reason.

Mikey's video also had several abrupt tone shifts as it would go from describing horrific torture to playing upbeat music with funny voices, and was also punctuated with title cards that were numbered in French for some reason.

### Aliens: Colonial Marines

On EFAP Gaming 1 and 2, MauLer, Rags, and Wolf played *Aliens: Colonial Marines*.

## Quotes

"I had some Buncha Crunch on my desk who took my Buncha Crunch?"

“But it feels like we found out that its possible to eat too much chocolate. I feel like we spoiled our dinner, it's just too much.”

“Once upon a time, Tony Stark just wanted some Burger King and now his hurdling through space with an arachnid teenager and a Space Wizard.”

“This movie set the stakes so unrealistically high that they don’t even bother justifying them”

“Hit us with misery nonstop, you might as well be *The Walking Dead.*”

"Spider-Man is going to beg for his life. Dope."

“Seeing the film wield trauma like a circus act is a little rough”

“Quill spent two movies learning how to be an adult”

“It's an astonishing and occasionally tiring awesome thing, mileage varies of how different people react to different films”

“It’s not a story, it’s an event”