Drive in Saturday Tuesday Movie Review: Thunderbolts!
This is the inaugural installment of the 2025 season of my occasional (but hopefully weekly) review of movies I see at a drive-in theater, the season for which usually runs from around April to November. I missed opening week, last week, so this is my first review of the season. The series is, of course, named after the Bowie song (and I usually see the movies on Saturday and post about them on Tuesday, thus…). Often the movies have little to do with Bowie. Nonetheless, this is a Bowie blog and I will strive to make a connection!
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Movie: Thunderbolts
Bowie Connection: The solution to the movie’s problem rested in telling the main antagonist, “you’re not alone.” Which, of course, is the message of “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.” The character, whose non-superhero name is Bob Reynolds, is kind of a rock ‘n’ roll suicide type who gets imbued with superpowers, but shifts between a golden, godlike heroic figure called Sentry, to a dark, shadowy entity called Void. There’s definitely a Bowie-esque quality to this character’s transformation and darkness-under-the-gilded-surface motif. Plus, there’s a more direct Bowie link— “Under Pressure” was adapted for the movie’s final trailer (embedded in this post). Sadly, the song doesn’t appear in the movie itself. And nobody wears a lightning bolt on their faces…
Experience: I have been going to the Jericho Drive-in almost all year because, even after the 2024 drive-in season ended, its on-location ice cream stand remained open for all but a few weeks in winter. At one point, on a cold, winter night, the Jericho hosted a lobster truck and it was THE BEST THING EVER. So, I was excited to return for the show (and more ice cream). The day had been rainy off and on, so I was a little concerned, and in fact the rain started just as the movie was ending. We were too tired to stay for the second movie anyway, and we’re at the point in the year when the first movie has to start fairly late, as the days are getting longer. But, for Thunderbolts, the rain held off, the temperature was comfortable and we had a great time.
Movie Review: Yeah, I’ll say this was worth seeing. Marvel movies have kind of largely been listless since Avengers: Endgame, and this one isn’t going to rank up there among the best of the franchise. But it’s far from the worst, either. The movie largely functions as a vehicle for Florence Pugh who reprises her role as Yelena Belova, sister of the now-deceased Black Widow. She’s an assassin who doesn’t actually possess superhuman powers, who ends up kinda leading a band of misfit anti-heroes (the rest of whom do possess relatively minor superhuman powers), up against a scheming CIA director named Valentina de Fontaine played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. De Fontaine is in the midst of being investigated by Congress (couldn’t they have spent a little more time more accurately portraying a Congressional investigation? No?). Anyway, she wants to eliminate all evidence of her past wrongdoings, which apparently involves killing off Belova and the other misfit quasi-heroes, who come to call themselves the Thunderbolts.
De Fontaine is given some Trumpian lines and briefly serves as an allegorical figure. She’s not simply dishonest, but she wants to confuse perceptions of what’s real and what’s not (which, if you are a close reader of my blog, echoes another Bowie connection— the concept of immersive false reality). She claims that world security rests on her assuming sole decision-making authority over everything. To be clear, this character was not meant as a stand-in for Donald Trump. There’s enough of her depicted as essentially a “deep state” boogeywoman for her to embody someone MAGA can also dislike.
The other thing going on in the real world fictionalized in this movie is the idea that too many of us feel isolated and alone. And while yes, these are common themes of Bowie songs, I think the movie was getting at the kind of tech-fueled post-pandemic isolation that Bowie never actually experienced.
So, the Thunderbolts escape but in doing so they release the subject of one of de Fontaine‘s secret experiments, Bob Reynolds, who becomes this all-powerful split-personality entity who, you know, threatens to destroy the world. Until, that is— spoiler alert— Belova tells him, “you’re not alone.”
As has been the case with most of the Marvel movies, this one sets up more to come including what seems like another Avengers movie and a Fantastic Four reboot. So, nothing profound, but it wasn’t boring. The special effects were what we expect from a Marvel movie, and hey, I had a good time.
Rating: Two lightning bolts. Yeah, lightning. This is still a Bowie blog!